Diablo IV: Second Anniversary – Interview with Drew McCrory

Diablo IV released 2 years ago. It had everything people expected in a Diablo game: powerful adventurers, dark narrative, lots of monsters, tons of loot, memorable quests, immersive visuals and audio, etc. But what worried players with disabilities was not The Butcher (not this time), but knowing the accessibility considerations it would have.

Since the earliest access was granted through pre-release betas, what was found was beyond most people’s expectations. Screen reader support, controls and inputs customization, captions and subtitles, sound cues for loot, highlights for players, enemies, NPCs and more. In those 2 years new features have been added and others have evolved , and the most diverse legion of adventurers to date in a Diablo game keeps marching into Sanctuary shouting a warcry: Hell Welcomes All!

For this anniversary, our editor Antonio I. Martínez interviewed Drew McCrory, Senior Lead UX and Accessibility Designer, to talk about the details of this journey.

Antonio: Hi Drew. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a bit about your work?

Drew McCrory: My name is Drew McCrory, and I’m currently the Senior Lead UX and Accessibility Designer for Diablo IV. I’ve been in the games’ industry for over 20 years. I’ve been Lead Designer on nine projects and served as Game Director on a couple. I have been really focused on accessibility for about the last seven years, as a key point of what I do in the games’ industry.

My work at Blizzard began with Diablo II: Resurrected, where I was trying to make a 20-year-old game that was incredibly “crunchy” more accessible for a modern audience. That was a very interesting challenge but really rewarding. And I got to take a lot of those learnings over to Diablo IV.

Antonio: I see. I used to play Diablo II back in the day and could no longer play as my own needs evolved. The need to hold down a key to maintain the position was exhausting. Every time you missed, the character would run right into the monster instead. The toggle option in the new version was very helpful there and it is in Diablo IV too.

Now, let’s jump into the new game. Diablo IV impressed players from its early days with its wide range of accessibility options and inclusive design features. The team has often mentioned that accessibility was a consideration from the very beginning of the project. How did this impact the final result in terms of accessibility? Did it help overcome barriers through inclusive design?

Drew McCrory: Absolutely. When you think about how a lot of teams, historically, have reached out to how they are going to build accessibility into their own game, it’s added near the end of the project to meet legal guidelines or to include a “colorblind mode” because it was expected. So they were doing it like a capstone to something that was already created but it wasn’t created to necessarily be accessible. So you are adding band-aids as opposed to just building something that didn’t need them initially.

When we were looking at Diablo IV, one of the pillars of the game, which is crazy because when you’re designing a game you say these are the five pillars that we want to hold the game to and everything that we’re designing has to meet the needs of those pillars. And we had being accessible as one of the pillars of the game! It meant that when I got to come in and start designing things, I had the say on par with the people that were designing the combat. And, we’re a Diablo game, right? So combat is what you do the entire time. But I could sit down in a meeting and help direct some of those designs that would potentially negatively impact the accessibility. So since accessibility was targeted so early, it was a consideration for all of the designs that we were building along the way.

And honestly, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been put into a position where I could do that because I know that is not common in the games industry at all right now. I’m hoping that when people see what you can get when you make it a priority and you make it a first class citizen feature, that your end product will show that, and it allows us to have our game be played by players that wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

You brought up holds for example, like that was just a really intrinsic Diablo style feature. And when I came in, I was like, “Cool. So, here’s abilities that require holds. We’re going to remove all of that and allow players to change that if that’s something they can’t do.” And people replied, “Really? Is that a thing?” And I explained “Oh, yeah. It’s totally a thing.” And we did it. We just made the tech to account for what a varied population could potentially need and I get away with a lot because it’s all in options, right? So players can opt into what they need. I’m never making assumptions on the part of the player as to what they could potentially need, but I give them as many dials as possible to find the right combination that works for them.

Antonio: One of the most requested updates arrived around January 2024, if I’m not mistaken, with the implementation of WASD controls. For a game based traditionally on mouse and keyboard, like the Diablo series, how difficult was to get it right? And did having controller support serve as a baseline for it?

Drew McCrory: Yes. This is a really interesting thing. WASD controls was one of the most asked for features after we launched and we had actually done a prototype for WASD. Before launch, me and an engineer were talking about how we really should have this and we just didn’t quite get it to a good enough state to ship.

And honestly, to your point, it was totally we borrowed all of the controller work that we had done. Because the big thing with switching from a very mouse-driven targeting system is we have a controller system that handles all of our autotargeting and a lot of that stuff that you lose when you don’t have the mouse cursor on screen.

