Talking Hell With Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred’s Rod Fergusson

Rod Fergusson is well known in the gaming world (FKA as GearsViking) as a professional who worked on both the Gears of War and the Bioshock franchises before settling into his role at Blizzard.

Ahead of the upcoming Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred expansion, CGMagazine was able to sit down with Senior Vice President and General Manager of Diablo , Rod Fergusson , to talk about the upcoming expansion during Fan Expo Canada 2024 .

As a former overseer of the Gears of War franchise and helping Bioshock Infinite launch, how difficult was transitioning from two shooting games to Diablo , an MMO A-RPG with a massive following already baked in?

Rod Fergusson : We have a really talented team. My role is quite a bit different from what I was doing, especially in Gears 4 and Gears 5 . I was the Creative Director as well as the Studio Head [for The Coalition ], so I was much more hands-on with the day-to-day details of the game’s design. But as the franchise’s General Manager, I’ve got a really strong team of designers, producers, and directors, of all the disciplines.

So, it’s more of an oversight aspect of it. So it wasn’t so much of like, ‘how do I transition from hallway shooters’ to MMO A-RPG, or whatever, so it wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t that bad. Part of it is like Diablo is one of my favourite franchises, so I play it a lot, and I was very comfortable with the material and being able to talk through it.

It’s one of the things I try to bring to the team, is to show up as a player as well as a leader. So that way, it helps understand the feedback of players when they are saying [certain things] is an issue. If somebody’s put hundreds of hours into a season, I can say, “Yeah, I feel that too,” or “No, I don’t. We should look into that.” Maybe it’s a vocal minority issue kind of thing. So, it wasn’t too hard of a challenge to switch [genres].

So, it was more of going from being a creative to a fan voice from the inside?

Rod Fergusson : Yeah, that’s part of it. In my career, when you go from being a line-level producer to general manager, you change your focus. When I go back to my Gears 1 days, I was very product-focused I would do anything in the name of the product. Going back to Gears 1 , I worked some pretty long hours and worked pretty hard to make that happen because I was very focused on making sure the product was delivered. When you mature, and as you move up and get more responsibility for more people, you have to become more team-focused as well so you can’t do it [the long hours].

At some point you have to be working in the name of sustainability and keeping the team healthy and focused, especially on a live service title. There’s no ‘one big push’ and then you all go on vacation. With a live service, you’re shipping every day. So you have to keep the team functioning and healthy, so they can show up as their best self every day.

With the upcoming expansion, Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred , as a fan, it must be exciting bringing the mercenary system from Diablo II into Diablo IV . What made you guys choose that system and not something else like the auction house from Diablo III ?

Rod Fergusson : When you look at the mercs in D2 or the followers in D3 , this idea of having a companion who can help you has been a part of the franchise for a while, at least for the past 21 years. The notion of being able to bring back the mercenary system, but in a much more robust way—in a richer way, is an improvement. The fact is that it’s a companion system that helps you round out your build. One of the things that our Game Director of the expansion, Brent Gibson, likes to say is that each class has a soft spot.

If you think of a Sorcerer, they have glass cannon tendencies, and they can be all damage and no defence. If you want, you can hire Raheir, who’s the blacksmith with a big shield mercenary, and he can come in and protect you while you’re pushing enemies and putting in all that damage.

That’s how it kind of works across the four different mercenaries. You can find the Cursed Child, Aldkin, and he can use a skill tree into fire OR shadow. So imagine you take them to the fire tree, and your Sorcerer’s doing fire magic. Then, you can synergize off each other that way and do even more damage. There’s many ways to layer that in. We wanted to bring the system back in a way that was richer like this.

When you think about the mercenaries in D2 , they’re kind of, they’re just a person to hire. You give them whatever X number of coins, and you get an extra body. When they die, you can go buy another one or pay to resurrect the one you had.

This mercenary system has a whole skill tree based off rapport. As you play with them, you build rapport with them. These mercenaries also show up in the open world doing events, and if you help them, during the event you’ll build rapport with them. There’s also a new system that we’ve added with mercenaries called “reinforcement.” Because the mercenaries only show up as a companion when you’re playing solo, which the majority of our players play solo, having a companion to play with is great. But if say, if I teamed up with someone, then we can’t have companions anymore, but we still wanted players to benefit from the mercenaries.

