Chatting Diablo, Gears of War and The Pop Shoppe with Canadian gaming producer Rod Fergusson

The term “legend” is thrown around a lot these days, but in the video game industry, it’s certainly an apt descriptor for Rod Fergusson.

The quinquagenarian Canadian game maker has worked on more than a dozen titles, ranging from Microsoft Train Simulator and Blood Wake to pretty much the entire Gears of War franchise, BioShock Infinite and, most recently, the Diablo series as general manager. He’s best known for being a “closer” — someone who can help teams navigate the numerous difficulties surrounding game development and get past the finish line.

It’s a storied career, to be sure, and it’s why I was particularly eager to catch up with Fergusson on the last day of Fan Expo Canada. After Vancouver-based gaming host Victor Lucas (The Electric Playground) invited Fergusson to Fan Expo for a panel, I made sure I’d be there for that after an early morning flight to Toronto from Anime NYC.

Rod Fergusson (left) and Victor Lucas (right).

But I was quickly given some much-needed perspective for my fatigue, as Fergusson had just flown in from Germany where he was promoting Diablo IV’s latest expansion, Vessel of Hatred, at Gamescom. And yet, his enthusiasm during our chat wasn’t tempered by any jet lag or, on a perhaps more devastating note, the underwhelming poutine he had while in town. “I went based on proximity this time, which I now regret. Smoke’s [Poutinerie] was good a couple of years ago, but they’re not [as much] anymore,” he says with a laugh.

He was, however, overjoyed to find a bottle of The Pop Shoppe in his hotel mini-bar.

This was a nostalgia bomb last night at the hotel. Remember going as a kid to pick out our flavors. #Canada pic.twitter.com/1BD7hZC36S

— Rod Fergusson (@RodFergusson) August 25, 2024

“When I was a kid, that was the thing! We grew up poor, my dad died, so my mom was living off a pension. And so this was the thing — the cheapest variety of pop,” he said, explaining to the Blizzard PR rep sitting with us what we call carbonated beverages instead of “soda” in Canada. He then begins to excitedly rattle off all of the different flavours of The Pop Shoppe. “It was huge — I was eight years old again!”

But of course, while we could chat about Canadian food and drink items all day (Fergusson also shouts out chocolate Timbits), he’s primarily here to discuss Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred. Before that, though, I ask what he’s most proud of with Diablo IV now that we’re a little over a year out from launch, as well as what he’d like to still improve or expand upon with the acclaimed action-RPG.

Diablo IV. (Image credit: Blizzard)

“I’m really proud of what the team has done from a live service perspective — that notion of getting better at listening to the player community and being able to also get better in how we communicate back to the player and trying to be more transparent,” Fergusson says.

He notes that when he moved to California to work at Blizzard on Diablo in 2020, he spent only eight days in the office before the pandemic hit and shut everything down. As a result, he had to simultaneously navigate both his new job of leading a team and adapting to remote work, and he says he commends the team for overcoming those challenges.

“[And now], to see where we’ve come in the last year, from sort of the rocky Season 1 to now Season 4 and Season 5 — I’m feeling really good. That’s just a testament to the team’s resilience, and again, knowing that once you launch the game, it’s going into players’ hands. It’s basically the players’ game at that point,” he explains. “So how do we get better at listening, both from the qualitative, ‘What’s happening directly on social media or in roundtables or surveys?’ And then the quantitative, the data side of it, with our metrics and telemetry and bringing that all to bear to try to make each season.”

Vessel of Hatred being the game’s first full expansion following seasonal updates also gives Blizzard the opportunity to revisit established pieces of the Diablo universe. One of these is Nahantu, which returns from Diablo II.

Nahantu. (Image credit: Blizzard)

“The notion of having a new place to go — so having a new region, having a new story, having a new class — that’s sort of the base of how we think of an expansion. And we had done most of the Eastern continent, so going to Nahantu felt like it made sense,” says Fergusson. “But also our art director, John Mueller, was like, ‘Okay, we’re a very gothic medieval game. I want to do something with a different colour palette and different sort of contrast to that. So going to these ancient jungles felt really good.”

Another returning element from Diablo II: Mercenaries. “They’re coming back in a very different, sort of deeper way, with their own skill trees, their own personalities, their own quest lines that you have to do to get them. They have different systems now, where we have this reinforcement system, where they can come in and help you, even if you don’t have them equipped, and so you can have them as sort of a companion or as a reinforcement,” says Fergusson.

