This week, Blizzard released Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, an expansion to the wildly popular fantasy action-role-playing game that tasks players with slaughtering masses of screeching demons and collecting the randomized gear that they leave behind.
Since coming out last year, Diablo IV has been a big success for Blizzard, earning more than $666 million (yes, really) in its first week. But before that release came years of fits and starts, including a predecessor that was perceived within Blizzard as an embarrassment and an iteration that was so drastically different, people began wondering if it was really still Diablo anymore.
Today, Diablo is one of Blizzard’s most important franchises. But to at least one Blizzard executive who was around in its early days, it wasn’t even a “real game.”
My new book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, chronicles the entire 33-year saga of the video game company, from the early hit-making days of Warcraft and StarCraft to its merger with Activision to last year’s $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft. This WIRED-exclusive excerpt tells the story of a canceled Diablo III expansion and the Diablo IV that never happened.
At the beginning of 2014, while finishing up Diablo III’s first expansion, Reaper of Souls, the team at Blizzard began talking about what was next. They had been operating under the belief that Diablo III would follow the StarCraft II model—one base game followed by two robust expansions—and they had even started brainstorming what the next expansion might look like. “We were looking at really big ideas, but nothing definitive yet,” said writer Brian Kindregan.
Then, during an all-hands meeting shortly before Reaper of Souls came out, they got news that vacuumed the energy out of the team: Diablo III would not get a second expansion. No matter what happened with Reaper of Souls, they were done. “Getting your next project canceled is scary,” said designer John Yang. There was no clear explanation as to why this was happening—Blizzard’s executives were complimentary of their work on Reaper of Souls and said the decision was not made because of any sort of failure on their part. “None of the answers met the sniff test,” said producer Jeremy Masker.
What they didn’t know was that a host of factors was working against the Diablo team. Chief executive officer Mike Morhaime and the rest of Blizzard’s C-suite saw Diablo III as a failure—a game that had damaged the brand—and several of the executives didn’t think Reaper of Souls would be good enough to turn it around. Morhaime was also feeling pressure from Bobby Kotick and his lieutenants at Activision, who were concerned that the developers in Irvine were trying to work on too many projects at once. And then there was the demonic elephant in the room: Despite its big sales numbers, Diablo III wasn’t equipped to deliver long-term revenue. People only bought the game once, which made it difficult for Blizzard to justify keeping together a team of 100 people to work on ongoing support.
Yet it also seemed absurd to view the game as a misstep. Diablo III was one of the most popular games ever made, to the point where other companies would gripe that their own games’ user counts went down significantly whenever a new Diablo patch came out. “Did it make World of Warcraft money? No,” said director Jay Wilson. “But it made more money than most things that Blizzard makes.” Production director John Hight begged Morhaime and the other executives to wait until they shipped Reaper of Souls to make the call on a second expansion, but it was futile. “The team was devastated,” said one executive. “Not just the Diablo team, but really the whole of development.”
On March 25, 2014, Blizzard released Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, and with it came a slew of big changes that fans loved. One reviewer wrote that “with Reaper of Souls, and the recent round of content patches, Blizzard has transformed Diablo III into something far more akin to what long-time fans like me wanted all along.” Versions of the game for Xbox and PlayStation proved that Blizzard had also mastered console development—Diablo III felt just as good if not better on a controller—and would help the company transition away from exclusively making PC games in the years that followed.
Now, Diablo players wanted to know what was next. Morhaime decided that the best move was to leave Diablo III on a high note and start fresh with a fourth game as quickly as possible under Reaper of Souls director Josh Mosqueira, who was now one of the company’s golden boys, both internally and to the outside world, where he had cultivated a reputation as the guy who rescued Diablo III from failure.
