Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  Finally, the world could play Diablo III. Like its predecessors, the third Diablo would let you build up a character and hack your way through landscapes full of demons, collecting fistfuls of shiny loot along the way. You’d unlock abilities based on the class you’d selected (wizard, demon hunter, etc.), switching between a large array of spells and skills. And you’d power through dungeon after dungeon, all of which were procedurally generated so that no two playthroughs would be the same. It appeared, at first, to be the game that fans had been waiting for.

  In the weeks to come, however, players would discover that Diablo III had some fundamental flaws. It was satisfying to rip through hordes of monsters, but the difficulty ramped up way too fast. Legendary items dropped too infrequently. The endgame was too challenging. And, perhaps most frustrating of all, the loot system seemed to revolve around the in-game auction house, where Diablo III players could use real-life money to buy and sell powerful equipment. This controversial system made Diablo III feel like a dreaded “pay-to-win” game, in which the best way to beef up your character wasn’t to play the game and make fun decisions, but to type your credit card number into a form on Blizzard’s website.

  Since Blizzard’s founding in 1991, the studio had developed a reputation for making fantastic games, including the cultural touchstones Warcraft and StarCraft. When you saw the jagged blue Blizzard logo attached to a game, you knew you were getting something unparalleled. With Diablo II in 2000, Blizzard had developed the definitive action-RPG, a game that inspired countless all-nighters and LAN sessions as millions of teenagers gathered to battle disfigured demons and hunt for elusive Stones of Jordan. Diablo II was widely considered one of the best games ever made. Now, in May 2012, the rocky launch of Diablo III had associated the Blizzard logo with something that the company had never experienced: public failure. And even after Error 37, the problems were just getting started.

  Josh Mosqueira had always hated winters in Montreal. A Mexican-Canadian with a thick blended accent who had served as a Black Watch infantryman in the Canadian army, Mosqueira spent his early career years writing role-playing games for the publisher White Wolf while trying to break into the video game industry. After working on a few games and spending a seven-year stint at Relic Entertainment in Vancouver, Mosqueira moved across Canada to work on Far Cry 3 at Ubisoft’s massive office in Montreal, where winter temperatures tended to drop a few degrees lower than they should in any human-inhabited city.

  On one particularly snowy day in February 2011, more than a year before Error 37, Mosqueira got a call from Jay Wilson, an old friend from his Relic days. Wilson was now working at Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, California, and they were looking for a new lead designer on Diablo III, the game he was directing. Someone from Ubisoft had applied, so Wilson wanted to know what the culture was like over there. Would this prospective new designer fit in? The two friends got to talking, and then Wilson offered up another option: What if Mosqueira took the job?

  Mosqueira said he’d have to think about it. He looked out his window, watching the snow fall, and realized there wasn’t much to think about. “Fast forward two and a half months, and I find myself walking into these halls as the lead designer for the console version of [Diablo III],” Mosqueira said. His job was to direct a very small team—three, at first, including him—that would adapt Diablo III for the Xbox and PlayStation. This was a surprising initiative for Blizzard, which for years had resisted releasing games on consoles, instead choosing to put out massive hits like World of Warcraft and StarCraft II only on PC and Mac. With Diablo III, Blizzard’s brain trust finally saw an opportunity to explore the giant world of console gaming.

  Mosqueira and his team settled into a section of the office and started playing around with prototypes, trying to figure out how to get Diablo III feeling good on a controller. Blizzard had given Mosqueira’s team liberty to overhaul everything for the console version, and they took advantage of that freedom, changing the skills of every class to account for their new control scheme. “A lot of the timing of skills on console felt off, because instead of focusing on your cursor, your eye, you’re focusing on your character,” Mosqueira said. “So we essentially went in and tweaked every skill in the game.”

