Blizzard chief creative officer Rob Pardo has taken to Diablo III's forums to publicly defended former game director Jay Wilson, who announced his departure from the Diablo III development team last week.
Wilson took to the forums to say goodbye after working on Diablo III for seven years, as he's now moving on to an unannounced project at Blizzard. The farewell discussions were quickly overtaken by many players who felt Blizzard has not done enough with their latest dungeon crawler, which was finally released in 2012 after years of development.
"This thread saddens me greatly," wrote Pardo after 106 pages of people airing their grievances. "I know that the Battle.net forums have earned a reputation for rough justice, but I do not believe justice is being served by how people are speaking about Jay’s departure from Diablo III."
While Pardo is "very proud" of Diablo III, which scored a very respectable 8.5 from GameSpot last year, he quickly concedes that the team at Blizzard have plenty more to do with the game. "I have enjoyed the game and played for many, many nights with friends and family. I’m not, however, going to use that as an excuse. The Diablo community deserves an even better game from Blizzard and we are committed to improving it."
"We have a talented team in place and have no intention of stopping work on Diablo III until it is the best game in the franchise."
Pardo also defended Wilson and said he has a great career ahead of him at Blizzard, "I hired Jay to head up the Diablo project and had the pleasure of getting to work with him, both in building the team and designing the game. He has great design instincts and has added so much to the franchise."
"I’ve worked with many, many designers at Blizzard and Jay is one of the best. He has a great career at Blizzard ahead of him and I guarantee that you will enjoy Jay’s game designs in future Blizzard games."
In summary, Pardo said that "blame" for Diablo III should be aimed directly at him instead of other people at Blizzard. "If you love Diablo as much as we do, then please continue to let us know how you feel we can improve the game. If you still feel the need to dish out blame, then I would prefer you direct it at me."
"I was the executive producer on the project; I hired Jay and I gave him advice and direction throughout the development process. I was ultimately responsible for the game we released and take full responsibility for the quality of the result."
The latest developments for Diablo III, which was one of Google's top searches in 2012, have shown difficulties in the long-awaited PVP mode of the game.
