In the computer and gaming industry, companies can be divided into two groups - those that operate the old, „corporate“ way, and those that operate differently, flexibly, and celebrate enormous success because of it.

The first group focuses primarily on meeting fiscal targets and ships a project to the factory/pressing plant while it’s still in a „good enough“ state, just to get it onto store shelves as fast as possible. Every year they release sequels to their franchises in order to squeeze more money out of their customers for minimal added value.

„New“ companies operate differently. They look at things from a long-term perspective. If they shipped something „good enough“, they might make money in the short term, but they would fall in the eyes of their customers, who would then approach their future products with greater distrust.

They’re able to calculate that an investment in perfectionism and the user experience across every aspect of their products will pay off many times over. You can spot such companies very easily - they don’t announce release dates far in advance, and when they do, they push them back several times. After all, it’s hard to estimate how much time polishing every last detail will take over several years of development. In the end, though, the buyer gets the best thing on the market for their money. When reviewers deliver their verdicts, they can’t come up with any meaningful negatives, and the bar is raised to a new level for the competition.

You can surely guess which group Blizzard (and Valve) belongs to. Games from the WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo series have always represented the gold standard in their genres and were still being played many years after release. We waited a long 11 years for the successor to the last of those. It’s been almost 4 years since Diablo 3 was announced.

Was the wait worth it? After reading the previous paragraphs, you already know the answer. Blizzard wouldn’t release anything that didn’t chain players to their monitors for hundreds of hours. The gameplay of its titles is fine-tuned to perfection by an army of developers and verified by an even larger army of testers. Blizzard can afford this thanks to the hoard of money flowing in from running WoW and selling its other titles.

Diablo 3 takes the best from its predecessor and changes the principles that had grown stale over 11 years. Slaughtering monsters will be a very pleasant and addictive activity, and once again we can look forward to the „just one more quest and then I’ll go to bed…“ effect that keeps players at their monitors into the late night hours. We’re also driven forward by character development, wanting to turn our character into a superman with powerful unique gear as soon as possible. This concept hasn’t aged, and Blizzard knows very well how to target a player’s most basic instincts.

Run and get it. It’ll be worth it.