Chaotic development, stress, crunch… According to the developers, Diablo 4 will never finish on time and would only be “mediocre”.
Highly anticipated, Diablo 4 made a remarkable appearance at the Game Awards 2022 with an excellent CGI presentation to formalize the June 6 release date. If the fans are in heaven and can almost touch their grail now, the developers are a lot less.
Chaotic development, stress, crunch… In your opinion, without “a lot of overtime”, the game will never be on time, worse, the game’s reception may not live up to expectations.
According to a long survey by Washington Post
Diablo 4, evolution from hell
Post sources agree that the general mood in the studio has deteriorated over time. While some sought to upgrade their salaries, there were major personnel movements at Activision and the team at diablo 4 just stopped messing up their plans and starting to eat away at everyone’s morale.
As a bonus, the employees surveyed emphasize that the development of diablo 4 quickly fell into chaos because of the project management.
In fact, according to the testimonies collected by the Post, the game was only abused internally, particularly because of several leaders who would have constantly changed directions and not hesitated to dismiss their frustration and leave their work to other developers.
Respondents particularly point the finger at Luis Barriga, the initial director of diablo 4, and Jesse McCree, lead designer. The duo had started developing the game without a clear idea of where they wanted to go. The developers also describe McCree as someone who is particularly unstable. He could demand change overnight, jump on it headlong, then suddenly lose interest, drop it, and give the job to someone else. Later, when the latter “resigns” along with Luis Barriga, the developers will remove and change most of the changes made by the two men diablo 4 to find some semblance of consistency. Tell yourself that a battle royale mode was planned and canceled, hence the turn things have taken.
You could tell they weren’t very confident, there weren’t many concrete plans for the game, they often changed their minds on a whim, sometimes without warning. Gradually it began to wear people down.
Above Washington Post
The Post’s sources also explain that the game has suffered a major delay due to Sebastian Stępień, a former CD project that worked on Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 in particular. The latter joined the project. diablo 4 2019 to rewrite the game’s script. Just, let’s go, the man’s changes had no more at all and caused a delay in development for several months.
Stepień had actually proposed a lengthy screenplay in Polish, which therefore had to be fully translated, and which highlighted the “brutal” rape of a woman. what to do diablo 4 more “gloomy and gritty” actually just disgusted the developers who had absolutely no idea what was going on. The latter, after an internal dispute, managed to get the entire part about the rape removed and the female character even disappeared from the script at the end. However, Blizzard softened to the Washington Post by saying that this was just the background of a character that should only be secondary and that nothing should have been shown on screen.
But despite the duo’s departure and the explicit overhaul of the script, things haven’t improved much. The staff has come and gone for years, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused trouble… In short, nothing is gained and at the moment the developers who are still on the project are not very confident about the quality of the game concerns.
Game release delayed when there are no crunch or cut features?
He explains that internally diablo 4 has already changed its release date several times without this being made public. 2021, 2022 then April 2023. Now the game is expected to be released on June 6th, 2023 as confirmed at the Game Awards. However, the respondents here do not believe that the game will be finished in time. Unless more features are thrown away and teams agree to work even more overtime.
We’re at the point where they don’t want to delay the game any longer, so we all have to pull through and figure out how much we’re willing to hurt each other to make sure the game comes out in a good enough state.
Above Washington Post
Therefore, in order to release its game on time, Activision Blizzard called for reinforcements by merging the Vicarious Vision studio, now known as Blizzard Albany, with the already existing teams. But as old as they are, the developers of this new studio had absolutely no experience making a game like this diablo 4. It must be said that we are very far from a guitar hero or a Crash Bandicoot, earlier productions by Vicarious Vision. Here, too, what was supposed to be a great help initially proved to be rather problematic.
After a while, hiring and weaning doesn’t solve the problem anymore. If you add them fairly late in the project it doesn’t matter if you rented an entire studio as they will never be up to speed in time to help deploy the game Hire people working on expansions .
Above Washington Post
The development of diablo 4, chaotic as it is, goes on despite everything and the game is therefore dated June 6, 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series and PC. The developers are obviously not reassured and the working conditions don’t seem to suit everyone. Some believe the game will still be “fun” after release, while others believe it will be “mediocre but passable”.
While the staff doesn’t believe the game will be postponed, we’re not immune to a definitive postponement a few months before arrival. Obviously the game needs some tweaking, although the feedback from those who’ve been through the various beta phases isn’t that bad in general.
At the same time, Activision Blizzard is currently in full paperwork to replace it, but Microsoft’s takeover project is also stalling here. We also recently learned that the FTC, the American regulator, decided to block the file and take Microsoft to court.