Sebastian Stępień

Sebastian Stępień

Sebastian Stępień is the creative director for Diablo IV. He previously worked on The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077.

Stępień was recruited by Blizzard Entertainment in 2019 to work on the story for Diablo IV. According to employees speaking under anonymity, Stępień's revisions to the script were a source of controversy. In meetings held with Stępień, employees faced various setbacks, which delayed the story’s development for months, according to five current and former employees. Although Stępień had held a creative director title before, his background was more in cinematic directing than in game mechanics, and he approached Diablo IV from the perspective of taking the entire game and rewriting it himself. In 2019, many Blizzard employees were disgusted by a version of the game's script that repeatedly mentioned the rape of a love interest and referred to this female character as the raped woman as her primary description. Stępień had spent months working on this script, penning it in Polish and having a translator change it to English, according to several employees. Employees pleaded with leadership to revise his version of the story, saying rape had no place in a Blizzard game. Many expressed discomfort with the idea of adding rape to the game in what they considered to be an effort to make Diablo IV feel grittier and tonally darker than the previous game, rather than engaging with the subject in a sensitive way. The "rape version," as multiple employees called the script, was ultimately overhauled in the same year, and the female character was cut from the story. Stępień refused to give comment on the issue when asked in 2022.