Diablo III Development "Technically Completed"

Liberation.fr recently had an interview with Mike Morhaime (President) and Frank Pearce (Senior VP) of Blizzard which you can find here (the interview is in French, so you may have to use a translator). During the interview, we recieved some extremely interesting and very good news about DiabloWiki.com - Diablo III Diablo III's release date.


Official Blizzard Quote:



Q: I suppose that you do not have a world-hysteria scoop to offer the readers of Liberation concerning the official and definitive release date of Diablo 3?

A: Alas, no. Just to confirm to you that we are full at work for the game to release this year. The development is technically completed. We are in a internal-testing and feedback-gathering phase. Yes, there are good chances of releasing before the end of 2011, but it is impossible to us, at this time, to guarantee you that.
Although the response is somewhat ambiguous, it can be determined that Diablo III is very far in development, and appears to be in alpha testing. It should be noted that the translation is somewhat hard to interpret, and it could be either "development is technically finished" or "technical development is finished," but either one is very good news. This response isn't too much different than the news recieved during the recent conference call Activision Blizzard conducted, or the subsequent interview with Kotaku, but the language does seem to be even more promising.

As is standard with anything Blizzard says, there are no guarentees, but the fact that they are comfortable saying there is a good chance of release in Diablo III is good news by itself. Surely there is plenty of work left to get the game ready for release, but this quote implies that much of the game is completed and needs to be balanced and polished to Blizzard's high standards. Again, this is not a guarentee that we'll all be playing Diablo III this year, but its the best news we've gotten about it so far. Hopefully we can get our hands on a beta soon, a scenario which is seeming more and more likely.

In case you didn't know, during the financial conference call last month, Mike Morhaime told us that we would hear more about the beta during the Q1 2011 Conference Call in May. That statement, along with this interview, makes it seem like we may finally be approaching the light at the end of the tunnel.

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