Well, the aftermath from the Diablo Immortal mobile game announcement has been quite controversial to say the least. Many high end streamers are up in arms with their chats calling Blizzard out on the situation. For myself, I honestly didn’t care one way or another.
I can’t say that I was extremely disappointed in the lack of an expansion, Diablo 4 title, character DLC nor feature update to D3. The reality is that I wasn’t expecting anything beyond the formal announcement of the port to the Switch.
The Diablo Immortal announcement itself was more like a simple shrug from me. I’m not really into mobile games to start outside of two that I play very casually. I don’t even know if I’ll check this one out. Quite honestly, if I could ditch my mobile device, I would prefer even that just to not be connected at all to anything. That’s how invested I am into mobile anything outside of making money from being a developer in that area.
What is interesting to me about this is the aftermath from the announcement. It hasn’t been very good in terms of PR for Blizzard. I feel honestly pretty bad for Wyatt Cheng having met him on a few occasions. I find that he’s a genuine person with a real love for making games. I’m certain the decision to do the mobile wasn’t really his but he just had to be the person making the tough sign offs and announcements.
But the reality of this situation is that Blizzard just needs to own up to the fact that the community that showed up wasn’t happy and deserve their voices heard. Sometimes when you have incredibly invested people, they become extremely vocal when they see something they love fall to pieces.
I think the salt being rubbed into the wounds is that game was outsourced. It stunk of some executive decision, perhaps even from Activision, to get something out the door fast just to show at Blizzcon in order to satiate the appetites of the hardcore fans on top of getting their feet more into the whole mobile universe. Worse yet it was a Chinese game company doing this.
The thing is that gaming fans aren’t that dumb. They can smell a rat from a mile away. That’s what we’re seeing here. Listening to the talks didn’t sound like Blizzard; it sounded like the mind controlling mechanics being mandated from marketing/sales/lawyers from Activision.
For myself, the only real disappointment I have is that it seems that we won’t get anymore game updates to Diablo 3. While the game is in a reasonable condition on its own, I feel that there’s still a lot missing. They never really did anything more with followers, for instance. Also, there’s quite a few meaningless legendaries while certain skills probably will never see use ever again. The little seasonal events like double bounty caches and the little portrait just aren’t enough to draw me back in.
It feels like the team just got hacked apart and pulled onto other areas of the company while only a few people remain to keep the lights on. At this point, there’s really nothing left for me to do that challenges me the way I want. I could do something silly like create some hybrid build or LoN build, but I don’t feel there’s much of a point to do that.
On the other hand, the game engine is old and it probably has hit its limits on what one can do. I feel that I got my money’s worth out of the game and it’s good to move on. I just wish that they could do some feature updates like the ones I’ve suggested before.