It's time to face the inconvenient truth: I don't care about Diablo IV. At all. Or, why I've chosen to rename this blog.

When I started this blog, it was meant to be all about the Diablo franchise. At the time, I was mostly done with Diablo, but I still found myself thinking about it on occasion. About how awful the launch was, and how broken the design was, and about how many things I wished the developers had done differently. I had already taken the step of deleting my Blizzard account at that point, burning my boats in order to force to move on to new gaming worlds, rather than looking back at the old world that no longer held anything for me.

This blog was meant to be therapeutic. It was meant to help me get my still-lingering feelings about Diablo out of my system, so that I could finally stop thinking about it. It was meant to help me find closure. And it must have worked, because I find that I no longer give a rat's ass about the Diablo franchise, or about all the ways that Blizzard is absolutely fucking it up right now.

I've blogged before about Diablo IV, and how every new piece of information that I learned about the game has served to reduce an interest level which was pretty damn low to start with. The WarCraft III: Reforged fiasco of the past week served to further hammer home the fact that Activision Blizzard is as creatively bankrupt as it is morally bankrupt, which is a thing we learned last year during the Blitzchung fiasco.

By the by, the capper on the whole Diablo saga is that Blizzard has only just this week hired someone to oversee the Diablo franchise... former Gears of War studio head Rod Ferguson. Because who better to oversee the direction of a PC-centric RPG franchise than a man who'd spent most of his career helming an XBox FPS franchise? Apparently the lessons of the Jay Wilson fiasco have yet to be grokked in fullness by the team in Irvine. The fact that they've only finally hired a Diablo director after they've pushed at least two different Diablo titles deep into development is also not a good sign.

If I were still a Diablo fan, I'd probably be losing sleep right now. But I'm not. I'm sleeping the sleep of the just, because I don't give a rat's ass anymore about Blizzard, or any of Blizzard's games, and I especially don't care about the Diablo franchise. 

This is why I found the Diablo Immortal announcement to be hilarious, rather than upsetting. (FYI, D:I playtests are finally slated to start later this year, in an event which should attract almost nobody and please even fewer folks.) This is why Blizzard's failures with WC3:Reforged did not surprise me in the least. And it's why the last installment of my "What Diablo III did wrong" series was posted in December of 2018. Yes, more than a year ago. I guess I'm just not feeling it anymore.

Which leaves me with a choice: Do I let the blog die the natural death of all such blogs, abandoned to rot quietly in peace and neglect? Or do I evolve the blog to allow space to comment on a wider range of my recreational interests?

Because I do have other interests? My lack of sustained interest in Diablo hasn't prevented me from blogging about other topics; in fact, most of the posts on this blog are about other topics. There's been more than one occasion in the last year that I've found myself wanting to opine/vent about some movie or TV show that I've seen recently, only to stop because it didn't really fit the theme of this blog... and because I really didn't want to start yet another fucking blog. Three blogs is truly more than enough to have going stale all at one time.

By this point, you've probably clocked the title at the top of the blog, and figure out which option I chose from those two.

So it is that I bid farewell to "How (Not) To Design A Videogame," even as I plot to still write about the design of videogames... and about the writing of the books, and shows, and movies, and media in general that I consume. No longer shall I write only about what I wish they were doing differently, either; I shall also write about what I think they're doing really, really well. Only the indifferent shall be ignored. As a therapeutic exercise, this blog fulfilled its purpose fantastically well; now, I get to see if it's equally fulfilling as a creative exercise.

Welcome to 2020, fellow travellers. I hope you'll join me in exploring whatever it may bring.