It says much about how different Blizzard’s games are from the norm that Diablo III’s lead designer, Jay Wilson, moving on from the divisive hacker-slasher to another role with the same company can be news. Blizzard’s games are designed to live for a long time, not to be abandoned after a couple of post-release patches and some token DLC. Don’t expect to see Diablo IV for at least another decade, y’know? Instead, D3 remains in a state of continuous development, catering to a large and vocal community, balancing and rebalancing to increasingly anal degrees and, no doubt, trying to become a goliath of real-money transactions. Then there’s the much-rumoured console version of the game potentially still in the wings. So, a going concern, and now in need of new leadership. A lot of people have a lot to say about Jay Wilson’s seven-year stewardship of the project, the state the game launched in and some of the big decisions (DRM, RMT, grind vs merriment) made.

Wilson obliquely referenced some of these in his long goodbye letter (again, bear in mind he was moving to a different part of the same building rather than another developer), and while it’s full of pride about the game too it’s probably the closest we’ll ever come to Blizzard admitting that D3 wasn’t their finest hour.(more…)