Diablo III - Not Till 2010

In an interview with Wired, Blizzard’s Executive Vice President of Game Design, Rob Pardo has unveiled that Blizzard is taking their sweet time with Diablo III. The highly anticipated RPG will get a release after StarCraft II - with StarCraft II shooting for 2009, it’s logical to assume that we’ll get to play Diablo III in 2010. A bit unnerving, but not unexpected.

Wired: Exactly. That’s key.

I have no idea if you guys are even remotely close to knowing this, but when — broad, ballpark estimate — can we expect to see Diablo III on retail shelves?

Pardo: When it’s ready.

Wired: Ok … alright …

Pardo: [Laughter]

Wired: Is that like 2 years from now? A decade from now?

Pardo: I don’t … I don’t know how far out it is, but it’s still fairly early in development. I think when people see it, it feels so polished and so finished, but the reality is we have a very small portion of the game done right now.

A lot of the way we develop is: We wanna make sure the game is really fun and the visual fidelity we want … we wanna make sure we have a small area that feels really done so we know what to build. So even though it looks really complete a lot of the content is just not there. We have a long ways to go to build each of the different acts in the game and put in all the quests and all the different monsters. We have a lot of development ahead of us before it will be something … It will definitely be out after StarCraft II.

Blizzard Gets Massively Greedy with StarCraft II

Well, looks like the capitalism bug has bitten Blizzard this time as the company plans to roll out StarCraft II as three different titles. StarCraft II, each containing different races. Bottomline, the game will be in 3 pieces (Trilogy), all priced at $50 to increase the revenues. Excellent! Furthermore, it appears that Battle.net will be getting a facelift with some premium features. Features that you’ll mostly likely pay for.

“[The second and third games] will be like expansion packs, but we really want them to feel like standalone products,” said Blizzard’s Rob Pardo.

Each campaign will be very different, with Pardo announcing the Zerg campaign will contain RPG elements. The Protoss campaigin will likewise be differentiated by elements of diplomacy. In addition, the Terran campaign will feature a Protoss mini-campaign.