14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of Diablo 3 and its recently released Reaper of Souls expansion, has just talked a bit about the launch of online titles and how issues are almost certain to appear and affect them.
Diablo 3 came out back in 2012 for the PC and Mac platforms and, because it was an always-only role-playing dungeon crawler, it needed to stay in touch with the Battle.net servers.
Unfortunately for the millions of gamers who got the add-on, the launch didn't go as intended, as the infamous Error 37 message appeared, telling players that they can't connect to Battle.net and play the game they just bought.
While talking about that debacle, Blizzard's Alex Mayberry shared that it was almost impossible to avoid such a situation, as it wasn't just about getting new servers operational.
"In spite of our very ambitious projections, even more people showed up for Diablo 3," he told CVG. "We doubled and quadrupled our estimates on how many people were going to show up, and it turned out that the hardware was just overwhelmed. It certainly didn't feel good when that happened."
Mayberry went on to say that such an online launch can't be solved by having more servers available, as certain precautions need to be taken depending on what content is accessed by players the most.
"It's not an 'x plus y equals' problem. It's not as easy as knowing 14 million people have bought this game and thus we need server capacity for all of them. What if all people enter the same part of the game at the exact same time? There are certain behaviors that we cannot anticipate or prepare for."
Mayberry emphasized that, with each different launch, developers are treading on new ground so it's hard to anticipate and plan for every potential problem that might occur once a game enters the hands of players from around the world.
"These things happen because we're doing incredible new things with technology that never happened before. We're inventing things, inventing new technologies, we're writing code that's never been done before," he said.
"So, every time you do that, you're just going to have issues. It may not be the code, or the equipment, or even the service IPs that you're using - you have to account for all the potential problems and try to mitigate risk."
Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls launched today, March 25, worldwide, and so far there have been no major problems, so it seems that Blizzard has managed to avoid issues this time around.