Building Diablo, WoW And Hearthstone From Home: How Blizzard Weathered COVID-19

Building Diablo, WoW And Hearthstone From Home: How Blizzard Weathered COVID-19

As virtual as video games are, the process of making them is very much a tight-knit, hard-fought collaborative effort. Some teams are well accustomed to a remote environment, but the culture and ethos of a major AAA developer like Blizzard are very different. The nostalgia of the Blizzard campus is part of the recruitment pitch, with prospective and current devs inspired by the hallways stacked with figurines, statues, concept art and fan letters from games past.

But that collaboration and spirit had to be rebuilt almost overnight once the coronavirus hit. And that all had to happen without the benefit of BlizzCon, the annual convention where Blizzard developers and teams get to absorb the energy and vibes of excited fans. So ahead of the recent announcements for BlizzConline, I had the chance to ask multiple Blizzard teams how they handled the coronavirus transition, and what some of the practical implications were.

All interviews below have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.


wow classic
Image: World of Warcraft Classic

(Note for context: All BlizzConline interviews were conducted over Zoom, and each of the interviewees had a coloured BlizzConline banner behind them with the logo of their game.)

Kotaku Australia: They must have had to ship one of those for everyone who’s doing all the interviews in the team. Is it one of those that has the strip at the bottom, and the [poster] pulls straight up? 

John Hight, World of Warcraft Classic executive producer: It’s actually a large scaffolding. I’ll give you a sneak peek that others don’t get to see — I actually have my aquarium right behind me.

That’s awesome; that’s beautiful. 

Hight: It’s in our family room, basically. But since my work has been here, at my desk, for almost a year now, it’s great to have the aquarium to have some life around me. Even if I don’t have the team around me.

I think it’s one of those ones; people started to ask me when we went into lockdown in Australia, how are you guys doing OK. I work with my partners; we’re editors in the same company, so we said, “We’re sweet,” we had stuff literally ready to go. But I know a lot of other people we work with don’t have a good space that they’re around [in home]. So they’ve just been working from a kitchen table for nine months. And it’s interesting how everyone’s — and it’s a reminder of how fortunate we are too, right? There’s a few hiccups, a few different things, but we still have our jobs, we can go full steam ahead.

Hight: Oh yeah, absolutely. Although this did prompt me to–we ended up moving into a new place. Because before we had our guest bedroom, and my wife had to listen to this all day long. I think she got a bit tired of the webcam meetings after a while. “You know, I think we need a slightly bigger place!” So we [moved].

It’s a good starting point as well. I knew this last year already from talking to people, but the transition in Activision, Activision-Blizzard has handled the [COVID-19] transition really well. But I’d like to know some of the things that cropped up that were not as easy to manage, and how you coped and dealt with that.

Hight: The stuff that we thought was going to be really scary and hard ended not being too bad. And that was literally, almost overnight, we had to get everybody working from home. And our initial take was, we made copies of everybody’s desktop. And we literally were doling out their desktops. Because initially, we thought we were all was going to log in remotely. But because of the size of World of Warcraft, and all of its assets — especially for artists, they really needed to have home machines — so that happened pretty damn fast. It took all of about three days for everyone on the team to have a machine available to them. Just an incredible effort on the part of our IT folks.

I think the stuff that we didn’t really count on — it’s tough, it’s tough for people to not be around our team and isolated. There’s a lot of events taking place in the world that can provide distractions to folks. So we just had to make a very concentrated effort to reach out, talk to people. So if somebody’s a little more timid or introverted, and is reluctant to call somebody on Slack or Zoom, [just] to make that proactive effort to do that, and to remember to do that.

Have you noticed a marked change in how you communicate?

Hight: It’s funny. Before this all happened, we had all these teleconferencing systems installed in our conference rooms. And I literally told them, “Rip that out, that’s not the way we work. We all get in a room together, we all make noise together.” And now I think when we return to the office, I think I’m going to have to ask them to put them back in — there’s still going to be people working remotely. This is the way it’s going to be from now on, even when everyone’s healthy.

So many people now like this mode of working, having that flexibility. The people out there that make games, the talent that’s there is just going to tell us, this is part of the conditions of working together. But it’s complex. I worry about interns coming out of college, associates that don’t necessarily know who to talk to. They don’t have necessarily have people to bounce ideas off of or learn from. And if they were to start in a strictly remote situation, I worry there’s a lot they’d lose out on. So it might be a little inhibiting. And WoW‘s a complicated game — there’s a lot that goes into building it, and not all of it is written in manuals. You really have to be around some of the folks who have been doing it for a while to pick up all the tricks.

