Matthew Rossi

We finally have some idea of how Diablo Immortal is going to play and I'm glad to report it's still recognizably Diablo in its approach to itemization.

I'm excited every time we get a Quarterly Update for Diablo 4, despite the fact that these are updates for a game that's not out yet and that could all change at a moment's notice.

We've seen World of Warcraft hang on as the top dog of MMOs over the years, weathering challenges from all kinds of other games.

We finally know when Diablo Immortal will get any sort of public test: the answer is "now, if you live in Australia." The announcement of a technical alpha test says invites to Australian players who pre-registered on the Google Play Store have started going out, and there are already streamers showing off gameplay.

This week saw some Torghast changes as the new levels went live and players started hurling themselves face first into the teeth of the Tower of the Damned to discover that, oops, some of the new stuff was pretty hard.

On Saturday, December 19, those brave souls who venture to the Blizzard Watch Twitch channel at 2:30 PM Central will witness the culmination of 16 episodes of our D&D play stream, as the party of ragtag adventurers who have gone from being trapped in a volcano lair to escaping to another dimension to returning home to find out their lives were stolen by imposters now head back to that volcano lair to destroy two horrible artifacts of a dread alien god in the unquenchable flames of another god's summer vacation home.

We are seeing more and more information about Diablo 4 and that has me really starting to think about what kind of game it's going to be.

The December 2020 Quarterly Update for Diablo 4 -- in general a very detailed update with a lot to chew on -- went into a change that brings back some of the RPG elements of the franchise.

Okay, one of the things I really like about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are the weapon drops, which are pretty sweet looking. I’m especially a sucker for the Carolingian Longsword, which is a greatsword in the game, and when fully leveled up is a +VLFBERH+T sword, as you can see from the screenshot accompanying this Queue. The Ulfberht swords (as they’re known today) are found in graves across Europe and date from the 9th and 10th centuries, so right during the period of the game, and tended to be made from large blooms of steel forged in a pattern welded fashion, sometimes with edges of even harder metal forge-welded to the body of the blade. The inscription +VLFBERH+T or +VLFBERHT+ derives from a personal name, possibly the smith who first crafted one somewhere in modern day France.

The Ulfberht was an extremely popular weapon in Norway, where the protagonist of the game is from, with 44 of the known Ulfberht found in Norwegian warrior graves. It’s a nice detail that Eivor can find and use one, and I also like that the sword’s Frankish origins are preserved in its name, as the Carolingian dynasty was the royal house descended from Charlemagne himself. WoW needs weapons like this — the Ulfberht were prized weapons, although they were also crafted with a variety of techniques and materials over the hundreds of years of their prominence. There should be a blacksmith or two in the game that sticks a little flourish like the engraving here onto their work.

Covenants can seem pretty daunting.