VGA is tomorrow and many people are expecting that the Diablo 3 release date will be announced. I'm positive, though, that it won't be announced even though it's a big event and three of Blizzard's founders will be attending (Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce).
I might make jokes about that 02/23/12 potential release date too, but I honestly don't believe that even Blizzard knows when they'll be releasing the game. :) 02/23/12 could be a tentative date, but they probably have many other tentative dates planned as well.
If Blizzard doesn't even know when the release date will be, there's no way we'll ever be able to make an accurate prediction. If we knew when the announcement for the release date was and with great certainty, though, then we could probably make a reasonable estimation of the release date. Problem is, if they're not doing Digital Downloads for D3 this time, their typical lead time of two months could be shortened. Really, the only thing we can look at is why it's being delayed, what the bottleneck is, and estimate how long after the restriction is removed that they'll make the announcement.
For example, here's what I know:
Based on TOD's March-based information, it was going to be announced at Blizzcon 2011 and would have been released about 1 month before Christmas (November 24). (Including a January 17 backup date for technical or delivery issues.)
On September 22, Blizzard C-Levels rushed to Korea to deal with the fallout of the GRB approval process and their questioning about the gambling aspects of the RMAH.
On September 23, Blizzard immediately published their “Soon” Was Too Soon -- Diablo III to Arrive in Early 2012 announcement. Coincidence? :)
This meant that the surprise announcement would not be made on October 21st after all. Instead, they would have filled that announcement with another backup announcement.. it was either the Diablo 3 CE details or quite possibly the WOW Annual Pass, which they were probably saving up for much later. :)
Right after Blizzcon, even the Book of Cain was suddenly pushed back from it's November 15 release date to an undecided time. (Even though the Book of Cain was fully published, stocked, and ready to ship. Many users were completely baffled as to why it was pushed back.)
Things were pretty quiet in November, and news tidbits were sprinkling out at a very slow pace. Almost as if they were trying to postpone information on purpose.
Although on Nov 21, Rob Pardo tweeted "time to get serious and work hard on Diablo 3" possibly indicating that they were getting close to crunchtime knowing that the GRB's decision was about 1 week away.
On November 30 (or possibly even Nov 29), Blizzard finally received an update from the GRB that they were in deliberations and a decision would probably be made by January.
Suddenly, there was a huge explosion of Diablo information.
On November 30, Blizzard announced the official release date (Dec 13) for the Book of Cain following several date changes over the previous months.
On December 1 (the day after), the Global RMAH testing was announced. Blizzard also started releasing information on items and Artisans, new pages were suddenly published, and the "Day In a Life" series was expanded from 3 employees to 5 employees instead.
On December 5, Blizzard Korea also made an official update about the delays of the game and the status updates on rating approvals.
There has also been a new beta wave, and more news announcements, with even more news announcements coming over the next couple weeks. Important ones too, the ones preparing us for Diablo.
* UPDATE: As I was writing this, Blizzard just announced the "Battle.net Balance" system. This is probably the piece I've been predicting for a while now; initial steps for setting up PayPal accounts and transferring money into your new B.Net credit account. I'm not sure if this has the PayPal D3 integration part yet (I'll read it after finishing this post), but that will happen at least 1 month before the release.
* ANOTHER UPDATE (12/20/11):
New additions to the timeline.
On December 8, AUS Beta Key contest announced.
Contest started Dec 12, first invites went out Dec 18, and contest expires Dec 31.
On Fri Dec 16, Blizzard received notification from the Korean GRB that more information was needed. The hearing was schedule for Dec 21 for their answer, however it was cancelled and postponed until Blizzard could provide proper data. (They were given 7 days to reply.)
On Mon Dec 19, this news made front pages of Korean news sites.
On Mon Dec 19, a major wave of opt-in beta keys went out.
On Tue Dec 20, Blizzard announced the US-based beta key giveaway. The contest started on Dec 20, and expires Jan 23 2012. (More stalling.)
If the game gets delayed any further in January by the GRB, expect the game to be further pushed back to April, May or even June. Blizzard can easily change the "Early 2012" into a very loose definition. (And you might even start seeing some "clarifications" about it if everything is pushed back.) If the GRB comes through, and approves the game in January though, we'll hear something of a release date probably a few days before their quarterly meeting.
And it will be a crazy rush too when it happens. The announcement "should" be made on a non-typical unusual day since they won't want to wait any longer to make the announcement (I'm saying "should" because I'm assuming they're in a rush, but they probably are not.) They might also be saving up other announcements to make around the same time.
So that's pretty much it. Even Blizzard doesn't even know the release date at the moment, and they won't know until they receive a confirmation from the Korean Government. Right now, the game is in excellent shape, and they're just keeping themselves busy with balancing, tuning, and Runes. The same things that they have been discussing for months and months and no one thought it was peculiar. Using player balancing as an excuse is also very bad; Blizzard has been tuning and balancing classes in WoW for 7 years now. That would NEVER hold back a game release and it's something that will always be an ongoing activity. (I suspect it's actually a metagame to keep things changing, keep players interested in the game, and keep them trying the new OP'd classes. Hence, the new talent trees and level creep fixes.) :)
Unfortunately, the game has been pushed back so much that we all missed out on a great surprise announcement at Blizzcon, and we could have been playing the full Diablo 3 for a couple weeks by now.
