Gamers have been looking forward to getting their hands on Diablo 3 since it was first announced in Paris at Blizzard's 2008 World Wide Invitational. Since then Blizzard has announced all five of the game's playable classes and also shown off the game's Player Versus Player Arena Mode. With this much information about the game out, it's almost suprising that Blizzard has kept so quiet about a release date.
Today, the CEO of Blizzard Mike Morhaime hinted at Activision-Blizzard's ongoing investor call that Blizzard is pushing for a late 2011 release target for Diablo 3 but that they won't compromise the game's quality, so it's quite possible that it will come out early 2011. Mike Morhaime also announced that the internal QA testing for D3 had begun and that they would be aiming to begin the public phase of their testing in Q3 of 2011.
Since Diablo 3 is such a highly anticipated title, it's probably for the best that Blizzard spend time testing it in beta like they did with Starcraft 2 in order to iron out the bugs and give us a taste of the action RPG goodness to come. For better or worse, Blizzard has given no comment as to whether Diablo 3 would be getting a rumored console port.
