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Blizzard is pushing to release Diablo III this year
- Thread starter Pooya
- Start date
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
Yeah...wasn't that supposed to come out in July?Forkball said:
It sounds fishy to me. Blizzard? Rushing something out the door? I suppose they rushed Cataclysm out, and it shows, but that doesn't sound like Blizzard to me.Eggo said:
echoshifting
Banned
Diablo 2 had numerous problems at launch, especially the online service.
Blizzard gets more credit than they deserve for smooth launches, to be honest, especially when new, intractable online components are involved. The 'craft RTS launches were great, iirc, but that's about it.
Blizzard gets more credit than they deserve for smooth launches, to be honest, especially when new, intractable online components are involved. The 'craft RTS launches were great, iirc, but that's about it.
elrechazado
Banned
We've been told that the online infrastructure is so crucial to the game that you can never be offline to play it, so how is that not "the actual game"?thetrin said:
pieatorium
Member
one game 12 years ago sure sets a trendechoshifting said:
, WoW had a sketchy launch aswell in the first couple of weeks but I think that was more due to demand being higher than expected.elrechazao said:
Bnet 2 has been out and working for a year with SC2
echoshifting
Banned
thetrin said:
That's fair, but if we have to be online at all times to play the game, nothing matters more than the infrastructure. A few visual glitches, balance issues or even the occasional desktop crash won't prevent us from playing the game at all.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see it a bit buggy. It's an enormous game in many ways. Much like WoW before it, there will be too many things they can't solve without releasing the game to a wider audience.
elrechazado
Banned
where did I say it hasn't?pieatorium said:
echoshifting
Banned
pieatorium said:one game 12 years ago sure sets a trend
First couple of weeks? No. WoW was "sketchy" for much longer than that. At least a couple of months, and you could argue longer depending on which aggravating bug or rushed solution you're referring to. The launch experience for the first couple of expansions were also messy, and those periods probably more closely suit the time frame you described. Cataclysm was, admittedly, much improved in this department, but it was rushed in other ways. I stand by what I said, they get a lot of credit for great, smooth launches because
1) Their RTS launches have been uniformly good
2) The game world itself is always highly polished, regardless of issues with mechanics, glitches or network infrastructure
The Omega Man
Member
I learned that the hard way yesterdaybtkadams said:
echoshifting
Banned
zoner said:
How so? Both of these games are huge. Personally, I'll probably end up putting off TOR for at least half a year, perhaps more, if it launches within a couple weeks of Diablo III (and I expect it to). A lot of people without the time or inclination to play both simultaneously are going to have to make a hard choice. Sucks, man, I'm dying to play TOR but I can't even put into words how much I want Diablo III in my veins. =/
echoshifting
Banned
Teknoman said:
Something like that, yeah. Blizzard has fallen out of love with lan.
pieatorium
Member
echoshifting said:
Any examples here? I played WoW from launch through to a couple months into Cata and don't know what you are refering too? First couple of weeks of Vanilla was lag prone and generally terrible because of loot lag for corpses and nodes, the world pvp had to have corpse decay time reduced due to lag. A couple of the raids had issues when the first opened most notably BWL but that fixed reasonably quickly and was introduced long after release.
BC had the node spawn issue where too many khoriums replaced lower nodes befor people had high enough mining.
Wrath had underground invisible gold farmers but that didn't happen till well after its release.
Anything I'm forgetting? Outside the first 2-3 weeks of vanilla i don't remeber anything near the level of bugs you are saying.
echoshifting said:
Can't blame them really. LAN is nice but it's really not the way most people play multiplayer nowadays, and it just encourages piracy. People can just share copies and LAN, or share copies and use LAN to play online through stuff like Hamachi (millions of Chinese do this with Warcraft 3).
I've never had a problem playing SC2 2v2 with a friend at his house over B.net2 with our seperate copies of SC2.
pieatorium
Member
TOR isn't even releasing where i am until some unknown future date so bring on D3!
I would like to see it sooner rather than later, but when I was watching a GameTrailers video, the Blizzard representative was essentially trying to explain the difference between World of Warcraft and Diablo.
Then I realized a whole generation of new gamers have never played Diablo I or II since they came out a decade or more ago.
Then I realized a whole generation of new gamers have never played Diablo I or II since they came out a decade or more ago.
echoshifting
Banned
pieatorium said:
Well, I'm not really sure what you mean when you reference the "level" of bugs I'm talking about since I'm just saying that in my opinion the launch was not good. Just talking about vanilla, though, these examples spring to mind:
1) The prime time queues, which persisted for months on high-pop servers. Needing to start attempting to get in at least an hour before a raid was ridiculous
3) Server lag on high-pop servers during prime time rendering the game unplayable
3) Loot lag persisted for months, not weeks on high-pop servers
4) Bit.torrent-style patching made every patch day unplayable, and server-killing issues following the initial release of a patch was the norm through Wrath. I know people who just gave up trying to play the game the first week of a major patch. Blizzard had no clue how to patch their game properly; they didn't figure out a good system until somewhere between BC and Wrath.
