I'm gonna say August 3rd. My reason is that's my birthday and damnit, they owe me!!! Plus it will give me leverage in hopes of some generosity flowing my way in the shape of a beta key
I voted August. Since we know for sure Alpha has started, that typically means all features are code complete and implemented. For testing geeks out there, I would call this the system test and scale test phase of the test cycle, which in itself is good news!
Now in my experience, this phase of testing is extremely intense. Lots of bugs, long hours fixing said bugs and pumping new builds, diet coke, high fives, raised voices, programmers remembering they forgot to sort out the data structure in an old stub procedure, more high fives, strokes of genius, strokes of idiocy, strokes of genius to undo strokes of idiocy, testers chasing holy grail crashes that happen once and never again, more diet coke, sweat, anger, joy, pain, fear, love... and then silence. The sweet sweet silence of going gold.
All in all, 3 months in Alpha, which would take us to Aug 1, is quite a long time. When you consider they've been iterating and doing unit/feature/dev/sanity/regression testing since the beginning, it's likely they have a very stable start point for Alpha. At the same time, if they hit major problems that require substantial re-writes, 3 months will go by reaaaaaaal fast..
The complexity level of defects at this stage goes up, and thus they're harder to find, reproduce and fix. Scale issues sometimes require low-level architecture re-writes, which are extremely painful. But Bliz knows their stuff, I envision a Beta start announcement in July, Beta start date mid August..
Here's hoping..
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Went with September. I don't see them missing a three month window, but I don't see them releasing it early on in the window either. So basically optimistic pessimism.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” - Albert Einstein
Why do you think Blizzard seems unsure of itself? Pretty much every high ranking person within Blizzard thats had an interview since the last conference call has reiterated that they are aiming for a 2011 release. And as far as the slide goes, clearly it wasn't accurate, and it was labeled as from 2009 even if it was real.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I was referring to the slide from their conference call yesterday. It had Call of Duty, Spyro and some other titles on it, with no mention of Diablo III.
There was no mention of Diablo III because it is not certain it will be out. In a financial conference call, they have to deal with absolutes in which Diablo III is not.
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Blizz aren't unsure of themselves... and as someone said, if they say "Aiming for Q3" that means definitely not the first month. September most likely... and a 2011 release is a joke at this point. Even the smoothest beta test starting in July needs to last at least 4-5 months, which doesn't leave room for a December release. Think more of a spring release in 2012, around this time next year.
Blizz aren't unsure of themselves... and as someone said, if they say "Aiming for Q3" that means definitely not the first month. September most likely... and a 2011 release is a joke at this point. Even the smoothest beta test starting in July needs to last at least 4-5 months, which doesn't leave room for a December release. Think more of a spring release in 2012, around this time next year.
Not sure why people keep thinking they'll need 4-5+ months of beta testing for what'll probably be, at best, the first act of the game or so. As others have pointed out, this isn't something like SC2 that bears a long and thorough beta for the sake of balance; it'd be surprising for anything game-breaking to appear in beta, they'll mostly (I assume) be looking to see how the game runs in so many variant pieces of user hardware & further gathering feedback on the playability of certain systems (the skill tree, etc.) After months of intense internal testing, another 4-5 months of beta? It seems like barring something really surprising that's a really excessive estimate. Even 2-3 months seems reasonable.
I'm going to speculate. Because, well, why the hell not?
I'm going postulate about what in D3 is actually "ready for beta" - meaning the parts of D3 are basically playable and presentable to the public:
The graphics engine is mostly done. What we saw back in 2008 was close. They probably have some last-minute enhancements to make, but it should be mostly done.
Class silhouettes, animations, all skills (and their respective animations), and most Traits (and their respective animations). (NOTE: this does not include balance of these items, only their basic forms)
Most of the level composition - i.e. the framework for the towns and random level generator.
Most of what I will call the "Economy"
All of the base items. (not including the legendary items, but including uncommon and rare item generation)
Most of the Artisans mechanics.
Vendors and most of their basic items.
Auction House (assuming there will be one, which I'm pretty confident there will be).
The story was probably planned out a long time ago and is all complete.
Music and sound effects.
Cinematic scenes.
Arena - this one seems pretty simple to implement.
The item drop system is surely complete for all/most bosses and chests.
