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There is not yet any official word on a '''beta test ''' for [[Diablo III]]. It's quite likely they'll conduct one though, during the months before the game's release.
This page has all the info you'd want to know about the Diablo III beta test, in a Q&A style.
__NOTOC__
==Will there be a Diablo III beta test?==
It's not been confirmed, but Blizzard has run large scale public beta tests for every one of their games thus far. It's hard to imagine that Diablo III won't follow that successful path.
[[Jay Wilson]] have made a few statements regarding the showing of games publically before release: [http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/2662371]
::'''''AG: Blizzard has always been great at showing games to people at an early stage and I'm interested in that idea. Do you think there are risks of showing games to people early? What's your philosophy behind that?'''''
::'''''[[Jay]]:''' There's only a risk – this is going to sound snarky – but there's only a risk to your ego. If your game is good then people will recognise that it's good. If it's not good, then you need to learn from that and make it better. A lot of the times I think people don't want to show their game early. It's something that some clutch close to their chests – they don't want something that misrepresents them. I can understand that, but the thing is – players only remember the last thing you showed them. So if you show them something and they're like "oh my god that was horrible" then you go "oh geez, then let's go back and make it better". But at least now you know why, at least now you have some information.''
::''One of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback; we want to hear what people like and don't like about it; we want to give them several opportunities to play it before release. We play our games constantly before we release them; we give them to the other development teams and we get feedback. We do very long betas and alphas that we include a lot of people – not just from the fanbase, but from the game industry as a whole. We get a lot of other game developers playing our games – months and months before we release – and I would say, look at the success of Blizzard games. If other companies think it's a risk, a bad idea... obviously it's not, because we've done very well on that front.''
==What's a Beta Test?==
Beta tests are large scale tests of a near-finished video game. To date, all Blizzard beta tests have been semi-public, with website signups drawing in thousands of public testers, who join Blizzard employees, their friends and family, fansite invitees, members of the media, employees at other gaming companies, and others. Beta tests generally scale up in size as they progress; starting with a few dozen testers, then gradually expanding to hundreds and then thousands of testers. In the old days this meant physically mailing out beta CDs; these days with the beta clients being shared via bit torrent, it means passing out more valid beta CD keys.
==How long will the beta test run?==
How long a beta test runs depends on what they're using it to test out. Blizzard might include all of Diablo III in the beta client and run a long and exhaustive test of the entire game. Or they might only include the first Act and the low level skills, much as they did in Diablo II's beta. The latter type of test would obviously not take as long as the former. It does seem likely that they'll be testing out all of the [[Battle.net]] features, such as (potentially) shared stashes, trading via email, friends lists, special rare quests, not to mention the entire basic online gaming infrastructure.
