The reveal of Diablo Immortal during yesterday's BlizzCon 2018 opening ceremony has been negatively received by much of the hardcore Diablo fanbase, with the game's cinematic reveal trailer currently sporting a dislike-to like-ratio of 277,000 to 8,900.
Now, in various interviews, Blizzard is beginning to respond. In a new interview with Polygon, Blizzard co-founder and executive producer Allen Adham stresses to fans that Diablo Immortal is just a part of Blizzard's future plans for Diablo, confirming that there are multiple unannounced Diablo projects in development.
“We have said that we have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple Diablo projects and that remains true, even after releasing [Diablo 3 for Nintendo] Switch and announcing Diablo Immortal,” Adham said. “We still have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple unannounced Diablo projects. Diablo is a tentpole franchise for us. And it always will be. We love it. We hope our fans understand what we’re saying when we say that.”
In regards to how the reveal was handled, Adham said many discussions were had about how to best reveal the game.
“We’ve had many conversations — and I’m sure we’ll have many more actually in the aftermath of this — about the strategy of weaving mobile gaming into our BlizzCon audience, which is a very passionate desktop PC and console audience. We had a fairly similar reaction when we announced Hearthstone; if you think back to the Hearthstone announcement at Gamescom our audience at the time, [fans were] a bit unsure of what to expect from a digital card game given our history of making other game types. But then if you look at our history, part of what we do at Blizzard over many years is make different games and different genres, one after another on different platforms. So we’ve done this for a long time, and it usually starts with a little bit of sort of uncertainty and then we win [over] our community over time.”
Speaking with IGN, Blizzard's Wyatt Cheng gave his own response to the negative reception of Diablo Immortal.
“I don’t think mobile should be a dirty word,” Cheng said, explaining that the developers at Blizzard play and enjoy games on all platforms. “When it came to looking at making a new Diablo game, and this opportunity to partner with NetEase to make this – the technology is there, where our mobile phones are more powerful than ever, and they’re capable of top tier gaming experiences.”
Answering a question about fan accusations of Diablo Immortal being a reskinned version of a previously released NetEase game, Cheng had this to say:
“We’ve been working with NetEase Games from the beginning as a partnership to create everything in Diablo: Immortal. We have artists on our side, they have artists on their side, and we work together as a team, as a partnership to create everything about Diablo: Immortal. The environments, the characters, the skills, the story.”
Be sure to read the full stories at IGN and Polygon. We will have our own interview with members of the Diablo team coming shortly, so check back soon.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018So Announce Diablo 4. Stop treating this like Voldemort and say the god damn words. You don't even need a release date, or gameplay. Talk to the community and work with us to build something that this franchise so badly needs.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018Mobile is for puzzle games and idle games. All action games on mobile suck.. hard. Console releases for diablo were a monstrous failure. I have tried diablo on console. It has thee worst interface imaginable for a game that it is. The auto aim in the game also makes many builds not viable. It is impossible to properly play a ray of frost, desintagrate, or torrent build on console without the game forcing your shots to go to something your not aiming at. The kicker? You cant turn auto aim off. This is going to be a total flop and I hope activision will step back and let blizzard do what blizzard does. Wyatt Cheng is the new Jay Wilson
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Posted Nov 3, 2018For funsies I also want to drop this here:
https://www.change.org/p/supporters-of-the-diablo-franchise-and-the-spirit-of-what-blizzard-used-to-stand-for-cancel-diablo-immortal-553cc916-8917-4277-b839-9bba07492a8e/w?source_location=psf_petitions
Its astounding how many people have signed on this in the last 24 hours.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018The problem with this response by saying “We have said that we have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple Diablo projects and that remains true, even after releasing [Diablo 3 for Nintendo] Switch and announcing Diablo Immortal,” is that nothing besides Diablo Immortal was mentioned. What do they expect from people who are tired of the same stuff over and over again? No new sets in the last 2 seasonal resets, just tweaked armor. No new class / classes, no new items, no new dungeons, no new anything besides seasonal themes. The team is working on new things? Cool, what can we expect? When can we expect them? What are you going to do to show the fans that the game we love is going forward and making great changes? WoW's team got it done right, even though it takes awhile. There's always something new to look forward to. Diablo's team is just throwing anything they can thinking fans are going to accept it. The biggest changes to Diablo is that it went from console a long time ago, to PC, back to console and now they're trying mobile phones.. The team needs to at least acknowledge that fans want something they've been asking for a long time so they can properly address what their plans are. Not give us a mobile game that we should enjoy. I also think one of the worst things they did during the Q&A was someone on the panel said something regarding people having phones as if mobile gaming is where we all should be leaning towards. Just plain stupidity..
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Posted Nov 3, 2018Honestly, the best thing they should have done, was "Now I know a lot of you are here expecting a big Diablo reveal, while we don't have anything major to show today, these are a few of the projects we are working on" *cut to some titles* "however we do have one thing to share that will bring Diablo into the mobile age" *cut to trailer of immortal*
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Posted Nov 3, 2018"multiple projects in the works"
And why should we have any faith in those "projects"? You missed the ball so hard I don't even want to think about what else you might be cooking up.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018Hearthstone is like Solitaire. Its cards, it works on phones!
Diablo is about PC-gaming, at minor occations, on next gen consoles.
They could announce the other projects first and continued with a "oh, by the way. We also have Diablo Immortal on phones for you guys that can afford state-of-the-art phones that can handle this game for when you are taking 5 minute break at work or before you are falling asleep in bed".
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Posted Nov 3, 2018Did Allen Adham just say that "Diablo is a tentpole franchise for us. And it always will be" is he serious ? does he even know what tentpole mean or is he joking?
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Posted Nov 3, 2018ITT: PR Spin
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Posted Nov 3, 2018What do you mean? It's 10k likes against 220k dislikes. The comment section is fun as hell too.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018It was over 314K, then dropped to 210K or so in the last few hours.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018You have to wonder why they can't tell us what these unannounced projects are. We all know it's either D4, extra D3 stuff or D2 remastered. Hell it could be all 3. It's not like it's going to be anything else... oh wait, Diablo Immortal.
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Posted Nov 3, 2018You can rest easy that none of these unannounced projects are D3 related. D3 is now in their "classic games" division and won't see any big updates.
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Posted Nov 4, 2018can confirm that it was over 300k when I went to sleep. Now it's already down to 130k.
kinda pathetic.
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Posted Nov 5, 2018I respectfully have to disagree on your assertion that the console releases are a failure. I'm a former PC gamer, played everything from WoW, to WCIII to D2 and D3 and I can without a doubt say that playing D3 on my Xbox is my absolute favorite way to play. Am I going to push the leader boards, no, but am I going to have a hell of a lot of fun playing, Yes! The couch coop alone is worth the price of admission. Anyway that's my opinion... All that said I'm not onboard with this mobile thing...