How long has the game been in the works?

　　Almost six years. Although I've been working on it for almost three. In my team there are a few guys who have been involved the whole time, but the majority of the team has been involved for two to three years.

　　Is this in part because of the creative issues that had to be resolved earlier in the project?

　　Yeah. I think the first issue... I can't speak much about Blizzard North because its before my time, but one of the biggest issues was that because of the values of Blizzard in general its really hard to have an external creative group, separate from the core group. There's too much that's done; sound, cinematics and story - so much of its done at core Blizzard HQ that they learnt the lesson that all groups should be internal. That's the only way that all the philosophy gets passed on. That's the conclusion they came to when they tried to bring Blizzard North into the main HQ arena. I think they offered 46 of the 49 positions... to move down. It wasn't that they didn't want Blizzard North involved, it was that they said "you guys don't function well away from us". So a lot of the team came down.

　　Since then, we've had creative struggles... trying to find a game worthy of the Diablo 3 name.

 

　　大约6年。尽管我在这上面只工作了3年时间。在我的团队里很少有人整整6年都在做这个，但是大多数人都干了两到三年了。

 

　　是不是有部分原因是因为早些时候创意团队(指暴雪北方分部)在这个项目上的离开呢？

  　　是的。我认为……我不能说太多有关暴雪北方分部的东西，因为那是在我在这个项目上工作之前的事了。但是其中一个最大的问题是当时暴雪的标准很难让他们从核心团队里再分出一个创意团队出来。很多东西都做好了：声音，动画，以及故事??很多都被暴雪的核心总部完成了，以至于他们认为所有的团队应该回归。那是让一切进行下去的唯一方法。这就是他们想要将暴雪北方回收到核心区域的最终结果。我认为他们提供了46到49个职位……降级。这并不是说他们不想要暴雪北方分部，而是他们想说“你们没有我们无法运转良好”。于是暴雪北方垮掉了。