Adding to the tin-foil. Travis Day's secret project is overhauling character stats. They did it once when he worked on WoW. Why not here? He's even expressed interest in doing it, but that there wasn't enough time to.
There's still a lot of people working on D3. Travis Day, Wyatt, Andrew Chambers, Don Vu, these are important guys on the team. John Yang mostly designed items and did balance for classes, so he'll be missed, but doesn't mean production grinds to a halt. Boyarsky was in charge of setting, so I'd imagine his work is mostly in early parts of development, (he left in April) and Mosqueira left only three months ago. I'm thinking they had wrapped up the biggest parts of development, which made it a good time to move on. At this stage it could mostly be graphics and art that needs to get done.
I assume if we haven't heard of them leaving, then they're probably still there.
I'm mostly basing this on how I hear other companies work. You finish a project, take a few months off, then get back to work on the next big thing. I don't see how Blizz would be any different. You don't finish something then spend 2 years twiddling your thumbs. That just seems absurd.
It's likely they've been working on an expansion the last two years.
Think of it this way. Even looking at the updates we've had there's no way that's enough work to fill all the hours of a 9 to 5 job for a group of five or so designers. Why would you keep that many people on the payroll, paying their salary and healthcare, if they're just going to dink around with balance? If that were the case, then Wyatt et. al has the easiest job in the world. In other words, if you're paying people, you better be planning a return on that investment. I know Blizzard has more money than god, but I don't see them as a charity.
Hard to say there will be nothing when the Blizzcon preview blog mentions in several instances discussion of new content.
Adding to the tin-foil. Travis Day's secret project is overhauling character stats. They did it once when he worked on WoW. Why not here? He's even expressed interest in doing it, but that there wasn't enough time to.
A mobile product would be the worst possible outcome.
There's still a lot of people working on D3. Travis Day, Wyatt, Andrew Chambers, Don Vu, these are important guys on the team. John Yang mostly designed items and did balance for classes, so he'll be missed, but doesn't mean production grinds to a halt. Boyarsky was in charge of setting, so I'd imagine his work is mostly in early parts of development, (he left in April) and Mosqueira left only three months ago. I'm thinking they had wrapped up the biggest parts of development, which made it a good time to move on. At this stage it could mostly be graphics and art that needs to get done.
I assume if we haven't heard of them leaving, then they're probably still there.
I'm mostly basing this on how I hear other companies work. You finish a project, take a few months off, then get back to work on the next big thing. I don't see how Blizz would be any different. You don't finish something then spend 2 years twiddling your thumbs. That just seems absurd.
It's likely they've been working on an expansion the last two years.
Think of it this way. Even looking at the updates we've had there's no way that's enough work to fill all the hours of a 9 to 5 job for a group of five or so designers. Why would you keep that many people on the payroll, paying their salary and healthcare, if they're just going to dink around with balance? If that were the case, then Wyatt et. al has the easiest job in the world. In other words, if you're paying people, you better be planning a return on that investment. I know Blizzard has more money than god, but I don't see them as a charity.
Expansion or new content.
D4 is not going to happen. Y'all crazy.
Even in the most cynical forecast, I say the game has at least one solid patch/expansion left in it before Blizzard "moves on".