StarCraft 2 is in internal alpha. Would mean there’s a very good chance for it to be released next year. I don’t think Diabo 3 is in alpha…

Diablo 3 is less then 25% complete, alpha will most likely start sometime in late 2009/early 2010. Starcraft II for Feb. 2009

blizzard never puts a % complete figure out there, since the dev process doesn’t work with such figures and estimates. it might only be 25% or 33% finished, content-wise, but that says little about the overall task, since building the engine and getting the design and art and all the other prep work takes the bulk of the time.

If you just judge by content, you’d have to say the game was 5% finished for the first 3 or 4 years of development, while they hammered out the framework and did all the behind the scenes structural work. That stuff was very difficult and time consuming; plugging content into the well-functioning game engine is a much quicker process, relatively speaking.

He "hopes" that D3 launches before 2012?! And he "hopes" Starcraft II comes out before D3?!

I realize they don’t want to misspeak and lock themselves in, but come on, these are pretty much non-answers. I’d like to believe they’d manage somehow to get out this game sometime before 11 years past D2X, 8 years past any active development/updates, and 4 years after they announced the sequel.

Sheesh. :p

He "hopes" that D3 launches before 2012?! And he "hopes" Starcraft II comes out before D3?!

I realize they don’t want to misspeak and lock themselves in, but come on, these are pretty much non-answers. I’d like to believe they’d manage somehow to get out this game sometime before 11 years past D2X, 8 years past any active development/updates, and 4 years after they announced the sequel.

Sheesh. :p

If released in 2012 the development time would be close to 8 years. Now I know Blizzard is all for living up to their reputation and releasing a pure quality product "when it’s done". However, one starts to wonder how talanted they really are if it’s taking them such insane amount of time to complete a _sequel_ to a non-mmo. I mean, even the lousiest chef can make the tastiest soup given enough time.

Well given the ammount of info we have been fed on the game so far, I wouild go ahead and make the guess on beta begining in late 2009 and the game being released 6-9 months after that.

^^ just what i said

[QUOTE=Flux;6758405]blizzard never puts a % complete figure out there, since the dev process doesn’t work with such figures and estimates. it might only be 25% or 33% finished, content-wise, but that says little about the overall task, since building the engine and getting the design and art and all the other prep work takes the bulk of the time.

They do in fact just that. Dustin Browder told me in person at BlizzCon ‘07 that he felt the game was 50-60%, and also repeated that to other journalists.

Still, he did also mention what you said, everything is relative, and the percentage is not a good indicator of development time LEFT. One thing he mentioned was that things are inevitably slower in the beginning, and speed increases towards the end just because a lot of stuff is already finished, so more time is spent on legwork, and less on conceptualization.

I’m betting my right hand that it’s going to be released in 2009.

He “hopes” that D3 launches before 2012?! And he “hopes” Starcraft II comes out before D3?!

Don’t read too much into that. It’s PR talk for “stop the hell asking for release date, bugger off”.

Flux, I love you; but Blizzard doesn’t have time tables, they have ‘Time Horizons’