Longtime Blizzard game maker Jay Wilson took to Twitter today to announce that this is his last week with the company, where he was best known as the longtime design director of Diablo III.
Wilson walked away from Diablo III in 2013 to work on other projects at Blizzard, though he took a quick jog back at GDC later that year to deliver a frank postmortem of the game. His impending departure from the company is especially notable because he now seems intent on walking away from the game industry as a whole.
"I'm leaving to pursue my original passion, writing," wrote Wilson. "It's what I was doing when I fell into this job, and I've always wanted to return to it."
Wilson's career in the game industry stretches back beyond Blizzard to encompass meaningful stints at places like Relic Entertainment and Monolith Productions, where he worked on everything from Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War to Blood and Blood 2: The Chosen.
The lion's share of his credited work is as a level and game designer, so it's worth noting that in 2012 he told Gamasutra that the secret real purpose of game design is not to put your own ideas into a game, but to guide everyone else's ideas to make the best game possible.
"If anything, your goal as a designer should be, 'I can't wait to get somebody else's ideas into this game,'" Wilson said. "You have to make it about the team. You have to make it about the ideas that come from everyone, while at the same time accepting you're going to have strong opinions about it."