14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has started paying a bit more attention to the rest of its franchises, besides World of Warcraft, and, while StarCraft 2 has officially received a beta testing session that will begin sometime this month, Diablo III is still lingering somewhere beyond the foggy horizon. While the game did give the Monk class an update last week, offering an inside look at the culture and fighting style of the holy warriors, the trailer that accompanied the update was very poor in quality.
Now, Blizzard has already put together another update, for the Barbarian class this time, with some new art and a new story from Abd al-Hazir, the renowned scholar, but it decided to put a hold on the trailer this time around. Arriving on top of Mount Arreat, at the Bastion's Keep, what should have been a glorious sight of the Barbarian legacy was nothing but a desolate, shattered ruin, with the barbarian clans nowhere to be found.
"Though they were once misunderstood as simple, bloodthirsty invaders, the long and noble history of these proud people is now rightly acknowledged," Abd al-Hazir wrote. "And therein lies the greater tragedy here, for those of us familiar with the nobility of the barbarians remember too what they call their 'vigil,' the concept that lay at the very heart of their culture. The barbarians consider it their sworn duty to protect Mount Arreat and the mysterious object within. They believe that if they fail to uphold their duty to the great mount, or are not given a proper burial upon its slopes, they will be denied a true warrior's death, and their spirits shall roam the land without honor for all eternity."
But with the fortress crumbled, and their reason to live broken, the barbarians scattered to the four winds and abandoned their traditions and virtues. Separated from their spiritual leaders and left to wander the world on their own, the barbarians have become what narrow-minded, superstitious fools once believed them to be, "monstrous things reported to resemble the barbarians in size and ferocity, but that are in reality nothing more than unreasoning, inhuman beasts." As for the game's future, at the moment, CVG reports that it will be launched in the same time frame as StarCraft II expansion packs, sometime in the "next few years," according to an announcement Blizzard made in New York yesterday.