5) High-pop servers would occasionally just crash and remain offline for hours
6) Falling through the world, while not common, did happen often enough
Finally, balance issues with specs, some specs well below the power level of other characters/specs. Some specs remained nonviable for years. That's not really what I'm referencing when I say the launch was bad, but talents were merely a rough sketch upon release and required several major upheavals to get them to the point they're at today. PvP features were also lackluster at best, but that's a content issue, not really what I'm talking about.
I'm not going to go looking for articles or whatever for evidence...I was there too, and I'm surprised that anyone could look back on WoW's launch and call it "good." Now...was it their fault? That is another question entirely, and one could argue that these are good sorts of problems to have, since they all indicate the game's success surpassed their wildest expectations...though I still feel they should have been more prepared than they ultimately were. Again, different discussion, and it's such a subjective topic that I'm not sure why we'd waste time on it.
However, given the regularity with which they were forced to dole out free days over the course of the first several months, the only objective measure I can think of, I'm not sure how you could come to the conclusion that the launch was good. You can make that argument for content, for the general quality of the game world and design, but the actual play experience is what matters at launch and that was bad. Having too many players is a good problem for the developer, and a bad problem for the player. Now that we know D3 is always-online, I am apprehensive about the latter.
Diablo II was much the same, if not worse, in the infrastructure department. I gave up on b.net for months. The server lag was just unbearable.
FieryBalrog
Member
echoshifting said:
You're ignoring the WoW expansions. In terms of network infrastructure, the expansions have been smooth, esp. for WotLK and Cata with the two starting areas. Cata did have pretty huge queues, although I don't really know how they can avoid that given the volume. It wasn't the bugginess or unplayability of vanilla though.
The really bad launches were D2 and WoW, although I was on a medium pop server for WoW a month after release and didnt have that many issues. The high pop servers were god awful though. D2 online was terrible for everybody for a really long time.
pieatorium
Member
I was on a medium pop server so I didn't have much of this after the first 2-3 weeks, except the patch day issues but that was usually just for that day sometimes two. Like I said in my first post the unexpected sucess was the biggest problem for vanilla. They were quick to add new servers and offer migrations to existing low pop servers.echoshifting said:
I aslo specifically avoided balance stuff because this is the area that they have made the most improvements on and is something they don't have to focus near as much attention too with Diablo. They learned alot with the WoW vanilla.echoshifting said:
I never said it was good in the first place so not sure why you keep saying that, I said it wasn't good for weeks, I was the one who brought up that it wasn't good.echoshifting said:
I don't really remeber D2 launch, most of the multi I played when it first released was local LAN. D3 won't have the same server issues that WoW had there won't be high and low pop it will be spread much more equally.echoshifting said:
elrechazado
Banned
you can log into wow and sc2 at the same time, can't you?MrDenny said:
The beta test approaches! Weve just updated our System Check program and would like everyone to update their Battle.net Beta Profile information by running the new one. You should do this regardless of whether there have been hardware changes made to your system.
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27822632904&sid=3000
Beta really soon ?!?!
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27822632904&sid=3000
Beta really soon ?!?!
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
Wizman23 said:
A console release is NOT going to happen concurrently with a PC/Mac release. It's still something they're "exploring" and nothing may ever come of it. I wouldn't even expect an official announcement of a console version until after the game releases on PC/Mac.
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
Valnen said:
Hell, with what we think we are getting in the beta so far, I doubt it will last longer than 2 months at most unless they add extra content to test.
Unfortunately I'm going to wager a guess that having a lower end system would increase the chances of a beta invite.Ran the updated system info tool...
Says my 1GB GTX 460 has 6.91 GB Video Memory....awesome. I'd like to know how I did that!
Hopefully those informed enough to run the new test can get some kind of priority in beta...although I'm probably just hoping a bit too much. I got into the SCII beta pretty early, and I was a rabid WoW player at times, so that might have helped. (I actually played more SCII beta than SCII retail...)
Says my 1GB GTX 460 has 6.91 GB Video Memory....awesome. I'd like to know how I did that!
Hopefully those informed enough to run the new test can get some kind of priority in beta...although I'm probably just hoping a bit too much. I got into the SCII beta pretty early, and I was a rabid WoW player at times, so that might have helped. (I actually played more SCII beta than SCII retail...)
Baraka in the White House
2-Terms of Kombat
It really is kind of ridiculous, these 12 year development cycles. I know Blizzard has been busy with... WoW... all this time but the gamers that grew up with Diablo have married, had kids and probably don't have much time for games anymore.