“We always say, ‘It takes a blizzard to make a Blizzard game,’” Rod Fergusson told me back in February, as I wound down my interview with him about all things Diablo.
As a near-final topic, I had wanted to discuss Diablo IV’s credits. He was soon sharing that saying with me. Their goal at Blizzard, he said, is to credit as many people in their games as possible, “basically everybody in the company.”
I left that part of our interview out of my report earlier this year, because I knew I’d be writing a lot more about game credits later in the future (as in: this week).
Time has passed. Fergusson even announced last week that he was ending his five-year run at Blizzard, where he’d been general manager of all things Diablo.
Nevertheless!
He and I had had an illuminating chat about Diablo IV’s credits that quickly covered:
How Blizzard did them
How they think about crediting people who’ve left the studio
And the very real worry about the downside of credits: that some angry gamers would see someone’s name attached to a Diablo feature they didn’t like and harass them
“Blizzard for the longest time had a credits tool,” he told me, as we started chatting about the topic.
“It was actually the best I’ve ever seen. Because, what would happen is: [it would say], ‘Hey you’re about to be credited in a game, can you give your title and your name and how you want to be represented?