Hey, Diablo III. Happy Switch launch day. Happy Diablo Immortal day! (So much for that animated series rumor?) As announced during the BlizzCon opening ceremony, the Diablo franchise is getting a new entry – a “full-fledged action RPG you can play everywhere with everyone.” Yes, it’s a mobile game, it’s being built by Blizzard and NetEase, and the demo is playable right now at BlizzCon.
Worth noting is that the press release calls it a “mobile massively multiplayer online action–role-playing game.” It is NOT coming to PC, but Blizzard says it’s a “true Diablo experience,” not an April Fool’s joke (the crowd cheered when the player asked this). They’re not sure there will be a “hardcore” mode.
“Six iconic and highly customizable Diablo character classes will be available in Diablo Immortal—Barbarian, Crusader, Demon Hunter, Monk, Necromancer, and Wizard—each with new powers and abilities, with more playable classes planned for future updates. Designed to be a living, breathing, and constantly evolving experience, Diablo Immortal will regularly introduce new storylines, new playable character classes, new loot, and all-new challenges—which you can face side-by-side with your friends … or foolishly choose to confront on your own.
Players will have many opportunities to meet and socialize with other demon slayers while wandering the wilds of Sanctuary, or while conducting less-dangerous business—like upgrading gear, crafting items, or forming groups before setting off on their next adventure—in the city of Westmarch, Diablo Immortal’s sprawling central hub.
In their quest to cleanse Sanctuary, players will embark on all manner of thrilling expeditions, including taking part in dynamic events across unique public zones, and hacking and slashing their way through instanced dungeons. From the peaceful town of Wortham to the ancient Library of Zoltun Kulle to the suffocating jungle island of Bilefen, players will explore familiar vistas and until-now undiscovered corners of Sanctuary.”
Lorewise, the game takes place between the end of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction and the beginning of Diablo III. Preregistration is live on the official site right now, and you can check out the cinematic trailer and gameplay trailer too!
Map Preview Art: pic.twitter.com/AxMnk83DPU
— Diablo (@Diablo) November 2, 2018
While I personally will be playing this, they went about the whole announcement and all entirely the wrong way. They made fans think there was some huge Diablo news coming out at Blizzcon. I don’t know how they thought this was going to go over as well received.
There were other ways they could have announced this and had this title happen without such huge fan letdown happening. This was a pretty clueless way to do it.
I’m trying to think of how a game company could be so disconnected that they thought this was going to go over well. They made the entire thing so very much worse the way they did it.
It’s sad, but this video captures most of how I feel MMORPG companies in general have approached MMORPG development for the last 12+ years.
It’s like all they’ve been interested in making is the equivalent of the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie directed by Courtney Solomon and what I want is the Lord of the Rings movies directed by Peter Jackson.
Some folks are great Dungeon Masters and allow players to explore all facets of being in a fantasy world. Others think the only thing that matters is throwing a bunch or monsters and treasure and calling it a day. The MMORPG development world has pretty much only had the latter after 2005ish. Anything that has tried the former has been crowd funded and badly financed and thus produced.
That’s one hilarious video. It’s funny most of the way through – until you’re almost done with the video and it starts to sink in that this is all actually very true… The hilariousness turns to a feeling of dread and sadness.
Couldn’t care less. /zzz
But to end this comment on a high note: we’ll get a new Spiderweb RPG next year!
I don’t play mobile games anymore on my smartphone but looking at some numbers (published by Apple/Google) plenty of other people do, so it’s not surprising Blizzard decided to go with mobile game, which will have mandatory “pay to progress faster” content and which will be made by third-party Asian company (for a pretty obvious reasons).
As for fans who are “outraged” – put your “outrage” into something more productive, people. Large corporations like Blizzard or EA don’t actually care about your silly video downvotes or anything you might type on Reddit or other less popular forums, all they care about is game orders and pre-orders. So vote with your wallets and spend your money on different games by different company.
They don’t care so much that they delete comments on youtube and upload new videos to try and reset the downvote counter… nop they don’t care one bit :D
Just like they didn’t care when they closed down Nostalrius and more or less got forced by the fans into making a vanilla server.
Seems they re-uploaded the video in hopes of resetting the dislike counter.
Looks like it’s backfiring, 300 likes to 15k dislikes at the time of my post.
65k Dislikes now, lol.
263K dislikes right now…
It’s back to 35k dislikes again. I guess they re-uploaded it yet again since then.
73k dislikes to 593 likes. Reposting it is just going to make people dislike it out of spite for attempting to hide the reaction.
Thanks for posting that, I just went to that video on youtube & did my part :)
Heh. Witch Doctor was far and away my favorite class in D3. Yes, really.
Also: Tyrael gave his life to destroy the Worldstone? Diablo himself is active in the period between 2 and 3? Who needs consistent lore? Not that surprising really since 3 told me that in the original game it was a previously unmentioned son of Leoric who defeated Diablo. The hell it was! I was the one kicked his ass, not Prince Adriahumper.
Hell I would have taken my joke of Diablo Battle Royale over this.
well. I won’t be playing it on mobile, but I did buy it for Switch today…
Well, at least Hellgate: London is alive and well and unlocked on Steam in 2 weeks.
https://clips.twitch.tv/ThankfulMistySquirrelNotATK
Hahaha oh man, folks are dragging this announcement so hard. So much delicious schadenfreude going on.
I think the fact that the company they went with (netease) is notorious for just reskinning the same game, relabeling it, and pushing it to market will hurt them more in the end that the fact that its a mobile game.
The least Blizz could have done is program it IN HOUSE themselves.
I agree, but aside from it coming from a different company, it isn’t like there aren’t sequels that bombed and would have been better if they just reskinned an earlier game in the series.
The difference being… for those other sequels that bombed, many times they still TRIED to do well.
Outsourcing like this to an asian prolific reskin company is not trying at ALL.
I’m actually a bit surprised they aren’t. I believe they had a number of mobile hires related to Diablo over the years which is why folks have been expecting this.