At the same time, Vessel of Hatred promises new content, particularly the MMO-esque “Dark Citadel” player vs. environment (PvE) raid. “We know that we’ve never had this type of content in Diablo before, and so we wanted to see how players felt around it. We wanted to have that sort of, ‘It’s fun to party up in Diablo and being able to work together to complete mechanics.’”

Mercenaries. (Image credit: Blizzard)

He says the new party finder system introduced with Vessel of Hatred is an integral part of it all.

“I was playing with my executive producer recently, and we were just having that notion of, ‘Okay, stop, what’s the strategy here? Okay, I’m gonna go top, you go bottom. We’ll do it this way.’ And so it’s having that little bit more than just sort of, ‘Just kill everything you see.’”

He says that all comes back to listening to player feedback. For instance, in Season 3, AKA Season of the Construct, Blizzard heard how traps really slowed players down, leading to a blemish on the otherwise compelling dungeon-crawling gameplay loop.

“And so we recognize that if we’re gonna bring mechanics to a dungeon like we’re doing for Dark Citadel, it had to be something that enhanced the combat, not something that took you out of it. And so that’s something I think that we’ve accomplished, and you’ll see when you get to play.”

As GM of Diablo as a whole, Fergusson oversees other entries in the long-running franchise. Another popular title is Diablo Immortal, the first-ever mobile entry in the series. While the community initially responded negatively to the game, the reception has been overall quite positive once it actually launched.

Diablo Immortal is also going strong. (Image credit: Blizzard)

What’s especially interesting about Immortal is that it’s completely separate from Diablo IV. While other popular games like Fortnite and Apex Legends aim for parity between their console/PC and mobile iterations, Immortal is a standalone experience set between the second and third Diablo titles.

While Fergusson notes that the D4 and Immortal teams do talk and share ideas (he recently confirmed that the former game inspired the latter’s Blood Knight class), positioning Immortal as its own product has been an opportunity to reach a different audience.

“They’re built for two different types of players. And that was one of the things we learned — originally, when we thought about, ‘Okay, we’re trying to broaden our reach, and we’re trying to give another on ramp into the franchise,’ having a free-to-play game on PC and mobile would be a great way to do that,” he said. “And what we found is that what really happens is that people become Immortal players, and they’re like, ‘this is the Diablo that I want to play. ‘ And so instead of them going on to D4, they just stay on Immortal because that’s the one they want to play.”

Having been on Diablo for now over four years, Fergusson reflects on the fact that it’s bigger than anything he’s ever done. “The sense of scale is quite a bit different. A lot of my career is Xbox exclusives, and that tended to be a smaller kind of audience. And so when you go and touch a 27-year-old-franchise with 100 million players — the scale and scope is actually what drew me to it. It was going to be another interesting challenge to go to make a game that so many people were affected by.”

One Hell of a career

But of course, so many people have been affected by his other work, as well. Gears of War, in particular, is arguably Xbox’s most beloved series outside of Halo, and Fergusson was with it since the first game in 2006. He says that to this day, some of his fondest memories in the gaming industry are of meeting some of Gears’ most passionate fans.

Gears of War 3. (Image credit: Xbox)

“Hearing people’s stories, when they have that moment with you — they tell you about what the game means to them. I have this example of this woman who came [to a meet & greet] for Gears of War, and she wanted me to sign this poster, and she’s like, ‘Hey, I work two jobs, I’m a single mom, and so when I get home and I want to reconnect with my kids, we all play Horde [mode] together in Gears, and that’s when we talk over the headsets and stuff like that. To me, those moments where you realize that the gaming goes beyond.”

He says he wishes he could directly share those feelings with his development teams, given that hundreds of people work on these games but only a handful get to go to events and meet fans. For now, at least, he’s happy that games can provide similar moments of connection at home, and nowhere is that more evident than in his own life.

“My brother, who’s nine years older than me, lives in Windsor, Ontario, and I live in California, and the only way that we stay in contact, really, is over the headset on Xbox Live. In fact, I [recently] flew him to me, and I realized we hadn’t seen each other face to face in 10 years, but we had been together playing games in all that time, and the games are what kept us connected.”

And for Gears, specifically, the venerable third-person shooter series shows no signs of slowing down. At the Xbox Games Showcase in June, Vancouver-based The Coalition unveiled Gears of War: E-Day, a prequel to the original Gears that follows a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago during the titular first contact war with the Locusts.

Marcus and Dom in Gears of War: E-Day. (Image credit: Xbox)

E-Day is particularly interesting for Fergusson as it’s the first mainline entry in the series in which he has no involvement. What’s more, it’s being spearheaded by The Coalition, a team that he once led for several years. So naturally, I had to ask: what’s it like to be watching from the outskirts now?

