Rush posted his interview with Diablo series creator David Brevik last night, and as everyone who has watched it or read the transcript knows, Dave was quite honest and candid with his answers, and wasn’t afraid to criticize features he’s not very fond of in Diablo III. He didn’t say anything we haven’t heard before, and his criticisms were about 1/1000th as angry as your typical flaming Battle.net forum post, but they seem to have really gotten under the skin of some of the D3 developers.
The quotes come from Chris Haga’s Facebook page, where he posted about the interview, and then received comments from a number of other Blizzard employees, including prominent members of the Diablo III dev team. Again, these are on Haga’s Facebook page; this isn’t coming from private messages or email or anything hacked. Thanks to an anonymous source for spotting them and throwing me the tip.
What’s got them so mad? I don’t think it’s Dave’s comments about the game, since after all, everything he said has been said far more forcefully and angrily a million times by now. I think it’s 1) the fact that he’s a developer, 2) that he created the game in the first place, and 3) his comments about how great the old Blizzard North D2 team was, and how none of the current D3 devs have experience making ARPGs.
Point #3 makes two assertions that are true as far as I know, and I think Dave meant it as a compliment to his old friends and coworkers… but it’s not hard to see how the current D3 devs took it as an insult. Drama!
Update: A few hours later Gazilli0n issued IncGamers with a statement reading
“We admire Blizzard and Blizzard games. David was asked about Diablo 3 and gave his honest opinion and we stand by him 100%. Marvel Heroes is David’s vision and is the spiritual successor to Diablo 2. We’ll be in closed beta soon, so visit MarvelHeroes.com if you want to check it out.” – Leo Olebe, VP Marketing Gazillion Entertainment.