14 DAY TRIAL // One of the leading developers working on Diablo III at Blizzard has said that one of the main reasons for the long development cycle for the game is the need to get the balance of the loot system right.
Kevin Martens, who is the lead content designer working on Diablo III, told Gamasutra that, “That balance is honestly the main reason why it takes so long to make a proper Diablo game. The bulk of our work goes into tuning the game's loot drop system. There are so many parameters to alter, it can be dizzying. Even the slightest increase to gold drop can suddenly change everything in the game.”
The developers believes that the time to balance the game is well spent because it allows players to have an unified experience that they can share.
Martens added, “Even defining what 'super rare' means in the game changes when you scale to five million players. So even if we make a mistake with a 'super rare' item and it only affects 400 players out of 5 million, that still is 400 players who have a bad experience. It's really a big deal.”
The Blizzard developer has acknowledged that there are a number of other role playing game and even shooters, like Borderlands, which have managed to implement impressive loot systems but he says that the pressure of other people's success is a good motivation for the Diablo III team to do even better.
Blizzard has also confirmed that Diablo III is also being developed for gaming consoles, with apparently 3 people how working on how the game would look and play on the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and, presumably, the Nintendo Wii U.
Diablo III does not have a launch date at the moment but a beta stage has just taken place, which means a first quarter 2012 launch is a possibility.