This is where the reinforcement feature comes in, which is basically the player giving mercs a condition and what you want the mercenary to do. Then they come in like a tag team partner will come in, do their thing and then go away again. So, you could set the condition as ‘if I lose a lot of health quickly, I want Raheir to come in and block some damage.’ Or if ‘I’m casting my core skill, I want Varyana [another mercenary] to come in and do whirlwind, etc. So you can find these cool mechanics where a cooperative player and I can pick different mercenaries to have different reinforcement conditions.

Even when you play solo, you can activate both systems. You can have the companionship of one mercenary, and you can have the reinforcement of another. You can say you’d have one and a half companions.

You mentioned my main play style. I play solo almost all the time. The new Dark Citadel sounds like amazing content, but as a solo player I feel hamstrung on certain content. Do you have some kind of matchmaking in place for Dark Citadel or the Kurast Undercity content?

Rod Fergusson : Yeah! We do big releases at the same time, occasionally. We’re doing season six, which is starting on October 8, the same day that the Vessel Of Hatred is launching but we’re also bringing a bunch of changes just to the core game that are not seasonal or expansion. It’s just changing the game at its core level. One of the big changes we’re bringing on October 8 is the party finder.

That’ll be a system that you can post looking for group-type systems where the player can say: “I’m looking for a party that is doing this type of content,” whether that be part of the Dark Citadel, Nightmare Dungeons or something else. Then you can also put a specification like “Hey, we’re chill,” or you can put certain things that define what kind of group you are.

My favourite part of it is that there are many ways it can be accessed. There’s the social menu that we have today where you look for people, and you can invite to party or join someone’s party, but it’ll also be part of the emote wheel. But my favourite is it integrates with the map. So, when you use a sigil, and you spawn a Nightmare Dungeon, you could post this dungeon to the party finder so that other people will join or can join me.

That’ll help a lot for Dark Citadel. Our big focus for the expansion was thinking about new ways to play, and so when we think about stuff like, ‘hey, we have a whole new class with the Spiritborn going to a new zone in Nahantu, we want to bring new modes as well.’

That’s where you get the Dark Citadel as sort of a co-op mechanic dungeon, but then we have the Kurast Undercity, which is a Time Attack dungeon. Kurast can be played solo, whereas Citadel can’t.

Both of the new content dungeons in Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred sound big and robust, but aside from the time attack mechanic and the difference between co-op and solo play, what are the main gameplay differences between the Kurast Undercity and the Dark Citadel?

Rod Fergusson : The Dark Citadel is a co-op dungeon, so it has mechanics that reflect as part of it. The reason it’s co-op is because there’ll be certain things players will have to do to work together to get through it. That, and it’s basically made up of like three major wings with each ending in a boss. Then you have an actual final boss fight.

There’s a lot of really great lore around the Dark Citadel. If you go back into the Diablo lore, the mage wars, and this is the giant temple you’re going to. This is where the very first goat men were, and they’re trying to channel all this energy to bring back their power. So you’re going in, and you’re getting to fight this sort of cool version of the monster family that we’ve had, the Goatmen, for a long time, but we’ve never had these sort of ancient, or the original Goatmen. They have some really cool bosses.

The mechanics [in the dungeons] themselves are very different in the sense that there’s a very simplistic one that can also be seen in one of our trailers, and it’s like the most basic where you stand on the pad to open my door, I go through, I stand on the pad to open your door co-op mechanic. That’s a very 101-type thing, and actually, the mechanics are much more interesting as you go deeper into the into the Dark Citadel.

This is something we really learned off of during season three, in season three (Season of the Construct) we brought dungeons with traps in them, and we got some really early feedback off season three with players saying, ‘this is actually slowing me down’ or ‘I have to stop to wait for the fire to go by,’ or ‘I have to not fight when I want to because of these traps.’ So when we were designing the mechanics around the Citadel, we were really focused more on what accentuates the combat and what makes the combat more fun, as opposed to how do I slow you down by putting traps in and all those kinds of stuff.

So that’s one version. It’s basically thought of as a co-op dungeon where we’re relying on each other. We’re having to split up on occasion to go do different things at different times, with the ultimate goal being clearing the three wings and putting down the Ultimate Big Boss at the end. The Kurast Undercity is a little bit more like if you play Infernal Hordes right now in season five. It’s kind of a little bit more like that, where it’s focused on a mechanic around this idea of a tribute.

At the beginning of your run, you can offer a tribute, which basically determines how players want to cater to the difficulty of the run and also how you want to target your rewards. When you go into it you’re killing elites or the bigger monsters to add and keep time on the clock. In turn, it will keep giving you more and more time, and you’re milling the fodder to increase your rewards. Or as we call it, ‘attunement’ or tuning it.

