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No Diablo II This Year
ViceClown writes "Blizzard announced in a press release that Diablo II is now looking at a Q1 2000 release and will not be available for the holiday season. They did mention, however, that there may be a limited 1,000 person public beta test around the end of the year so if your lucky enough you can get your fix before everyone else! Read more at IGN PC. " But on the positive side, Rob and I will remain productive throughout the rest of the year.
Diablo II is going to sell a lot of copies, no matter what. Even though they're going to miss the holiday season, that's not going to stop me, my brother, the entire population of Slashdot, and everyone else from going out an buying it when it is released.
And why? Because Blizzard puts out good games. The original Diablo was late, other games were more than likely late as well, and Warcraft: Lord of the Clans was axed because it fell short of expectations. Here we have a company that is the opposite of most software companies: Instead of rushing a product out of the door, they test it and refine it until they have a product that's not "good enough" but actually good. And the fans love them for it - games like Diablo and Starcraft are still some of the highest ranked games (in terms of player esteem) ever made.
I think Blizzard gives an example of a software company that doesn't rush out a product, and yet still has a large amount of 'market share'.
IMHO, many companies could learn from this.
-Denor
Blizzard has always kept the quality of their games to a higher standard than those of other companies. They could have released StarCraft in 1996 ... they didn't -- they took two more years to get it "just right".
The end result of their policy is that, even though they release less games than other game companies, *every single game* that they have ever released as "Blizzard Entertainment" has been a best seller... they haven't released a single bad game, or even an overly buggy game. Every patch that they've released to every game that they've made has eithor been a game balance improvement for something that they couldn't have seen without actually releasing the game, a patch to re-arrange the memory image of the game to make cheating more difficult, or an enhancement.
Blizzard and Diablo II are the only reason I still have a Windows partition on this computer, and if I didn't know that the game was going to kick ass before I had even gotten previews of it, Windows would have been nuked for the HD space long ago...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Diablo II is currently the only reason I still have a licence for Windows 98, but I don't want to have to reboot to play it.
They've got a Battle.net forum for suggestions for Diablo II, (at http://www.battle.net/forums/diab lo2-suggestions/), so I'm off to suggest that they port to Linux.
They are one of the best, if not *the* best, game company out there. If we can just get them to understand the benifiets of a Linux port, then I can ditch Windows and save myself 500 megabytes.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
As an industry insider (core developer for all 3 Age of Empires games), I've known for a long time that Diablo II wasn't going to come out this year. There are two reasons for this, and both of them are for the better.
....
/. readers. As well it should be. Things like that are not accidental, and it's my strong belief that Blizzard will be much more careful this time.
:) (It's a sort of tit-for-tat in the Game Biz.. We send them a beta of our game, and all productivity at their officies grinds to a halt for a couple weeks, so.. they are compelled to return the 'favor' and spread the delays around.)
First Reason: Blizzard's Management and operating principial is to not release a game until it is done to a high degree of polish. This includes testing for such hard to quantify things such as "is it fun?" This goal is held in high enough regard by the company that it will allow release dates to suffer for it. Not every game company does this - in fact I would say that game companies that do are in the minority. This is made practical by the
Second Reason: Blizzard can *afford* to let Diablo II slip. Their previous titles, and the fact that they publish themselves, has given Blizzard an incredible cash flow and reserves. Consider that Blizzard employs around 80 (give or take) people. It would probably be conservative to say Diablo 2 has cost more than $5 Million dollars (so far) to make. Time and time again in the game business, money considerations have forced a game to be shipped before it is finished and polished. Time and money to do it right is a luxury.
What's interesting about the business is that this becomes something of a self-perpetuating cycle: The top selling games are the ones that make the lion's share of the money.. allowing their creators the luxury of not having to make any cuts or concessions in their next game, while the ones that didn't sell well leave their creators in the position of having to do their next game quickly and cheaply.
Another Factor: Content Level Expexctations - these have risen steadily every year. As each year passes, you have to put some x% "more" into a game for it to be received at the same level by the game buying public. Must be a side effect of radiation from ever increasing CPU speeds.
As the costs of making a "Triple-A" (or "AAA") quality game (That phrase is used to death by people in the industry) have risen steadily in the last decade, we are seeing less change in terms the people and companies that make the chart toping games. I'm not really sure if this is good, bad, or just the way it is. So far it's not significant enough to stifle innovation or newcomers, but if development costs keep rising you have to wonder about the future...
Anyway...
With Diablo 2, Blizzard faces a couple of tough challenges:
#1: They have to make the game more resistant to hacking and cheating. This is not anywhere as easy as it sounds or most programmers think. If you are really interested in the subject, I am in the process of writing an lengthy article on the subject of cheating in on-line games for 'Game Developer' magazine, which should appear around the time Diablo 2 is released. (If you really are interested, feel free to email me). Diablo's problems with cheaters were so well known, that it tainted the reputation of the game and sets a high bar of expectations to be met for Diablo 2.
#2: The privacy challenge. It's fair enough to say that every network packet sent by Diablo 2 will be under the microscope of many
All that said, I'm looking forward to it. I know many of their guys and they are excellent at what they do. Hopefully, putting their developers on The Age of Kings beta will get us on the D2 beta.