Have you recently visited the homepage of World of Warcraft developer Blizzard? If the answer is ‘Hell yeah!’ then you may have noticed a minor change to their front page. Well, I say minor, but it’s actually a pretty major change that’s impossible to miss.

Hit the jump for all the speculation.

Right about now you’ll either be going:

‘Ahhh OMG OMG OMG OMG it’s the worldstone from Diablo that’s changed from red to blue due to the events at the end of Diablo 2. Diablo 3 confirmed!’

OR

‘Ahhh OMG OMG OMG OMG Wrath of the Lich King beta is coming soon!’

OR

‘Woop dee do, it’s ice. Plain old cold blue and possibly dirty (and therefore unhygienic) ice. It will be interesting to see what they announce, but I don’t really care either way.’

OR

‘Where am I and how come I’m quoted in this article?’

OR -

Ok we’ll just leave it at those four for now.

You can disregard the last two (they’re just me being hilarious), it’s the first couple that we’re interested in. The internet is in two minds about this image. One half believes it’s signifying the arrival of Diablo 3, and the other half thinks it’s the Wrath of the Lich King beta. If you’re really keen then take a look here for an in-depth analysis, but for those who are just mildly interested, stay here for the facts.

For Diablo 3:

• The ‘ice’ could be the world stone from Diablo 2.
• The runes in the image could be from Diablo 2’s rune system
• If you dig deep into Blizzard’s site a number of interesting numbers present themselves that all point towards the announcement of Diablo 3. Again, this can be seen on WoW Insider.

For Wrath of the Lich King beta:

• The image is called ice2.jpg meaning that it could just be good ol’ ice and not a worldstone.
• Some of the file titles mentioned above could just as easily relate to Northend from WoTLK.
• Blizzard could be trying to trick us into thinking it’s Diablo.

This is the second splash page that Blizzard have put up (the first was ice1.jpg) which leads many to believe that more of the ice will be removed periodically with each new splash page image and the announcement will be revealed behind the ice. Clever. However, not one to be deterred by common speculation, I believe the ice teaser is actually referring to one of Blizzard’s earlier games (they were known as Silicon and Synapse in those days): Rock N’ Roll Racing. Ice often forms on rocks and as it melts the water droplets may race each other down the front of the rock. Rock N’ Roll Racing 2 confirmed.

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