Basically, that’s your whole run as you’re trying to get through this dungeon, get to the boss before time runs out, and you have to kill a bunch of monsters to do it. Hopefully, if you kill more than what you need, like if you kill the stuff that’s not just time additions to the clock, you’ll get bigger and better rewards at the end of the run.

That does sound like a good party! I noticed in the premium skin store that Diablo IV had Warcraft -flavoured skins recently, and with the mercenary system, do you think we could see some mercenaries that come in from Warcraft ?

Rod Fergusson : Oh, no. There’s nothing really that we’re talking about right now around any sort of cosmetics or flavours of mercenaries. I mean, one of the cool things we did lore-wise, was based around the Pale Hand. We made the mercenaries have their own sort of secret society. They’re kind of like the rebellion. They have this sort of nod to if you remember the Pale Hand internally ande I jokingly call them the A team. They’re like the A team! You’ve got to call them in to help out.

But one of the things we’re sort of leaving open – what I like to call negative space – is how many people are actually in the Pale Hand? Like, is it only these four? Are there more mercs out there part of the Pale Hand? It gives us freedom to pivot, like where do we go here with the Pale Hand?

I think what you see like with Hell Tide from season one to season five, how much it’s changed in terms of action, intensity, summoning the Blood Maiden, and now it’s available in all world tiers. Now it’s even available in the Eternal Realm. You know, those are the types of things we look at. As we release something, we get a lot of feedback on it, and then we iterate and improve on it, and I think mercenaries will follow that as well.

Noting something and going back to your question around the differences between the Kurast Undercity and the Dark Citadel, another interesting difference is also when you can actually play it. The Kurast Undercity can be played sort of in the mid-game. You don’t have to be at a super high level to do that. Whereas we see the Dark Citadel as more of an end-game feature. So when you’ve hit your max level, and now you’re kind of proving  how strong your character build is, that’s really more of the Dark Citadel content. It’ll also have weekly rewards similar to when you kill a World Boss for the first time, it gives you extra cash and rewards.

The Dark Citadel will have this as well. Have a weekly reward. Every week there’s new rewards to obtain, and you can even grab some Dark Citadel specific cosmetics and things from the activity. You’ll also have a Dark Citadel currency that you can spend on really cool bonuses as well, so there’s a lot there to earn.

So, players will be able to earn more cosmetics outside of the Battle Pass?

Rod Fergusson : Yeah. We’ve always tried to find ways to make sure that there are things that you can earn. We have lots of free gifts in the shop that’s happening right now. There’s also the mechanic when you salvage things from the game, it’ll be auto-put into your wardrobe so you’re able to dress up from the stuff that you have there. When we do events, we tend to do cosmetics as well, like when we had our big Christmas event last year, we had cosmetics.

But yeah, the Dark Citadel will have its own specific cosmetics. When I was talking about the first Goatmen monster family, you’ll be able to, basically, every time you kind of go in there, you can take out a piece of their armour, and you can wear that armour.

Wow, that’s sick! But, because you guys implemented the Warcraft skins, will we see other licenses from Blizzard enter the shop? Like, maybe Starcraft?

Rod Fergusson : I mean, we’re not announcing anything, but I think it’s an interesting space. We just did a collab with Diablo Immortal . We just did a recent IP collab, and it went very successfully. I think where we now, Immortal is also doing a World of Warcraft collab. We’re also looking at the success that Overwatch 2 is having with those types of collabs as well, they recently did one with Transformers .

So, yeah, I think it’s an interesting space. I think there are sort of things we have to do, you know, you have to be careful at the beginning. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that documentary about South Park , where they talk about the things that they show, like what it is to make a show as fast as they do. They also talk about what the episode was about, which is a controversial topic, and they could never do that in season one because they hadn’t earned the right to do that.

You have to kind of bring people along on that journey. That’s kind of how we felt. When we first launched we wanted to make sure that everything was grounded and very authentic, and we didn’t want anything that was going to break your immersion.

That’s why two of the most successful things in the Diablo franchise, especially in Diablo III , were wings and pets. Even though we had very clear numbers, the most popular thing in Diablo III is wings and pets. We didn’t bring them to Diablo IV at launch because we were concerned that everybody in town, and be walking around with angel wings on and wouldn’t feel like the grounded place we wanted to be at launch.

