The team has delivered a number of patches to enhance the game

Sep 26, 2012 13:23 GMT  ·  By

The leader of developer Blizzard has admitted that the launch of Diablo III, the action role-playing game that the company delivered earlier during 2012, was less smooth than he would have liked but blamed many of the problems on how well the game sold.

Mike Morhaime, the president and one of the co-founders of Blizzard, tells GamesIndustry.biz that, “Oh, there are definitely things we would do differently. It would be so helpful in advance to know how many people are going to want to play a game. Because we could plan things out a lot better: we can make sure we have enough capacity, we can buy the hardware that we need.”

The executive also emphasizes how successful the game was, by adding, “The Diablo III launch exceeded our forecasts by an order of magnitude, we were very far off. We outsold our full-year forecast in the matter of a week. I have to give our team some credit because they scrambled really quickly and they were able to increase capacity everywhere within a couple of weeks.”

Blizzard tried to test many of the systems of Diablo III during an open beta stage, where everyone was invited to come in and play the game.

But it seems that many fans were waiting for the full release and that the beta stage did not reveal how overwhelmed the infrastructure would be by the launch.

Since Diablo III was launched, the development team has launched five patches for the game, all of them designed to squash the problems the community revealed but also to change how some of the core gameplay mechanics worked.

The main aims were to increase the survivability of the player characters, while encouraging gamers to use more skills and abilities rather than focus on a core of ideas that were already proven to work.