Diablo III will miss 2010, maybe 2011 as well

Posted by Mister-X on November 24th, 2009 at 08:05am

Speaking with gaming and gadget consumer site, Techland, Blizzard’s executive vice president of game design, Rob Pardo, has confirmed that Diablo III will not be releasing next year, and is uncertain when a solidified release date will be available for the hugely anticipated action RPG.

This may come as a disappointment to fans of the series, to which Pardo and co. at Blizzard are sympathetic, as he laments over the fact that the developer always seems to announce its games “too early,” but always strives to announce its next game closer to its respective release date, which is difficult, says Pardo:

“We realize that and go, ‘You know what? Next time we’re not going to [announce games too early].’ And then we always fail at that. But I’d rather fail at that than fail at making the game great. I think it’s safe to say that, yeah, (Diablo III) is not going to be out next year.”

When asked whether the development of StarCraft II, the company’s online service Battle.Net and World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Cataclysm, has anything to do with a slower development cycle for Diablo III, Pardo responded:

“Each game has individual development teams; it’s just that the way that we develop games, we develop them very iteratively,” he said. “We just have a different process and approach than a lot of other studios, and it makes it a very difficult process for us to predict street dates when we’re multiple years out.”

Pardo was also quick to mention that the release dates of Blizzard’s games aren’t dictated by stockholders and quarterly earnings, allowing the studio to take all the time it needs to make its future games great:

“We’re definitely not fiscal calendar-driven,” Pardo explained, “and we know that our fanbase is not going to hold us to a fiscal calendar. With (2007’s World of Warcraft expansion) Burning Crusade, we missed Christmas by about three weeks.

“We could’ve shoved it out the door,” he continued, “but we decided we didn’t need to get it into stores for Christmas. We just needed it to be great and our playerbase is going to buy it whenever it hits the shelves.”

Earlier this month, the news that Diablo III wouldn’t show up in 2010 was all but confirmed during a presentation by Activision Blizzard’s chief financial officer Thomas Tippl, which contained a slide breaking Blizzard’s games down into release windows.

Diablo III showing up in the column headed “The Next Few Years,” which was joined by ‘World of Warcraft’ (probably another expansion), Battle.net, a StarCraft II expansion, and an unannounced massively multiplayer online game.

Source: Techland