Safe to say?

[firemager]

Safe to say that the rumored release date for D3 on Jan 17th is true?

With the recent announcements of the battle tag, I read a post somewhere & there pretty much saying read up on it asap for it is to be released soon. Then you have this blue forum post quote.

"When will BattleTags go live?"
"We will soon begin limited testing of some features and functionality of BattleTags in the Diablo III beta test, and the feature will be available to Diablo III players at launch."

Also with the recent patching of D3 as well. Jan 17th has been a rumored date for a few weeks now on many websites. So is it safe to say with all the recent developments that it will be released soon? or will it be later, as in months?

[Lysah]

No way to tell. They might hold the release until 8 weeks after the announcement, which would mean March at the earliest.

Or they might announce the release the week before and mid-Jan is possible. It's all guesses.

[Kisho]

I'm actually hoping it'll be A LOT later now. SWTOR is taking up a hell of a lot of my time, so I really want to at least get one level 50 on that before D3 is released.

That said, I doubt it'll be in January at this rate. If it was we'd have heard the release date by now. March is my guess.

[Deleted]

Don't forget that they can still push the date back several months if need be.

[firemager]

well with all this being said, when would they put out a announcement about a release before it is actually released, maybe a 4 week warning before the full release? Or do they tend to announce a release date months ahead of time before the full game is out? Maybe the Jan 17th deadline is too soon, would mean one month away so, might be looking into Feb, March timing or later.

[Kisho]

Well let's go by previous experience:

Wrath of the Lich King: Release date announced October 10th 2008, released November 13th 2008
Cataclysm: Release date announced October 2010, release December 2010
Starcraft 2: Release date announced March 2010, released July 2010

Sources: WoWpedia, Wikipedia

When I say 'release date announced', it sometimes isn't exactly right. For Cataclysm it is, but with SC2 I'm matching it up with the announcement that the new battle.net would go live in July (logically speaking it would coincide with the release of SC2, and it did). With WotLK, I'm matching it with the date when Blizzard said WotLK went 'gold'.

So essentially, Blizzard appears to give us anywhere between 1 month to 4 months notice. This would mean we'd get D3 in January at the earliest, but this is highly unlikely. It should be in the Spring of 2012, though.

[Jurwi]

Safe to say that the rumored release date for D3 on Jan 17th is true?

With the recent announcements of the battle tag, I read a post somewhere & there pretty much saying read up on it asap for it is to be released soon. Then you have this blue forum post quote.

"When will BattleTags go live?"
"We will soon begin limited testing of some features and functionality of BattleTags in the Diablo III beta test, and the feature will be available to Diablo III players at launch."

Also with the recent patching of D3 as well. Jan 17th has been a rumored date for a few weeks now on many websites. So is it safe to say with all the recent developments that it will be released soon? or will it be later, as in months?

No, of course it's not "safe to say" because there is no official statement yet. You could say it's the best guess right now, but it's not "safe to say". Besides, personally, I think that one single month of testing for BattleTags including the fixes needed is not long enough, so it could be easily pushed to february.

[Deleted]

Definitely not safe to say, still just speculation and guesswork unfortunately. I dream of a release date as early as Jan 17th - but realistically, we'd have seen pre-orders and confirmations with it just 1 month away I'm sure. They've just added another patch and wiped characters again - if retail release was just a month away, well... that seems waaay too close, considering they have to get millions of copies boxed and out to shops AND considering the fact that most companies, and I assume Blizzard too, gives it's employees a fair amount of holiday time over christmas.