Diablo 3 in 'polish mode' for past two years

Tomorrow's release of Diablo III marks the end of a journey, years in the making. While Blizzard fans have grown accustomed to the studio's "when it's ready" stance on shipping games, we can't help but question why it took so long for the game to come out.

Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson was also surprised by the lengthy development time of the upcoming RPG release. "It just took a lot longer than I had anticipated," he admitted. "I was surprised by how long it took to reach it."

Speaking to Gamasutra, Wilson says that the game has been in "polish mode" for the last two years. There were "little things" that built up that would constantly have the team revisiting certain events. "We would play it, and we knew what was supposed to happen. But when we put it in front of other people... ehh. They would not feel good about it."

"It's hard to pinpoint any one particular thing. It's lot of areas where we had to do revision," Wilson described.

Those little things added up to a development time of four years after the game was announced. And Wilson says the last two years were focused on polish, he wants to reassure fans that "it's not like the game was 100 percent done for two years, and then we just polished it... There's certainly more content being built during that time."

Fans will finally be able to get their hands on the finished product tomorrow.