“It’s weird, but good!” he admits. “I think it makes sense. It was [initially] weird for me because when I was there, I wrote the pitch for Gears 6 of where the story should go and how we should do it. And so I didn’t know whether they were doing 6 or they were doing something else. And so when I saw it was a prequel, I was like, ‘Well, that kind of makes sense.’”

He notes that even since the first Gears, he’s been asked about why the team never depicted E-Day since it’s one of the most pivotal moments of the series.

“At the time of the [Xbox] 360, we really didn’t have the tech to represent the size of the invasion that it was,” notes Fergusson. “And so I think now, where we look at Gen 9 [of consoles] and kind of where the technology is, I think they can do a really good job of what E-Day would be.”

He’s also excited to see how they navigate some of the trickiness surrounding canon, given that E-Day is a prequel. “I’m excited. I think it’s always a challenge when you go back, because there’s no chainsaw gun. It’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll do Star Wars before lightsabers.’ It’s going to be an interesting challenge, but they’re the right team to solve that.”

Bringing a “Canadian-ness” wherever he goes

Fergusson with Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty, VP of Xbox games marketing Aaron Greenberg and The Coalition team celebrating the launch of Gears 5 in 2019. (Image credit: Xbox)

But while he no longer works at The Coalition on Gears, he says he still looks back fondly on that experience, especially since it was a Canadian team. He notes that some American studios he’s been at, especially the now-defunct Boston-based Irrational (BioShock Infinite), can be quite “aggressive,” but the culture at The Coalition was much healthier.

“It was nice to go to a Canadian culture where everybody was saying ‘sorry.’ The funny thing about the stereotype around Canadians is, for the most part, it’s kind of true. In fact, I brought somebody from BioShock onto my team, because I knew what he could do. He was a great shipper. He shipped a great game, and he did great work. So I knew what he was capable of. But he came in and he was a bull in china shop, and I had to say, ‘Hey, the thing that worked in Boston doesn’t work here — you have to come softer and you have to listen, and you have to think about how you phrase things,” explains Fergusson. “And he did great. He got there, but it was initially culture shock to go from ‘East Coast, in your face and super blunt’ to the more ‘gentle sort of Canadian culture’ that we had. I loved it. I loved [The Coalition] and a lot of the people are still there.”

Thankfully, he says the transition to Blizzard was a bit smoother, in part because there was already a fellow Canadian, executive producer Gavian Whishaw, in a leadership role. But of course, it still took some adjusting to Blizzard’s California culture. (It should also be noted that Fergusson was entering Blizzard amid a toxic work culture that led to multiple lawsuits and company-wide changes.)

“I got hired specifically to try to change the culture a little bit. And changing a culture is hard. I think it’s trying to help the team succeed, but I think my ‘Canadian-ness’ has served me well over my career, because I try to be sort of non-threatening, self-deprecating, very easy to get along with,” he said. “My career has been a career of persuasion and influence, because I haven’t had the authority to do the stuff that I’ve done. And I think a lot of that has to do with how I was raised and where I lived.”

Fergusson, Xbox president Sarah Bond and Microsoft CEO of Gaming Phil Spencer playing Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred at Gamescom. (Image credit: Blizzard)

It’s almost ironic, then, that the latest chapter of this Canadian’s prolific career is focused on a bloody series about devils and demons. To close out our chat, I bring it back to Diablo by asking Fergusson what tips he has for newcomers to Diablo IV, especially those who might be intrigued amid the new season.

“You don’t need to wait for a season start. The campaign’s there at any time, although you don’t have to play through the campaign if you want to just jump in with your friends to play seasons. Basically, you just play through the prologue, and then you can skip, because we wanted to teach you the basics. But once you’re through the prologue, you can skip the campaign and get into the season and play with your friends. We’ve tried to make the onboarding pretty smooth,” he said.

“And really, it’s just about having fun. You don’t have to go hardcore, be super optimized and try to make this over-the-top build. Diablo is about expressing a power fantasy. And everybody, whether it’s a magic user or a barbarian or whatever — everybody has that sort of secret fantasy, power fantasy. And so Diablo is a great way to go do that and just kill a bunch of demons, get rid of some hatred in the world. It’s fun!”

This interview has been edited for language and clarity. 

Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred launches on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5 and PC on October 8th. Xbox has not yet confirmed a release window for Gears of War: E-Day.

Header image credit: Blizzard