And I imagine that another thing has always been super unique — and one of the best things of covering BlizzCon from the ground floor — is the energy staff pick up. Not just from mingling with other people or what will happen, like conversations in the bar, but the energy people from different teams will draw from each other as you get in the same place and as announcements roll out. And you see it as you go up to interviews and people are just outside the media rooms and stuff. And that quick connection, because you’ve been in development for a long time, energy management is super crucial especially if you’ve been through a long period of crunch or some combination of factors that has meant that BlizzCon gives you a real surge of, “We’re here, everyone’s loving what we’ve put out.” 

Now we’ve got this online virtual environment, the energy’s not quite the same, right, because you don’t have that contact. So the sort of boost that you might rely upon to get through the holiday period, the next little period, it’s not really there anymore. So have you thought about what impact that’s going to have on the team, or is it a case of there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just have to discover and see what happens?

Hight: It’s interesting you bring that up. Take for example our team meetings. It’s a big team. We have to essentially have to be in a big meeting hall. And you just feel the energy. You have to get up on stage, you give a speech, and it’s not quite the same as being in a room full of 20 people. So when there’s thundering applause it’s great, and when there’s a groan you feel it across the room.

But an interesting development that takes place is, when we do these things on Zoom, the chat just fills up with comments. So in real-time I get to see if one of my terrible Dad jokes has bombed real-time and everyone is cringing. If something we present or something that someone says everybody loves, they’re like “Yayyyy” — everybody gets a voice in that. It’s funny, they feel free to do that — it’s almost like our own little Reddit in a way. They’re pretty unabashed about throwing it out there. And if they have a criticism for me, they might not have said that in a big setting where they put their hand up — but they’ll put it right in that chat. And that part is pretty cool, because it’s a very democratic way of conducting those meetings.

But going back to what you said about the energy. There’s a lot of cultural stuff that we did at Blizzard; there’s this big group, a champagne toast when you launch a game. We would literally spray champagne on each other, yell and laugh and carry on. But we’ve done a lot of things to try and preserve that group thing. We literally had a Blizzard event, completely social, that took place on Zoom.

We had a lot of different channels if you would, you could go to. It was a themed event: there were games in there, you could play trivia games together, you could do karaoke — I’m sure somewhere there is a horrible recording of me signing because I felt like it was my duty to make other people feel comfortable by delivering the worst performance so that no-one would have to worry about doing worse than. But I think we’re trying to be really creative to still make this feel like we’re part of one community. And I think those things will continue even into the return from work times.

I just have to ask: what song? You can’t mention that and not say what the song is.

Hight: I sang When I’m Sixty Four by The Beatles. It’s a good one! A lot of people know those lyrics; it didn’t cause me to have range problems. But I’m pretty sure it was a horrible performance.


hearthstone
Image: Supplied

Kotaku Australia: I have to ask, just because I got a shot of someone’s aquarium [in another interview], have you got anything fun behind the banners that you had shipped out? How’s the environment there, any cute fish, what have we got going on? 

Chadd Nervig, Hearthstone game designer: I think my cat is sitting on my beanbag behind there. [goes to grab cat]

Dean Ayala, Hearthstone lead designer: It’s all a disaster behind me. I’ve got a chair over here, some blankets over here, but then you just do a little zoom in [laughs] and it all goes away.

I can’t even do that: my camera’s decided to die this morning two minutes before we went in. 

Nervig: How does the cat look? [shows off beautiful grey cat]

Everyone loves cats!

Nervig: This is Shirvallah, the Hearthstone and [World of Warcraft] character.

Ayala: I have two dogs, but they’re too crazy to be in here. They’d probably bark at you.

[laughs] How essential has that been, actually, just being able to have something that you can pet and cuddle?

Nervig: Super essential for me! In between meetings, I go hug my dog and my cat.

Ayala: I don’t spend as much time with my dogs as my wife does, because my wife just has them 24/7 because they’re attached to her. But I spend a lot of time with my wife, so by virtue of that I get to hang out with my [dogs].

