If there was one thing on everyone's mind at BlizzCon 2011, it was the relatively near term release of Diablo III (Blizzard having recently announced it as due "early next year"). For 11 years, players had hankered for a new Diablo title and with one close at hand, all else seemed to pale in comparison to it.

Perhaps one of the coolest announcements beyond the display of the final box art during the keynote was the announcement of the Diablo III Collector's Edition (see left image), which will arrive with a USB drive on it containing both a Mac and a Windows copy of Diablo II, a USB drive holder shaped like Diablo's head, art books, music and other assorted goodies.

Albeit no final launch date or final price has been announced for Diablo III or its collector's edition, here's what we were able to discover over the course of BlizzCon 2011:

- The game will feature items which can have drop-in items installed into them. Beyond this, players can visit a jewel crafter to have them add sockets to certain items, thereby allowing for new bonuses and abilities.

- If you don't like it, you can change it: Gems can be unsocketed from items at a certain gold cost.

- Players WILL have to log into their battle.net accounts to play single player. While this policy has raised eyebrows and been the source of some controversy, developers stated that theologian isn't centered around DRM (Digital Rights Management), that Diablo III is a client-server game and that while certain files will be stored locally on your Mac, items, etc. are stored on the server. The developers then went on to state that one of the largest issues in Diablo II was item hacking, so the required login and server-side items work around a security basis.

- Players will be able to jump straight into public co-op games and ill be able to see which friends are online and what quest they're playing via battle.net.

- Blizzard is currently designing Diablo III around four levels ("Normal", "Nightmare", "Hell" and "Inferno"), each difficulty level providing progressively better loot during gameplay. In this case, developers estimated that 70% of the game's items are available in the "Nightmare", "Hell" and "Inferno" levels.

Diablo III's stash boxes: they're useful.

- Players will be able to use a shared stash system in which extra items can be stored via one character and picked up and used by all characters on your battle.net account.

- Items can be broken down to their core components, these components being taken to a vendor to create even better items down the line.

- Item crafters are now account-level and can be upgraded for the other characters on your battle.net account. For example, if you've played one character for several hours and raised an item crafter's experience by several levels and start a new character, the item crafters will have already been leveled up for their convenience.

Don't love your current gear? Visit a crafter to level up your items and add new abilities to your inventory.

- Game designers confirmed that there will be 2.8 trillion possible builds via the game's passive ability system.

- The passive ability system will allow for 15 or so passive abilities per character, thereby allowing for multiple abilities that automatically occur without your triggering them.

- Developers confirmed that Diablo III will feature security upgrades that defend against bot programs that have attacked the battle.net Diablo II servers in the past. In this case, the system will be on the lookout for players who suspiciously play for 24 hours at a shot or seem to jump in and out of the game multiple times, this behavior sometimes being associated with cheating tactics.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available and with regard to Diablo III, happy questing in the new year!