Diablo III Season 1 Launches Friday

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

Diablo III community manager “Lylirra” jumped on the Battle.net forums Monday night to announce that the first Season will begin Friday, August 29. Blizzard won’t open the doors all at once but will stagger the release so that the servers can handle the load. Here in North America, Season 1 will begin to roll out at 6:00pm PDT on Friday.

Blizzard is introducing Seasons with the release of patch 2.1.0, which takes place today in North America. Seasons is a new “social” competitive system that includes acquiring as many Achievements as possible, reaching the highest tiers in Greater Rifts, and completing Season-exclusive Achievements called Conquests.

“You can track your progress against other players for the activities above on the Leaderboards and compete with others for the highest rankings,” the Diablo III blog explained earlier this month. “Want to be the first Hardcore player in the new Season to reach Level 70? Complete that Achievement and you'll be immortalized on the Conquest leaderboard.”

According to the blog, Seasonal heroes are the only characters that can complete Conquests. These tasks are offered in Hardcore and Normal modes, and are difficult to complete, making them different than the typical Achievement. The first 1000 players will be rewarded by having their name on the Conquest Leaderboard throughout the Season.

For gamers who don’t care about Leaderboards, the Season will provide ten new Legendary items to play with. They will be made available throughout the Season and will be rolled over into the standard game once the Season ends.

The good news is that all this work wasn’t accomplished for nothing: Seasonal characters become regular avatars when the Season ends. They will also retain the loot they picked up during the Season, including blood shards, gold, crafting materials, Stash tabs, Artisian level learned and more.

For more information about what Seasons will bring, check out Blizzard’s preview here. Happy hunting!

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Kevin Parrish
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • patrick47018
    I'm ready!
    Reply
  • pills161
    Am I the only one who thinks achievements and virtual e-penis size battles are lame for games? It seems like anymore you will have a half decent game and instead of adding REAL content (you know, like maps, items, new play mods etc...) you just get achievements/competitions? They aren't a bonus to the game they just keep better track of what you're already doing. Does anyone REALLY care about how further in the game another player has reached? about who was the first person to hit lvl 70 in hardcore because they play every minute of every day and I don't?
    Reply
  • rantoc
    Wish Blizzard spent the time doing truly Randomized Instances rather than the same static ones over and over but i guess the consoles limited hardware crippled that possibility for the PC that have the hardware to do it in the blink of an eye.

    Its pure BS that they came up with the idea to release for consoles afterwards, the whole design stinks of dumped down (no offence, the input options as well as the hardware on the consoles are limiting) console design.

    Consoler's go ahead and vote it down the post if you like, know the truth can hurt when not viewed objectively.

    My 2 cents!
    Reply
  • balister
    Sounds like Blizzard is hurting due to Path of Exile being a better Diablo than Diablo 3 and mimicking what PoE has been doing since it started.
    Reply
  • ShadyHamster
    Sounds like Blizzard is hurting due to Path of Exile being a better Diablo than Diablo 3 and mimicking what PoE has been doing since it started.

    My thoughts exactly.
    Reply
  • LORD_ORION
    Or you could just go Path of Exile, the game they stole all these ideas form.
    Reply
  • agnickolov
    They introduced this play mode in Diablo II in 2003 IIRC and that's about the time I stopped caring about that game. In fact, it drove me away so hard I never even bought Diablo III... (Though to be honest, the always-online requirements was a big no-no for me this time and probably the deciding factor.)
    Reply
  • fkr
    Am I the only one who thinks achievements and virtual e-penis size battles are lame for games? It seems like anymore you will have a half decent game and instead of adding REAL content (you know, like maps, items, new play mods etc...) you just get achievements/competitions? They aren't a bonus to the game they just keep better track of what you're already doing. Does anyone REALLY care about how further in the game another player has reached? about who was the first person to hit lvl 70 in hardcore because they play every minute of every day and I don't?

    first of all i upvoted you (you know you like the upvotes).

    but games are always about progress. if we really look at games it is about accomplishing some sort of goal. these accomplishments really do not mean anything but there is something to be said for just finding some goal in an activity that you already enjoy and meeting that goal.

    for example i casually play on kongregate (at 1440p and CF 7950's) and I do take some weird sense of pleasure in seeing that I have a higher player lvl than others. I will a times play games I do not really care about just for the 10xp. why? because I am human and we like to compare ourselves to others.
    Reply
  • a490920
    so they are trying to make this into another wow??no wonder they set up the auction thing.
    Reply
  • Merry_Blind
    Path of Exile does it better.
    Reply