This year’s Blizzcon saw a lot of excitement with the announcement of the next installment in the beloved multiplayer franchise, Diablo 4. It’ll be long wait for that one, however, but one that managed to garner a lot of hype all the same. It was a very different story last year when Diablo Immortal was unveiled to a very cold reception. But the game is still coming, and it doesn’t want to be overshadowed by its console and PC big brother.
In an interview with GamesBeat, Lead Game Designer Wyatt Cheng said that they wanted Immortal to stand on its own. While there will be similarities obviously, and there will be shared material between them, too, it won’t be influenced much by Diablo 4 with each game aiming to do their own thing catered to their own strengths.
“The Diablo IV team is straight down the hall,” said Cheng. “We bump into each other in the break room all the time. There’s definitely this shared understanding that we’re working on the same universe. But we also make the best decisions that we can for our game. My responsibility is to make sure that Diablo: Immortal is as fun as it can be. Sometimes that involves doing something that’s actually very similar to what Diablo IV is doing, and sometimes it involves doing something different. We don’t go out of our way to be the same or different. We just make the best decisions we can for our game. I’ll bounce ideas off of them, if I’m working on a problem, and they’ll give me their feedback. Then we’ll make decisions for our game.”
Diablo Immortal will launch at some point in the near future for mobile devices. Like Diablo 4, it has no set date or time frame. Maybe with a new mainline game on the way, people will have warmed up to whatever the game will be by the time it does release.