After Diablo Immortal was announced at BlizzCon 2018, there was a storm of negative reactions to the game. The majority of players do not seem satisfied with the mobile game. Now Blizzard is making a statement.
What is the status? Diablo Immortal was announced as the only product for the popular Diablo franchise at BlizzCon 2018. After hopes were raised in the meantime that Diablo 4 could be coming, a pure mobile game as the only announcement was a harsh disappointment for fans.
The reactions were understandably upset, the official trailers received many more downvotes than upvotes.
There are more Diablo projects
The US site Polygon spoke with Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham and Production Director Dan Eggren about Diablo Immortal.
Diablo is one of the most important franchises: In his response, Allen Adham particularly mentioned that Diablo fans could expect even more. Diablo Immortal is not the only project:
We said that multiple Diablo teams are working on multiple Diablo projects, and that remains the case even after the release of Diablo 3 on the Switch and the announcement of Diablo Immortal.
We still have Diablo teams working on unannounced Diablo projects. Diablo is a cornerstone franchise for us. And it always will be. We love it. We hope our fans understand what we mean when we say that.
Diablo Immortal is part of development: The development of Diablo Immortal is a reaction to the change in gaming behavior. More and more people are playing on mobile devices.
“The world is evolving geographically and demographically,” Adham said. “For younger people, mobile devices are the primary gaming device. They are also the predominant devices used in many areas of the world, and it has always been our goal to deliver games to them.”
Adham continued: “We’ve been doing this for about three decades now and have made games for many different platforms during that time […] so for us, this is just a new platform.”
Eggren added: “Diablo Immortal was built from the ground up. Our intention from the very beginning was to create a Diablo experience for mobile. The feel, the interface, and everything about the game was built with the philosophy of making it the best possible experience for mobile platforms.”
How does Blizzard respond to the feedback? The reaction to the almost exclusively negative feedback is that Adham believes players will change their minds when they actually get to play it.
Adham:
I don’t think these comments are necessarily anything other than [the reactions] of a really passionate audience that desperately wants to see what it hopes for. We know that a broad audience around the world will love the title.
However, there have apparently been discussions about whether there were concerns beforehand. The team compared the introduction of Diablo Immortal with Hearthstone. Adham:
If you think back to the Hearthstone announcement at Gamescom and the audience at that time. Fans were uncertain what to expect from a digital card game, especially considering the types of games we had made up to that point.
But if you look at our history, it has been part of Blizzard for many years to make different games in various genres, one after the other for different platforms. We have been doing this for a long time, and it usually starts with a bit of uncertainty, but then we regain our community over time.
The reactions from the community are becoming increasingly intense. Some fans are already claiming that Diablo Immortal is a blatant copy.
