Earlier this morning a new splash page appeared on Blizzard's official site. When they did this last it was just before the 2007 World Wide Invitational in Korea, and during the event they announced Starcraft 2. This coming weekend there's the World Wide Invitational in Paris, coincidence? Doubtful! I'm sure there's a fairly large announcement… question is what, though?
As I just said, this coming weekend, June 28-29 the World Wide Invitational for 2008 will commence and it’s in Paris, France. Several from Curse are attending and we're going to bring you live coverage from the event across our entire network of WoW sites. It's highly unlikely what's going to happen will leak out beforehand; some sites such as Xfire accidentally put up an announcement of what they are going to cover live via a stream at World Wide Invitational, and in their agenda it mentioned how Blizzard was going to announce a new game. This is speculation and no hard facts are backing it up -- yet.
A couple of other noteworthy things are that www.diablo3.com is not redirecting to diablofans.com anymore, and www.diablo.com and www.worldofwarcraft.com both show the splash page. Possibly more Blizzard sites will redirect to it during this week, who knows. Worth mentioning is that last year when Blizzard showed a splash page, they kept showing new images throughout the week prior to the WWI07; chances are we'll see more images this week...
So what could it be?
Diablo 3
Quite a few people are speculating that Blizzard will announce Diablo 3 being in development at World Wide Invitational in Paris. A couple of reasons have been mentioned to back it up; there's a red tint to the ice in some places, and the phrase "hell freezes over" was used during the 1.11 patch of Diablo 2. If you want to take it a step further it sort-of looks as if something may burst or explode out of the ice. Maybe even melt it with fire.
www.diablo.com redirects to the splash page, this may not be something special, since other sites (at the making of this article) redirect to it as well, such as worldofwarcraft.com. Diablo 2 has been out for a very long time and seeing and developing a third Diablo title would be the logical thing to do. There's already a Warcraft 3.
Wrath of the Lich King release date
This is something many expect it to be. The release date of Lich King for World of Warcraft. It could be… the image is referenced to as "icefield" in the html code.
Wrath of the Lich King beta
The potential is there; information about the beta of Wrath of the Lich King and perhaps a way to obtain a key at the WWI in Paris. Again – only speculation. For all we know, the release date and the beta might be announced. We'll just have to wait and see during this week and then finally at WWI.
Wrath of the Lich King cinematic trailer
More speculation… the release of the cinematic trailer for WotLK. It might be, but I'm rooting for something bigger.
Something else
Yup, it could be something else. Starcraft 2 release date, Warcraft 4, Warcraft the movie information… you name it.
What are your thoughts? We're going to be sharing some more thoughts tomorrow.
