So what do we know now? Do we finally have a vague idea of a possible release date of this supposed-to-be-uberfantastic-and-nearly-perfect game?
The answer is -of course- no. Instead, we are given yet another "soon, when it's ready, we are working hard, we're almost there, just be patient we love you..." crap:
While you bring up a number of points of speculation, I just want to cut right to it and state that the reason we don’t have a release date yet is because the game isn’t yet where we want it to be in terms of our quality standards.
As of December 19th they still don't have the power to give us a release date? That does not sound anything close to "early 2012 release", in my opinion. And there is one another thing that really makes my "bulls*it detector" go crazy:
While it is indeed playable from beginning to end, we’re still actively working on many individual game elements and the ways that they interact with one another, with a great deal of iterative tweaking, balancing, polishing, adjusting, redesigning, and retesting going on.
So the game appears to be "playable from the beginning to the end". Again, "wow!"... very impressive, I'm astonished. Given that Blizzard was aiming to deliver it before 2012, I really did not expect it to be "playable from beginning to end"... Of course the fact that Korea caused tons of problems to Blizzard (real money auction house stuff) did not influence the release date, right? Nah... it's just about meeting the quality standards... Sure!
But there is more. Someone asked why the beta is not openly playable, right now. If not for everyone, at least for a larger audience. The answer is simple: the infrastructure is not ready yet:
The service currently available is a single test site, it just couldn't hold that many people. While we'd certainly like to make people happy, it wouldn't be a good experience, and frankly letting people try the game is not the purpose of the beta test.
I am very curious about HOW Blizzard is testing the game. Diablo III is supposed to attract millions of players. Many of them will be playing the RMAH, dealing with real money. Meanwhile Blizzard still has to implement the "virtual wallet" thing on Battle.net and properly test the AH. And what about PayPal? No clue, we will discover mechanics and fees when the game will go live, I suppose. Also, where is the damned "stress test"? Again, nothing.
I'll be honest, I'm getting a bit bored of everything even before seeing the game. I guess that's the side-effect of too much anticipated hype. Hype that YOU, Blizzard, decided to generate from nothing between September and October. Grrrrrrrrr....!!!
I can see you're chomping at the bit there. So am I but I've decided to chill out. I'm bored with whatever games I have so I switched to doing other stuff like lots of reading, watching movies and other stuff. Time goes by so fast anyway...
ReplyDeleteAs for "early 2012" I hope you will keep in mind that this can technically extend UP TO the very end of June. After all, it's still within the first half of the year. My guess is they won't go past March. My hope is that it'll be sometime during February. But for that they would need to make an announcement soon. Most likely the release won't happen in February. For that to happen they would have to announce it already. So if they announce it on January 1st, then it would launch at around March 1st. If they announce on January 15th => March 15th. So if we're lucky we might see an announcement within 1 month.
If they do the open beta thing and I can get it, I won't really care so much but we'll see.
Well I really chilled out too, it just happened I came across that blue message and felt the need to blog about it. Other than that, the game could even be ready for 2013 that I would not care that much. Not like I did few months ago, I mean.
ReplyDeleteNow back to Terraria!