Diablo IV is very easily one of the most anticipated titles of the year, and its very nearly here, with its June 6, 2023 release date only a few weeks away.
Ahead of this launch, Blizzard has been hosting open betas, allowing players to jump in and allowing for the team to learn from these betas, in order to better prepare themselves for hopefully having a launch period that doesn’t involve annoyances for players like long queue times or being randomly kicked from the servers.
Each of these betas has, for Blizzard, gone better than the last, to the point now were the team is “really confident” that things will be “a smoother launch experience.”
In an interview with Eurogamer, associate game director Joe Piepiora spoke about these betas, and how each one has helped the team learn a lot to prepare for June.
“Everyone 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.
These are not marketing betas – none of them were. Everything has been about, we need data to make sure the launch goes smooth. That’s entirely the purpose of the betas we did.
And we learned a tonne. Even this last one where it was really smooth – people didn’t have long queues leading into getting into the experience – we still found things happening in the back end that if left unresolved, would have resulted in some issues during the launch.
We caught those only because we did this extra weekend.”
Art director John Mueller, also speaking to Eurogamer also spoke about how he feels these tests have been essential in the road to launch.
“Each one, it’s a tonne of work to put them on, it’s not a trivial thing for us to do. But we see the value as being worth it. And again, it’s not a marketing thing.
It’s really about getting that information so we know day one is going to be as good as we can possibly make it, and that we just feel confident going in.
So currently, right now we feel really confident.”
Diablo IV’s betas didn’t exactly begin on the best foot in terms of players having more than a bit of trouble just getting to play the game, but what they could play was immediately impressive enough to get fans old and new excited.
By all accounts, this last minute Server Slam beta and all the ones behind it have definitely seemed to set Diablo IV up to have a great launch day – let’s hope that’s indeed the story.
Source – [Eurogamer]