I don't think comparing Blizzard North's operating procedures from a decade ago is really all that relevant anymore. I do think that this game will require less testing than an RTS or MMO release due to lack of need for airtight balancing and gigantic volume of content, respectively.
Scosglen on
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ZarathustraEckUbermenschnow with stripes!Registered Userregular
I don't think comparing Blizzard North's operating procedures from a decade ago is really all that relevant anymore. I do think that this game will require less testing than an RTS or MMO release due to lack of need for airtight balancing and gigantic volume of content, respectively.
It's different testing. Players are still going to find things that utterly break the game within the first two months. There just won't be as sweeping of changes as we saw in SC2 because those don't come at the chagrin of other players (aside from envy towards those who are cakewalking their way through the game).
Over the first couple months, I anticipate a few builds the devs never even imagined that will trivialize parts of the game, and some big hits from the nerf bat in response.
Am I the only one who doesn't actually want to be in the beta? I mean, for Starcraft 2 it's not like playing the beta was spoiling anything. You knew prettymuch exactly what to expect, what it would play like, and there was no story in the beta.
For Diablo 3, I want my first time playing it to be on launch with the real deal, rather than a limited experience where I'm replaying act 1 over and over for 3 months or something.
you know, I didn't think I'd be in the same boat as you, and kinda wanted to get my hands on it ASAP like I was with SC2, but now that I think about it, I really don't want to grind through a few sections of D3 over and again, only to have all of it reset when beta ends. It was bad enough to know that none of your achievements would carry over on your retail profile (although not at all unexpected) but it's totally different in an RTS like SC2 where you don't have that persistence of levels, money, gear, etc.
it'd be like grinding through the newbie zones of WoW repeatedly, then when the game comes out, you have to do it all _again_. I don't think I could stomach it.
Oh, who am I kidding. If I get a beta key, it's not like I'm gonna ignore it.
Destructible environments + random map generator = beta bug reports full of players getting stuck somewhere.
That's my bet, anyway :P
"Destructible environments" is a phrase that implies more than it actually is. Y'know how sometimes book shelves appear in Diablo 2 in the Monastery? Think of destructible environments like that; in some of the puzzle pieces used in random map generation, they'll have set destructible objects.
Between D3 just being more complex (D2's betas were 6 quests and ~10 or so zones) and B.net 2.0, I'm sure D3's beta will be longer than 3 months.
I'm pretty sure the cut down D2 beta you're referring to was the server stress test that they allowed piles of people in on. I could swear that this was done after a fairly lengthy closed beta period, which included all of the classes annnnd I want to say all of Act 1, but I wasn't in it so if someone has a cite or better recollection feel free to update/correct me on that.
It could be a good playground to just mess around with all the classes without fully committing to one, assuming they're all available.
I'm still torn on what to play first so that's what I'd hope to get out of it. Also the new control scheme, but I guess it's very much like Torchlight?
We won't see D3 this year. They've got too much to test and it's May. This game is a 4 to 5 month beta, you wait and see.
"When it's done" isn't nearly as true of a phrase as it used to be. I could see them releasing the game with a hefty release-day patch, then spending the next month or so continuously fixing problems.
I have a lot of faith in Blizzard, but I also have an innate distrust of Activision. Activision is seeing numerous best-selling iterations of its Call of Duty franchise released in the timespan of Diablo III's production, and while that's their cash cow on the console market they're going to be looking to Blizzard for a PC release soon.
I'm expecting Diablo III will be slated for holiday 2011 and maybe delayed to January if something catastrophic happens.
We won't see D3 this year. They've got too much to test and it's May. This game is a 4 to 5 month beta, you wait and see.
"When it's done" isn't nearly as true of a phrase as it used to be. I could see them releasing the game with a hefty release-day patch, then spending the next month or so continuously fixing problems.
I have a lot of faith in Blizzard, but I also have an innate distrust of Activision. Activision is seeing numerous best-selling iterations of its Call of Duty franchise released in the timespan of Diablo III's production, and while that's their cash cow on the console market they're going to be looking to Blizzard for a PC release soon.
I'm expecting Diablo III will be slated for holiday 2011 and maybe delayed to January if something catastrophic happens.
And you know what, even if it is pushed back it's starting to sound like Q1 2012 is pretty much the latest we can expect. And I'm really excited just to know that much.
I've been holding off on building a new computer for this game for so long that I could have build one and it would already be obsolete again. If I'm playing D3 before pitchers & catchers report for next season, I'll be ecstatic.
That's right; Blood Raven and Den of Evil with Barbarians, plus a few other areas. It was good times, even if just to whet ones appetite for the full thing.
