{"id":11658,"date":"2011-05-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"diablo-iii-beta-announced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/11658-diablo-iii-beta-announced","title":{"rendered":"Diablo III Beta announced"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking during Activision Blizzard’s Q1 results conference last night, Blizzard co-founder Michael Morhaime revealed that the developer has been running an internal testing program for Diablo III, and aims to launch a public beta in Q3 2011. <\/p>\n

To allay any confusion, Diablo III community leader Micah “Bashiok” Whiple told Force Strategy Gaming<\/a> that in this case, Q3 means regular calendar Q3 and not financial Q3, hence we can expect a Diablo III beta to kick off sometime between July and September 2011.<\/p>\n

Of course it would not have been a Blizzard conference had Morhaime not reiterated that Blizzard will not sacrifice the quality of its game to meet a target deadline, and therefore the Q3 beta is not set in stone. Morhaime also reiterated that Blizzard is still aiming to release Diablo III in late 2011.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Earlier in the conference some big shot business types confirmed that if Blizzard does not release another game this year, then it is expected to release two games in 2012. StarCraft: Heart of the Swarm was also mentioned, and apparently will be shown to media within the next few months, so we can assume from this that Diablo III will either be launched late in 2011 or early in 2012, and that Heart of the Swarm will be released later in 2012.<\/p>\n

Apart from that, Morhaime revealed that development on Blizzard’s next generation MMO, codenamed Titan, is currently being “scaled up” which may indicate that the publisher is beginning to broaden its focus a little bit. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, nothing else is known about the Diablo III beta right now, but if its anything like the StarCraft II beta, we can assume that there will limited beta keys and the beta will operate through Battle.net. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, here’s a Diablo III wallpaper to keep you warm at night (save to HDD to view full size).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Diablo III wallpaper<\/em><\/p>\n

Discuss the Diablo III beta<\/a><\/strong> in the forums<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blizzard is aiming for public Diablo III beta in Q3 this year, still pushing for 2011 release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}