But now that we’re a year in, we feel like we have a bit more room to play around there. That’s what you’re seeing with the with the incentives around the expansion. That we’re offering the angel on the demon wings and pets are now a feature that people can get inside or outside of the expansion.

So, yeah, it’s just one of those things. I think collabs are cool, and people look for novelty when they’re playing. But, yeah, there’s nothing new I can tell you, beyond the World of Warcraft stuff is very cool.

At the end of the main quest line in Diablo IV , we saw Neyrelle become a Horadrim. This is the first time the series has explored a creation around a new one. Can we expect to see more?

Rod Fergusson : Yeah. One thing we really wanted to do with our expansion was we wanted to continue the story, so this is kind of what I really like, is the fact it’s getting to understand. When we left Neyrelle, she had Mephisto in a soul stone, and she was trying to figure out how to imprison him permanently. So she sort of took on the burden of having to carry around a Prime Evil, which we know we’ve learned from the game’s past, that’s going to have a really negative impact on you. They [the Prime Evils] can corrupt you.

That’s where we left you, and that’s kind of where we pick up with Vessel of Hatred as we get to understand what happened with Neyrelle and your journey to help her. But the great thing we’re trying to do, is we want to make sure we know people play socially. That idea of ‘Oh, I see my friends playing, I want to join them!’ and the idea that maybe they saw the marketing around Vessel of Hatred or what have you, that they then think, ‘Well, I would play with friends, but I haven’t played the main story yet, and he’s playing Vessel of Hatred , so I’m not going to bother.’

We’ve tried to make sure that the Vessel of Hatred is available to the player regardless of player journey. If you haven’t played the main campaign, that’s fine. You can go right into Vessel of Hatred , and it’ll have a “Previously On…”, so it’ll give you a synopsis of what you missed in the main story, and then you can go right in. You can also jump right in as a level 100 Eternal player, or you can go right in as a level one new class. It could be a level one Spiritborn! Or you can be a seasonal player and decide to do it halfway through, ending at level 50.

It’s really up to the player about how they want to play the expansion, and I personally am going to go back to square one because you can play the Spiritborn through the main campaign.

We’ve even gone and re-recorded all the dialogue as the Spiritborn in the main campaign too, so I really want to have that feeling of when I’m a Spiritborn in Nahantu with Neyrelle that I’ve earned that relationship because I’ve played the main story with her.

That makes sense! At the end of Diablo IV ’s main story, you see Lilith vanish. You know a defined ending, like a REAL ending has met Inarius. Can we expect to see her again?

Rod Fergusson : I don’t know what to expect. I think one of the things that’s really what you’ll see us lean into, and I think you see a little bit of it already, when you see the quest giver when entering Kyovashad, and he’s yelling at you, “Hey, wanderer, I know what you are!” It’s this notion of they fed you the blood pedals and that now you have sort of Lilith blood within you, and so you had a connection to her, and that’s how that story played out. I think you’ll see us leaning into that connection. But as to Lilith’s reappearance or not, I can’t really speak to.

During the gamescom live stream, you guys mentioned “permanent character progression” updates. Can you expand that a little bit? Can I play my level 100 character in multiple seasons? Will that be a change that you guys think about implementing?

The progression part is one of those things that we talk about, where we’re doing it on October 8, but it’s really not seasonal nor expansion-based. We’re just changing the game, much like when we did in Loot Reborn in Season Four. It was changing the base game about how itemization or loot works, and so, yeah, the notion around that is a lot of what we’re doing will be presented during the live stream on August 29. Plus, we’re also doing PTRs. Those are called Public Test realms, where we make the features available in a private place before we put it out into the game.

We’re going to be doing a PTR for what we call patch 2.0, which is this progression stuff that we announced. People will get to see progression before they actually get to experience it in-game. If that’s been hugely successful, for instance, we’ve had a PTR for season four and a PTR for season five, where we were giving the players a week of it in a private area to test the changes and give us feedback. We’ve made fundamental changes to our seasons from that feedback, and so we’re looking for the same for the progression in season six.

To your question [regarding characters being available for multiple seasons] specifically, no. We continue to have the conversation around eternal versus seasonal players. Our desire where when you look at what an ARPG player typically does, a ARPG player typically goes through the seasonal model. Take Diablo III as an example. That idea of, ‘oh, I’m going to play something for a season’ then ‘oh, great, it starts over with new progression mechanics,’ etc, and I’ll start a new character. Then I’ll level up because, again, you can do it [level up] quite fast now, especially in season five.

