http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/11763856488#12
I clearly heard:
-We dont communicate internally.
-Everybody has their own project we work really hard on.
-I dont know how these side – projects fit together
Dev1 is supposed to be one of the big spiders in the web, that brings all stuff together?
To be fair, this sounds about right for someone in Wyatt Cheng’s position. While he is lead game designer, his position is not one who makes the ultimate strategic level decisions that surrounds the game. Thus he isn’t expected to know exactly what all the other teams are doing 100% of the time. This is pretty much standard fair in many software development shops. But I’m not going to deny that communication issues aren’t present (from my personal experience, it’s always the biggest issue second to organizational fiefdoms/politics, as well as individual developer ego’s).
He even confirmed this when he was asked during the play test stream, about what plans there were after the expansion goes live; whether or not it would just be bug fixes or if there would be actual content updates?” See the 42m mark of Archon’s stream archive:
His response was that he isn’t the ultimate authority on decisions like those; where it would be the game director (Josh Mosqueira) or the lead designer (Kevin Martens). Marten’s is interesting because I’ve highlighted him before with some of his quotes (especially this one: “We didn’t make that game. That’s the straight-up answer. We did not make that game, and we’re not going to turn this game into that game.” He’s one of the sources of the “what you remember was purely nostalgia” when players were having discussions about certain design decisions around 2011.
Cheng has always been passionate about what he does since he was the one who spent hours talking with regular Blizzcon attendees about stuff related to the game. But again, the game designers can brainstorm and come up with interesting ideas; they aren’t the ones making the final decisions or doing the actual coding though (which is a whole another ball of wax; as what designers want, often times is not easy to code, and/or gets placed into the priority queue). This just illustrates that one person does not a team make. There are other cogs in the wheel; in the Diablo III development teams case, some of those cogs don’t mesh well when it comes to the legacy they inherited, and the expectations that came with it.
It also makes sense he wasn’t aware of the Imperius Wings; that’s a higher level marketing level decision (and it is probably part of the CE for Warlords of Draenor – because they, Blizzard Marketing realizes the demand for wings, and what “better” way than to throw that carrot onto one of their other franchises). The “valor buff” string in the datamine is exactly just marketing fluff because they know this stuff gets mined, and grapevined like no tomorrow.
I’m not saying I agree with all of his takes regarding balancing (as I also believe, numbers/stats/math, cannot always be the final arbiter; feel is very subjective, but is often times, one of those intangibles that can trump the stats that comes from data gathering). My point is that I don’t feel that Cheng is one of the key developers as to why the game has had this shallow experience associated with it.
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The fact that D3 was released as less than its predecessor belies an internal problem that goes beyond complaints of Blizzard selling out the series or some other ‘evil’ corporate strategy. The simple fact is there seems to be, somewhere in the decision making chain, a person (or people) who are working with an agenda or design philosophy that does not lend itself towards creating or maintaining a gaming franchise. Not saying these people are not useful or wouldn’t be a huge asset in one way or another…perhaps working on a game that is not a sequel or a different genre?.
It’s hard (again, because of what happened with North and then the subsequent project leadership vacuum that followed). Lot of those key North folks wanted to start their own studios. Plus whenever you have a large merger/acquisition like what happened with Vivendi, there is going to be cultural changes that breaches the organization (even though Blizzard Entertainment was allowed to act independently and keep its identity; there was naturally going to be a push to have Blizzard North absorbed into Irvine headquarters).
If you talk to former lower level (non-mgmt) North programmers for example, some will say they also aren’t working their for a reason. Likewise, you will rarely hear the bigger names, specifically detailing these cultural differences because no one wants to burn their bridges in an industry where paths cross often. The whole thing with Brevik and Wilson was not malicious; Brevik stated what is truth (very different design philosophies). Plus it’s also a studio with personnel that had been together since 1993 (a direct contrast to the D3 development team). Wilson of course stuck up for his team but made the mistake of expressing it the wrong way via social media.
When Blizzard made the decision to actually move forward with releasing Diablo III (means putting actual code behind all the artwork and visuals being done), they basically hired outsiders like Martens (Bioware) who had RPG/dungeon crawler experience (he was lead designer for some of the later Baldur’s Gate titles) in 2009 while also drawing from internal talent including those who had formerly worked with North in some fashion, and decided to stay with the company after the studio was closed (though as I mentioned in some other post, most of the key designers who had direct input in shaping the first two games, left Blizzard completely).
Julian Love and Wyatt Cheng worked at North in 2002/2003 respectively. Joseph Lawrence was actually a sub-contractor who did a lot of the sound work for Blizzard North. Matt Uelman was the biggest holdover as he, Lawrence, and Cheng were transitioned to work on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade after North was shuttered. Uelman left Blizzard in 2007 but there is still 90 minutes of acoustic guitar tracks recorded that are in Blizzard’s vaults. Love continued working on Diablo III (even though Blizzard had no immediate plans as to a release date; it made sense to continue work on the franchise) leading the artwork team in 2006. If you love (pun intended) the visuals, effects, physics, combat mechanics, etc, you can thank him and the VFX team that he had. The work he did on the engine for the North version of the game, also made sense for prototyping/early builds (and is still the basis for what became the current engine). Cheng and Lawrence were eventually tapped for their current positions in the D3 team (lead game designer and lead sound designer respectively). Love has since transitioned to working on effects at a higher level for Blizzard (but is still involved with Reaper of Souls). None of these folks though are in a position to make the key strategic decisions regarding the franchise.
To keep this short (since it is already getting too long), producers tend to decide features that will sell a title (creative + marketing cap), game directors oversee the development of a title (higher level project management), also acts as a PR mouthpiece which provides a vision for that title, and calls the key shots on what specific features, music, etc are kept/cut, and also deals with the mundane administrative/managerial stuff like personnel issues.
The lead designer has the most overall creative control as they define the rules, the characters, the game play. They don’t direct specific areas like the art/sound design, but have a say on whether the design fits the strategic vision. Basically, it is this person calling the real shots as they have the most hands on role in the design and development process. Guess who answered the question when someone asked about increasing stash size during the open Q&A at Blizzcon, and gave a very strong, “straight up we are not intending to increase the Stash space.” -> http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/diablo-3-reaper-souls-open-qa-transcript
Lot of folks placed too much blame on the previous game director (not saying that he made the right calls on everything either). He had directives from his boss (the executive producer as well as whatever else management saw as priority) that he had to carry out (here, you have to include this thing called the RMAH, make it happen) including making sure the game shipped within the time frame that was decided on. The game now has a different director. The game’s development however as far as core game systems, has seen the same troubling mistakes. Guess what factor has remained the same?
