With a reputation for being a closer, Rod Fergusson helped get the last troubled BioShock game out the door. Can he do it again? Bloomberg reports the outgoing head of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard will join 2K Games’ struggling Cloud Chamber studio as BioShock 4 development stalls and layoffs hit the Montreal-based team.
Fergusson announced earlier this month he was leaving Blizzard after five years, having joined just prior to the launch of Diablo 4 and before Microsoft, his old employer, purchased Activision Blizzard. He was similarly brought in to help ship BioShock Infinite which suffered multiple delays under a chaotic development process led by series creator Ken Levine at Irrational Games over a decade ago.
Not long after it launched, Levine left Irrational and parent publisher 2K Games announced it was shutting the entire studio down. Years later, it revealed a new studio in Canada called Cloud Chamber would be making BioShock 4 while Levine worked on Judas, a very BioShock-looking sci-fi immersive sim, at his Ghost Story Games startup. Despite both being revealed a while ago, both projects are still MIA.
Bloomberg reported earlier this month that BioShock 4 had suffered a setback and leadership change after a recent negative internal review. It now reports that some one the team will be laid off, though Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick claims the game won’t be canceled. “It’s going to come out,” he said in a recent interview. “That I can say hand on heart, without question.”
Fergusson, a long-time producer, is a known hater of the phrase “it’s ready when it’s ready.” “It takes the agency away from the team,” he told Polygon last year. “Saying ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ means the team doesn’t have control over what they’re building. Mind, I’m giving you one person’s philosophy. But you control the scope. You control the schedule. You control a bunch of things. The idea that the game has to reveal itself somehow, with some unknown amount of content…I just find ‘it’s ready when it’s ready’ to be so passive.”