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→Estimated Progress?
Estimates of a percentage completed are discouraged by Blizzard development teams, since there's no way to quantify the process in that fashion. They spent years working on the foundation of Diablo III: programming the game engine, trying out numerous different styles of art design, coming up with a plot and character concepts, etc. The hardware and foundational work takes as long or longer than adding in the content, which makes it impossible to estimate the overall percentage completed.
<blue>We have weekly playtests to focus feedback on areas and features. Last week was an Act III dungeon.<br>
...The game isn’t being developed in a linear fashion so us saying we’re working on things in Act III doesn’t really mean anything in regards to how much of the game is finished.
Since we’re constantly evolving the tools and processes for creating the various assets for the game (and just plain getting better at it), it’s best to have as wide a perspective as possible. Otherwise we’d probably paint ourselves into a corner. All of the work being produced at the end of the game would look far and above better than the stuff that was produced at the beginning, and so we’d probably have to go back and redo a lot of that work.</blue>
Almost since the game was announced in June 2008, the developers have said that they were well into content production.[http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/diablo-iii-heavily-into-development/] (Meaning that the engine and basic game functions were all locked down and working properly.) Content though, especially in Blizzard titles, is such a huge area of work that experienced Blizzard-watchers expected the content production and balancing would take years. And it has.
==Diablo III Beta Test==