Blizzard is focused on releasing two titles next year: “StarCraft 2″ and “World of WarCraft: Cataclysm.” Unfortunately for action RPG fans, “Diablo 3″ is not in the cards. In an interview with Techland, Blizzard executive VP of game design, Rob Pardo, said, “I think it’s safe to say that, yeah, ['Diablo 3'] is not going to be out next year.”

But that wasn’t all. Speaking about the fact that Blizzard frequently announces games long before they are ever released, Pardo said the following:

“We’ve been wrong [on release dates] for as long as I can remember. Now when we announce [a game] we just go, ‘Here’s the game we’re working on, we’re going to start talking about it and who knows when it ships.”

Sounds like he was half joking when he said it…clearly Blizzard has an approximate sense of when the game will come out, but in terms of telling the public, sorry, you get nothing.

In the meantime, play “Torchlight.” It’s basically “Diablo 2.5.”