Blizzard Entertainment’s long-awaited Diablo announcement at BlizzCon 2018 was expected to garner an overwhelming reaction. Diablo Immortal – which is an MMO action RPG from NetEase Games that’s heading to iOS and Android – received just that, but leaning far more towards the negative side. That Blizzard didn’t announce anything else aside from the mobile title also rubbed fans the wrong way.
Speaking to Kotaku, Blizzard executive producer and co-founder Allen Adham said the company was expecting backlash, though “not to this degree.” As Adham notes, “We know our audience here is passionately PC- and console-focused. We’ve also seen this before. We saw a similar response when we announced that we were bringing Diablo to console, and we saw a similar response to the announcement of Hearthstone.”
The real question then is: What about the major sequel that’s meant to follow Diablo 3? Adham said, “That being said, we knew our audience here desperately wants to see and hear about one thing in particular.” That’s why the preemptive blog post before the convention, asking fans not to get their hopes up too high, was posted. Despite this, the reaction to Diablo Immortal reflects a community scorned.
That being said, Adham maintained that game quality mattered more than timing when it came to announcing a new release. “At Blizzard, we don’t announce things until we’re ready. It’s all about game quality, less about timing, all about delivering an overwhelming experience to our players. We tried to get ahead of that a little bit with the blog post to let that group know that we are working on multiple things and continue to work on multiple things. But it’s pretty clear that their incredible passion for Diablo manifests in interesting ways.”
Regardless of how fans feel about Diablo Immortal, it’s pretty obvious that there are things waiting in the wings. Unfortunately, it may be another year until we hear about them, at the very least.