I’ve spoken to — and over the last year as well — [people] about how they’ve handled the transition, but what was it like for you both personally? And how are you keeping your energy and spirits up, especially in an environment like now where you would traditionally go to BlizzCon, get a huge boost or surge of energy from not just seeing each other but everyone coming to the show? 

Nervig: I really miss the in-person BlizzCon; it’s really energising for me and most of the rest of Blizzard. It’s hard, no doubt, but it’s hard for a lot of people. And I see that passion still through interacting through the community, seeing what they’re doing on Twitter, Reddit, elsewhere. And you have to think about it a bit more. It’s not as in your face. But the passion and love that so many people share for these games is there, if you look for it.

Dean, what about you?

Ayala: It’s definitely different. It changes a lot, what I get excited for. The thing I get most excited for – and I think most people would agree — you’re out there on the internet, talking to people, and sometimes it can go well, sometimes it can go poorly. There’s a lot of conversations on the internet about things that can improve, which is fine. But when you come to BlizzCon, it’s generally just a bunch of people who love the stuff you either work on, or playing the same games. It’s more of a celebration, the happiness. So missing out on that part is a little sad.

The part of it that’s interesting, that’s exciting to me, is that it’s so hard to keep track of what’s going on in your own team, let alone figure out what’s going on in any of the other game teams. And we all have friends — we both have friends who worked on Team 2, I have a bunch of friends who work on Team 4, Team 3 (the Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft teams). And honestly, I don’t have any idea what they’re working on. What they’re going to show off at BlizzCon, I’m really going to engage with it for the first time. So getting to see all that stuff, all the things your friends are working so hard on over there. That’s really cool for me; that’s really exciting.

Nervig: Same for me. Seeing what the other teams are working on is really new for me in a lot of cases.

Does that also change, too, because you don’t have those direct conversations — or, you can have direct conversations but there is a very different perspective and lens when they take place on the internet as opposed to when you’re sitting and having a drink with someone? How do you parse that in a productive way? [For example] if I sit down across the table from you Chadd, and you ask me about Hearthstone and I say, this is the experience I had, this is what I played and these are the roadblocks I ran into, you can use that in a very different way as opposed to if that was a Twitter conversation.

So how have you dealt with that over the last 12 months and how are you thinking about that as Forged in the Barrens and Hearthstone Mercenaries goes out and what you take away from players? 

Nervig: Face to face conversations are missing now. But the vast majority of the feedback that we get about the game is online, so it’s not an insurmountable problem there.

Ayala: The conversation is a lot different. For our work at least, a lot of the decisions we’re making day to day, BlizzCon is not a place where a lot of that feedback takes place. Imagine following basketball: if we’re talking about basketball on Reddit or Twitter, you’re talking about plays that they ran, things that players should or shouldn’t have done, whereas when you’re at the event you’re celebrating, everyone’s having a good time, taking it in and enjoying it together. BlizzCon is a lot more like that.

We’re not collecting data; we’re not sitting with players and really talking about the decisions we should or shouldn’t make, how you experienced the game, why are you here, who are you, talk about your past experiences. It’s more of a joyous sort of thing. We’re not like missing anything on like, oh, we need to account for this on our feedback loops or anything. It’s a really joyous time. But I’m really glad we have BlizzConline so we can showcase a lot of the stuff we’re working on. We can have part of that experience, but you know, it’s not the whole experience.

Has BlizzConline, and online in general, gotten to the point where you can now safely get all that data and information online and we don’t really need — it’s nice to have that physical space where people can come in, but can you get what you need completely virtually?

Ayala: There’s a lot of questions wrapped up in there. There’s feedback, you’re talking to players, there’s the working from home environment in general. Basically, every company that works on-site somewhere is having the conversation of–all the doubts about whether work from home can work, I think a lot of those doubts are going away. We’re having to do it either way! So I think we’re proving we can do the work, it’s just the ruleset around it. Do we even need to come to work anymore?

I think every team, every company, every small group of people is going to have to figure out what’s best for their environment. It’s hard to say. What’s good for Netflix, versus what’s good for Blizzard, but what’s good for someone on Hearthstone vs. World of Warcraft, or the card design team vs. the narrative design team. People’s needs are all really different. That’s been one of the biggest struggles, which I actually really enjoy doing as a manager, I have a team from 10 to 15 designers. And work from home, one fo the biggest challenges is that everyone deals with that differently, both in terms of their attitude, how they’re doing, but also how they work. What kind of people are they that really feed off that day to day engagement, or chiming in on a conversation they’re overhearing. Versus people who are just super comfortable jamming away at an editor, and the idea of working from home makes them happier and more productive to some degree.