  Toward the end of 2011, as the Diablo III PC team started crunching for the spring release, Mosqueira and his colleagues put the console project on pause so they could help finish the game. “The three of us—and at that time we were about eight—eight of us were all new to Blizzard, so we sort of felt like we have to,” Mosqueira said. “We want to be part of this. It’s going to be really exciting. It’s going to be a big moment in Blizzard history, and we’re just happy to be part.”

  Then came Diablo III’s launch, and Error 37, and manic days at Blizzard in May 2012 as they tried to stabilize the servers. While Mosqueira and his crew went back to work on the console version, Diablo III’s other designers began trying to solve the game’s deeper problems. Players clearly weren’t happy with the loot system, for example, but what precisely was wrong with it? How could Blizzard make the endgame as addictive as it had been in Diablo II, where players spent hours and hours fighting through demons and hunting for gear even after they’d already finished the story?

  The biggest problem, the developers realized, was the game’s difficulty. Blizzard’s designers had originally built Diablo III’s difficulty system to mirror Diablo II. You’d play through the full game once on Normal mode, then play it a second time on the challenging Nightmare mode, and crank through a third time on Hell mode. Diablo III repeated that structure and introduced a fourth difficulty option, Inferno. Designed for players who had already hit the level cap, Inferno was blisteringly tough, to the point where you couldn’t beat it without the game’s best gear. But Diablo III’s best gear dropped only when you played on Inferno mode, creating a nasty, demonic version of the chicken-and-egg dilemma. How could you get Inferno gear if your gear wasn’t good enough to get through Inferno in the first place?

  There was one option: the auction house. If you didn’t want to bash your head against the wall in Inferno mode, you could dish out real money for better gear, which was the exact opposite of what most players wanted to do. As a result, some crafty players found ways to abuse the system. Thanks to Diablo III’s random number generator, the chances of getting loot from a powerful enemy weren’t much better than the chances of getting loot from smashing a stationary pot. Once players realized this, they’d spend marathon sessions doing nothing but breaking pottery. It wasn’t particularly fun, but hey, it beat giving away real money.

  What became apparent to Blizzard in the coming months was that people were more interested in gaming Diablo III than they were in playing it, a problem that would take serious investment to fix. From May 15 through the end of August, the Diablo III team released roughly eighteen free patches and hotfixes that fixed bugs, tweaked character skills, and addressed various player complaints. The largest of these patches, on August 21, 2012, added a system called Paragon levels that would let players get stronger once they’d hit the level cap (60). It also made Inferno mode less difficult and added a bunch of unique effects to legendary gear, so getting a sleek new weapon would make you feel like a devastating war machine.

  But Blizzard knew these patches were just bandages—temporary solutions to get players to do more than smash pots. There was still a leaking wound in Diablo III’s side. And it would take a great deal of time to stitch it up.

  In the center of Blizzard’s sprawling Irvine campus is a giant statue of a Warcraft orc. Surrounding that statue is a ring of plaques, each with a different message that’s meant to be a mantra for Blizzard employees. Some of them seem like they’ve been ripped from parody motivational posters—“Think Globally”; “Commit to Quality”—but one resonated strongly with the Diablo III team throughout 2012: “Every Voice Matters.” Players were frustrated, and Blizzard’s developers felt compelled to listen to them. Diablo III’s producers and de
signers took to as many Internet hangouts as possible, from Reddit to the Blizzard forums, to collect and collate feedback on how to make the game better. In blog posts and letters throughout the summer and fall, Blizzard promised players that they had a long-term plan to fix the auction house, improve the loot system, and make Diablo III’s endgame more fun.