So we thought “All right, well, what if we just say WASD is actually a controller and let’s borrow all of that work that we’ve done on controller and then just let players do it from a keyboard.” And everyone was like, “Yeah, that’ll just work.” So we spent maybe a month fixing weird edge cases because there’s always shenanigans that occur, but in general it just worked and we were so excited with the final result.

I have carpal tunnel syndrome and it’s getting very bad in my right hand. I’m a hardcore PC gamer and I can’t play mouse and keyboard games as easily as I used to. So things like WASD controls are really really important for me personally because they don’t tire my hand as much. When we did this, they asked “How many people do you think are going to use this?” and I said “Oh, a lot of people are still going to use this. This
is a really good feature!” It would have been far more work if we didn’t have controller support already in the game but since we did, we got to borrow a lot of that tech and a lot of the work that had gone into it and bring it over into WASD. I was really happy that we managed to launch it so quickly from the initial release of the game.

Antonio: And it also helps because people with very different setups and assistive software that can handle keys but not controller buttons, for example.

Drew McCrory: Yes, absolutely.

Antonio: Audio design is one of Diablo IV’s strengths, even more for how much it aids with accessibility. The video “Seeing Beyond: Diablo IV’s Screen Reader & Navigation Innovation” was published for Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025, offering a look at the creation process behind the latest features.This type of content, explaining the development process, has a lot of potential because it helps everyone: players learn how things are done, developers gain ideas, and transparency is always welcome. Can we expect more content like this from the team when new features are added?

Drew McCrory: We’ve really enjoyed making it so I’d expect we’ll continue. We’ve done two in a row now and I think the team has actually gotten a lot out of it. We have a lot of really passionate developers that are working on accessibility. Getting to showcase their work, how we work as a team to build interesting mechanics and solve problems that not all teams are solving is really great.

I get to talk to folks a lot about the accessibility work that we’ve done on Diablo 4, but I love the fact that we get to bring up and showcase a lot of my team that are there with me every single day working on all this content. I work with some amazing engineers and I’m a designer, right? I make designs and that’s cool, but my engineers are the guys that sit down and go, “All right, how do we do this thing that Drew asked for?” But they’re so involved that they come back, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we added X, Y, or Z features to this?” And I’m like, “Yes, that is a great idea! We should absolutely add that.” So being able to give them some recognition for all of their hard work has been absolutely fantastic.

And it’s also really important that we can educate our audience on how we’re taking their feedback and we’re building all of this stuff. There’s probably some areas where people say “Oh well the game totally needs X, Y, or Z.” but that might be way harder than people think. So kind of giving people a glimpse behind the curtain as it were can help people understand all of the work that actually goes into making some of those big changes. The team has loved making those videos so I’m really hoping that we continue to do it.

Antonio: Talking about video content. It’s common to find mainstream content creators posting videos with tips and tricks where they show “the hidden compass”, suggest enabling the “Auto-pin New Quest” feature or the “Highlights”. It’s often mentioned by the community how accessibility helps everyone. Do you think this wider adoption by the big public will help to educate about the importance of accessibility? Also, do you have any metrics or data on the usage of these features?

Drew McCrory: We don’t have great metrics for usage in the options menu right now. It’s something that I’ve been trying to get people to instrument, but we get a lot of feedback in and I’ve been doing a lot of user research. Asking “What options are you using? How are you using them?” and that sort of thing. And in general, we have a lot of players that are using them. Auto-pin for example has a very high usage rate from people that we’ve spoken to.

Something I like to say is that accessible design tends to just be really good game design. I’m building features because I think it targets people that need them and can help bring them into the game, but those features are also just really good features for a wider audience. I really want to encourage people to look at them and realize “You know what? These are features that games should have.” Why? Well, they make some players be able to play the game and it makes the game better for everybody else.

And what we have seen in the accessibility realm is that there’s a lot of osmosis from major companies. So, as we push bars, that pulls up that bottom bar of what is expected in games. As we release more and more content that is more and more accessible, other competitors are looking at us going, “Hey, all right. So, here’s what X, Y, or Z game did. Well, maybe we should do those features.” That level of visibility has helped to just increase the push for accessibility across the industry.

When you look 10-15 years ago, the actual accessibility features in games was effectively non-existent. As more things have become more common, those features are now things that games need to have. My goal is that we just keep pushing that bar up, we’re trying to do more and more and more, but now that means that the bottom bar is getting higher and higher. So when companies are making games, that minimum bar for them to ship is now way higher than it used to be. We know they’re going to add more features than they did before because the expectation now is that there will be more.