So I don’t think there’s a one-shot answer to something like that. What’s the information you’re trying to get? Who are the people? How do they thrive? Each situation is going to be a little different.


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Image: World of Warcraft Shadowlands (Chains of Domination)

Kotaku Australia: Zooming out a little from [World of Warcraft Shadowlands: Chains of Domination], I’ve done a few BlizzCons. One thing that many people on different teams and different franchises have spoken about that’s really useful and unique about the show — apart from the energy they get from all the people on the ground floor — is all the instantaneous feedback about how things are announced, and then the details in the follow-up panel after the opening conference. And because we’re doing this now as a virtual event, that’s going to change significantly — not just how the feedback comes in and the ability to go up to someone and say, “Hey, you saw this, what did you think about it?” — but also the kind of energy that you and your whole team as designers would receive.

So I’m wondering how you both feel about that. Are you itching for 2022 for when you can go back to much more direct feedback? Have you designed, or talked about a specific way of recreating that in this virtual environment; how are you going to deal with that? 

Johnny Cash, senior World of Warcraft Shadowlands game designer: Given the unique circumstances, moving the show to an online format was the right choice. Making sure that everybody was safe but everybody could still learn about all the exciting new things that are coming online. I think the World of Warcraft community in particular is very well versed in the online space; a lot of people’s fondest memories of WoW were friendships you made when you were levelling. And so in that sense, yeah, it’s a different type of show and that’s cool in a lot of ways. And it’s interesting to have a different spin on what it’s like to talk about the new things coming to the game, Chains of Domination, and we’ll get feedback through different avenues. And we’ll get feedback from some of the same avenues that we’d also get from in the past: chats and streams, various social media platforms or wherever it might be.

I think we all feel good: people are still going to react, let us know what they’re excited about, what they’re thinking about. One thing that’s always a popular topic with a new content release will be the raid — I’m sure people will be wondering about the bosses in Sanctum of Domination, what does the terror group fight look like given what they’ve seen of it in Torghast so far. I think we have a fantastic community, and it’s a different year than other years, but I’m personally so happy that we’re able to have a show and share that with people. I think we can all use that right now.

I’m just curious, especially with the change of environment. Do you rely on whiteboarding tools when you’re having chats in this virtual space that we’re still in? I imagine if you’re all back in the studio you might get post-its, you might post stuff up on walls, move stuff around so everyone can come together — but maybe you do stick a ton of post-its on your monitors at home! But how does the brainstorming, how is that affected by COVID-19 and how do you keep it effective?

Kevin Martens, lead World of Warcraft: Shadowlands designer: A lot of it is just good Zoom protocol when you’re running meetings, making sure everyone gets a chance to talk and etcetera. But people have a variety of tools. In some cases people are sketching on the screen; a lot of people have tablet pads that they use for art. So people are drawing over the top of screens, and that maybe takes the place of what we would have done with a whiteboard if we were in the office. And it feels very much the same. So you can get past that very fast.

And we are very rapid iterators. Something that’s very cool about Blizzard’s culture as a whole, and one of our design values, is “focus on the fantasy”. So it’s no coincidence that that’s how we start brainstorming dungeons and raids. People try to take people’s ideas and make them bigger and bolder.

Take Korthia for instance. Korthia is a sister city to Oribos, which is our capital in Shadowlands. And it is an archive, a library, a city of secrets, and it’s been placed into the ether away from everything else. So certain mechanics of how the universe works can be kept out of the hands of people who would do ill with them. While the Jailor has been looking for it, and he’s found it. So we had this idea originally — here’s the initial pitch — how about Korthia, they find their way there, we take a portal there.

Someone says, “No, we don’t need to do a portal. The Jailor is all chains and domination. It should be more physical than that.” So we start brainstorming, and eventually, someone says, “What if we just had giant chains with massive hooks and we just cast them out with hooks on them, like fishing poles, but in this massive size, and just pulls it in.” And that went on and on, until Korthia is grabbed as an entire city, brought smashing with giant chains into the Maw, is half-ruined and there’s this big wave of death and only parts of it are still together and it’s falling apart in a way as you walk through it. And that informs the art from there. So you no matter what your idea is, no matter how cool it is, whenever you go into a meeting with a Blizzard development team, it’s going to get bigger. And that’s something I’ve always loved about the company as a whole, with all games, and WoW is a great example of that.


blizzard
Image: Diablo 4

Kotaku Australia: Everyone’s had different experiences over the last 6 to 9 months, and our experiences in Australia are super different to what you and your team have been going through. Do you have different spaces set up in your homes? How have you restructured your lives to deal with the situation we’ve found ourselves in? 

