Hot on the heels of major announcements for Overwatch and Hearthstone, Blizzard offered BlizzCon attendees a sneak peek at its plans for the Diablo franchise. While we weren’t treated to anything as momentous as Diablo IV, Blizzard did unveil its plans to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the franchise with an anniversary patch, and an upcoming character class.
The new patch, aptly titled The Darkening of Tristram will take players back 20 years — to a time before fancy 3D graphics and massive, sprawling game worlds. That’s right, Blizzard designers rebuilt the original Diablo game inside the Diablo III engine, and that’s not all: The pack will feature a pixelated filter and down-scaled player animations to recapture the unique experience of delving the depths of the Tristram Cathedral on a 60MHz PC with 8MB of RAM.
The anniversary patch will go live sometime in the coming months, but you can get a taste as early as next week, when the Darkening of Tristram hits the Public Test Realm on Diablo III.
In addition to the anniversary patch, Blizzard teased the upcoming release of a character class that has become a fan favorite over the years: the Necromancer. Players will be able to command legions of the dead and make corpses explode with the new edition of the classic Diablo II character as early as next year, when Blizzard releases a Diablo III character pack. It will be the first piece of paid content since the release of Reaper of Souls but is not expected to be a full-on expansion.
Additionally, we can expect to see two new zones hitting the Diablo III Adventure Mode sometime next year. The new zones, Shrouded Moors, and Temple of the Firstborn will be added to the game for free.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.