Somewhat random and shocking news: Steve Parker, the Senior Game Producer for Diablo III has left Blizzard according to a Twitter update.

It's not quite known whether this is for personal reasons, or if he didn't agree with Blizzard's recent system changes to Diablo 3.

Hey Twitter, I'm no longer working at Blizzard or on D3. I've had a great 5 years there and those guys are going to kill it with Diablo.

Hopefully there wasn't any bad blood between Blizzard and Steve Parker, but by the looks of his follow up tweets, there doesn't seem to be. Perhaps this just means the game is ready to go, and he feels he is no longer needed, and thus moving onto future projects.

Projektsnake
@retailsails Gotcha. Best of luck in your future endeavors. I salute you for your contributions to Blizzard. /salute

@retailsails Steve Parker
@Projektsnake Thank you! It’s been a great pleasure to work on the game.

About six minutes ago (2:27pm EST / 11:27pm PDT) he updated his twitter:

“@mumper @westofhouse @el_pollo_loc0 Packed and ready to go. Time to dominate.”

Blizzard are now looking for a Senior Producer for Diablo 3, so if you feel lucky, apply over here.

will be interesting to hear the full story.

f*** the full story it would be awesome working on D3

Holy s***, not good. Especially considering the timing of the project :-/ You'd have to think they were trying to complete in unrealistic time-frame now or something like that, surely.

Or they are taking it into a colourful direction.

haha are you kidding? This is blizzard, it's not like human capital are going to be hard to come by for them..

Could be any number of reasons, but the gaming industry tends to be scandalous at best most of the time. So be interesting to see.

Surely Blizzard wouldn't rush a title?

Surely Blizzard wouldn't rush a title?

Don't think Diablo III can be considered "rushed" at this time of it's development life haha.

They recently announced a bunch of changes to d3, so it sounds like theres a fair bit more time left before its going to be ready :( I think they are still working on some of the more major game mechanics as well, such as the rune system.

The mystic was just removed from the game altogether.

It's not quite known whether this is for personal reasons, or if he didn't agree with Blizzard's recent system changes to Diablo 3.

Perhaps its because he raped and murdered a girl in 1990?

haha are you kidding? This is blizzard, it's not like human capital are going to be hard to come by for them..

It's a huge loss to remove someone at this level, for any company.

Sure, you can employ anyone - maybe even someone better than the guy that left - but then they have to get into the game, understand every detail. That takes a f***-ton of time (==money).

The mystic was just removed from the game altogether.

Saw that. Was sad :(

I don't know what the Mystic is/was so I don't know whether I should be sad.

Khel, Mystic was a Artisan that could enhance your items. Blizzard felt it was just gemming with a new name, and so took it out.

http://images.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/9375719.jpg

bah, stop screwing around with the game and just release it already.

*clicks incessantly*

I can only finish the beta so many times, release it!

Give me a beta key you mother f'er

Sack em all.

Meh, they keep going "Hey, lets bring out this awesome feature" and then scrub it months down the line...

Yes, that's what we all want. Less features.

If it makes the game better, they can do whatever they want with it imo

Give me a beta key you mother f'er

don't think they give you a key. you just get an email saying "hey you can now download the d3 beta from your battle.net account. have fun!"

i've yet to download it.

You don't always get an email, so it's worth logging into battle.net to check.