There are only two weeks left untill the Blizzard Convention, Blizzcon opens its gates. But for now, we got only the information our lovely Bashiok lefts in the official Battle.net forums. Today he speaks about the Levelcap, the weight of items and treasures.

Asked about the maximun Levelcap, Bashiok only repeats an old statement of Jay Wilson:

The first and last thing said on it was in an interview with Jay at WWI when we first announced, and paraphrasing that: we will probably keep it about the same, level 99, but it always seemed like an arbitrary number to stop at so we may up it to 100.

Futhermore Bashiok, posts a litte article about the itemmanagent and the weight that items could have in Diablo 3:

A weight system is simply a different approach to inventory restrictions, and it’s actually fairly similar to a grid based system except that weight systems are generally augmented by a character stat instead of being item based upgrades.The main issue with these systems as they relate to Diablo III is they add an additional value to items. That secondary value works to complicate and thus slow down the inventory management of a player, drawing their attention away from the action, which is of course the main focus for us with Diablo III.I’ve played a few RPGs with weight systems, and they’re among my favorite games of all time, but it’s a case of choosing which systems works best for each game.

At last he explains, that there will be no locked treasures in Diablo 3 anymore. In addition to this he added, that treasures are going to have higher quality loot but they will be less placed, than in Diablo 2. Because of this Dungeons in Diablo 3 will be more interesting.

First the old function of the Alt key  will not change in Diablo 3. We can still press our beloved Alt key and we can still mix it with the Windows key to mess up our Level 87 Hardcore Char. But function of pressing the Alt key to see the names of items lying und the ground has been improved as Bashiok explains in his new Battle.net post.

“The way it works now is that when an item drops the name shows for about 5 seconds and then they fade out and disappear. Pressing Alt shows all dropped item names for again about 5 seconds and then the names fade out and disappear.

I actually didn’t like it at first, I liked the on/off state of pressing or not pressing Alt, but with the names showing immediately after drop and having a sort of “grace period” after just tapping Alt, it’s really grown on me and is a lot more intuitive. It’s a lot easier to see what just dropped quickly and decide if you care, and it isn’t necessary to constantly hold down Alt while scavenging after a large fight.

I still want to see -nopickup return but I haven’t really asked anyone what the possibility of that is. I don’t think it would work well with the current system, so options may have to be a possibility.”

If you look at this new screenshot, you can see a dead NPC and some beasts. But where is the players charakter? A Diablo 3 fan noticed that too, and asked Blizzard about this interesting issue. Surprisingly, he got an answer. Bashiok denies nothing, in the same breath he clarifies nothing too.

This isn’t the first screenshot to be released where the player character isn’t shown.

It’s an option in our editor to hide various elements, and in the case of these shots the player was hidden to show off the environments and monsters.

And yes those are lootable corpses.

Diablo-3.biz thinks: An interesting rumor, but nothing more. Blizzard can remove this feature instantly, if they don’t like it.

As promised Blizzard updates the official Diablo 3 with new media. Rather they added four new artworks and screenshots. These new pictures are almost uninteresting, but one special artwork need further attention. On this specials artwork we can see a new creep. The Dune Trsehser.

Next our Battle.net Posting-Guru Bashiok explains some new facts about the physics in relation to the disappearance of corpses:

“In a single player game with a class that maybe doesn’t use a ton of skills that interact with corpses in a significant way this could work, but in a multiplayer game there could potentially be hundreds of corpses piling up as they’ve never come to rest due to all of the player skills firing off.”

Within an interview with Crispy Gamer Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce and public relations guy Bob Colayco clearifys, that Diablo 3 is going to support DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. Furthermore they added an interesting statement about the new “Battle.net 2.0”.

“Some of the ambitious goals that we have in terms of the online experience and Battle.Net — bringing that to the next level, and contemplating the things that are going on in social networks and other online gaming services like Xbox Live — I think that’s where we’re going to have some of the biggest challenges.”

With a litte phantasie you can read between the lines, that Blizzard has taken a look at social networks like Facebook and other gaming-networks like Xbox Live or Valve’s Steam. In the end we can imagine, what this meas to the future Battle.net