There must have been something in the water over the last couple of years because more and more money is being pumped into developing games. Yet, many games have been released in truly abysmal states recently. One only has to look at The Last of Us Part 1 for PC or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor as good examples.
It’s, therefore, no surprise that while excited, many fans have also been apprehensive about the impending release of Diablo IV and the general state that the game and servers will be in on launch.
Moreover, Diablo itself has a pretty shoddy history with previous launches, which has led to Blizzard stating that this time around, it is confident that the launch for Diablo IV will be stable.
I don’t think anyone here who played Diablo 3 on launch must be reminded of that glorious Error 37 message that launched alongside it or of Diablo II Resurrected’s similar issues. And even if we look further outside of the Diablo franchise, Blizzard didn’t have any more luck with Overwatch 2’s launch.
That being said, it’s no surprise that fans are scared, and Blizzard is sitting in the fire trying to convince everyone that they’ve got it handled this time. In an interview, the associate game director of Diablo IV, Joe Piepiora, talked about how Blizzard plans to create a smooth launch experience:
“Every one of these betas has been transformational in terms of our understanding of our own technical capacity and what we need to do to make that a smoother launch experience in general. So it’s been great.
When you have people coming through different ISPs and coming in through different servers around the world, there’s so much more data you get from that. And with each of those we found lots of little things that happen, like this happens with clan invitations, this happens when you join a party in a certain way—lots of little things like that across the board.
None of them were marketing betas. Everything has been about, we need data to make sure the launch goes smoothly. That’s entirely the purpose of the betas we did.”
But now we want to know from you, do you believe Blizzard has everything under control, or do you think players should brace themselves for the rocky ride of a launch that the Diablo games are known for? Let us know.
Diablo IV is launching on the 6th of June 6, with early access starting on the 2nd.