Highlights from the call and Fourth Quarter 2011 financial results include:

• No release date announcement. Big shocker.

• Diablo 3 has been delayed to Q2: "The company's first quarter 2012 outlook does not incorporate a new release from Blizzard Entertainment."
  
  Well, I guess we finally have our answer. "Early 2012" actually means "Mid 2012".

• WOW has 10.2 Million Subscribers as of 12/31/11. (During their last conference call, they announced 10.3 million.)

• Calendar year 2012 outlook anticipates two releases from Blizzard Entertainment. Looks like SC2 HOTS has been delayed to 2013.

• There are approximately 50M monthly active users across Battle.net, CoD multiplayer, CoD Elite, and Skylanders WebWorld.

By the way, with all of the new people joining this call (potentially thousands of anxious fans, especially because direct links were advertised on Reddit and various Diablo forums), this is why it's so important for Blizzard to state ahead of time that the release date announcement WILL NOT be revealed at their upcoming conference call. When they don't do that, they're just trolling their customers.

Blizzard "Community Managers" (which is a form of PR) and Support staff frequently state that there are upcoming surprises, surprises planned, and surprise announcements. Because of this, people will grow even more suspicious when they say "Oh yeah.. this upcoming event is no big deal. You should really just go to your favorite site for the highlights of the call." It's like anticipating a surprise birthday party while your friends and family try to act nonchalant.

The reason they should notify their customers ahead of time is because, one of these days, an angry fan is going to raise a question during the open Q&A period for all of Activision Blizzard's employees and investors to hear: "Hey, Mike.. why is Bashiok such a troll?" Except, it will probably be worse.

"Early 2012"

Just to be clear, "Early 2012" means Q1. Blizzard even confirmed that this was their "internal definition." Bashiok never recanted his statement, he re-confirmed it.

There's a big difference between making a typo/mistake and the mistake of accidentally revealing something.

If someone were to accidentally leak Titan MMO game details, and they were to tweet "That was a mistake," it doesn't make it any less true that the game details were real.

Bashiok: Sorry I wasn't intending to imply anything by writing first quarter, just an honest mistake. Our official target is still "early 2012". Not sure if it makes too much difference one way or the other, but I don't want people to nitpick a mistake. :)

As Bashiok said, it doesn't make any difference one way or the other.. whether he writes it as Q1 or "Early 2012", it means the same thing.

Just a mistake on my part. Q1 is definitely more literal, so I suppose I should correct it.

Here, Bashiok confirms that Q1 is definitely more literal or accurate than saying "Early 2012".

If it was a typo or a mistake, then it would have meant that "Early 2012" means Q1-Q2 or "included Q2."

And moments ago, Bashiok just RE-re-confirmed that "Early 2012" always meant Q1, but now they just changed it this week to Q2 instead.

We've only ever said "early 2012". And we just decided we'd need until Q2 this week. Seems like the conference call was as good a place as any to announce that.

It's been delayed again; from Q1 to Q2.

When Will It Be Announced?

So, apparently, Blizzard was indeed intending on announcing the release date this week just as predicted. It was probably no coincidence that all of those Battle.net changes (5+ hour outages) were taking place and you didn't see the results. They truly were preparing for the release date announcement this week.

It's also no coincidence that the Battle.net Balance and PayPal features were implemented on Monday, which I had said would logically be accompanying the Release Date announcement.

To recap, for a couple months I have been predicting a 80% chance of a release date announcement right before the Q4 call. This was based on Blizzard's "promise" that their game would be coming out in Q1. However, I had also said that if an announcement was not made on the Monday, that the chances diminish substantially, and it means that the game will be delayed to Q2 (if still not announced before the call.) This week was really their only last option.

Maybe the new delay was related to the various Battle.net Balance problems they were having?

I'm currently waiting for the call recording to go live so that I can listen to it again. Mike Morhaime possibly mentioned that the release date schedule for the Diablo 3 release would be announced in the coming weeks.

The thing is, they can't make the announcement within the next 2-3 weeks. I mean they COULD, but if they did, it would imply that they actually KNOW the release date right now. Meaning that Q2 was planned before this week and they could have still made the announcement this week.

Plus, for such a major finance related item, it doesn't make any sense to announce it immediately after a major investor call rather than before. This means that the release date announcement has to be made late February or in March. Given a minimum of 2 months lead time for all of their past titles, this means that the game will be coming out in May at the earliest.

But, as I said, if they do announce within the next 2-3 weeks, then it means they actually know the real release date TODAY. And that would be very bad, considering that they could have announced it this week and it would have benefited them more greatly, especially from an investor perspective, while also avoiding many negative incidents (such as the forum outrage and angry frustration over the past 3 blog articles.) And, if THAT happens, it means that the decision "this week" was more personally motivated rather than business. :)

I've received a couple more Path of Exile keys, and I'll be giving away one tomorrow here at 12:00PM PST.

And speaking of tomorrow,

The Activision Blizzard investor call will be taking place at 1:30PM PST.

If you want to skip the call and just find out if they're going to be making a release date announcement (which they shouldn't be), all you need to do is keep refreshing this page as 1:30PM approaches. They'll typically post their results on this page about 5 minutes before the call starts.

Just open the HTML file ("... Fourth Quarter 2011 Net Revenus and Earnings"), and if it's in there (for some bizarre reason) it will be in the Business Highlights up near the top. Also, checkout the "Company Outlook" section right below for anything about future games.