I think, at like day five, maybe even day seven, the average max level was 60. People are moving fast in the seasons. But that notion of saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to play a level 100 eternal character in a seasonal realm’ like that, those are two different realms. So right now, you wouldn’t be able to do that, but you would be able to play like the expansion because it crosses that. You’ll be able to play your eternal character in the expansion, or you can play a new seasonal character in the expansion. They’re just in different realms.

The same thing would be how we think of Hardcore Mode as in a different realm as well, which is that if you die we delete your character thing that some people like. So that’s a different realm as well.

More on the Hardcore aspect, when I started Diablo IV I played a hardcore character, and The Butcher ended that run pretty quickly. Can we expect more of that? Do you guys have other tricks up your sleeves like that?

Rod Fergusson : (laughs) I mean, this The Butcher surprising you is kind of like that was the throwback to what we were trying to get to that feeling of Diablo 1 , where it was unexpected. When we look at Diablo III , where The Butcher was an actual boss and kind of in an unknown room, it took a bit off the element of what makes The Butcher, The Butcher, that surprise aspect.

I mean, we’re always trying to find ways to sort of inject more novelty and interest into the gameplay, but not at the point where you feel like you’re being a victim to the game that you can’t control the situation. You know? The good thing is, The Butcher will get tired eventually and bored, so you CAN run, right? You don’t HAVE to fight The Butcher if you’re not strong enough.

So, there are ways to control it. My first time I did a level 50 character, because there’s an achievement on Xbox to get a Hardcore character to level 50, I did very little dungeons (laughs), which is hard because some of the classes require it. Like the Sorceror, to do the level 15 specialty quest, you have to go into a dungeon. You’re thinking, “This could be the end of my Sorc If I do this wrong.”

But, yeah, we’re always trying to find new and interesting ways, and that’s why in this season, the Infernal Hordes, we have these Lords that come in that are hunting you. You also get the sort of ‘super duper’ Butcher that can show up there in the Infernal Hordes, too, which is cool.

Honestly, for me it was the novelty of seeing it happen, it was way better than, the victimization I felt (laughs).

Rod Fergusson : It was great! It was one of those things that was streamable. A lot of people had their like, “Oh, it’s The Butcher!” moments, right? And then, their squeal, and a lot of clips being shared on it. So it was great to bring back that feeling of The Butcher. It feels really good when you can actually turn the tables. Usually, when it happens the first time, and you’re not playing hardcore you tend to get surprised by The Butcher, and you get wiped out.

The next time, you’re kind of anticipating it, and then you have a strategy in mind and then tend to find a way. That accomplishment of I ran into The Butcher for the second or third time, and I finally took him down! Which feels really good. So, yeah, no, it’s been a fun element.

Why did you guys choose the Spiritborn for Vessel of Hatred and not a returning class as presented in Diablo 3 ? For D3 you guys had an expansion that reintroduced the Necromancer class, so why’d you go with a new class as opposed to a returning one?

Rod Fergusson : The thing is the time between games. You know, from D2 to D3 was ten years, D3 to D4 was also 10 years, so when we were releasing D4 we wanted to make sure that we were updating the franchise while also capturing the nostalgia. That’s where you get five classic classes. The Rogue is kind of an Amazoness meets the Demon Hunter all in one. And then you’ve got the Druid, the Necro, and the Barb and the Sorc.

Those were all sort of homages to the past. One of the things that we really wanted to do was embrace those two things. One, was that we wanted the class to be where we were going, and one where the new region was from, and two, was that we wanted to do something new. We’ve done five classes that were homogeneous.

So we want the team creatively to, I think we really wanted to flex its muscle like it’s a rare opportunity to be able to put up new class. We felt like this was the time to bring something new. Believe me, we’ve heard all the feedback around people wanting the Paladin or wanting other classic characters to come back. As we look at supporting Diablo for years to come, this won’t be the last class we add to Diablo IV . So those will have opportunities to kind of visit other classic characters if we need to.

What’s your favourite class?

Rod Fergusson : My favourite class is a necromancer. Actually, I have a Necromancer tattoo on my arm. So when we did a Hell’s Ink, I went and got the class symbol for the Necromancer on my arm.

That’s badass! For my last question, and I’m sorry for this one, are you guys going to add a cow level?

Rod Fergusson : (laughs) I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never heard of this before!

Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred launches on October 8, and pre-orders are available now .