The opening date of Diablo 4 Season 3 has been confirmed: January 23.
With less than two weeks to go, the announcement of S3 can be considered quite sudden, not only does there be no gameplay preview, but also the season name. What's more, there is no news of any PTR (test suit) yet, which makes people suspect that the S3 is just a pad before the expansion film. Diablo 4 has experienced twists and turns, but since S2, it has shown a clear warming trend, S3 should not be a sloppy season, PTR has been delayed, and Blizzard may have its own reasons.
Foreign media suggest that the PTR be implemented as soon as possible, because it provides an enlightened way for developers to take more active action on player feedback, and there will be less criticism of new content polished by PTR. However, in recent years, Blizzard has gradually abandoned the PTR model.
As early as last year, during Gamescom last year, Rod Ferguson, general manager of Dark, and Chris Wilson, assistant director of production, said in an interview with 4players that they did not plan to update in advance through PTR in the future, but directly contacted the player community to develop and modify new content based on their feedback.
Ferguson said that PTR is fun, but it brings issues such as development cycles, balance, and spoilers, and that Blizzard has experimented with other games and may not continue to use PTR in the future.
It's worth mentioning that PTR helps a lot with the game's balance, but additional development tasks do exist, as early as the launch of Diablo 4, PTR caused delays in features such as leaderboards and character loading.
Spoilers around PTR have also been a point of contention, and in the case of World of Warcraft, players have deciphered the plot direction of the entire expansion in advance through data mining more than once. For the first time in the history of the Exploration Season server, PTR is not opened, which is also to keep players fresh from exploring. The dark plot is relatively simple, and there are no spoilers, but many new gameplay structures have ended in the PTR phase, and the official version is just a copy.