Fans have been submitting the rumor as a news heads up, but Mockery, Sol_Invictus and I reached a concensus not to post about the rumor unless we had an official statement from Blizzard Entertainment. We wish to post news responsibly.Jay Wilson: Well we have a brand new version of the Battle.net that is in the works. It’s going to come out with Starcraft 2. I cannot really steal their thunder in terms of the specific feature set, because that is their announcement to make. What I can talk about is the philosophy. It is essentially as a company our goal is to provide the best online experience that players will have in gaming.
I was at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitationals and played Starcraft II. All reviews online say it is a very polished game. All it needs is start beta testing process for balancing. Anyone who has played Starcraft II at the public hands-on events will tell you that game is ready to ship. It is unlikely that Diablo 3 could be released before Starcraft II. That's my personal view. My recommendation to all forum members is to please refrain from posting alleged leaks or baseless rumors. Moderation is in full swing by our roster of moderators. We do not wish fans to get misinformed or misled.
Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok responded Diablofans.com with an official statement concerning the rumor:
We're pleased with the development progress on both StarCraft II and Diablo III and are looking forward to sharing more news about both games at next month's BlizzCon event. Development is proceeding at full speed on both games, but we do not currently have any release dates to announce for either game.
i second that
Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King were played by the public. The latter is already in beta, and release date was announced to be November 13th.
By that logic, Starcraft II will enter beta very soon.
Tell me when or where has Diablo III been played by the public? Nowhere. The rumor is a pile of fakeness.
Sweet delicious fakeness... *Homer gargling noises*
Whats left to know is how far is the Diablo 3 development. Bashiok in a recent interview didnt rule out the possibility of a playable version in BlizzCon this October. Its still not certain, but if its true then the chances to see Diablo in less than a year look very good.
How far the development of Diablo 3 is (at each given time), we'll only be able to guess from the things they announce. First the character classes, then how the content goes (how complete each act will be and how many acts there will be total - after they're done that is, because many plans change in the process) and finally the balancing of the classes for both pve and pvp (that should also take a while).
the release will come last right when they're fine tuning the game, not during the actual development.
People are very excited about even possibilities of seeing the game, why take that exciment off of them right now? Blizzard is well known to like making surprises and give as few info as they can so they can surprise people even more some time ahead.
Blizz does that and they are going to have some 60 million koreans lining up to blow blizz headquarters.
In all seriousness, this rumor makes absolutely no business sense. Why would they waste more time and resources on SCII to basically gain nothing in return(except a lot of sc fans angry)?
Lol j/k. But really I hope D3 doesn't come in 2010.
That'll just sound a little ridiculous. xD
I interviewed Mike Huang on 2003. He worked for Blizzard North in the San Francisco offices. Yet, he worked on World of Warcraft and Starcraft. Mike Huang told me in said interview he was who gave the idea to the programmers to make pylons power up buildings.
Starcraft 2 started development right after Warcraft III: Frozen Throne shipped (July 2003). However, people from the Starcraft II team was moved to help with the launch of World of Warcraft on 2004, and most likely Burning Crusade.
That was the reason Starcraft II development took this long. Some staff kept working on Starcraft II, but most of it was working on games that needed as much resources as possible to ship.
I work in a medium-large software company. At any one time, we are working on several large (multi-million dollar) projects. People are always shifting around as they are needed on different projects, but one thing is always the same. When a project is in full development mode it has a lot of people working on it. As the project nears completion, many developers get moved to a newer project. Some remain behind to fix the bugs and add some polish.
This is where Star Craft 2 is right now. The art is done, the programming is pretty much done, all that remains is a bit of tweaking. It doesn't need a full team of developers working on it. However, Blizzard has stated several times that Diablo 3 is in full content development. This means art, programming, design, the whole 9 yards. That requires lots of people.
It does not mean that D3 is coming out before SC2.
Having said that, I do believe we will see a playable D3 demo at blizcon. It will show what we have already seen, as well as anything new they announce.