Diablo IV will be released on June 6, 2023, and it looks like early players should have no problem logging into the hack-and-slash game on launch day unlike the last mainline effort. Speaking to Eurogamer in an interview in London, Diablo IV art director John Mueller and associate game director Joe Piepiora revealed that Blizzard was feeling “really confident” about Diablo IV’s launch going smoothly, having run a range of tests that includes a year of internal testing and live player tests, including last week’s server slam event that gave Diablo fans one final chance to explore the earlier portions of Santuary for free before the game’s release next month. A Diablo IV Limited Collector’s Box that offers a variety of items, but not the game itself, remains available for pre-order from the Blizzard Gear shop for $96.66.
From a Eurogamer report:
“Every 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,” Piepiora said.
“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,” Piepiora said. “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 experience. We caught those only because we did this extra weekend.”