Will Season Three’s Start Coincide With Three Year Anniversary of Diablo III?
by JR Cook - 9 years ago show comments
As we discussed during a segment of this week’s Westmarch Workshop, Season 3 is currently available for testing on the Patch Test Realm (PTR) along with the many other new and exciting changes coming with Patch 2.2.0. The new season will bring with it a handful of brand-new Conquests, Legendary Gems, and the final pieces of the transmog set that we have been assembling over the course of the previous seasons. However, I’d like to bring your attention to two attainable rewards in Season 3 that were quietly displayed on the introductory screen.
The Rewards
Yes, a Diablo-themed portrait and Diablo-themed pennant. As we are all likely familiar with by now, the main colorways for the “theme” of Reaper of Souls are black and blue. A quick trip through many of the zones in Westmarch will confirm as much. However, a trip down memory lane to the last zone you enter in vanilla Diablo III, The Crystal Arch, finds you fighting Diablo in a lair that hums with the glow of that forever-familiar “Diablo red” (excepting the quick visit to Diablo’s Realm of Terror, which has the darker, blacker feel to it). With that in mind and the image above, the flavor of these two items seems rather consistent with the hallmarks of the original game and would do well to be rewards that coincide with a celebration of three years since Diablo III officially launched.
The Investigation
Reddit user Rickardinhu took screenshots of the Season 3 Pennant reward currently on the PTR http://t.co/Sol1gRPjgH
— Wyatt Cheng (@candlesan) March 13, 2015
The Season 3 Portrait frame is pretty sweet too! It’s planned as a reward for reaching 400 Seasonal Achievement Points!
— Wyatt Cheng (@candlesan) March 13, 2015
Next up, let’s discuss these two tweets from Wyatt Cheng. He called attention to Reddit user Rickardinhu, who posted a short missive about nabbing the pennant. There were also some accompanying pictures to show off how it looks in-game. To earn the pennant, you have to obtain 100 achievement points in Season 3. To earn the portrait frame, you have to earn 400 achievement points in Season 3, as noted by Wyatt above. What further drives our theory here is that the string for the pennant’s text is still displaying in game and you can see the key word “anniversary” in the string from Rickardinhu’s picture:
The Timing
The last question we have to tackle is whether the timing makes sense. Let’s consider:
- Today marks exactly one month of Season Two.
- The PTR for Patch 2.2.0 went up shortly before the end of February.
- Diablo III launched on May 15, 2012.
- The developers noted at the last Tavern Talk that their goal for Season Two was to make its duration decidedly shorter than Season One.
With those points in mind, I think it would not be unreasonable for everything to hit. We will have a two week warning before Season Two ends, then Patch 2.2.0 will roll out, and then Season Three will begin shortly thereafter. The previous two seasons have begun on Fridays (August 29, 2014 for the first and February 13, 2015 for the second) and guess what? May 15, 2015, the three year anniversary of Diablo III, is a Friday.
What do you all think? It seems all too fitting to be circumstantial. Sound off in the comments and let us know if you agree or if you have evidence to the contrary.