Blizzard Entertainment posted three new job openings this past week. As the image below (taken August 29) reveals, the Associate Game Producer and Lead Artist positions were removed — which could mean: filled/no longer needed/expired.

While checking the Blizzard Careers page, and comparing the listing with the image above, I noticed three new job openings:

The first question that crosses my mind is… Didn’t NetEase finish their side of development on Diablo Immortal back in February 2019? Why a Game Producer in Shanghai this late when Beta is in the horizon?

Well, I am not clear on what to advocate here other than:

  • Maybe it is common practice to hire a game producer this late to help crunch now that they have post-companywide-testing feedback to make the game ready for Beta testing.
  • Maybe there are more Chinese version work required — we already viewed the extensive changes made to Diablo Immortal: new Mongolian-style Barbarian, Humanoid-like Necromancer minions, and awesome new models for the remaining Class characters.
  • Maybe hiring for Diablo Immortal post-launch content.
  • Anyone’s guess.

Looking into the first few lines of the Game Producer listing, though, we can read this game producer is mostly in crunch mode to iron out Quality Assurance (QA) testing. This is crucial for Beta and Global Launch. Making sure the game meets the quality-standards of a Blizzard game.

Then we have the Narrative Designer — who will work in Irvine, CA. This late in development nigh Beta testing, requiring to help quest designers? Well, it is plausible. Even World of Warcraft needs them. Shadowlands Alpha started only with Bastion on day one, then each zone was released individually every 2-4 weeks. So I can see how work is needed in the quest design side of Diablo Immortal this far in development — but further in the job description this person will also coordinate with voice actors and voice directors.

We don’t know other than implementing changes based on the internal company testing feedback, whether there is other portion of developers working on post-launch content simultaneously.

Recently, FilthieRich (Diablo community manager) teased just 3 days ago (Sept 10) the following. We’ll have to wait and be on alert mode to find out what’s cooking.

You and the community have my greatest appreciation. We have a few things baking right now to support the players, content creators, forum contributors, etc. I just want to take the proactive approach and get a good grasp of who is out there, what’s important to the community and come up with some cool activations for the future.

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BlizzCon 2019 Panel Transcripts