I'm expecting to be disappointed though.

* UPDATE:

And, here's the key!

FR9QU-DY7B4-EBDFH-3____

Jumbled Letters: X 3 L C

For a better part of the day, users have been unable to access their Battle.net User accounts. The reason for this was because of standard maintenance over the past 5 hours.

And it wasn't just maintenance. They have finally integrated the new Battle.net Balance system and brought it online today. EU will be next tonight.

Unfortunately, the new changes are still broken. The US Account Page links to the European Battle.Net Balance FAQ instead of the US one and the Battle.net Balance instruction page still has the incorrect URL.

So far, there has been no official announcement about this new major feature addition.

The first time the "new" Battle.net Balance feature was announced was December 9, 2011. When Blizzard revealed the new feature they said that it would be "Coming Soon" and rolling out within the weeks ahead (end of December). It has finally been implemented, but 10 weeks later.

* UPDATE: It's been about 1 hour now, and still no official announcement. I guess they're waiting for it to be rolled out in all regions first.

* UPDATE: 4:30PM now.. most of the managers will be heading home now so there's little hope of an announcement today. That just leaves the next few days.

* UPDATE: Finally! An announcement over two hours after the changes went live.

Took Long Enough

A short while ago, Supererogatory finally published a piece about my older post on Swingin' Ape Studios and the other games they were working on (including exclusive information that I had obtained from Steve Ranck, who was the President and Technical Director at SAS.) I'm surprised he hadn't discovered it back in December. :)

As you know, I've been drawing a lot of parallels about Blizzard's old abandoned games and how they might be revisiting these ideas for their Next Gen MMO.

With that in mind, there was also a tweet about Blizzard's other cancelled project Raiko (which I had also mentioned as one of their cancelled games previously.) Apparently, though, I wasn't aware that Blizzard had outsourced the game to Flextech Productions.

According to Ron Seifried from Flextech, it was a role-played game based on Japanese Samurai.

Video Production Coordinator & 3D Modeler
Blizzard Entertainment
April 1996 – April 1998 (2 years 1 month)

I co-owned Flextech Productions, a company that was financed by Blizzard Entertainment to develop a role-playing game based on Japanese Samurai. This small operation was one of only three pilot companies that Blizzard deemed worthy enough to co-develop an computer game, at a time when resources were limited and time was short. From the days leading up to E3 ’97, we created a prototype that literally wowed our prospective investors, including volumetric lighting and multi-view angles that were years ahead of its time. I also managed finances and coordinated work schedules for development of PC role playing game and managed the video production facility.

Interestingly, Blizzard had brought Stan Sakai onboard to work on the new Next Gen MMO (lore & story.) And wouldn't you know it.. he has a wealth of experience with Japanese Samurai lore. :)

People in the World of Titan

I was going to wait until mid-March to post this, but since we're on the subject of Titan, I figured I might as well do it now.

For a while, I've had a belief that the Next Gen MMO would have a much deeper focus on it's people. I'm not just talking about character customization, but rather the NPCs within the game itself. I've been imagining more of a modern world filled with people, human villains and human heroes rather than the typically mass array of fantastical creatures and fictional aliens.

So, I've been following Brian Schwab (Senior AI/Gameplay Engineer II at Blizzard). He's given a few lectures of AI, but they have always been very careful never to say what game he has been working on at Blizzard. It's in fact the Next Gen MMO and he's their Senior AI programmer. That's why I've been so interested in his lectures; because he talks about his working experiences and he's careful not to reveal ongoing projects.

At this upcoming 2012 GDC (March 5-9), Brian is giving a presentation on Psychology in Game AI.

Less A More I: Using Psychology in Game AI
Tuesday 1:45- 2:45 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl

When dealing with game AI characters, psychology can’t help but come into play. Players process what they see and experience through a filter of expectations. We expect human-like game characters to exhibit human-like traits. A by-product of the quest to improve AI decisions, however, is that characters can begin to “feel” robotic and sterile. This session will begin by showing various psychological biases that we as game players bring to the experience. We will then show how characters can be imbued with simple affects to exploit these expectations in order to seem more “alive” and believable.

In earlier (2011) presentations, he talks about simple AI behavior and how you need to find a gentle balance so that it's not too challenging for players.

But now, he's focusing on human and human-like characters along with life-life behaviors. While this is no confirmation, it's interesting how he will be discussing this particular aspect of AI given that it's something that Blizzard has not done in any of their games yet (it's only life-like behavior via animation, but never AI) and it's not something that he spends his free time on. If it was an area of AI that he was currently working on exhaustively within Blizzard, though, then he would have a wealth of practical information and real world challenges to share.

Learning about a developer or artist's background and experience is a great way to get an idea about gameplay. For example, the Next Gen MMO team is comprised of many employees with scifi backgrounds such as Ghost and the Halo MMO. The artists themselves have done a lot with with scifi, post apocalyptic, and ancient city designs and concept art. And, a couple key writers have worked on scifi stories, secret societies, or historical civilizations (17th century Japan being one of them.)

This all makes me think that life-life NPC behaviors are planned for Titan. Nothing fancy, mind you.. something that has been proven successful (Blizzard won't experiment) like Skyrim, where the world's inhabitants have daily routines, jobs, reactions, emotions, and better communication options.

And, I'm thinking there will be a lot more people and humanoids (aliens) in the game, rather than just mobs of monsters, with a lot more interpersonal communication going on.