late 22 release confirmed -)
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First half of 2023 confirmed 
Friends and Family alpha 2H 2021
Wider F&F beta 1H 2022
Closed beta with signups 2H 2022
Release May 2023
It all fits!
Keep telling yourself that…
Tbh I am personally completely baffled by this. Putting 44 GB on PS for just a friends and family testing doesn’t sound right. It’s more than that for sure, but then why on PS first?
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Not sure if you are joking or not but the entire D3 testing phase was 7 months long. Why would you think D4 will need 18 months of testing?
D4 testing will in theory be more involved as they need to not just test cross play but also the open world elements.
It’s possible this just signals another internal test phase but also expanding the tested platforms for cross play related testing.
44GB is pretty reasonable for an open world game with PBR assets designed for display at 4K. I would expect they also haven’t optimised the filesize at this point so it also probably doesn’t reveal how big the launch game will actually be.
44 GB to me “screams” all 4 acts. This then isn’t F&F testing, it’s a whole new stage in testing.
Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the final game is >70GB.
D4 is also not (to my understanding) following a strict 4 act structure. If we look at the map of sanctuary then I don’t think 44GB is the entire thing.
Graphics assets are fairly big, D4 seems to be going into a lot of detail when you zoom or view a cutscene so all the assets are very high quality.
D3 is around 25GB? and it’s art assets are far far lower in detail than the D4 stuff.
What was the D4 Alpha size when it first appeared?
It was 30 GB last year:
I’d say it can go to 60 GB at release, but what we have right now at PS are all 4 acts.
I was joking.
But D3’s external testing was much longer than 7 months from what I can see. Beta was ~9 months but then add some unknown alpha testing on top of that.
Btw, regarding game size. The game could take less space at release than while in an unfinished state without filed packages properly and what not.
It’s certainly not impossible but I would warn everyone to be weary of using file size as an indicator of game progress.
There are many reasons that a file size can be inflated heavily and many optimisations that can make things smaller.
If we assume this 44GB install is compressed then the total diskspace used could be over 60GB for this current version.
It’s also possible that with internal versioning that this install is missing stuff that has already been completed.
It’s also possible there is an array of specialised debugging tools and testing tools included that inflate the file size.
It’s also possible for this copy to have source assets rather than optimised assets which could be 10x larger than what they will end up distributing at release.
F&F started September 2011. I know because I was there. Closed beta ended in May 2012. So 7-8 months.
It’s huge news for sure, pretty much opening the Q1/Q2 2022 window for a release. But then, why they haven’t announced Blizzcon yet?
Because we already had it in February, but you know this.
So, because we had it in February we won’t have it again?
They have to announce next class at next Blizzcon. That’s happening before D4 release obviously.
That is acceptable for me.
Not unless they plan for us to have 2 blizzcons in a year, which would be unprecedent (to my knowledge anyway) considering that Blizzcon is an annual event, in other words: once a year event. So the next Blizzcon won’t be until 2022, as Avalon stated. In short, you’ll likely have to wait until next year for the next blizzcon.
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