Blizzard’s plans to satisfy their fanbase and still deliver a fresh experience

Waiting in the lobby of Blizzard’s Irvine headquarters, I was overcome by nostalgic reverence. Where most businesses have a mountain of months-old magazines, Blizzard has a museum. It was nothing too extravagant, mind you, but the frames lining the walls were like windows to my childhood. Each piece of classic Diablo art conjured up fond memories of the franchise that’s marking its 15th birthday this November.

It wasn’t always this way, however. Blizzard certainly didn’t begin its existence as a gaming giant responsible for both this generation’s Dungeons & Dragons and the game that has become South Korea’s national sport. Over the years, the company has seen both growth spurts and growing pains, both successes and, er, whatever Warcraft Adventures was. Many incredibly talented people have come and gone.

This is the environment Diablo III has evolved in. To track its development is to see a balancing act made all the more precarious by countless shifts and upheavals. One thing, however, has always remained constant: fandom. I’m not just referring to Diablo’s near-militant community—Diablo’s story is one of diehard dedication on both sides of the table. Most of the original Diablo team, you see, is now gone. In its place is a band of folks who grew up playing Diablo and Diablo II as fans, just like you or I. Now they’re shaping the franchise’s present and future, but—thanks to that ridiculously passionate community—they’re also trying their damndest to avoid losing sight of the past.

“When we started, we really inherited this big scary game,” explained game director Jay Wilson. “There are very few of us who actually worked on the previous Diablo games, so a lot of us came at it more as fans. When you’re building something that you didn’t originate, the struggle that you have is, how do you remain true to it while also being true to your own creative nature? If you make something, you can’t just copy. You have to infuse it with your own personality, your own interests, your own opinions, your own desires. If you don’t, then it will be soulless.”
It almost seems fitting—a game about, you know, the devil that sells its own soul. Sorry, though, Satan: this just isn’t your day.

Everybody’s had those first moments with a new game that really define the entire experience. Diablo III’s origins, then, lie not in some linear extension of the original Diablo’s creative vision, but in those player-driven experiences. Hearing Wilson describe his love affair with the first Diablo drove that point home.

“It was when I bought Warcraft II,” he said. “On the back of the CD case they had an ad for Diablo. It had a picture of the warrior with his sword and shield, standing in front of the church door with the red light streaming out of it. That image was so compelling to me that I wanted to play that game. I didn’t even know what it was and I wanted to play it. I remember, back then there was so little information. You just didn’t know a lot about games before they came out. So to have an image so compel me, I always remember that.

“The day I installed it, I told my wife ‘You need to leave the house, because it’s Diablo time now.’ ‘Diablo’ spoken in hushed tones. And it was all the classic moments: the first encounter with the butcher, the first encounter with the Skeleton King, the first time a hundred goatmen come running at you and you manage to survive by the skin of your teeth. The first time you griefed somebody who was your teammate. There are all those great moments that I think everyone had.”

Hindsight, however, stops being 20/20 when rose-tinted glasses are involved. For Wilson and the rest of Diablo III’s development team, avoiding that trap is the biggest challenge. When is it appropriate to give diehard fans precisely what they want? And—perhaps more importantly—when do you fire back with a stern “No”?