After years on Diablo III, Mosqueira was ready to try something completely new. He gathered a few artists and designers and began conceptualizing the next Diablo game, which was code-named Hades and would diverge from the series in several important ways: The camera would be over-the-shoulder rather than isometric; the combat would be punchier, akin to the Batman: Arkham series; and the game would have permadeath—every time your character died, they’d disappear for good, giving you perks for the next run. It was a drastic departure from what people were expecting from Diablo IV, but Mosqueira had earned the executive team’s trust to experiment.
The problems with Hades began to pop up right away. Like other Diablo games, Hades would support cooperative multiplayer, but in the Arkham games, groups of thugs would circle around the Dark Knight, comic-book style, waiting to be punched in the face. It was impossible to envision how that could work with two or more players, especially because so much of Arkham’s combat relied upon time dilation—if your buddy was beating up monsters and time slowed down, what would you see? Designers on the team began to wonder: Was this really Diablo anymore? “The controls are different, the rewards are different, the monsters are different, the heroes are different,” said designer Julian Love. “But it’s dark, so it’s the same.”
Hades only required a small subset of the Diablo team, so the remaining developers found themselves with little else to do. A few of them began calling themselves Team Summer Camp in an echo of what had happened at Blizzard North many years earlier. “People would come in at 11 am, play Diablo III, do a two-hour lunch,” said Masker. “They might do a meeting or an hour of work and then go home at 4 pm.” Then, as some of those people moved over to the Hades team, the pressure grew on Mosqueira to make decisions so they’d all have work to do. He became harder to track down, coming in to the office only two or three days a week, which hampered some of the designers’ progress as they waited for feedback.
In July 2016, Mosqueira announced that he was leaving Blizzard. Shortly afterward, he launched a new game studio with some other former employees. When a group of Blizzard executives and lead designers came to evaluate the progress of Hades, they left unimpressed. Believing that the project wouldn’t be feasible without Mosqueira, they decided to cancel it. Diablo IV would have to start from scratch.
As Blizzard scrambled to find a new director, the rest of the Diablo team began working on a new content pack for Diablo III. During the development of Hades, the developers had held a game jam where they all spent a few days hacking together quick prototypes based on wild ideas. One group had prototyped a new version of the scythe-wielding, skeleton-conjuring, corpse-exploding Necromancer from Diablo II, which the team then decided to flesh out and turn into a proper release. “It was one of the best development times ever,” said Julian Love, who helmed the project. “Everybody was so busy trying to get Diablo IV running, they left us alone.” It was called Rise of the Necromancer, which suggested some sort of grandiose expansion, but all players received was a new class, which made the price tag sting.
“For $15, you’re right to expect more,” wrote a GameSpot reviewer. And that was the end for significant new content in Diablo III. One of the rationales behind canceling the second expansion had been to release a new game more quickly— now, they had neither an expansion nor a quick sequel. The game remained the black sheep of Blizzard’s lineup, part of a franchise that had been created by another studio—Blizzard North—and one that some Blizzard veterans scoffed at. “I was directly told by one of the top people in the company that Diablo wasn’t a ‘real game,’” said Jay Wilson.
Morhaime and other Blizzard executives would later privately admit that canceling Diablo III’s second expansion before Reaper of Souls even came out had been a tactical error. Reaper of Souls was a win for the company, and to leadership, it had helped make up for the original game’s failures, but they lost momentum shortly afterward. Later, the lack of new content for Diablo would have other repercussions—and it would be many years before the release of another Diablo game. Since Hades was never publicly announced, fans spent years wondering why the franchise was dormant.
But the Diablo III story was ultimately a triumph for Blizzard—a sign, both to players and to employees, that the company wasn’t going to just accept failure. Other game makers might have given up after the polarizing launch of Diablo III and immediately moved on to their next product. But to Morhaime and his inner circle, “commit to quality” wasn’t just about a game’s development—it was also about what happened afterward. As video games moved away from one-time releases and began transforming into living products, other companies across the industry would look to Reaper of Souls as proof that what appeared to be the conclusion of a video game’s development was sometimes just the beginning.
Excerpted from Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment ©2024 Jason Schreier and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group.