Diablo IV

(Blizzard Entertainment)

Diablo IV is the latest installment in the genre-defining Diablo series, an ARPG set in the world of Sanctuary. It is Blizzard’s fastest selling game to date, an immense achievement for the team.

I was lucky enough to be one of the very first Quest Designers hired onto the Diablo IV team, and was able to help shape the standards, tools and narrative systems that the entire quest team ultimately used to ship this massive game.

In those early days, I built dozens of quests to help inform what a quest in Diablo IV should look like, the tone, length, and types of experiences we wanted the player to have. While foundational, most of that work did not survive to see ship.

I am immensely proud of the quests that shipped with Diablo IV. My goal is always to weave personal, human and emotional experiences into the lightning fast pacing of the game. I wrote and designed questlines such as The Heretic and Malady of the Soul, as well as many smaller quests such as Heart’s Burden and A Pound of Flesh. Partnering with a writer, I concepted and designed the “major” questlines A Question of Self and To Walk a Dark Path.

In addition, starting in late 2019 I was asked to take on the role of a Zone Supervisor, acting as the Creative Director’s representative to help evangelize his high level vision for the Dry Steppes zone. As the team continued to grow, it became ever more vital to ensure that everyone working on the zone understood what we were making, from the campaign storyline to the POIs, to the general narrative themes of the sub-regions and towns. In 2021 I handed the Dry Steppes off to another quest designer and began work as the Zone Supervisor of Hawezar, which I continued until the game shipped.

While shepherding the zones forward, I also designed and built the early blockout for a significant portion of the Dry Steppes campaign (from Guulrahn onwards) as well as designing most of the Hawezar campaign (Lorath’s chain through to the finale) and taking it to shippable quality.

Along with designing and implementing the campaign quests, I was also lucky enough to write a small portion of it. I wrote all of Meshif’s dialog (excluding his final scene) and highly emotional “Donan Confronts His Grief” cutscene in Hawezar.

(I also snuck in almost two dozen named Rare Spawn monsters into the game to give exploration focused players like myself something to seek out. Shh don’t tell anyone!)

Given the size of the team, I feel extremely lucky to have had the outsized impact on a game as high-profile as Diablo IV. The amount of trust and leeway my peers gave me to pitch stories, characters and gameplay moments made my time working on Diablo IV an unforgettable one.