Luis Barriga, Diablo 4 game director: It’s a great question. One of the things we’ve found ourselves, especially those of us who happen to be parents, is we now have multiple jobs. IT for the house — if there’s network problems, I have to solve them for the entire family. I’m also the Spanish and math tutor, and things like that.

The way that I think, organically, we’ve approached it is, we’ve talked to all our leads and the pillar is giving our teams flexibility. This situation, nobody signed up for, so how do we keep doing the thing that we love but also understand that these aren’t the circumstances of like … we have 9 to 5’s, go to the office, but we all might be called on to take on some of these other roles. So we have a lot of people on the team adjust their hours so this doesn’t conflict, or we have a lot of the team where they make certain ground rules they find, like, “We want to be really respectful of these hours to these hours.” And we give the leads agency over that.

And overall–

[PR person interrupts]

–I was going to bring it to Diablo 4! One of the things that’s a little hard to replace is just the social aspect of running into people in hallways and having conversations. So once we were able to start having playtests, we made up a little bit of that connection. Diablo 4 has a lot more social components previously, so when we have these playtests now, we’re grouping together, doing dungeons, fighting each other in PvP. So it’s been really great in terms of making back up some of those connections that we might have lost in the transition to work from home.

John Mueller, Diablo 4 art director: I’d just add in, we do a lot of things too. We try to do community coffees, things like that with each other to make time so we can just hang out without having to think about work all the time. So I think we’ve done as well as could be expected. And it feels like the game hasn’t been hurt by it — in some ways it’s benefited a lot of people. Like myself, I don’t have kids. So the distraction for me for the last 9 months was getting to work on Diablo 4. So I probably put in more hours than was healthy. But you know, I’ve enjoyed it.

So how do you maintain that perspective when you’re working on something, especially in your position where you’ve got to maintain the vision for the rest of the team? Part of the perspective of the office is walking around, seeing what other teams are working on, you see some concept art going on over here. How do you deal with that being taken away? 

Mueller: I can speak to it from a visual design standpoint. WIth the concept team, when we were designing the rogue, we were starting from 16 pixels by 16 pixel images from Diablo 1, you know, this is the container of the Rogue. I think the thing we all like about the class is that it’s allowed us to put the Diablo 4 lens on it.

So visually, I meet with my team pretty much every morning. We’re on Zoom calls and Slack. But we also have some software that allows us to share a whiteboard. So we’ve really used technology to bridge the gap as much as possible. I don’t think it ever replaces the in-person to in-person. But as a team we’ve worked together for a while, so we already have a lot of creative relationships that allows us to have very quick communication and I feel like on [the art team], everyone gets the visual style of the team at this point. I think if this had happened two years ago, it would have been harder. But once we’d showed [Diablo 4] at Blizzcon, a lot of the look of the game were pretty fixed and we were pretty happy with the reaction. So that part hasn’t been too difficult.

Barriga: Since you asked about the Rogue, we knew we were on solid ground when we started having feedback sessions. It’s not like running into someone in the hall, and they say, “Hey, nice work on the Rogue!” But it’s more like we’re setting aside time on Thursday or Friday to play the new iteration of the Rogue. The team plays it, we send feedback, we maybe breakout into some sessions to talk about it. And separately from all that we get some metrics. So when we happen to have open-ended play-tests, we look at which classes are popular, which specs are popular and what feedback people are leaving. So those are some other ways we get those interactions as well, and so far the Rogue has been really popular with the team.

Just in terms of how Diablo 4 is going to be received from what’s announced, do you have to change how you take in the feedback of what comes in? Because traditionally, you’d go to BlizzCon. There’d be playtests on the ground, people flood in, you see people have played these classes, used these abilities, get a bunch of data, maybe you have some conversations with people, then you’ve got some tangible feedback and you say, “OK, this is what we’ve put out, this is how people have reacted to it.”

