Diablo 4 boss hates the phrase ‘it’ll be ready when it’s ready’

Blizzard Entertainment used to be famous for declining to set release dates for its games. When asked about some upcoming title — World of Warcraft, say, in the early 2000s — Blizzard staff would always give the same answer: “It’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

In other words: Quality is paramount, and it takes time. Legend has it that this company mantra dates back to the first Diablo, which was supposed to be released in time for Christmas 1996, but ended up coming out in January 1997 after a last-minute delay. According to conventional wisdom, missing the holiday sales window would be a disaster. But Diablo was acclaimed and sold like gangbusters anyway, proving the old game industry maxim (often misattributed to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto): “A delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is bad forever.”

But it turns out that Rod Fergusson — general manager of the Diablo franchise, which makes him a senior leader within Blizzard these days — has no truck with this famous Blizzard saying. At all.

I discovered this during a recent video interview with Fergusson. I noted that the Vessel of Hatred expansion had come out a swift 15 months after the release of base Diablo 4, and, in my innocence, inquired if we could expect a similar gap to the next expansion or if it was an “it’ll be ready when it’s ready” situation. Big mistake.

“[That] phrase is a pet peeve of mine,” Fergusson said. “I hate the phrase ‘it’s ready when it’s ready.’ When I first came to Blizzard, somebody put a slide up that had that on there, and I went, ‘Nope! You’re deleting that.’ And they were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I’m like, ‘That’s not how I make video games.’”

It’s not that surprising. Long before he came to Blizzard in 2020, Fergusson was known as a closer — a no-nonsense producer who could get even the most troubled production shipped. An avuncular, friendly Canadian, Fergusson made his reputation by saving the troubled development of the first Gears of War at Epic Games. In 2012, he parachuted into Irrational Games to perform the same task for BioShock: Infinite, which was then floundering in development hell, before heading to The Coalition to work on his beloved Gears of War again. It was a love of Diablo that brought Fergusson to Blizzard; he used to set up three TVs in his house to play Diablo 3 with his kids every Christmas. (“My youngest — we couldn’t do shared screen. He would look at the vendors for an hour and we’d be waiting. We couldn’t. And so it was like, we each need our own TV.”)

Fergusson, like any good producer, believes in the power of schedules and deadlines. But his belief in them is so passionate that he objects to “ready when it’s ready” thinking on an almost philosophical level.

“It takes the agency away from the team,” he said. “Saying ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ means the team doesn’t have control over what they’re building. Mind, I’m giving you one person’s philosophy. But you control the scope. You control the schedule. You control a bunch of things. The idea that the game has to reveal itself somehow, with some unknown amount of content…” He trailed off in exasperation.

“I just find ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ to be so passive,” he continued. “I feel like it’s like, ‘I’m just going to watch this flower bloom and I don’t know when it’s going to bloom. It’ll bloom sometime maybe next year, or this year, or at night, or under the full moon, but it hopefully will bloom soon. And then we just keep shoveling fertilizer…’ Wow, I could beat this metaphor to death. I like this one,” he laughed. “So we could be throwing water and fertilizer on the flower, and it’s still not blooming, what’s going on? I prefer to be like, ‘Hey, we’re going to grow a flower that’s going to bloom at about this time, and we’re going to make sure that happens because we’re going to do all the right things to make sure it happens.’”

Fergusson was quick to offer reassurance that quality is still his number one concern, however. “Look, quality is implicit. It will always be shipped at quality. Never at any point in time is the answer ‘we trade quality for time’ or ‘we trade quality for quantity.’ That is never, ever the answer. Now, the question about what’s the time, and what’s the quantity — you control those.”

He still didn’t tell me when the next Diablo 4 expansion will be out, though.