Diablo 3 - First Year in Review Parts 1-4 @ diii.net

Fansite diii.net puts up a month by month summary of all the headlines and development news over the past year concerning Blizzard's long-anticipated arpg sequel, Diablo III, including numerous links to interviews and media. Part 1 covers June-August 2008.

Here's a sample from the month of July, 2008:

The “Too-Colorful” Controversy
For most fans, their main activity in July wasn’t analyzing new content… it was arguing about what they’d seen thus far. The infamous, contentious, and apparently never-ending Art Controversy got started in July, just days (hours?) after D3’s announcement. Our first post on it was July 2nd, just 3 days after the WWI event, and even at that early stage there were dozens of forum threads debating the issue, and numerous fan-altered screenshots showing how they thought D3 *should* look...

The Art Controversy took off like it had Tyrael’s wings, and in the days that followed there were numerous articles about it in the gaming media, interviews with defensive D3 team members, interviews about D3’s art design philosophy, comments on the “too colorful” player petition, and WoW design influences. And no, July 2008 wasn’t the last we saw of this issue.

The D2 Team on D3
One of the things I found most interesting in the early days of D3 was hearing what the D2 designers thought about it. Though most of them are no longer with Blizzard, they’re still working in the industry and could not be induced to say anything about D3. There was some lingering bitterness about the way Blizzard North crashed and their early work on D3 was discarded, and furthermore, most of them are still in the industry and no one wants to risk burning any bridges. Fortunately, we tracked down a few guys on the D2 Team who weren’t afraid to speak up, and while Max Schaefer (who must have been quite distracted by the ongoing collapse of Flagship Studios) had nothing but PR puffery to add, the comments by Mike Huang and Ben Boos provided some great inside info on the issue.

You can check out  the rest of the series at these links: Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.