Rod Fergusson head of the Diablo IV project recently affirmed that Blizzard has done a good job in the transition to working at home, he claims that the studio is encouraging developers to keep the productivity by allowing employees to take their development equipment home, he also mentions that developers are given “allowances” that cover internet expenses and other motivational tools like “snack boxes”.
Rod Fergusson left The Coalition, for Blizzard Entertainment, he was hired to lead the development of Diablo 4, a game that was announced at BlizzCon last year. However, the veteran only spent eight days in the office as COVID-19 forced Blizzard to send employees home. The Canadian veteran admits that the situation has been #challenging”, but he affirms that the team is “just moving forward”. He motivates his team and himself by saying “I’ve been really grateful — if I was going to do it, to be able to do it with Blizzard.”
“It’s been really hard actually, for me, because I think people who know me and have worked with me know that part of what I thrive on and do well in is [being] in the room with people, and talking, and trying to motivate and understand, and collaborating and those sorts of things. The push, kind of taking one of my sort of quote-unquote ‘superpowers’ and putting it behind a video screen, I found really hard.”
Fergusson is a very respected veteran in the video games industry, he had worked on the Gears franchise since the IP was owned by Epic Games, he started at Epic in 2005, he followed Microsoft after the acquisition of Gears in 2014, he was appointed as the head of The Coalition, the new studio in charge of Gears 5.
Diablo IV is a dungeon crawler action role-playing game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, Fergusson does not reveal the launch date, but the game will launch for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
“In Diablo IV, players will attempt to bring hope back to the world by vanquishing evil in all its vile incarnations — from cannibalistic demon-worshipping cultists to the all-new drowned undead that emerge from the coastlines to drag their victims to a watery grave,” reads an official pitch of the game. “For the first time in the series, Sanctuary will be a contiguous, seamless landmass comprising diverse regions ranging from the burning desert of Kejhistan, to the verdant werewolf-infested forests of Scosglen, to the harsh and rugged wilderness of the Dry Steppes.”
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