The beta was only intended to be about a couple months long as well.. that's why it's so short. Are things starting to come into focus now? :)
Second Document
The below document has the only known screenshots of Guerrilla currently in existence. The "Confidential" part, of course, no longer applies since this was from back when they were pitching the game and the IP is not held by any company.
Later, Steve left Blizzard and formed Specular Interactive and returned to his roots, I'd guess you say, working on the arcade title "H2Overdrive" (much like his original "Hydro Thunder" arcade game.) Their most recent arcade title is DIRTY DRIVIN'.
Here's something new that some of you might find interesting. It's a short history about Swingin' Ape Studios, including some information that no one outside of SAS or Blizzard knows about. I've also collected some exclusive information and never before seen images of an unreleased title. I hope you find it as interesting as I did, especially if you were a big fan of Metal Arms (like I am.)
During the course of my investigation, I actually ended up breaking out my XBOX from storage and I'll be playing Metal Arms later tonight. :)
Now.. as many of you know, Blizzard had outsourced the Starcraft Ghost project to Nihilistic and they ended their relationship in mid 2004. The project was then contracted to Swingin' Ape Studios, which was later acquired by Blizzard in May 2005.
According to official documents, Blizzard acquired Swingin' Ape Studios, and Vivendi acquired several other studios around the same time. They paid approximately $71.6 million for all of the acquisitions. (Detailed breakdowns are not publicly available of course.)
The subject of Starcraft Ghost has been talked about so much, it's like beating a dead horse, and you know that those are subjects that I try to avoid. :)
I'm actually surprised that no one has ever focused on Swingin' Ape Studios themselves. It seems that the focus has always been on Ghost, but never on it's other games or the company itself.
The Original Metal Arms
I wanted to start out with a quick description of what SAS originally brainstormed for Metal Arms. This has been brought up in past interviews, but I thought I would re-post because it's very interesting and often overlooked.
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System is Swingin' Ape Studios's first game development project. How did the title come to be? Did Vivendi request your development services, or was this a project that Swingin' Ape Studios took to Vivendi for publishing?Steve Ranck also posted some fun facts about Metal Arms here back in 2004.
Steve Ranck: In early 2001, Swingin’ Ape Studios was working on a game concept based on a space traveling bounty hunter. We had a rich story, interesting characters, and exciting planets the player could visit. One of these planets was called Iron Star, and it was inhabited entirely by various types of robots. When we learned that two other bounty hunter games were already far into development, we dropped the idea and began experimenting with a game based on the robot world of Iron Star. We replaced the biological bounty hunter character with Glitch, our small but determined robot protagonist. With our robot universe providing a creative springboard, our design document quickly grew to over 200 pages and from there it was easy to develop a playable prototype using a few of the more exciting ideas. At the same time, we were speaking with many publishers about Metal Arms and eventually signed with Vivendi who really understood the potential of the game.
For example,
The initial design for Metal Arms revolved around RTS-style mechanics. Obviously we lost the RTS elements as the game design evolved.
Swingin' Ape pitched the Metal Arms concept to over 12 publishers at E3 2001. Sierra was one of them. The pitch included a design overview, concept art, and the demo movie that you can view in the shipping product after you beat the game.
Swingin' Ape surprised Sierra with a playable demo several months before Sierra decided to fund the game. It demonstrated the various gameplay modes, including the ability to take over and control a Titan.Other Games After Metal Arms, But Before Ghost
After the Metal Arms project finished, the company pitched several game ideas to various companies before landing the SC Ghost project.
The team worked on Metal Arms 2, a SWAT demo for the PS2, a GI Joe demo, and a game called "Guerrilla: Jungle Revolt" for the X360. The Guerrilla demo actually started out as a Wasteland / Mad Max / post-apocalyptic themed game, but when they showed it to EA, they thought that something more military themed (on an island like Far Cry), would sell better so they encouraged SAS to re-theme and update the proposed design. The new design was pitched to Microsoft, who were interested in it as a X360 launch title, and they were willing to pay SAS for 3 months to make a prototype. They were especially excited about this as a Xenon (X360) launch title, and they were a week away from signing on with Microsoft to develop the Guerrilla prototype when Blizzard approached them with the Ghost opportunity.
There was a discussion about Guerrilla vs Ghost, but Ghost made the most financial sense because Blizzard was committing to years of funding vs the 3 months from Microsoft just for a prototype.
Steve has graciously provided me with the original Power Point Presentation doc (25 pages) that was pitched to Microsoft. He noted that the address at the bottom of the presentation was their old location. They moved into a much larger facility to develop Ghost, but the first site was where they developed Metal Arms and it's now Aliso Viejo's City Hall. (The other documents with in-game screenshots I'll create in a second post.)