And I don’t want to say that we’re doing all of the work, right? Because I’ve totally begged, borrowed, and stolen from other games that are also doing really great accessibility work. The one thing that I will say is that the games industry tends to be very competitive, but the people at companies working on accessibility are all about trying to get other teams to learn from them and build more accessible games. The community is fantastic and we are absolutely all working together to try to make all of our games accessible because people that are working on accessibility in games tend to be super passionate about it. In the end we’re all learning from each other and we’re all fighting to make sure that our games are becoming more accessible.

Antonio: I want to ask you now about pets and mercenaries, added about a year ago when Vessel of Hatred released. While they aren’t explicitly referenced as accessibility features, they can significantly impact the player experience. For example, pets eliminate the worry of leaving gold and materials behind, allowing players to reduce cognitive, motor, and visual load. Is there a line between accessibility and quality-of-life features? And where or how do you draw it?

Drew McCrory: When I sit down with teams to build new features, I always ask them: “What is the expected player agency?” At any moment in the game, what are we asking the player to do, and what do we expect the fun to be? So, anything that isn’t that point of agency that they’re trying to add, I suggest that maybe that doesn’t have to be manually controlled by the player. Because if that’s not the thing that’s going to be fun, if that’s not the question we’re asking players to solve, do we need them to press three buttons when they could only press one? Those are real questions that I’ve made the team, actually, and take a step back and think and be like, “Hm, well, maybe they don’t need to do that.” And it’s a realization, “Yeah, maybe they don’t need to do that.”

As an example, in Diablo II Resurrected, we added Auto Potion drinking as a feature because I thought “Well, maybe part of the fun of this game isn’t deciding when to chug a potion. Maybe if they have potions, we can just let them drink.” And the team agreed, so we did it.

That was a level of cognitive load and a level of mechanical stress that players could have that we decided wasn’t part of the main thing that we cared about players to do. In Diablo, we want to sell a player fantasy. We want people to feel powerful and we want them to kill, you know, legions and legions of demons. So things that aren’t necessarily focused on that, well, maybe those things aren’t as important.

And mercenaries was a great example. because it could heavily reduce the amount of clicks per minute that players needed to do to feel they were still being powerful and being exciting. When we were designing some of those features for mercenaries, the team had like all of these cool ideas about what they wanted mercenaries to do, how they wanted mercenaries to feel and all that sort of stuff. And I thought cool, what can the mercenaries do that can offload some of that work for players?

Those are the kind of conversations that we had and it was really nice to recognize we don’t need players to hit a billion buttons, because maybe that could be fun for some players, but it’s unnecessary. So we look at how can we distill the gameplay down to what is fun and anything that’s beyond that is optional. Because it’s about getting players in. Let’s get them to have fun and just focus on the actual important stuff.

Those were the conversations we had, and it was really nice to recognize that we don’t need players to hit a billion buttons at once. While that might be fun for some players, it’s unnecessary. What can we distill the gameplay down to? “Oh, this is the fun.” and anything beyond that is optional. Let’s get players in, let them have fun, and focus on the actual important, fun stuff.

Antonio: Absolutely. That example about the potions in Diablo II really resonated with me. One of the stresses was running out of potions mid-fight and fleeing to a safe spot, opening your inventory and filling up your belt again. You’d think, “This is not what a magician or a barbarian should be doing.”

Drew McCrory: Yeah, exactly! You’re a powerful hero. Why do you need to spend time dragging mana pots into a belt? That seems like a silly thing to ask you to do. That was a big question, because originally they were like, “Alright, maybe you just drink the potions that you have in your belt.” I said, “No, I want the belt to refill.” And they were like, “What do you mean?” I said, “Yeah, no, like when you say this slot is health pots, as you drink your health pots, we just start filling them back in from your inventory.” Why? Because you’re a hero. You don’t need to manually do that. (Laughs)

Antonio: Diablo IV, being a live service game, has a longer lifecycle meaning frequent additions and changes. What are the challenges and opportunities that this presents?

Drew McCrory: The opportunity and challenge I think is actually the same thing for this. It means we have more runway, but it also means we’re constantly adding new features that we constantly have to lens through our accessibility gates to make sure that everything new we’re doing still feels as accessible as the previous content. But, it also means I get to keep “cooking” after we ship and add more things.

For example, we didn’t ship with our blind navigation suite because we didn’t get it running in time for launch. But I had time and resources to do it after we shipped, and now we have auto-pin, audio navigation, and all these different things to allow players who are blind or low-sighted to progress through the story campaign.

