Imagine Toto pulled back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz’s first act rather than its last, and you’ll have an idea of how Blizzard’s latest slowburn announcement campaign is going. Less than an hour after Diablo 3 Redditors uncovered a teaser site for something called Reaper of Souls, they’d spotted a dead giveaway in the file name of its main image: ‘d3x’. As in, Diablo 3 expansion.
So that’s settled, then.
The site features a quote from the Book of Tyrael, Blizzard’s latest tie-in Diablo novel, and a background image depicting the gaping mouthway of what can only be a dungeon.
And that’s about it. Redditors kept digging, however, and found that the direct link to that background image spoke volumes:
“http://us.battle.net/d3/static/images/teaser-page/d3x_teaser-en-us.jpg”
Even better, some clever (if damned) soul thought to paste a link to the Reaper of Souls site into Facebook’s status update box, and was met with this:
Perhaps this is the “special announcement” Blizzard have promised for next week’s Gamescom, which they claimed was “sure to capture the attention of the Heavens, Burning Hells and all the shadowed places that lie between”. And perhaps the Blizz-trademarked name The Dark Below does belong to WoW after all.
Announcement or no, the developers have already told us that it’ll be 2014 before a Diablo 3 expansion arrives. What would you like to see in it? Proper PvP? Severance of all ties to the auction house?