Rod Ferguson's move to Blizzard was not particularly well-timed. He left The Coalition in March as head of Diablo 4, shortly before COVID-19 hit, forcing the entire company to telecommute.

"I was in the office for eight days. I started work on Tuesday, and the following Thursday we all telecommuted," Ferguson said during the GDC Q&A livestream. [because] people who know me and have worked with me know that part of what makes me thrive and do well is being in the room with [people], talking to them, motivating them, trying to get them to understand, collaborating, and doing things like that. I found it really difficult to put one of my "superpowers" - pushing - behind a video screen."

Overall, however, telecommuting "has worked out very well," he says, with little loss of productivity; Blizzard allows employees to bring equipment and PCs home, provides "allowances" to cover Internet costs and other expenses, allows adequate downtime and rest periods and even sending "snack boxes" to employees to minimize disruption.

The efforts are paying off, says Ferguson: "Hearthstone has released two expansions, WoW is about to release an expansion, and when you see Hearthstone shipping two expansions and WoW about to ship an expansion, we at Diablo continue to challenge ourselves. So I really appreciate - if I'm going to do it, to be able to do it with Blizzard.

Unfortunately, this is all he said about "Diablo 4" and there are still no hints about a release date or anything else. For that, we'll have to wait until at least next year: at Activsion's quarterly earnings call earlier this week, Blizzard confirmed that a digital version of BlizzCon is in the works for early 2021.