2012, The Year Of Diablo III
It saddens us at Diablofans to have to announce this, but bad news is best served fresh. The target release window for Diablo III has officially been pushed into 2012.
Official Blizzard Quote:
We commonly use the term “soon” when referring to Blizzard releases, because we know that no matter how hard we’re working to reach a target, we’re not going to compromise and launch a game before it’s ready. For Diablo III, we were aiming to launch by the end of 2011. As we’re announcing globally today, our new target for the game is early 2012.
While this news might not be a complete surprise, I know that many of you were hopeful that Diablo III would ship this year. We were too. However, this week we pulled together people from all of the teams involved with the game to decide whether we felt it would be ready before the end of December, and we grudgingly came to the conclusion that it would not. Ultimately, we feel that to deliver an awesome Diablo sequel that lives up to our expectations and yours as well, we should take a little more time and add further polish to a few different elements of the game.
The upside of today’s announcement is that we will be running the beta test longer than we initially planned, which will allow us to invite more of you who have opted in.
For those taking on the Diableard challenge, we salute you -- and now fear for your well-being and personal hygiene. We hereby issue an official reprieve to all Diableard participants, including Blizzard employees, if you want to trim or otherwise manage the lower half of your face. We’d still love to see your beardly achievements, and we look forward to seeing more of your efforts as we move into 2012, but not to the detriment of your workplaces and significant others.
Thank you everyone for your support and anticipation for Diablo III. We’re still moving ahead at full pace, and we’ll be keeping you fully informed of any news and developments here at Diablo3.com, including the specific release date when the time comes, so stay tuned.
-Mike Morhaime
UPDATE 2: A fellow Diablo follower from another site was able to capture the linked post in its entirety. With this as further evidence, it seems the Blue post itself was in fact legitimate. As it looks, the post was promptly taken down shortly after its publishing.
A special thanks to Soul for bringing the image to my attention.
UPDATE 3: The post is back up on the Official Site.
You think they just announced this so they could sit in their offices and laugh at you?
In fact, Blizzard rarely misses projected deadlines. Aside from Diablo 3, the only in recent history was WoW:BC. They said they were set for a 2011 release and now that won't happen. That is what "pushed back" means. When you plan for a particular time-frame and miss it completely, it's delayed.
It's humorous how people have been saying there's no way they could miss 2011, how the game is almost done so there's no way it'll be later than that...and now since the announcement so many are claiming they aren't surprised. Good grief, the only people that aren't surprised about the delay work on the Diablo 3 project.
I'm sorry, but part of running a successful business is knowing what a time table is. You have repeatedly broken thousands of hearts, let down people time and time again.
I'm pretty ashamed of you, with literally endless resources for a gaming company, can't get your shit in gear and stick to what you said. Ashamed.
if this was true, a mid november release would already be confirmed. If its a money grab, releasing before black friday / holiday shopping season would make the most sense, and patch out the bugs later.
I give blizzard the benefit of the doubt because they make awesome games, although at times they do seem to move their development along at a slothlike pace; their results speak for themselves though.
Thankfully Torchlight 2 will be out in a couple months to scratch my looting itch online.
I knew this was going to happen. IMHO I think one of the main reasons is SWTOR along with other things already mentioned.
There are other major releases coming out in the next few months like SWTOR, Skyrim, BF3, CoD MW3, ex. All these big games are coming out at around the same time and a lot of people play all these games. I don't think people are going to be able to spend $300+ in 2-3 months for all these games including D3 if it came out this year. So Blizzard waiting till next year for people to cool off from those releases and get pumped up for theirs is the right move no matter how to look at it.
I love all the people crying about something that they knew was going to happen but were just in SUPER DUPER denial. I mean come on haven't you learned anything from SC2. Blizzard never puts things out when they say they are. It doesn't matter to me though, Blizzard always delivers on their games so waiting as long as I knew I would have to makes no difference to me.
So who doubts Max Schaefer now about what he said a month ago.
Take that, you pitiful 2011 hipsters!
What does it mean that they've taken the blue post down. Was the topic getting people mad or what.
I hope more invites to the beta are rolled out, however. It really seems a low.
I'm sure they will polish the game a lot. But what I'm sad, is that a lot of sad announcements will come out in the forthcoming months as well.
Like, for instance, StarCraft II's stupid region-and-language lock. I'm from Latin America. If I wanted to play the game in English, I was forced out to play in the NA Servers, forbidding me to play with my local friends who wanted the game in Spanish.
I fear the same will happen to Diablo III, aggravated due to the RMAH.
While I'm glad they take their tame to develop and fully polish the game (hell, Batman Arkham City had like a year of polish alone), I fear this is not the Blizzard I used to know back when Diablo II was released.
Let us hope for the best. I hope a release date is announced at BlizzCon.