Having that time is probably the most critical thing. Plus, we get to ship the game and then start getting player feedback. The amount of user research we can do prior to shipping is always going to be far less than what we get by just listening to the community after we’ve released. I’ve tried really hard to be very open and accessible from the community standpoint. I encourage them: “No, come hit me up. Reach out to me on social media. Send emails to accessibility@blizzard.com. Come and talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what your big sticking points are.” Then I’ll break everything down, and we’ll try to get everything scheduled. I couldn’t do that if we weren’t a live service game. The amount of work we’ve accomplished post-launch has been tremendous.

And I love it, too, because as I mentioned, my impassioned engineers – I’ve added a bunch of them to all the emails we receive. So they’re just seeing all the feedback come in, and they’ll say, “Oh yeah, well, you know what? That’ll only take me a couple of hours. Let me go in and fix that,” without me even having to ask them. It’s amazing. So, being a live service game allows us to refine what we thought was a good package, and then it gives us the resources to add more.

Antonio: One of those features that get constant updates is the screen reader is to keep up with new UI elements and menus, and it’s used by players for different reasons, including blindness or dyslexia. Are there plans to expand its utility by customizing which elements are read?

Drew McCrory: I am trying very hard to give players the ability to really pick and choose what they want. We just recently added a feature for players to say, “You know what, I don’t want the screen reader to read when players enter or exit the screen.” That was actually a big sticking point for players because it was interrupting reading tooltips, and our tooltips are not the shortest in the games industry. So, people were having to find areas in the world where no other players were, because if anybody ran on screen, it would interrupt their read. So I thought, “Well, okay, cool. Let’s just add a feature where players can opt out of reading player names as they enter.”

Again, as I was talking about earlier, I want to make sure that we’re just providing a lot of options for players, and then they can choose what options work for them. I’m hoping that we actually get more bells and whistles for really just kind of opting into what you want to read and what you don’t want to read. That way, players can build their customized screen reader to exactly what they want.

Antonio: Talking about changes and seasons in Diablo IV, the classes and builds are a big part of what makes it so adaptable and fun. There have been important balance and gameplay changes happening, like in Season 8 for example. Some may have an unexpected impact on the player experience from an accessibility perspective. Is the accessibility team part of these conversations? How relevant is player feedback on the Public Test Realm (PTR) to help with this?

Drew McCrory: We are involved with all of it. It’s always a give-and-take with us talking to the gameplay team and them talking to us. We’re trying to find a happy middle ground where we’re not stomping on all of their designs but ensuring that we’re not releasing stuff that is harmful to players.

I remember we had a Sorceress build, the Ball Lightning Sorceress, and I was trying to play that, but I would have to stop because it was basically just spamming two buttons over and over again. It would fatigue me so fast that it was causing me pain. I told them, “Guys, come on. We can’t have builds where that’s the play pattern.” Again, those are conversations we have with the class team, trying to figure out how to make sure we’re not building systems and designs that require a certain level of physicality to optimize them. I don’t think that’s the agency we’re asking players to have. We’re a stats and gear game, not a physical dexterity game.

Antonio: Looking at the accessibility journey since release to today, is there something that you would have liked to implement that hasn’t been possible yet?

Drew McCrory: The biggest thing I want that I haven’t managed to land yet is my audio navigation in dungeons. For audio navigation, we used the world nav mesh to handle all of that, but we don’t have the same nav mesh in dungeons. So far, I haven’t managed to get it to work there. We have a lot of low-vision players who are like 90% of the way there, but when they have to do things in dungeons, it’s still just bumping into walls until they get to where they want to go. I am very sad that I haven’t landed that yet, but it is still something we are cooking, and I’m desperately trying to get it in.

Antonio: Finally, how can people be part of this journey to keep opening the world of Sanctuary to even more players for many more years?

Drew McCrory: Players are already doing it. To this day, I still receive 30 to 50 emails a day at the accessibility@blizzard.com email address, with people talking to me about their experiences and things they’d like to see. Honestly, that feedback goes straight to me; there’s no filter. It lets me know what players are dealing with, and then I use that to create our backlog. All those things people are requesting just become the work I’m looking to do next season or the season after.

I am really proud of how much I’ve been allowed to work directly with the community. I want players to sculpt this with me. I have my personal needs, but I don’t have the needs of everybody else. So, I can make informed guesses and decisions about what features I think players need, but I want players to tell me directly, “Hey, this is what I need to play the game better.” “Awesome, I can do that!” You tell me where your rough patches are, and I will help fix them. That level of communication is exactly what they should be doing, because when I know what’s causing problems, me and my team will work our asses off to fix it and ensure we’re getting everybody in in a way that works for them.

Antonio: Awesome. Thank you for your time today, Drew. The passionate work that you and all the team at Blizzard have put into the game has been showing for the last two years, and I’m sure that it will keep going strong in the years to come.