And the things I think are probably not ready for beta:
Battle.net - this will have to be ready before beta and is probably not quite ready for the public, but since they are doing internal testing, it's probably functional.
Matchmaking system is probably not done.. that's all I can speculate on there.
The GUI is probably mostly done, but I'm sure not all the systems.
Friends system is definitely done (since it's already been done for wow and sc2).
I doubt all the monsters are complete, and I'm sure there will be some iteration on bosses as well.
Legendary Items and their balance as well as how their distributed might not quite be there.
That's all I can think of now, but will come back if I think of more. What do you guys think? Am I totally off, or are these lists reasonable?
A quick PS, we've all heard the off-the-cuff remark that beta would appear 'about 6 months before release'; some things on this--
1) off the cuff, about as far from 'set in stone' as it gets
2) beta appearing 6 months prior to release does not mean 6 months of beta. figure x months of beta as well as some time between the end of beta and release; SC2 had a similar window, though not very large (wasn't it like a month or so?)
3) including the unspoken caveats to the informal remark, he did say 'about' 6 months, which gives extra lee-way. obviously this goes both ways, could be more or less.
Again, even 4-5 months of beta seems like a lot to me for what will be what, maybe 20-25% of the actual game content? I'm sure even that slice will provide them more than enough bugs to work out, but still...
On one hand, there's no external factors to consider, such as Battle.net tweaking, since the platform is now fully in place.
Also, we know for a fact that there isn't a new World of Warcraft expansion that Blizzard wants to release this year.
Any cross-functional members of the development team who are to be involved in heavy crunching and modeling will likely only be splitting their time between Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and Diablo 3.
Given those factors, I would feel somewhat confident about Blizzard being able to hold to their Q3 target...
...of course, Blizzard is about as good at hitting "targets" as Garrosh Hellscream is at peaceful diplomacy.
I'll go ahead and say that I expect beta testing to be delayed to the holiday season, in the late November/early December time frame.
Again, even 4-5 months of beta seems like a lot to me for what will be what, maybe 20-25% of the actual game content? I'm sure even that slice will provide them more than enough bugs to work out, but still...
This is a good point worth repeating. People are taking that off-the-cuff 6 month remark as canon, assuming it means 6 months of beta. I agree with you, 4 months of beta seems adequate given what Bliz has revealed. Namely, the beta's a small part of the game.
I think they're going to give us builds with specific balance objectives. PvP, build variety, runes, playability at given difficulties, etc would all be a focus in my book. As such, I don't think we'll see many bugs in the core game.. The buggiest area imo will be battle.net, but as much refining as they've already done on the engine and graphics, I'd be shocked if there were showstopper bugs in the core game.. most of those get dealt with in Alpha, even scale issues.
Of course all this postulating comes with the following disclaimer: While I am really hoping to release facts in this post, if it turns out there aren't any, I will release two facts in my next post.
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
It will come out "soon", as Blizzard always likes to say. Other than that, tomorrow would be nice... this year would be nice... this decade would be nice!
Waiting in high anticipation (but certainly not bated breath) for Diablo 3...
I'm going to speculate. Because, well, why the hell not?
...
-Music and sound effects.
-Cinematic scenes.
-Arena - this one seems pretty simple to implement.
I don't get the basis for assumptions about this material in particular, especially when you consider that the otehr two SC2 releases will be very heavy on that kind of stuff by default (because you can't really sell the engine and multiplayer three times).
And you could probably spend years trying to tweak and balance the rune/skill permutations, and as much time trying to make the skill graphics cool-but-not-over-the-top.
The arena is especially a huge can of worms - when has Blizz released something half-assed?
The arena is, IMO, the coolest feature of the game, and the fact that it has been an ignored stepchild by Jay (in his own admission) means it will need a ton of polish to meet Blizz standards.
BNET 2 is not an issue m8. I was a beta tester for SC 2 and SC 2 was delayed cause BNET 2 wasnt ready. They said that they wanted to make sure BNET 2 would work perfectly since BNET 2 would be the way all their new games will use to be played including D3. SC 2 along with BNET 2 is out for almost a year now.
First off, I realize how much effort they put into Bnet 2.0 for sc2, but there are a TON of other integration issues I don't think you're considering here. Here's my arguments why I think Bnet is going to be probably the most contributed delay:
1. A matchmaking system that is based on not SC2 rankings but instead d3 character develop = entire new system. This isn't just a matter of flipping a switch and poof it works.