  This sort of commitment was atypical. Usually, a developer would release a game and then move on, maybe leaving behind a skeleton team to fix any lingering critical bugs before the studio dove into its next project. But Blizzard had built its reputation as a premier developer by sticking to games for the long haul. Blizzard would update all its games with free patches for years and years after they launched, believing that the support would lead to goodwill from fans, which in turn would lead to better sales.*

  By the end of July 2012, Diablo III had sold an astounding ten million copies. Blizzard’s developers felt like they’d made a fun game, but they also knew it could be so much better. “It was a diamond in the rough,” said Wyatt Cheng, a senior technical designer. “We knew we needed to polish it a little bit more. It just needed that extra little bit.” It helped that Blizzard’s CEO, Mike Morhaime, had told the Diablo III team to keep working on updates and releasing free patches for the indefinite future. “There are few other companies where (a) we could sell millions of copies and still feel like we could’ve done better,” said Cheng, “and (b) given some of the initial launch problems, [we’d be] given this long runway to work on the game and make it better.”

  That was one way of looking at the situation. The other was that the people who worked on Diablo III—some of whom had been on the game for nearly a decade—wouldn’t get a break. Anyone who’s spent a great deal of time on a single project knows how relieving it feels to finish—and how when it’s done, you never want to look at it again. “I was listening to a podcast,” said Cheng, who had started on Diablo III in the early days. “There’s a person who’s been making the tours promoting her book”—the psychologist Angela Duckworth—“and she used to write about grit. She said grit is this quality that a lot of successful people have. And it’s this persistence, to push forward with something. Anything worth doing, it’s not necessarily day-to-day fun sometimes. Sometimes it is. Great when it is. But grit usually means that somebody sees the long-term goal and they see the long-term vision and they push through any obstacles that they have on a day-to-day basis, with the end in mind.”

  The “end,” or at least the next big milestone, was Diablo III’s expansion. Traditionally, Blizzard would produce meaty expansion packs for every game the company released, and Diablo III’s developers knew theirs would be the best opportunity to overhaul the game. Toward the end of 2012, they started putting together a giant Google document full of problems that they needed to fix and features they wanted to add, like an item revamp and a new set of goals for the endgame.

  But they needed a new leader. Diablo III’s longtime director, Jay Wilson, had told the team that he planned to step down, citing burnout after nearly a decade spent working on the same game.* Blizzard needed a new director, not just to lead development on the expansion, but also to shape the future of Diablo III. And there was one newcomer who might make the perfect fit.

  When he first saw the opening on Blizzard’s internal website, Josh Mosqueira wasn’t going to apply. He’d been enjoying the challenges of porting Diablo III to consoles, and he liked overseeing a small team. Although his squad had expanded from three to around twenty-five, it was still a drastic departure from his days at Ubisoft, where he’d had to help coordinate a team of four hundred–something people. Even when Wilson and other leaders at Blizzard encouraged him to apply for the director position, Mosqueira was reluctant. “I was just really happy being a lead and having a console project to look after,” he said. “Just getting my hands dirty actually working on the game and not just PowerPoints.”

  But Mosqueira also loved the culture of Diablo III’s development team, and soon enough he was persuaded to file an application. After a gantlet of interviews, not only with Blizzard’s management but also with all his coworkers, Mosqueira was called into the office of Blizzard’s cofounder Frank Pearce for the news. He’d gotten the job. Mosqueira hadn’t been on the Diablo III team for very long, but people respected him as a designer and leader, and Blizzard wanted him to drive the future of the game. “When they told me, it was a pretty amazing moment,” Mosqueira said. “Quickly followed by a lot of panic, when you realize that Diablo’s one of the big franchises, not just at Blizzard but in the industry, and to be given that responsibility was intense.”

  After becoming director, one of Mosqueira’s first moves was to sit down with the rest of the staff on Diablo III, who had all once been his colleagues but now reported to him. He asked how they were feeling. What did they like about the game? Where did they see Diablo III going in the years to come? Usually, video game expansions were additive—they’d provide new content, new areas, new loot—but for Diablo III, Blizzard wanted to make something transformative. “It quickly became apparent that they really wanted to use the expansion to not just adjust and pivot from the launch, but really create this platform that will take Diablo into the future,” Mosqueira said. “That’s the kind of pressure that the team put on themselves. And they were thinking really big.”

