Blizzard wants you to have high expectations from D3 after all; incoming release date announcement


All hell has broken loose when Blizzard’s community manager, Bashiok, said that gamers should lower their expectations for Diablo III. This sounded awkward, right? I mean a community manager telling gamers to lower their expectations for a triple-A game that will most probably sell like hot-cakes? Something didn’t seem right. And according to Blizzard’s Jay Wilson, Bashiok was being sarcastic. Now obviously, there are two sides of this story: either Bashiok was indeed trolling everyone and the media mistook his comment or he was dead serious and Jay Wilson is trying to damage control this whole mess.
Naturally, Wilson felt the need to clarify some things and it’s up to you to choose which side of this story is true. So, Wilson went ahead and stated that the beta is in good shape and the latest full build they’ve been testing here in their offices is in great shape. Start taking notes everyone, because this means that we are pretty close to an announcement for Diablo 3’s release date. Moreover, Wilson said that we can expect a launch-date announcement from them in the near future. The key here is that Wilson didn’t use the ‘soon’ word, so this means that we can expect an announcement in the coming weeks.
Wilson then admitted that Blizzard wants gamers to have high expectations:
“And by the way, we want you to have high expectations for Diablo III and all Blizzard games. That’s what pushes us to try to make the best gaming experiences we possibly can. If Diablo III wasn’t a worthy next installment in the Diablo series, we wouldn’t release it. That’s the way we do it. That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
So, according to Wilson, Bashiok was being sarcastic with his comment and Blizzard knows pretty well where Diablo III stands. It’s surprising though that Bashiok hasn’t come out to clarify his previous statements.
As always, it all comes down to personal preference and point of view. Guess we’ll find out whether or not Diablo 3 lives up to the high expectations in a few months.