It was well along it's way though. Also this:Exort said:Key Blizzard north Employees start leaving at 2003 not 2005. WoW was not even release yet.Mister Benoit said:World of Warcraft started exploding, also the heads at blizz north left and they relocated the team at the new offices.Scrumpmonkey said:Diablo 2 came out in 2000, 2005 is well enough time and space to have another one. It sounds to me like they just canned a project that they could have completed in this timeframe and picked up another one a couple of years later that would become this version of D-III (i wonder why things got scrapped in 2005.... hmmm...)
I'm pretty sure it has to mostly do with WoW though, noone had any idea that the game was going to be THAT big, seriously, WoW is absolutely massive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_North
"However on June 30, 2003, several key employees left Blizzard North"
August 1, 2005. 5 Gamespot:
The team behind the enormously popular Diablo franchise--most recently known as Blizzard North, the Bay Area outpost of Irvine, Calif-based Blizzard Entertainment--has been officially shuttered. Arguably, the office was moribund for months, those with ties to the Diablo franchise having departed months or even years ago to form studios of their own. In a statement today, Blizzard president and founder Mike Morhaime said the relocation will "improve our efficiency as a company" and "represents an opportunity for all of our teams to have regular, direct input on each other's projects." Those from Blizzard North who were offered relocation packages "will continue work on an unannounced project," which most believe is the third installment in the hugely popular Diablo series.
Many employees took the offer to remain with Blizzard and relocate to Irvine. Others did not, and many more joined Flagship Studios, or looked for other work in the Bay Area.
They were having communication problems between studios and didn't like the direction the "unannounced" game being developed there was going, pretty sure we can take a guess at what that was.
I'm guessing by the time they relocated everyone and such WoW was building a lot of momentum being it had been released for almost a year. Blizzard put a lot of things on the back burner. I don't think it's so much a case of not having enough developers/artists/programmers but having to start a customer support branch of the company in order to support their absurd player base, something they did not have prior experience in.