While Diablo IV’s sold well enough in the run-up to launch, nobody can say that it’s been a smooth ride for Blizzard’s online ARPG. One of its worst moments is the ongoing rollout if the game’s first season, which was met with a truckload of criticism.
If you feel this way, know that General Manager Rod Fergusson agrees with you, although not necessarily for the same reasons. In a short interview with GamesRadar, the Diablo IV boss acknowledged that the team “made some sort of mistake in managing expectations” despite trying to be “responsive and agile.”
“We were trying to move a little fast, we were trying to be very responsive and agile,” Fergusson said. “So we were like ‘hey, we have two-thirds of a solution. So let’s give them the two thirds, and we’ll do the other third later.’ And that didn’t work out in our favor.”
He also acknowledged that the snafu with character balancing pass wasn’t communicated well in advance, resulting in an “expectation management problem.”
“We had to just own that and recognise we have to do better to get patch notes out before that. We were doing patch notes at the moment the patch dropped, we weren’t doing live streams ahead of time to talk about it,” Fergusson said.
Diablo IV’s second season is scheduled for October 17th.