  What had also become clear to Mosqueira, and what he tried to convey to the rest of his team, was that they didn’t really know what Diablo III was yet. Mosqueira liked to point out that when gamers got wistful about Diablo II, they weren’t remembering the game’s original incarnation—they were thinking about what it became in 2001, after the developers reacted to fans’ feedback and released the expansion Lord of Destruction. That was the game people remembered. It was the result of millions of players giving Blizzard feedback, and Blizzard reacting directly to that feedback.

  “What makes it really hard is you can build a game, you can test a game, and you can think you know the game—until you release it,” said Mosqueira. “Within the first day, probably more people have spent more hours playing the game collectively than [in] the entire development up to that point. So you’re going to see things you never intended. You’re going to see players reacting to things. . . . They’re playing with it, they’re engaging with it, they’re interacting with it. And really, what makes it hard is learning the discipline and the rigor to know how to react to that.”

  As the Diablo III team looked ahead to the expansion, which they were calling Reaper of Souls, they saw it as a chance to make amends—not just for Error 37, but for all of Diablo III’s early faults. This was the team’s chance to make their own Lord of Destruction and reach the heights that Diablo II had set all those years ago. “We took it as, this is our one opportunity to win back the fans,” said Rob Foote, a senior producer. “Let’s do it.”

  It might have seemed odd, to an outside observer, that a game ten years in the making would launch with so many problems. Mosqueira’s theory was this: Diablo III’s issues were a direct result of a development team haunted by the beloved Diablo II. As he said in a 2015 talk: “The specter of Diablo II loomed large over the team. The pressure of trying to live up to the legacy of this incredible game weighed heavily on the team and impacted so many of the decisions.”

  Where BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition team was bedeviled by negative reactions to Dragon Age 2 (see chapter 6), Blizzard had the opposite problem: Diablo III had to surpass Diablo II’s massive success. The designers of Diablo III had been willing to make big innovations in some areas, like the flexible skill system, generally considered a highlight of the game. But, in Mosqueira’s view, they were too rigid about other series traditions.

  As a newcomer, Mosqueira was willing to challenge everyone’s conceptions of what made Diablo feel like Diablo, even if it meant picking fights with some of Blizzard’s veterans. For the console version, which was still in development alongside Reaper of Souls, Mosqueira had fought hard for an “evade
” feature that would allow players to use a joystick to roll around on the ground, dodging enemies’ attacks. This was controversial. “Evade was extremely contentious on the team,” Mosqueira said. “Extremely, extremely contentious. I would get into very heated discussions with some of the other designers about why we needed it on console.”

  Mosqueira argued that players would get bored walking around for hours at a time without having some method of switching up their movement, like the beloved jump button in World of Warcraft. Other designers pointed out that offering an evade feature would diminish the impact of items that boosted players’ movement speed—a concept from Diablo II—therefore making the game less rewarding in the long term. “Both are really strong arguments,” said Mosqueira. “Both are right arguments. At the end of the day, you have to say, ‘OK, I’m willing to sacrifice some of that long-term reward for the short-term visceral feeling.’ . . . I understand I’m giving away the power reward, but for this to feel like a console game, my thumbs need to do something at regular intervals, and it just feels good. It’s a console thing to do.” (Mosqueira eventually won this battle, and the evade feature made it into the game.)

  By experimenting on consoles, where there was less pressure to adhere to the formula of Diablo II, Mosqueira and his team could take steps that seemed radical to the rest of the team. “I think that was one of the most liberating things,” he said. “The PC team, for all the right intentions, because of all the pressure, the expectation, some of their initial design was very conservative. But on console, it was a bit of the Wild West. And in some ways, looking back at it . . . there’s a level of being very naive. We’ve been mucking around with this game for about six months, not knowing all the history behind all the decisions leading up to this moment, just walking in like kids and pushing buttons.”