Diablo Immortal reaction puts Blizzard on back foot at Blizzcon
The developer spent much of its two day annual celebration firefighting - then fighting back
WHEN Blizzard revealed that the next game in its storied Diablo franchise was going to be mobile game co-developed with China's NetEase, many fans made their displeasure clear.
Despite the fact that the developer had made it clear before its annual Blizzcon fan event that it was not going to be revealing Diablo IV, the next major iteration in the 22-year-old franchise and would be revealing a side project instead, it seems many had hoped for something more aligned with the firm's PC gaming heritage.
Dislikes stacked up on YouTube videos for the announcement in the hundreds of thousands, and the project's director was forced to fend off a suggestion the launch was an "out of season April Fool's joke" by on disgruntled fan during the Q&A immediately after the announcement.
Talking to Sun Online, Blizzard's new President J Allen Brack revealed that Blizzard and NetEase, a Chinese developer and publisher specialising in mobile and online games with whom Blizzard has partnered for a decade to get their games into the Chinese market, for "over a year", and that the reveal had been planned as the "cornerstone" for Blizzcon's opening ceremony for the past six months.
Explaining the decision to split the development, Brack said: "We've had a partnership with NetEase for coming up to ten years now, and we partnered with NetEase because we felt they were similar company with a similar spirit."
"They have a very strong development culture, and we saw our worlds as being very compatible."
What is Diablo Immortal?
DIABLO Immortal is new game in the Diablo universe, set between Diablo II: Lord of Destruction and Diablo III.
It is a smartphone game with touchscreen controls, co-developed by China's NetEase and Blizzard Entertainment.
It looks and plays very much like a traditional Diablo game, from what little we have seen of it so far.
It is a massively-multiplayer game, so you will encounter other players out in the world as you progress through the story.
It contains dungeons which players can attempt either on their own, or in groups of up to four.
The player moves a character, which can be one of several distinct classes, around the screen with a virtual joypad, and taps the screen to activate skills.
There is no resource-management in the game for those skills; they are just limited by having a cool-down period after use before they can be used again.
Players move through dungeons and open areas, using those skills to slay monsters and find new items to upgrade their characters.
The classes and monsters all looked very similar to those encountered in Diablo 3, though in different arrangements.
Full inventory and character customisation options have been promised, but were not in the demo of the game being shown off at Blizzcon.
Matthew Berger, one of Blizzard's senior designers on the project, revealed to Sun Online that there was one joint team developing the game comprising both Blizzard employees in Anaheim and NetEase developers in China.
Berger also insisted that Diablo Immortal, which had been criticised for over-simplifying gameplay to fit with NetEase's touch-screen interface, was "pushing the envelope" in terms of gameplay in a way that would feed back into the main Diablo franchise, emphasising the addition of verticality, as shown in the gameplay video after the announcement.
Addressing the critics, Berger said: "We all know how passionate Diablo fans are." He also re-iterated the team's desire to get those people criticising the game actually playing it, thinking it would bring them around.
He also insisted that Diablo Immortal "is not restricting the world [of Diablo] -- it's expanding it. It's going to make all the other Diablo projects underway better. That's just the way it is."
Speaking the crowds near the end of the event, Diablo Immortal director Wyatt Cheng once again re-iterated that Blizzard had "several" other Diablo projects in the works, that that the joint Blizzard / NetEase team was separate from those to make it clear that the development wasn't slowing down that of any other Diablo games.
Diablo Eternal is out for smartphones next year. It has not been revealed whether it will be a free-to-start game funded by microtransactions and loot-box-like content, as NetEase's other games are, or funded in some other way.
MOST READ IN GAMING
While precise hardware specs haven't been revealed, Berger revealed that the plan is for it to be available as widely as possible across Android and iOS and that it would not be following the Fortnite model of only being available on top-tier handsets.
You can for a chance to play early demos of the game, and get in-game bonuses in other Blizzard titles.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4368 . We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.