"It's official. You won't be playing
Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty this year, as Blizzard has moved the release date of the real-time strategy game to the "first half of 2010." No, they never dated it; but they have now.
Activision Blizzard's reason for the delay of
Starcraft II is reportedly tied to the relaunch of its upgraded Battle.net service, which handles multiplayer for all things Blizzard. In a statement to the Blizzard community, the developer writes "Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game."
Blizzard calls the new Battle.net an "integral part of the
Starcraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward." Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said during an investor call today that the new iteration of Battle.net will likely be ready "early next year.""
(source:
Kotaku)
Sure, B-net is a big part of D3 as well, but it will be ready well before D3 is even close to being released. I doubt they'll even be nearing the beta stages by the time SC2 releases.
How so?
It only affects Starcraft. Diablo III wouldn't have been out for some time anyway, delayed BNet 2.0 or not.
The multiplayer components, yes. But they can still get the single player components out of the way while they wait for B-net to be released.
I mean sure, I don't know much of the development cycle for games, but logically it seems that they could easily stay on track.
Each team may have there own projects but people move around to different ones to help out. for a while Diablo 3 and SC2 were abandoned to help finish work on Wrath of the Lich King (Warcraft Expansion)
Blizzard: Diablo 3 Unaffected by StarCraft 2 Delay, Two Releases Coming Next Year
I don't know why the other topic was locked, since they both talk about things that are not exactly the same, and some people over here seems to ignore the fact I just posted.
But oh well.
Good find though, if you're the one who found it.
If not, thanks for bringing it up :D.
If you go by when they announced WotLK to when they released it (August 2007 to November 2008), and The Burning Crusade, which was announced in October 2005 and released in January 2007, that would be 15ish months from announcement to release. So if they announce the next WoW expansion at this Blizzcon, which is likely, it would, unfortunately, make sense for the 2nd title of 2010 to be the next WoW expansion and not D3. Hopefully we get D3 in early 2011, or they change their normal announcement -> release for WoW expansions with D3 having been announced for so long at that point (and at this point, for that matter). Or they just don't announce the next WoW expansion, that would be nice, too.
Just figured it was some good info as to how this may or may not affect D3. Blizzcon will tell really
Im tired of it, im through with it, and Im out of the Blizzard market.
The only reason Im still posting here is because Im wasted off my ass (peachfeast and the Snow Birds in town this week = too many Kokanee Golds) and wanted to see the replays to my last post.
Blizzard can lick donkey balls, Im tired of their bullshit release date and time frames, no way in hell Im going to be 30 years old and still playing this game, just by the fundamentals of it. I wont do it.
So, for this customer, they have less than 12 month to release this game or I will back away from all Blizzard titles untill my kids play them (If i dont make them hate them from inception).
Im tired of the blizzard bullshit.
As far as this whole Diablo 3 and WoW expansion thing, a WoW expansion hasn't even been talked about formally yet. They don't NEED a new WoW expansion yet, the fucking one we have still has a lot of work to be done. Ulduar is the big dungeon now, but as we all know we have yet to dethrone Arthas in Icecrown. For all we know, there may be a whole nother raid coming out before Arthas. The LAST thing they need to do at this point is start talking about releasing a new expansion when we haven't even finished the one we have on our plates. "If you can't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you can't eat your meat?!?"
That being said, I personally think the most Blizzcon 09 might do for WoW is announce said expansion. Let us know its coming, but not happening any time soon. That is no way or form means we won't be getting shit on Diablo 3 (we had better), and it in no way or form means an WoW expansion will be coming out before D3. It could, don't get me wrong, but it is WAY to early to be predicting that crap. The only thing we KNOW for sure right now is that SC2 will be coming in 2010. On top of that, assuming there are no delays, we also may very well see another title released in 2010 (most likely later in the year, before holidays). Its either going to be a WoW expansion or Diablo 3.
At this very point in time, it may not LOOK like Diablo 3 is close to completion. What I really cannot understand is how people can blatantly say that it IS NOT, FOR SURE even close to completion when they have no clue in hell as to whats going on behind closed doors. We have damned Blizzcon 09 THIS MONTH, and still people tend to judge Diablo 3 based on old 08 news? WELCOME TO 2009! Its coming in TWO WEEKS! See what Blizzcon 09 has to offer before you start making unreal judgments. After Blizzcon 09, we will most likely be much more suited to make these kinds of theories. If they don't even announce a new WoW expansion, chances are Diablo 3 will see its way to stores before a WoW expansion ever will, but we don't know that because its not Aug 21st now is it?
So....After playing the campaign out, and multiplaying a while, some folks will switch to D3 end year 2010 and early 2011, then when the next campaign for SC2 gets release it will re-spark interest....etc
Most people don't play only 1 game at a time anyways.....:thumbsup:
I'm sorry but I major in Human Resources Management and the first thing you learn is that the larger the company is, the harder it is to keep a level of quality throughout the company. It's simple mechanics. Yeah, your reasoning on more workforce=speed is right, but unfortunately, no matter how talented a designer/coder/artist is, without proper direction he won't be able to acurately imput his knowledge into the game.
You could try to do somthing similar to larger entities and span out management so that every department can guarantee output, but once again, every manager thinks differently. So before the lead developer Jay Wilson's ideas go from his mouth to the ears of the actual employees, alot will have gone through intermediaries.
This is why Harley Davidson brought it's company back down to near original size after nearly going bankrupt from lack of quality due to management/employee numbers being too high. They tried to overproduce to compete with japanese companies that produced lower quality products at a faster rate. When the quality degraded, that's when Harley nearly went down the drain, is that what you want Blizz to become? http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2005/07/28/case-study-harley-davidson .... there's a link, go read and understand how high quality, customer satisfactory companies work.
You can't have best of both worlds.(Quality/Speed) It's always a sacrifice when it comes to those two. So in conclusion, I prefer Blizzard take their sweet ass time with a smaller group and produce a quality product like they are known for than to speed up the process and become like EA (Sport)who spew out the same shit every year, or Flagship.....(I wont even go there).
You can't simply say: "They have tons of money, they can work faster!" The more people work together, the more complicated it gets to manage, and you end up having less control over it. Too many people working on the same game wouldn't necessarily make the game ready earlier, and it would probably generate more bugs, since too many people works on different parts of the game.
Injecting money in a game wont make it better... Hiring tons of developers isn't really a solution either.
-
Also, about the release date part, I don't want to disappoint anyone, I know we all can't wait for Diablo3 to be released, but I really think that in Q4 2010 will be released another WoW expansion, not Diablo3. The last expansion is already almost 1 year old, and for the last 2 expansions, it was always only 1.5year to 2years since the previous release. You know, even if you dont like WoW, it's still their milk-cow, they HAVE to release new content for this game to make a decent income and have the money for developing their other game projects.
I don't think that Battle.net not being ready yet will delay the release of Diablo3, since they can redistribute a part of the development teams on their other projects, but I'm not really expecting Diablo3 to be released in 2010 either. If it is though, I'll be really happy that I was wrong!
Edit: Mattheo got the 'more workforce = harder to manage' point before I finished writing this!
:cool: lol.....
I just wish more people understood those principles, would be less BStting about every issue dealing with Blizzard. Seems like everyone's favorite excuse nowadays is, Shit just throw some money on it. Or, can't the almighty Blizza just make it better with a flick of their golden fingers...
Cmon gentlemen, life just doesn't work that way.
It's litterally like the old folks say: Anything that's worth something takes time.
Which innevitably leads to the more annoying saying that goes: Patience is a virtue.....
Can't say they didn't warn us.!