Realistically, ActiBliz prints so much money from WoW that Blizzard can basically make their own rules at this point. If they try to get D3 out by 2011 but it misses its mark, it's not the end of the world...but it does mean that everything else on the release schedule will get pushed back. You won't see D3 drop in March and Heart of the Swarm in May. To be fair though, it's not like we've heard word one about HotS yet. I expect something from blizzcon though.
A Q3 Beta start would mean at least 1.5 to 4.5 months of Beta prior to Blizzcon '11 (end of Oct), which would potentially make it a good time to announce the D3 release date (or at least a more accurate quarter range), assuming beta'ing is going well/has started.
We'll have to wait until July/Sept to see if even that's begun first, of course.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
OP needs to remove the info on item binding. That last interview (or was it the blue posts?) linked in the last D3 thread mentioned specifically that they were doing away with the concept of binding items to players.
A D3 Christmas would be an awesome thing. That said, I would rather wait for Spring if it meant not having to live with a lot of broken features at launch time.
Why are all the games I want being pushed to 2012 or at least rumored to be
Because you can't decide which direction to look in! (God I love that avatar)
Delays in video game development are a good thing these days, as far as I'm concerned. Pushing games out sooner and having them be unfinished is the shittiest thing to happen to the industry.
Three decades ago we didn't have -1 day patches, so I'd say it's a bit worse now if not a new problem.
I don't think it's worse; I think it's just the industry using current technology. Even very solid games have software bugs in them, and if they can find and patch them between when the "gone gold" code freeze hits and when the game hits shelves then more power to them.
I think the only thing that scares me about the D3 release when it happens is how much the servers can take. SC2's release was handled relatively well if I remember correctly, but WoW servers are lagalicious whenever a new patch drops (and that's when you don't have to get in line to log into the server) and when D2 came out...well...the realms were up less often than they were down for a little while there.
Between these past fears/issues and the continuing "hear no evil" sentiment Blizz has towards including LAN in B.Net2....well, I hope it all works out.
To be fair D2 and WoW's release issues were being victims of their own success, but hopefully by now they've got a grasp on the raw load that X million players all trying to log in within an hour of each other does to their code and hardware.
And they were a good decade / half a decade + ago apiece.
I mean, sure, I'll bet the login servers take an absolute pounding immediately upon release, but have hopes that it's just a brief bump in the road.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Wow servers haven't had much problems coping with the release of the expansions. Only gotten better each time tbh. Same for Starcraft 2, I didn't have any problems.
Three decades ago we didn't have -1 day patches, so I'd say it's a bit worse now if not a new problem.
I don't think it's worse; I think it's just the industry using current technology. Even very solid games have software bugs in them, and if they can find and patch them between when the "gone gold" code freeze hits and when the game hits shelves then more power to them.
Yup. My point was that games being rushed by a deadline and released early to try to cash in is almost as old as the industry itself. Shit games were being shoveled out before they were ready back on first gen consoles. Nothing has changed except that the rushed games cost more to develop and have more people being told to slap them together.
To be fair D2 and WoW's release issues were being victims of their own success, but hopefully by now they've got a grasp on the raw load that X million players all trying to log in within an hour of each other does to their code and hardware.
And they were a good decade / half a decade + ago apiece.
I mean, sure, I'll bet the login servers take an absolute pounding immediately upon release, but have hopes that it's just a brief bump in the road.
Weren't there issues with a lot of people losing connection to B.net in the first few weeks of SC2 while doing single player things and thus not getting credit for achievements?
The shittiest thing to happen to the industry three decades ago?
It's more transparent these days, and the way it happens these days is definitely built around, "Hey, let's get these holiday sales numbers!" I imagine in cases like Metroid it was a matter of giving up on aiming high. In that regard, at least it gave game developers a better sense of what to try to do in games, and was humbling.
Henroid on
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
Weren't there issues with a lot of people losing connection to B.net in the first few weeks of SC2 while doing single player things and thus not getting credit for achievements?
Couldn't say, I didn't pick up SC2 until weeks (if not months) after release.
Any of our die hard SC2 players care to weigh in?
I'd try to search the forums, but the SC2 threads are among the fastest moving in G&T, so god knows how many pages would need to be scrolled through to even find one that old.
A cursory Google search didn't show anything of note, but I'll admit I wasn't trying very hard.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Speaking as someone who played through the whole single player campaign on release day, I didn't have any problems with achievements registering. My only problem was that I'd play a mission with an achievement in mind, then realize that I had to beat the level on hard to get it. :-/
Posts
It's different testing. Players are still going to find things that utterly break the game within the first two months. There just won't be as sweeping of changes as we saw in SC2 because those don't come at the chagrin of other players (aside from envy towards those who are cakewalking their way through the game).
