The Diablo 4 developers at Blizzard feel good about the game's upcoming launch. Recently, the Diablo 4 devs have shared their recent experiences with the latest beta, further tests, and all the work they've accomplished on the backend of the game.The first open beta for Diablo 4 was made available to players who pre-ordered the game on March 17 and to the rest of the gamers on March 24. Unfortunately, plenty of issues cropped up from the moment the servers opened up to the general audience. Players reported arduously long waiting times in the queue, getting disconnected from the game and then not being able to reconnect, and lagging gameplay, among many other problems. Since then, Blizzard developers have been hard at work to get through the list of complaints and fix them. The last test before launch was a "Server Slam," which was held from May 12 to May 14.In an interview with Eurogamer, Diablo 4's art director, John Mueller, and associate game director, Joe Piepiora, shared their experiences about trying to smooth out every bump in the game before launch. From their perspective, last weekend's test went smoothly, as barely any players reported long queue times, and they received feedback on improved performance while being in-game. Both developers felt like they learned a lot from the betas, which were for the benefit of Diablo 4. Piepiora stated that the beta tests have never been about marketing, but rather about gathering data to make sure everything works as smoothly as possible. While most players had a good experience on the front end of the game, the dev team still noticed unresolved issues at the back end, which they could now resolve. Blizzard is glad they've done so many tests, as even those small issues could've caused considerable problems during the launch.
As the Diablo games are always online, Blizzard wanted to be extremely cautious about any possible issues. The infamously bad launch of Diablo 3 gave the company plenty of incentive to not want to repeat that experience either for the developers or the players. Even before the open betas, Blizzard ran internal testing for over a year with automated accounts. The accounts were tasked with performing basic actions such as killing monsters or equipping gear.
But just automated accounts couldn't help find all the issues necessary to fix. Therefore, the contribution of all gamers taking part in the open beta tests of Diablo 4 has been essential. While the devs feel confident, the true and final test will not happen until the game goes live for good.
Diablo 4 releases June 6 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
