So something really cool happened this week, the last class for Diablo was announced at Blizzcon! That's right Diablo fans, the classes will be: Monk, Barbarian, Wizard, Demon Hunter and Witch Doctor. Really cool stuff!
Now for the fun part (I know right?, marketing=fun!). I was looking at some old posts about what the 5th class was, so at this time, nobody knew what Blizz had cooking at the time, and I noticed that Blizzard has slowly but surely released classes for 2 years. The game has been in development since 2001, that's 9 years ago! Now, i want to set aside all the other things Blizzard has done to promote D3, and focus solely on the strategic release of characters. Yup, you heard me, the order of release is in fact, marketing. If we look at the order these classes were revealed in, we can notice a couple things: The Barbarian and the Witch Doctor were both revealed when the game was announced in June, 2008. So we have a re-hash from D2, and a completely new class revealed together. Next comes the Wizard, announced in Blizzcon 2008, a ranged magical user. We have the Monk a year later at Blizzcon 2009, the game's second melee class. And finally, we have the Demon Hunter at Blizzcon 2010. So Blizzard reveals 2 when the game comes out, and then one for each Blizzcon after.
The way I see this, Blizzard is trying to keep all kinds of players interested. They release a Melee and Hybrid first, then Caster, then Melee, and then Ranged. Releasing so far apart also entails marketing, raising the hype as much as possible, and rewarding those who stay on top of the game with periodic information about the upcoming game is enough to make hardcore fans crawl. I even read about this guy who created an algorithm or some other nerdy thing so he could estimate the number of letters in the 5th class' name based on the space taken by the tabs of the the other classes on the D3 webiste, what did I just say about crawling?
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