Last week a video was released featuring two senior developers working on Diablo IV: Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora and Art Director John Mueller. In the clip the pair were presented with a series of questions from “fans”, which they answer at length, but it didn’t take long for some digging to find that the questions were…oddly specific.
Here’s the video, posted on the Future Games Show channel, and made I guess to promote both the game and the event, which is an annual showcase for the British media publisher, and in particular its video game site GamesRadar:
Philtacular was watching and was among those who thought the questions were a little weird, though, and with the Future Game Show so helpfully providing each question-asker’s social media information, they looked up each one.
That’s not a one-off, though! There are loads of these!
I won’t keep pasting them, but there are accounts from other sites too, like Reddit, which also have zero trace of ever having actually asked those questions. This has of course led to allegations that the questions were fabricated, a ruse that could at least partially be explained by the fact the FGS asked for community questions for a Diablo IV interview back on May 13 and…didn’t receive a single reply.
I asked both the FGS and Blizzard for comment, and Blizzard has responded, telling Kotaku “Blizzard was not involved in the process of gathering questions”. A community rep also posted about the video in the Diablo subreddit, saying “this was an interview Joe and John did on a EU press tour last week with numerous outlets. [These] interview questions came from the media outlet and we just answer them. The team is following up with the outlet to ask where the questions came from.”
If the questions were indeed made up, this is simply the funniest example possible of the pointlessness in putting these forgettable pre-release promos together; what was so immovable about this arrangement that, having apparently received zero actual questions, some shit was seemingly made up rather than, I dunno, getting staff at GamesRadar—a video game website putting the event together—to ask some questions instead? Why bother? It’s such a dumb scandal over something nobody would have cared about otherwise!