Diablo III Collector's Edition

The Diablo III Collector's Edition was revealed at Blizzcon 2011.^[1]It contains the full game, plus numerous bonus features including a behind the scenes DVD and an art book. There is no retail price yet, but it's expected to cost around $100, as the Starcraft 2 Collector's Edition.

Collector's Edition Contents

Glowing Tyrael-style wings are a special bonus.]] The full contents were revealed at Blizzcon 2011.

Diablo III full game.
Behind the scenes making of DVD.
Diablo III Soundtrack.
The Art of Diablo III book.
Diablo skull and 4gig USB soulstone.
- The full games: Diablo II and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction come loaded on the flashdrive.
- The soulstone USB fits into the skull as a resting place/decoration item.
Special digital bonus features in Blizzard games:
- "Aesthetic Artifacts" in Diablo III: Two special color dyes (Bottled Cloud and Bottled Smoke) and glowing Tyrael's Angelic Wings. The wings toggle on and off. You can use all these items as many times as you want and can transfer to other characters on a single account via the shared Stash. ^[2]
- World of Warcraft Fetish Shaman pet.
- Starcraft II Battle.net character portraits

D3CE full contents reveal.

The Angelic Wings can not be dyed. ^[3]

Angelic Wings can not be shared with characters off of your account, so no sharing with friends. ^[4]

Pre-Announcement Comments

Prior to the reveal, the D3 Team were repeatedly asked about the Collector's Edition. They always followed Blizzard policy by denying everything prior to an official reveal. (Obviously they knew a lot about it; the items in the CE were planned months of years in advance.) For example, A fan asked about the D3:CE at the Crafting Sanctuary Panel at Blizzcon 2010:

Question: What exclusively might there be in a Diablo III Collector's Edition?
Answer: We haven't talked about it at all yet. But something cool, I'm sure.

Another instance came in February 2011, from the @Diablo twitter feed. ^[5]

We’ve not announced a collector’s edition.

Availability

Various prizes from the D3CE.

The Collector's Edition is available for preorder for those in north America on Amazon.Com, it is not yet on any other of their regional outlets. Blizzard have released previous Collector's Editions outside of north America and although it is not yet available for pre-order on European online retailers Blizzard announced the Collector's Edition on the Blizzard Europe website.

Fan Speculation

Fans were fond of speculating about what might be contained in the Diablo III Collector's Edition^[6]

In the collector's editions for their recent titles (Warcraft 3, WoW and its expansions, and Starcraft 2), Blizzard has always included the game's soundtrack, an art book, a comic book, and a behind the scenes making-of-the-game DVD, and World of Warcraft virtual pet. All of those seemed fairly safe bets for the Diablo III collector's edition, and indeed most of them were included.

Starcraft II: Collector's Edition

The SC2 collector's edition was released on July 27, 2010, the same day as the regular game. There has not yet been any word about Collector's Editions for SC2 parts 2 and 3. The Diablo III Collector's Edition did not contain the same stuff as the SC2:CE did, but the loot was fairly similar.

The SC2:CE contained:

An art book. (Hardcover, full of concept art for Starcraft II and notes from the artists.)
A 2 GB flash drive modeled after Jim Raynor’s dog tag with the original StarCraft and Brood War expansion preloaded.
A behind-the-scenes DVD.
The StarCraft 2 soundtrack.
A StarCraft 2 comic book.
Unique avatar portraits for use on a player's Battle.net account.
A unique model for the in-game Thor unit in multiplayer.
A World of Warcraft virtual pet.