You mean what you zeroed in on? The rest of your arguments I can’t even respond to because they aren’t even grounded in actual fact. So far you’ve said Barriga was only on the WoW team up until Cata when he was quite publicly the game design lead for Legion, appearing in multiple interviews, then you said he was a writer for D4 when he was the Game Director. Who even actually wrote the wheelchair thing? Do you know it was actually him or was it Sebastian? Nobody really knows as it’s just an article. People don’t even have to tell the truth in those, either.
I don’t like how Rod Fergusson has handled questions at all. Every time he talks he either says something like “we thought we were doing good”, “it’s a lot of people’s on the teams first game” or something along the lines of they can’t give us too much all at once.
I don’t like calling for people’s jobs so I won’t but there needs to be some drastic changes in the game or a new team should take over much like what happened with D3.
A halfaxe CEO hired a bunch of halfaxe game producers who then in turn hired halfaxe game dev interns that barely passed college and now what do you get?
A halfaxe product that nobody from the toes up to the head gives a single squid about. SUCH BIG SURPRISE
wrong, it is the whole team to blame for. if someone doesnt beleive in the job he has been handed to do, he simply leaves. so all of them that are there have the same responsiblity for the bad status of the game.
Not true, havent you ever heard the " I was just following orders " defense ?
People need their jobs, they cant just leave when they dont like them.
They have families to feed and care for. Ive disliked about every job ive ever had at 1 point or another.
This is a leadership issue plan and simple but it doesnt really matter what we say here in the long run.
To them these forums are just mice running frantically in a box that will never change anything. They just give us this space to keep us all together bouncing off each other and the walls of the box while they walk past and do w/e they want regardless of what happens in the box.
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A good game director can be a senior game developer, especially from good games, so he know everything about a good game development. The problem is developers don’t like to be directors generally, they are too “out of space” 
i think its both tbh.
the argument would hold the road better if we didnt see how bad they are at the game 
Perhaps not being a Diablo fan makes me less disappointed, but I think people have to give credit where credit is due.
The original team Barriga/McCree and then Stepien dicked around and wasted a lot of development time. Barriga/McCree get turfed and then everyone had to fight to get Stepien’s “creative vision” back on track from whatever that caveman fantasy was that he was stuck on.
Fergusson gets tacked on the project in 2020, and Joe Shely gets Game Director in 2021, which means these guys had only 2-3 years to turn a train wreck of a project into a shipping product. With a mostly inexperienced team.
All flaws and disappointments and unmet expectations aside, they managed to ship a product that mostly works and is playable across all classes and builds. Not meta playable but then everything isn’t balanced and meta in any game.
Keep in mind that Diablo 3 had eleven years of development time and still wasn’t ‘finished’ on release. And on release had a lot of the same complaints as D4 has. “Not as good as D2, not enough content, not enough items, story weak” etc.
Personally I feel that Blizzard lacked the talent and vision to release a true Diablo successor, something innovative and cool, and instead they settled on a better-looking, smoother rehash of existing ARPG standards.
Given the time and the context they had to work with, I think the current team did the best they could in the time they had. And they likely need some turnover to keep the game moving forward and not getting too stale.
Blizzard can and should do better with D4 but I think people need to focus on where it goes next and not on who’s fault it was that they had to rush an unfinished product out the door to meet deadlines.
There’s enough blame to go around from top to bottom. It was a systematic issue. However, the grunts who had to listen and work with what they were told to do are probably the ones with the least blame. If you say inexperienced junior members are at fault, well, they shouldn’t be hired in the first place or supervised by senior staff. You can’t expect newbies to be perfect, skill development and supervision is the job of the people up top.
Anyways, looking forward to Microsoft’s takeover. Maybe they will replace the current directors/decision makers with an AI. At the very least the AI will be more efficient, if unapologetically blatant with their purpose of making money off of us. If nothing else, the AI might even be able to prioritize and actually fix the underlying issues!
They sold over 10 million copies.
Made over 600 million in revenue.
That is a big win for a game director. They made profits, they sold a lot, they exceeded their expectations.
Now they move onto another game
It’s more an executive mandate problem. Everyone’s getting their marching orders…and you either march or get replaced.
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The plan was for more than 600 million. They wanted more, from microtransactions, battle pass, expansions, etc. Compared to the revenue they can gain if even 10% of 10 million players engage in the other revenue streams? 600 million isn’t much. It’s a lump sum, they need a constant influx, especially if they need to pay for server maintenance including staff salaries etc. Those CEOs don’t pay themselves.
Hence the revolving door policy?
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Where is that states they wanted more than 600 million?
They exceed their goals. Big hefty paycheck for those game directors, they went above and beyond expectations.
D3 sold 30 million copies, and Blizzard called that a failure. All the money made from this game is more of a promotional team win, not development team.
Companies always want more… Also, the game design. Games with seasons, battle passes, microtransactions and live service. Companies will not plan to run on deficit, the 600 million is a big win, but compared to what long-term sustained revenue will get them, they can get so much more.
600 million seems a lot but games like FFXIV the revenue steams are completely different. FFXIV has 20 million subscribers, who pay $13 - 15 per month. That’s $156 per year per player, which sums up to ~$3 billion per year… they’ve been going 10 years now. This is all excluding the upfront cost of the game and expansions and fluctuations in playerbase. Yes, this is a different genre, but just something to put into perspective what kind of revenues games can make.
I doubt Joe Shely is going anywhere. He’ll probably remain on the Diablo IV project for the next few years before moving onto Diablo V.
To be honest, I don’t think Bobby Kotick and Co. really care all that much, at this point. They won’t be part of the company for much longer. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Diablo IV was released a month before the acquisition was originally slated to finish.
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Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
In this case, we can probably skip everything and safely say that it is enemy action.
I generally think if this was a indie release, it would have been looked upon as good by most and average by the hard core arpg players.
Talking to my friends who are mainly blizzard diehards, this is a 2/10. Talking to all my daughters friends on their discord, everyone scores it between 4-6/10 - these are all gamers, but they play a ton of different games. It’s a weird gamer culture it’s different. They shelved and quit D4 already so…
The game is playable but lacks any depth and the mechanics and economy of certain things are not tuned well - some parts need a whole redo, some need polishing. You can tell different teams were involved just from how the different the quality of the quests are and how some of the dungeons run vs others.
It’s everyone’s fault ^^;
Kotick and the Shareholders for being too greedy with the rush
The last team that got canned for their crappy behavior and mistreatment of women at the company
Rod and the team for the XP kneecaps, cooldown nerfs and level scaling changes that acted against the other good they did do in the first few months that kept the wheels spinning instead of the machine lurching forwards
Yours and mine every single time we bought mtx, pre ordered and signaled to game companies that we are okay with standards slow decline…
We all suck