An ominous-looking website has appeared at diablo2hd.com, warning one and all that “Evil Has Survived,” and counting down to something. In between, the skeletal face of the Lord of Terror himself, Diablo, leers malevolently. The timer is set to hit zero at the beginning of BlizzCon, and a /whois shows that the site was created on August 18, 2016—almost one year to the day after it was reported that a new Diablo project was getting underway. The pieces are finally coming together!
Except, sorry folks, but they're not. I reached out to Blizzard to ask about the site, and was told bluntly, “This isn't ours.” It is, I'll admit, a disappointing outcome: The pre-confirmation consensus among the PC Gamer cognoscenti was that the site was fake, but Diablo 2 is my second-favorite Blizzard game (the original takes the top spot) and the prospect of a full-on HD remaster was, even if only for a moment, very exciting.
That's not to say that something along those lines won't happen eventually. That art director job listing has apparently been filled (it's no longer listed, anyway), but it was real, and Blizzard's search for a Diablo game director to replace the departed Josh Mosqueira is a clear sign that there's life left in the ol' demon yet. But this is not that, and whatever Blizzard is getting up to, it's keeping a lid on it for now.
BlizzCon 2016 will run from November 4-5. Virtual tickets are available for purchase at blizzcon.com. And if the Diablo twitter account's teasing is any indication, there might end up being something new and devilish at Blizzcon, anyway.
