I know they have a secret Diablo project going on that Travis Day and others are working on
I'd say the above relates to either some mobile stuff or D2 HD.
I am also 99% sure they will announce D3 2nd expansion at Blizzcon. Reasons are marketing related.
May I ask where you take this "99% sure" from? Marketing is no reason to announce something. Development is. And all we see from development (i.e., assets with the name _x2 in datamined stuff being published in various patches) hints at the expansion being scrapped. To be honest, most of the complaints about Diablo 3 at this point make it unlikely to impossible to satisfy the fanbase (both casuals and die hards) with any expansion. What people want is a new game ground up. New lore, new itemization, different skill system, trading but no AH, PvP - there's essentially no aspect of Diablo 3 that is not being criticized. Well, maybe except for the very neat looking combat animation which outclasses every other ARPG, but that's it. Anyways: A second expansion is super highly unlikely.
Same for mobile. I have no idea why people are so persistent on this, maybe it's because of Rhykker's video. I've tried to tell him in various comments including on his video post - he completely misinterpreted the post which he used as his "main evidence" for D3 mobile. In that very post they stated that the job required Direct X development experience, which is a Windows (desktop) only feature. It's like looking at a Baseball bat and saying "oh, you're going Swimming, cool!". Direct X in that job posting was the 100% evidence that whatever the unannounced project may be: it's not mobile. So basically: Mobile D3 is highly unlikely, and if so there's something else, because the job postings were all pointing in the opposite direction.
D2HD may be likely, but only because of the SC HD leak. But people need to understand that scaling up a sprite-based game such as Diablo 2 is essentially the same as developing an entirely new game. They can re-use the numbers and names from the items, but everything you see on screen - all graphics - need to be "remade" almost from scratch. Still: D2HD is more likely than D3X2 and D3mobile. But here as well - D2HD is also not the "unannounced Diablo project". Why? Because they hired concept artists and very basic positions which you need for a game in its very first stage, not something which is basically just a "game engine port". There's no need to have a concept artist pitch out concepts of the D2 story or the D2 monsters, because in a remake you want to stay as close as possible to the original. Takeaway: D2HD is possible and the most likely out of the D3, but not the unannounced project either.
MissCheetah's post sounds to me like something bigger. My assumption is that the "new Diablo project" is a slight deviation from the initial ARPG genre; much like World of Warcraft took the franchise to a new level. And that could mean any part of the Diablo universe. It's highly unlikely that the story is just continuing after D3 - I also remember somewhere in an interview some developer saying that Diablo was more or less a trilogy and it's finished. To be fair, with Cain dead I probably wouldn't care for another sequel. I could imagine an "origins" story which dives deeper into the magic of the Horadrim or that kind of stuff (I don't know too much about the lore but I think there could be interesting stuff there). Or it could be a world of constant battlefield in which Evil has won, providing a never-ending stream of enemies. It would be boring lore-wise to have no achievable "goal" (i.e., you'll never cleanse everything) but to be fair, 99% of successful games on the market these days have zero story either. In terms of gameplay/genre it could be anything; something they've got already (RTS, FPS, MMO, MOBA, ...) or something they don't have yet (a pure adventure or a sandbox game would make me super super excited but probably not be too popular) or even make a crossover and "invent" something new. The older ones among us might remember Blizzard for being the company that could take a small genre to a new level (which is what Diablo did, some even say they invented a new genre with Diablo).
We'll see. But putting your money on D3X2 or D3mobile... makes me wonder if it's just what people want, or if people have stopped following the news altogether. Just do some research and you'll see it's very unlikely.
There's still a lot of people working on D3. Travis Day, Wyatt, Andrew Chambers, Don Vu, these are important guys on the team.
Don Vu moved to the World of Warcraft team in December 2015 already. We haven't heard anything from Travis and Andrew in a long time (I think since Blizzcon, so for about a year?) which means we don't know (oftentimes we just heard of someone moving to a different team way later).
Not saying the team is Wyatt only, but I think it's safe to say that not "a lot of people" are working on D3. There might be people working on something Diablo-related, though. I'm really surprised that so many people voted for the 2nd expansion in this poll - of all things it's the most unlikely option based on everything we know.
Yep :-) Or both of us!
Same for mobile. I have no idea why people are so persistent on this, maybe it's because of Rhykker's video. I've tried to tell him in various comments including on his video post - he completely misinterpreted the post which he used as his "main evidence" for D3 mobile. In that very post they stated that the job required Direct X development experience, which is a Windows (desktop) only feature. It's like looking at a Baseball bat and saying "oh, you're going Swimming, cool!". Direct X in that job posting was the 100% evidence that whatever the unannounced project may be: it's not mobile. So basically: Mobile D3 is highly unlikely, and if so there's something else, because the job postings were all pointing in the opposite direction.
D2HD may be likely, but only because of the SC HD leak. But people need to understand that scaling up a sprite-based game such as Diablo 2 is essentially the same as developing an entirely new game. They can re-use the numbers and names from the items, but everything you see on screen - all graphics - need to be "remade" almost from scratch. Still: D2HD is more likely than D3X2 and D3mobile. But here as well - D2HD is also not the "unannounced Diablo project". Why? Because they hired concept artists and very basic positions which you need for a game in its very first stage, not something which is basically just a "game engine port". There's no need to have a concept artist pitch out concepts of the D2 story or the D2 monsters, because in a remake you want to stay as close as possible to the original. Takeaway: D2HD is possible and the most likely out of the D3, but not the unannounced project either.
MissCheetah's post sounds to me like something bigger. My assumption is that the "new Diablo project" is a slight deviation from the initial ARPG genre; much like World of Warcraft took the franchise to a new level. And that could mean any part of the Diablo universe. It's highly unlikely that the story is just continuing after D3 - I also remember somewhere in an interview some developer saying that Diablo was more or less a trilogy and it's finished. To be fair, with Cain dead I probably wouldn't care for another sequel. I could imagine an "origins" story which dives deeper into the magic of the Horadrim or that kind of stuff (I don't know too much about the lore but I think there could be interesting stuff there). Or it could be a world of constant battlefield in which Evil has won, providing a never-ending stream of enemies. It would be boring lore-wise to have no achievable "goal" (i.e., you'll never cleanse everything) but to be fair, 99% of successful games on the market these days have zero story either. In terms of gameplay/genre it could be anything; something they've got already (RTS, FPS, MMO, MOBA, ...) or something they don't have yet (a pure adventure or a sandbox game would make me super super excited but probably not be too popular) or even make a crossover and "invent" something new. The older ones among us might remember Blizzard for being the company that could take a small genre to a new level (which is what Diablo did, some even say they invented a new genre with Diablo).
We'll see. But putting your money on D3X2 or D3mobile... makes me wonder if it's just what people want, or if people have stopped following the news altogether. Just do some research and you'll see it's very unlikely.
Not saying the team is Wyatt only, but I think it's safe to say that not "a lot of people" are working on D3. There might be people working on something Diablo-related, though. I'm really surprised that so many people voted for the 2nd expansion in this poll - of all things it's the most unlikely option based on everything we know.