Over the first couple months, I anticipate a few builds the devs never even imagined that will trivialize parts of the game, and some big hits from the nerf bat in response.
-Z
That's my bet, anyway :P
you know, I didn't think I'd be in the same boat as you, and kinda wanted to get my hands on it ASAP like I was with SC2, but now that I think about it, I really don't want to grind through a few sections of D3 over and again, only to have all of it reset when beta ends. It was bad enough to know that none of your achievements would carry over on your retail profile (although not at all unexpected) but it's totally different in an RTS like SC2 where you don't have that persistence of levels, money, gear, etc.
it'd be like grinding through the newbie zones of WoW repeatedly, then when the game comes out, you have to do it all _again_. I don't think I could stomach it.
Oh, who am I kidding. If I get a beta key, it's not like I'm gonna ignore it.
"Destructible environments" is a phrase that implies more than it actually is. Y'know how sometimes book shelves appear in Diablo 2 in the Monastery? Think of destructible environments like that; in some of the puzzle pieces used in random map generation, they'll have set destructible objects.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
The stress test was 2 quests and about 3 zones.
I'm still torn on what to play first so that's what I'd hope to get out of it. Also the new control scheme, but I guess it's very much like Torchlight?
"When it's done" isn't nearly as true of a phrase as it used to be. I could see them releasing the game with a hefty release-day patch, then spending the next month or so continuously fixing problems.
I have a lot of faith in Blizzard, but I also have an innate distrust of Activision. Activision is seeing numerous best-selling iterations of its Call of Duty franchise released in the timespan of Diablo III's production, and while that's their cash cow on the console market they're going to be looking to Blizzard for a PC release soon.
I'm expecting Diablo III will be slated for holiday 2011 and maybe delayed to January if something catastrophic happens.
-Z
And you know what, even if it is pushed back it's starting to sound like Q1 2012 is pretty much the latest we can expect. And I'm really excited just to know that much.
I've been holding off on building a new computer for this game for so long that I could have build one and it would already be obsolete again. If I'm playing D3 before pitchers & catchers report for next season, I'll be ecstatic.
That's right; Blood Raven and Den of Evil with Barbarians, plus a few other areas. It was good times, even if just to whet ones appetite for the full thing.
So before the end of June/start of July then?[/gayprideparade]
We'll have to wait until July/Sept to see if even that's begun first, of course.
A D3 Christmas would be an awesome thing. That said, I would rather wait for Spring if it meant not having to live with a lot of broken features at launch time.
Because you can't decide which direction to look in! (God I love that avatar)
Delays in video game development are a good thing these days, as far as I'm concerned. Pushing games out sooner and having them be unfinished is the shittiest thing to happen to the industry.
I don't think it's worse; I think it's just the industry using current technology. Even very solid games have software bugs in them, and if they can find and patch them between when the "gone gold" code freeze hits and when the game hits shelves then more power to them.
Between these past fears/issues and the continuing "hear no evil" sentiment Blizz has towards including LAN in B.Net2....well, I hope it all works out.
And they were a good decade / half a decade + ago apiece.
I mean, sure, I'll bet the login servers take an absolute pounding immediately upon release, but have hopes that it's just a brief bump in the road.
Templar, or displaced warcraft 3 soldier.
Also more uninspired gameplay.
They don't appear to have armor equipment slots, do they just roll their own as they level?
It's more transparent these days, and the way it happens these days is definitely built around, "Hey, let's get these holiday sales numbers!" I imagine in cases like Metroid it was a matter of giving up on aiming high. In that regard, at least it gave game developers a better sense of what to try to do in games, and was humbling.
Scoundrel's got a bitchin' stache.
- that also seems to be the first waypoint we've seen so far. It's almost a certainly a waypoint, anyway; from someone else's post in Incgamers:
Templar has Heal, so there's our Prayer mercenary already. I wouldn't bet against one of the other skills being a damage booster.
@NGN: he does look like a Footman, doesn't he?
He's a Medieval Man!
I just piddled in my pants.
Couldn't say, I didn't pick up SC2 until weeks (if not months) after release.
Any of our die hard SC2 players care to weigh in?
I'd try to search the forums, but the SC2 threads are among the fastest moving in G&T, so god knows how many pages would need to be scrolled through to even find one that old.
A cursory Google search didn't show anything of note, but I'll admit I wasn't trying very hard.
@forty: nope, just music.
Well, it's pretty obvious we'll probably be getting two more.
Enchantress = Wizard
Scoundrel = Demon Hunter
Templar = Barbarian
??? = Monk
??? = Witch Doctor