But now we’re in a virtual environment, and because Diablo 4 isn’t as far along as, say, a new mode in Hearthstone might be. So it’s not really something that you can make accessible to people over the internet. So do you have a replacement of how you’re going to gauge what the reaction of people will be, what feedback is tangible and what feedback you have to filter through as just internet noise?

Barriga: Yeah, no that’s a great question. So as an example, when we had the playable demo last BlizzCon, we had analytics but we also had a survey at the end where players rated their experience, told us which class they played. So we immediately had some really awesome tangible feedback. And that’s something that unfortunately, because as you mentioned, the players will get to see some cool videos but they won’t get to play it themselves, and we won’t be able to assess [that].

But now that we’ve established the quarterly blogs, and we have some avenues for players to give us their reaction to things, we’ll be able to get some initial impressions. But you’re absolutely right that if we run into some more nuanced feedback where players go, “Huh, this aspect of the Rogue looks cool but it sounds really complicated.” That’s something that’s really hard to gauge how it’ll play, because once you’ll play it in the game it’s something that gets more tutorialised or doled out over time, or you introduced to a very simple version at low levels. So you’re right that due to the virtual nature, we’ll get some great initial feedback but more nuanced things that require hands-on gameplay will have to wait until a bit later in the process.

Does that make it a little bit easier on you and the team in that sense, because you don’t have to go through the lengthy process of building a demo for BlizzCon? Or does that nature of this just means it’s postponed that work six months, twelve months down the road? 

Barriga: I’d say it’s different, right John? I don’t know if we’ve done more or less work, just different work.

Mueller: I’d say it’s different. You know, we’ve put a lot in for the Rogue to get the Rogue really feeling polished. There’s still many cool armours that are coming in, but all the components are there. It’s just adding to it. Everything we’re showing, we’re really happy with how the rogue is presenting.

I don’t know if it’s less work, if that was your question, the difference of not having a BlizzCon and not having to do a playable demo versus what we did preparing for BlizzConline. It’s different. We were definitely able to keep the team very focused on some tangible goals. It’s always great to get your game playable; we always benefit from that, because you get so much data from it, there’s so many things you don’t have to guess anymore about what people like and don’t like.

Barriga: One good example is that since we’re showing so much more video. So typically in a BlizzCon panel, you might see a group of devs talking, showing video for a little bit. The emphasis on how finished that video is might be different than a fully virtual environment, where we really looked at those videos and put them through a lot of loops and lot of sets of eyes. So it’s just a different kind of work — I’m sure there’s a quantifiable answer, but off the top of my head, I don’t know which one wins out in terms of heavier work.

Mueller: It’s less nerve-wracking! I get nervous speaking in front of a group of 10,000 people. So I miss that interaction with the fans, but those moments when you’ve got to do that, not a lot of people are built for that. I’m certainly not.

Are you going to miss the energy of what comes after that, once you get off the stage and you’re walking and milling about–

Mueller: Going to the hotel, high fiving people — it’s a great feeling.

And I imagine that would be really good for a lot of the team as well, because that’s energy that goes back into development and now you don’t have that. 

Mueller: It’s an interesting experiment to see what this feels like. I’m really excited: I’ve seen this stuff we’re showing tomorrow. I got kinda caught up int he moment of it watching it. And we’re kind of in uncharted territory a little bit, right?

Barriga: I don’t think there’s anything that can replace the feeling of the fan who tells you, “I played the demo seven times.” I literally had a guy … “I played your demo seven times.”

I’m like, “Dude, you had all of this stuff to do at BlizzCon, and you played our demo [seven times]?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love your demo, I played a different class, I went different places.” It’s going to be hard to replace that. But like John said, the first time we saw that Rogue video, we’re like, oh man. We as fans are loving it, so we think there’s going to be a good reaction there. But maybe a little bit of that altogether in the same room feedback loop that you feel, the energy when we showed that video early on?

Mueller: I mean, getting to show By Three They Come at Blizzcon 2019 was an unforgettable experience of my life. That moment, that anticipation, the people reacting and just freaking out when it comes through the blood curtain, that was pretty awesome.

Barriga: You know what was pretty crazy? I actually didn’t know if people liked it [at the time]; everyone was so quiet, because the video was so tense. You could hear a pin drop. And then Diablo 4 comes out, and everyone lost they’re–it was so cool.

Mueller: Yeah, there’s a lot of things I’m going to miss. Thank you Alex for reminding me of all the things I’m going to miss!


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