2. The UI will have to be COMPLETELY different. Think about it. If it looks like SC2 or feels like SC2 in any way, people will hate it. It must have it's own personality - which takes time. Especially the chat gem - I mean - developing that will be a nightmare
3. If there is an auction house, there's a possibility it might be functioning outside of game, using the bnet interface (again, speculation).
4. Having chat channels cross-communique with WoW and SC2. This will take time, again it's not just the flip of a switch and it's magic. (note that we're talking about the Battle.net for the game, not battle.net forums in your web browser)
It's also probable that Bnet is one of the last things they work on, too. So it's development is probably the most behind of them all.
I have faith that it will be July, if the Alpha test is going right now that's a good sign, Mike Morhaime sounded pretty optimistic about the testing they're doing right now. He could've just mentioned that work on Diablo 3 was still ongoing or something to let investors know that they're working on it. Since it's a linear game it shouldn't take long. They already have Battle.net 2.0 up and running, so they just have to make that gel if they haven't already. I say the AH sounds cool, but if there is anything that will delay the launch, that will be it. They should release the game and patch the AH in. By the time they get AH to work players will have decent items to sell. Give us our single player and PvP ASAP. Blizz can sort the rest out while we kill each other. They will be adding more content with patches, AH can be the first if that's what players REALLY want!
Regarding the other issues like bnet, legendary items, etc,
Bnet: the bugs on this won't be worked out entirely on release anyway,
PvP: as far as matchmaking goes, that's probably why we aren't able to adjust stats (as far as I know) players will be 1-5 levels of each other, they are probably focusing on overall attack and defense, not by each skill someone has.
Item drops: how many times are item stats changed in WoW? skills as well, anyone who's played that game knows i'm talking about the dumb patch list we get to read over on nerfs, and buffs while we wait for updates to load.
Does anyone else think there is no way the beta lasts six months? Didn't Starcraft 2 beta.. a RTS game not even have a beta that lasted six months? Diablo 3 will not need that much input from the beta testing imo and I don't think there is any chance the beta lasts more the 3-4 months. I bet they release the beta in early August which would give Blizz approx. 3 - 3 1/2 months of internal beta testing. Then I'm thinking a Nov. release of the game when they realize they don't need crap from the external beta testing.
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Now in my experience, this phase of testing is extremely intense. Lots of bugs, long hours fixing said bugs and pumping new builds, diet coke, high fives, raised voices, programmers remembering they forgot to sort out the data structure in an old stub procedure, more high fives, strokes of genius, strokes of idiocy, strokes of genius to undo strokes of idiocy, testers chasing holy grail crashes that happen once and never again, more diet coke, sweat, anger, joy, pain, fear, love... and then silence. The sweet sweet silence of going gold.
All in all, 3 months in Alpha, which would take us to Aug 1, is quite a long time. When you consider they've been iterating and doing unit/feature/dev/sanity/regression testing since the beginning, it's likely they have a very stable start point for Alpha. At the same time, if they hit major problems that require substantial re-writes, 3 months will go by reaaaaaaal fast..
The complexity level of defects at this stage goes up, and thus they're harder to find, reproduce and fix. Scale issues sometimes require low-level architecture re-writes, which are extremely painful. But Bliz knows their stuff, I envision a Beta start announcement in July, Beta start date mid August..
Here's hoping..
-Thomas Jefferson
^This
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I was referring to the slide from their conference call yesterday. It had Call of Duty, Spyro and some other titles on it, with no mention of Diablo III.
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the News team
Not sure why people keep thinking they'll need 4-5+ months of beta testing for what'll probably be, at best, the first act of the game or so. As others have pointed out, this isn't something like SC2 that bears a long and thorough beta for the sake of balance; it'd be surprising for anything game-breaking to appear in beta, they'll mostly (I assume) be looking to see how the game runs in so many variant pieces of user hardware & further gathering feedback on the playability of certain systems (the skill tree, etc.) After months of intense internal testing, another 4-5 months of beta? It seems like barring something really surprising that's a really excessive estimate. Even 2-3 months seems reasonable.
