News Blizzard: No Diablo 3 in 2010

If you take the average development time as 2 years, then yes, double seems about right. Probably even longer if you take into account all the pre-production work and inevitable false starts.

Blizzard get a lot of abuse in regards to their long development cycle, but I would be willing to bet 99% of other studios would do the exact same thing if they could.

They take as long as they like because they can, who can really tell Blizzard to 'hurry up'? They effectively bought their last publisher (well, merged..).

If I had to speculate, I would even say their 'announce early, release late' is deliberate to help sales - it turns Blizzard releases into 'events' similar GTA/Halo etc. Fact is, RTS and dungeon crawlers aren't exactly genres which attract massive mainstream sales, but Blizzard's trickle of information (which is naturally followed by press attention) leads to more people who aren't currently fans starting to pay attention.

 

Well long time to produce doesn't always mean high quality, just look at Too Human. 11 years in production and it was really flawed and lacked many things. I wasted about 100hours in it just because I am a perfectionist, but that doesn't mean that I didn't suffer

Anyways Blizzard has almost without fault produced high quality games, feels like their entire franchise is built around that thought. So they can't really "afford" to make a shiet game in that aspect.
Also they don't want to draw consumers from either product, hence Blizzard selling them on entirely different years. Smart move considering the amounts of cash they've put into the development (no I have no idea how much)

 

That's quite a treasure you have there in that Horadric Cube.

 

was looking forward to this game

we might get Half-Life EP3 by then...

 

I am very disappointed with this announcement.

In the meantime, might I suggest some of you trying Titan Quest and its expansion Immortal Throne? Compared to D2 the graphics are simply stunning. The gameplay is just as good and you can actually dual class your characters. I will say that I do not play it online in multiplayer, but its single player game is great. Additionally its been out for a few years now so you should be able to pick up copy fairly cheap.

 

well that puts all the conspiracy theory's to bed then doesn't it

 

If its not gonna be out till 2011, then hows about they at least release the 1.13 patch they promised us IN JUNE!! And a ladder reset?

 

Makes me a sad puppy...

 

its being released on iphone as main platform

 

If you're afraid the game will look like crap, I seriously doubt that. IMO, it makes more sense to me to publish a game that doesn't use all the newest tech as it limits their customer base. If they're gonna make a console port, then to hell with it... I mean, either way, they win. People will buy it anyway.

 

Please tell me you are NOT asking for a Patch for Diablo 2, please tell me that!

 

Diablo 2 is my all time favourite game I've played. Currently playing Borderlands on the PS3 and this reminding me very much of D2 except for its a FPS rather hack n slash

 

I will say this. I won't be buying this game whenever it comes out if there is a better game out by that time.

They can release this game now and still a lot of people will be able to play it. They can play it at low resolution and put it at medium details at least if they run it with Physx. These companies always scale their games according to the market.
I was able to get Mass Effect 2 running on a 8600m gt by running it at 1 resolution lower and still have some details on.

Ofcourse, I run the game on my high-end gaming PC but goes to show you that you can still play these games.

Well, the game will still probably be a good sell because even if people don't buy it right away, they might after they've played the other games.
Blizzard sure likes to take their time. Why does it take so long to polish these games? Are they waiting for input?