While fans have been anxiously awaiting the release of Diablo III since Blizzard announced the title at theBlizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational. Now, already a full year and a half after being announced, the release date for Diablo III is still completely unknown – even at Blizzard.

When speaking with Techland, Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design at Blizzard, explained the reasoning behind such a delay.

“We always announce all of our games too early. We realize that and go, ‘You know what? Next time we’re not going to do that.’ And then we always fail at that. But I’d rather fail at that than fail at making the game great. I think it’s safe to say that, yeah, [Diablo III] is not going to be out next year.”

So now we know not to get our hopes up for a 2010 release – we want to know what the reasoning is for such a delay. Well, we are assured it is not down to lack of focus or commitment.

“We just have a different process and approach than a lot of other studios, and it makes it a very difficult process for us to predict street dates when we’re multiple years out,” Pardo added, “We’ve been wrong [about release dates] for as long as I can remember. So that’s why don’t do release dates anymore.”

At least we know its they are not going at it half-hearted. Instead of blaming Blizzard for the delay, we should divert our hate-mail to whoever decided to announce it back in 2008. As it’s their fault we have had our hopes up ever since.