I'm going postulate about what in D3 is actually "ready for beta" - meaning the parts of D3 are basically playable and presentable to the public:
And the things I think are probably not ready for beta:
That's all I can think of now, but will come back if I think of more. What do you guys think? Am I totally off, or are these lists reasonable?
1) off the cuff, about as far from 'set in stone' as it gets
2) beta appearing 6 months prior to release does not mean 6 months of beta. figure x months of beta as well as some time between the end of beta and release; SC2 had a similar window, though not very large (wasn't it like a month or so?)
3) including the unspoken caveats to the informal remark, he did say 'about' 6 months, which gives extra lee-way. obviously this goes both ways, could be more or less.
Again, even 4-5 months of beta seems like a lot to me for what will be what, maybe 20-25% of the actual game content? I'm sure even that slice will provide them more than enough bugs to work out, but still...
Also, we know for a fact that there isn't a new World of Warcraft expansion that Blizzard wants to release this year.
Any cross-functional members of the development team who are to be involved in heavy crunching and modeling will likely only be splitting their time between Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and Diablo 3.
Given those factors, I would feel somewhat confident about Blizzard being able to hold to their Q3 target...
...of course, Blizzard is about as good at hitting "targets" as Garrosh Hellscream is at peaceful diplomacy.
I'll go ahead and say that I expect beta testing to be delayed to the holiday season, in the late November/early December time frame.
i know right rough. I do like a after Blizzcon Beta !
This is a good point worth repeating. People are taking that off-the-cuff 6 month remark as canon, assuming it means 6 months of beta. I agree with you, 4 months of beta seems adequate given what Bliz has revealed. Namely, the beta's a small part of the game.
I think they're going to give us builds with specific balance objectives. PvP, build variety, runes, playability at given difficulties, etc would all be a focus in my book. As such, I don't think we'll see many bugs in the core game.. The buggiest area imo will be battle.net, but as much refining as they've already done on the engine and graphics, I'd be shocked if there were showstopper bugs in the core game.. most of those get dealt with in Alpha, even scale issues.
Of course all this postulating comes with the following disclaimer: While I am really hoping to release facts in this post, if it turns out there aren't any, I will release two facts in my next post.
-Thomas Jefferson
Waiting in high anticipation (but certainly not bated breath) for Diablo 3...
I don't get the basis for assumptions about this material in particular, especially when you consider that the otehr two SC2 releases will be very heavy on that kind of stuff by default (because you can't really sell the engine and multiplayer three times).
And you could probably spend years trying to tweak and balance the rune/skill permutations, and as much time trying to make the skill graphics cool-but-not-over-the-top.
The arena is especially a huge can of worms - when has Blizz released something half-assed?
The arena is, IMO, the coolest feature of the game, and the fact that it has been an ignored stepchild by Jay (in his own admission) means it will need a ton of polish to meet Blizz standards.
First off, I realize how much effort they put into Bnet 2.0 for sc2, but there are a TON of other integration issues I don't think you're considering here. Here's my arguments why I think Bnet is going to be probably the most contributed delay:
1. A matchmaking system that is based on not SC2 rankings but instead d3 character develop = entire new system. This isn't just a matter of flipping a switch and poof it works.
2. The UI will have to be COMPLETELY different. Think about it. If it looks like SC2 or feels like SC2 in any way, people will hate it. It must have it's own personality - which takes time. Especially the chat gem - I mean - developing that will be a nightmare
3. If there is an auction house, there's a possibility it might be functioning outside of game, using the bnet interface (again, speculation).
4. Having chat channels cross-communique with WoW and SC2. This will take time, again it's not just the flip of a switch and it's magic. (note that we're talking about the Battle.net for the game, not battle.net forums in your web browser)
It's also probable that Bnet is one of the last things they work on, too. So it's development is probably the most behind of them all.
Regarding the other issues like bnet, legendary items, etc,
Bnet: the bugs on this won't be worked out entirely on release anyway,
PvP: as far as matchmaking goes, that's probably why we aren't able to adjust stats (as far as I know) players will be 1-5 levels of each other, they are probably focusing on overall attack and defense, not by each skill someone has.
Item drops: how many times are item stats changed in WoW? skills as well, anyone who's played that game knows i'm talking about the dumb patch list we get to read over on nerfs, and buffs while we wait for updates to load.
Bottom line is this game will never be perfect.