Blizzard chief Rob Pardo defends Jay Wilson over Diablo III departure
By Tim Colwill on January 21, 2013 at 10:09 am
Rob Pardo, one of Blizzard’s key members, has stepped up to defend Diablo III designer Jay Wilson in the wake of Wilson’s announcement that he was departing the Diablo III development team.
“This thread saddens me greatly. I know that the Battle.net forums have earned a reputation for rough justice, but I do not believe justice is being served by how people are speaking about Jay’s departure from Diablo III,” said Pardo on the Battle.net forums.
“I am very proud of the Diablo franchise and what the team was able to accomplish with Diablo III. As a gamer I have enjoyed the game and played for many, many nights with friends and family. I’m not, however, going to use that as an excuse. The Diablo community deserves an even better game from Blizzard and we are committed to improving it. We have a talented team in place and have no intention of stopping work on Diablo III until it is the best game in the franchise.”
“I’m the only person in this thread who has actually worked with Jay,” pointed out Pardo. “I hired Jay to head up the Diablo project and had the pleasure of getting to work with him, both in building the team and designing the game. He has great design instincts and has added so much to the franchise with his feel for visceral combat, boss battles, and an unparalleled knack for making it fun to smash bad guys. I’ve worked with many, many designers at Blizzard and Jay is one of the best. He has a great career at Blizzard ahead of him and I guarantee that you will enjoy Jay’s game designs in future Blizzard games.”
“If you love Diablo as much as we do, then please continue to let us know how you feel we can improve the game. If you still feel the need to dish out blame, then I would prefer you direct it at me. I was the executive producer on the project; I hired Jay and I gave him advice and direction throughout the development process. I was ultimately responsible for the game we released and take full responsibility for the quality of the result.”
Diablo 3 players have logged more than 2.8 billion hours in the last year
You crazy people. You so crazy.
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Then i blame you for ruining diablo.
I seem to remember spending most of the time on nightmare running away from bad guys, so I can’t really comment on that.
In any case, acting surprised at the amount of poo on the walls of the forum only really shows that he never actually pays any attention to them. That’s pretty much what official forums are used for.
Well. You no longer really need to run away as they fixed that.
I just feel that despite the time they had spent on developing the game… It was still undercooked and the features that people expected were simply removed or altered in the name of casual gamers.
You can’t customize your characters or skills like you would have done in Diablo 2, automatically there is less attachment to your character as there is less risk/reward.
If anything, Blizzard should have allowed us to fine tune our characters more than we could in say Diablo 2.
Completely randomized environments are now gone, you essentially just memorize a path through the whole game and it gets repetitive because of it.
Sure, an entrance to a dungeon might be moved elsewhere…
Then that Auction house. On launch, you needed to use it to progress, it was essentially a pay to win button, completely removing the need for “lucky drops” or doing multiple runs to get a specific item.
Lastly no LAN support or Australian servers, expect rubber banding, disconnections and all that awesome stuff all in the name of “Combating Piracy” while making your paying customers literally go through hell.
Also the graphics and environments, in Diablo 1 you felt claustrophobic, in Diablo 2 you felt like a tiny dot in a giant world.
Diablo 3 it looks like a colorful painting and not the end of the world that is under threat by a demonic horde and it feels so linear. – Also no Eyefinity support, you can sort of force it, but some of the art backgrounds come out derped.
I honestly believe that for the first time in Blizzards History they really dropped the ball and actually released an “Average Game”.
However, they are also known to support and patch games for over a decade, so I am Interested to see how it pans out in 5+ years or just move on to an Expansion or release a Diablo 4 which fixes allot of the games fundamental issues.
Barb cleave + the explosion on kill glyph with a big 2 hander is pretty fucking awesome fun. Worth trying.
Leap > Cleave > Boom!
Ah I see, haven’t gone back to it since playing it at launch up to act 3 of inferno. Good that they fixed it, maybe I’ll give it another shot.
I actually really like the customisation system, and never really had any issues with lag.
My main issues were having to play the game through FOUR times and, as said before, having to constantly run away during cooldowns.
Hopefully they just say fuck it and roll out Diablo 4 and hopefully it wont look like a WoW expansion like D3 does.
I dont like the chances of the D4 release being before the singularity, with how long #3 took
jesus, read a bit of that thread, what a bunch of fucking whingers. I haven’t played any of the diablo games properly (played the 2nd a bit). I know Diablo 3 wasn’t perfect from i’ve heard, but yeah, jesus the guys moving onto another game…get over it.
Stuff like this makes all gamers look like fuckwits lol
You have to understand Diablo has an absolutely massive following and Diablo 2 especially has stood the test of time incredibly well. Right from the get-go you have a very high standard to match.Secondly, Diablo 3 was made by a completely different team after an ugly separation of the original team (Blizzard North). The new team already would have an uphill battle convincing long-time fans they were up to the task.
Finally, you had Wilson who while might be skilled in some areas of game design, made pretty much the #1 textbook error when stepping in to command; instantly assuming you know better then the people that did the job before you. I’ve seen it in my time in the Army, the corporate world and public service. You get a fresh faced, newly appointed leader busting with ideas how to do things “better” without ever fully appreciating the foundation laid by their predecessors. Wilson did that to a tee, ignoring feedback and legitimate concerns, dismissing them quite often with flippancy and arrogance. Now I am not even a fan of the Diablo series but even I can see a history of Wilson telling Diablo fans what they want instead of actually listening to them.
Now if Diablo 3 is a good or bad game is purely and personally subjective but I can fully understand why Wilson earned the reputation he did. Hopefully he will learn from his mistakes and become a better developer from it for whatever project he ends up working on.
D2 on release was good, but it really came into it’s own after the expansion and patches. without these things it wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular. just something to remember. I know you would think that maybe Blizzard could get it right on release from experience, but game development is probably more complicated than that.
the crap WIlson is a bit unfair. since release every single patch has fixed a whole bunch of issues players have been having. it’s still missing a few things, but it’s getting there.