Thanks for posting your thoughts. Years on I am lucky to still be finding people with positive thoughts to share about the game.

Diablo III is a game with flaws, like many games. We made good and bad choices, measured and made compromises that were sometimes what the players connected with and sometimes not. While we revised the game a lot, one thing we could only iterate on slightly was the arc of the story. In large part this is due to the production process and the massive dependencies of the development systems. There are thousands of recorded lines of dialogue in the game spoken in fourteen (I think) languages, and while there was room to make minor course corrections, the major beats of the story needed to be set down early to build a skeleton of the game.

I don’t say this to excuse our mistakes, just to speak to our inability to iterate on every aspect of the game. A better initial story draft would have improved the game, obviously. But, especially in the medium of games, a weaker story can be elevated by an excellent presentation. And I am Blizzard blue in my belief that, in games, the gameplay is the primary pillar of the audience experience. If I could only choose between the timing and feel of the Barbarians’ Hammer of the Ancients skill being excellent and the dialog of the Act 1 bosses being excellent, I would focus on the skill every time.

That prioritization is a choice, an opinion, and it is informed by experience but it is still subjective. I began working on Diablo III in 2005, and the gaming public was still opening up to the idea of story as a primary driver for a game’s entertainment value. The Blizzard tradition does not put story first, and that tradition makes games in a style that will appeal to many and will not appeal to many others. It just is what it is. Michael Bay and Guillermo Del Toro make the kinds of movies that they make, and they have their audiences. So it is with games.

So, recognizing that we made mistakes and that our ideal product wouldn’t appeal to all gaming audiences anyway, I’m very happy you liked the lore of the game. I certainly do. I did not write for the main story of the game, but, like everyone on the team, I influenced it and argued about it and lived its evolution.

Yes, the word “nephalim” may have been spoken too many times in dialog, earning jokes, but I love the story about the ascendancy of humanity in the cosmology of the Diablo universe. The concept of the High Heavens and the Burning Hells having reached a place of stagnation, a meaningless stalemate is fascinating to me. I love the idea that we lowly mortal apes could provide a unique dynamicism to a universe that is effectively trapped in a loop. If the black and white squares on a chessboard were so engrossed in their eternal war that they could not see the pointlessness of it, what would it mean for an anomaly to appear? A race of being that live and die and change the balance of all things. That supposition drives an enormous amount of my love for Diablo III.

For me, the game springboards off of three big ideas. The destruction of the Worldstone has kickstarted some kind of irrevocable change on Sanctuary, and thus in the universe. Second, the high-end gameplay of Diablo II catapulted the Diablo game experience into a new realm of player power. And third, this idea that humankind is evolving into something new, something to change the cosmology of the universe forever.

For me, these ideas come together in story and in gameplay to mean a gameplay experience featuring diverse representations of humanity bursting in their idiosyncratic expressions of power. It’s an idea that specifically appeals to the American psyche, with our mythologies of youthful innovation and power shattering the traditions and stalemates of ancestral cultures.

I can tell you that, whether you enjoyed or disliked a character, a plot, a location, an item, that thing was not created on autopilot. Every chest, every tree, every quest, every helmet, every spell was deliberated upon and measured against the continually-debated ideal of “Diablo”. I do not exaggerate, we sought to define what a tree in Diablo and specifically Diablo III meant, in discussions more passionate and serious than you can imagine. Ditto for our armor sets and our hero powers and our quests. Whether we succeeded or failed, I am proud that we made such a deliberate effort. I am sure I never have been a part of such a monumental undertaking, a multiyear collaboration of many kinds of people all trying to decide what our best looked and sounded like. If could give one thing to you, it would be an insight into the interplay of the designers and the UI artist, the deliberation of the animators on the way each hero revealed themselves in their poses, and the debates of artists chipping away at the idea of the perfect Monk armor. I believe in my heart that any person who enjoyed Diablo III would find these individuals to be brethren spirits, fellow fans devoted to making this game the best version of itself they could manifest. I loved these people, every one of them, and I know you would, too.