From 2014 until 2016, it was Team 3’s main project, developed alongside a handful of patches and light content updates for Diablo III. It was such a departure from previous games, some at Blizzard thought they might not even end up calling it Diablo IV. Rather than maintain the isometric camera angle of the first three Diablo games, it would use an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective. It would be a gothic, challenging dungeon crawler. Mosqueira and team designed Hades as a Diablo take on Dark Souls, according to three people familiar with the project. The goal was to take the franchise in a very different direction. Josh Mosqueira, the Canadian transplant who had started on the Diablo III console team before taking the franchise’s reins as director of Reaper of Souls, would lead development on the new project, which was code-named Hades.

Those who remained on Team 3 began talking about what Diablo IV might look like. Cancelling Titan led us to Overwatch, and as another example, cancelling Nomad led us to World of Warcraft.” Not shipping a game is never an easy decision to make, but it has always been the right decision for us.

“Historically, we’ve launched about 50% of the total projects we’ve worked on over the past three decades-those are the ones we consider representative of Blizzard quality. “As far as game cancellations, we see that as a strength-a reflection of our commitment to quality, and how we’ve always operated,” the spokesperson said. When asked, Blizzard did not address the cancellation of this expansion, but as part of a broader statement, spoke about cancellations in general. “They could’ve held off a few months and seen how Reaper did, but in their mind was irredeemable.” (When Reaper launched on PC in late March, 2014, Blizzard said it sold 2.7 million copies in its first week-a big number, but only a fraction of the ~15 million copies that Diablo III had sold across PC and consoles.) “The perception overall was that management thought, ‘This team really screwed up,’” said one person who was there. It’s still not clear why Blizzard wouldn’t want to support a game that had been so commercially successful, but the theory on Team 3 was that Blizzard’s management had lost faith in Diablo III and saw it as a failure, even before Reaper launched.

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