https://gematsu.com/2018/08/multiple-diablo-projects-in-development-reveal-teased-for-later-in-2018
This falls in line with what I mentioned last year after BlizzCon 2017 where I guessed Blizzard would begin teasing the next major game in the franchise in the later half of this year. The teaser reveals that Blizzard marketing normally does will likely begin before the actual full reveal to build up the hype leading into BlizzCon 2018 (normally for existing franchises, Blizzard does not tend to make major announcements like that at BlizzCon).
As I noted in a recent entry, Wall Street analysts have already begun including “Diablo 4″ in their Q3 2019 (and thus, FY2019) estimates. Part of the above also will likely cover the announcement of the remaster of at least Diablo II (it could possibly cover the original Diablo given the reverse engineering of its code via the Devilution project on Github). If both of these projects are going to released closer towards the later half of 2019 or 2020, Blizzard could possibly announce some sort of DLC for Diablo III in order to tide players over (I believe they will do this only if they actually still have some stuff left over from the aborted (second) expansion).
I’m basing the above on all the job postings that have been happening since 2015 with most of those being related to the next major Diablo release as well as their classic games (of which the older Diablo titles will have significant challenges of being remastered).
I’ve already speculated about what the next version might be like in this previous post. As far as some sort of recurring revenue from the game, I was wrong in the past about the second expansion when I thought that they would also implement micro transactions with it once they released the Chinese version (which is free 2 play). They came to the conclusion that they would prefer to leave money on the table and release cosmetic items differently in the non-China regions (which they partially did via seasonal rewards).
D3 remains their only title that did not institute some sort of recurring revenue model; I’m not sure if they will change their stance on that because they really are leaving a lot of money on the table. Another thing that Blizzard has been pushing is eSports. This one is really a hot button issue because game systems designed heavily around RNG (which is core to ARPG systems and mechanics), are a balancing nightmare.
This leads all the way back to D3’s original PvP arena; Team Deathmatch. One of main reasons they ended up shelving it was philosophical; the issue was you didn’t actually play your own characters. They were predefined at the time of their demoing and the development ran into the exploding parts problem with trying to balance a players actual characters when those were brought into an arena PvP situation. And they never got around to solving that and ended up giving the game a simple dueling area instead where it was a one shot festival.
The designers could’ve simply come up with a compromise by normalizing gear back to a baseline but they ended up being adamant about not wanting to reduce the power that players were able to achieve from playing. Whether or the next Diablo game is designed to allow it to be leveraged for Blizzard’s eSport’s initiatives may come down to an auction house style decision; is implementing the needed designs good for Diablo style games? If there is a concerted effort to correct a lot of the mistakes with the design decisions behind D3 (bringing the franchise back to its actual ARPG/dungeon crawler/hack-n-slash roots), they may eschew eSport’s for the game. They eschewed revenues from implementing cosmetic micro transactions in D3 for the realms that existed prior to the launch of the Chinese version.
If anything, the company did take away some lessons from D3 where they will likely keep expectations in check this time around. What I do know is that once the game director and senior designers are known, a lot of folks are going to be looking over their backgrounds with a fine tooth comb (the company has managed to keep this group including the executive producer, sequestered rather well).
