"Who Knows" When We'll See Diablo III

Compulsive clickers unite! We must march on the hallowed fortress of Blizzard Entertainment to free that ancient and fabled beast known as Diablo III from its prison of crunch-time hell and long, unnecessary QA testing! Runewords want to be free! ...Legalize Wirt's Leg!

Ahem. Armchair activism aside, Diablo fans have had it rough, being teased with the tiniest of information scraps about their beloved sequel since it was first announced in 2008. We'd already seen that the game had been tacitly aimed outside of the release window that is 'anytime in 2010,' but the latest Blizzwords from a Techland interview with VP of Game Design Rob Pardo shed some light on the whys regarding the unfortunate whens:

We're definitely not fiscal calendar-driven, and we know that our fanbase is not going to hold us to a fiscal calendar. With Burning Crusade, we missed Christmas by about three weeks. We could've shoved it out the door, 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.

We've been wrong [on release dates] for as long as I can remember. So that's why don't do release dates anymore. (laughing) Now when we announce [a game] we just go, 'Here's the game we're working on, we're going to start talking about it and who knows when it ships.'

So while the Internet Minutemen will certainly take up arms to fire off about Diablo III's even-longer-awaited release, it sounds like Blizzard's nearly Valve-esque opposition to hard release dates also comes with the promise of a product polished to perfection. Or maybe a game thrown in a Horadric Cube with other untested games to raise it's quality.

In the meantime, Diablo junkies who've foregone Torchlight and still have a Diablo II CD-key that hasn't been lost or 'forever borrowed' may have more reason to get back into the game soon. Announced back in March, Patch 1.13 is nearing a public testing phase, though details are currently sparse as the team working on it had taken a hiatus to help with recent updates to Warcraft III. It was originally billed as a "content patch," with Blizzard's community team asking for player input on what should be included or tweaked, but some of the more popular features (such as a shared stash) seem to have been stripped in the latest dev update. Here's hoping your character XXBarbarianDudeXX is still happy doing the whole 'mule' thing! Diablo II's 1.13 patch still doesn't have a release window.

[via: Joystiq & Digg]