And it’s the usual end-around sort of carefully crafted PR reply that tells me they are going to maintain the course (completely missing the point of the negative reactions in the first place). Cheng never directly addressed the question about this being a sort of re-skin (given the number of mobile titles which NetEase has turned out that were pretty much that). Sure, he isn’t lying when they say they are working close together; they are going to tweak the graphics and game play but it’s not like the entire underlying foundation was created from scratch.
Blizzard’s decade long relationship with NetEase is one that has more to do with the publishing end due to the Chinese government (foreign enterprises like Blizzard cannot directly operate their own server farm and have to work with a government approved one like NetEase). An actual design and development partnership like this is completely different where Blizzard really hasn’t had a long history with NetEase. And that is one component of what upsets players; Blizzard not performing the work completely in-house.
The point is also being missed about mobile. No one is denying the compute/graphics capabilities of todays smartphones, yet Cheng spent way too much time espousing about how they are gamers and play a wide variety of games on these different devices. Well so do I (so I have my own opinions here as well). Some games are perfect for mobile while others less so. There are only so many ways you can do touch input which is why many developers copied the Heroes of Incredible Tales combat system for mobile RPG’s. The effective limiter is form factor size of smartphones (and to a lesser degree, tablets) where your fingers are going to be obscuring part of the display.
The high resolution of the screens are primarily related to pixel density which allows graphics and text to appear sharper/detailed; if it were about actual display resolution and using that real estate to display more of the screen (ala PC displays), everything would be small. So text and graphics needs to be scaled accordingly to be readable and to provide a large enough target for tapping/manipulation.
For an action combat style game like Diablo (as well as many other mobile MMORPG’s), that touch based combat is always a limiting factor with providing actual visceral/tactile feedback. Part of that also helped to drive systems like auto-combat and auto-questing (it’s not known if Diablo: Immortal will have this). Diablo has its roots with actual physical I/O (keyboard and mouse, gamepad controller) which is another reason for the negative reaction. Again, I fully understand the ulterior motive of capturing an untapped demographic (primarily mobile device users which in many Asian countries, outnumbers PC/console players). The problem is that Blizzard South (aka Irvine) has used the franchise as a guinea pig with Diablo III where all of the issues associated with it along with the neglect (relative to the other Blizzard franchises), had reached a tipping point.
BlizzCon’s core demographic is primarily PC focused so it ended up being a completely tone deaf decision to market it as a keynote outro (while heading into the panel right after). And they should’ve known how neglected their player base has felt over the last 3 years with Diablo III (with an aborted 2nd expansion and no real news about the next PC Diablo game). The end result was the negative reaction. But as the interview above shows, they are going to stay the course (with the same arrogant “you think you know what you want” attitude). So in reality, very little has changed from when I stopped playing D3 back in 2015.
It is why I maintained that if some of these key folks ended up being senior/leads on the “Diablo 4” team, that nothing would change (because they would be bringing the same “have to control every aspect of the game play” mentality to that next version). Do I believe like some are stating that the franchise is dead? No, the franchise will live on but with fewer of us older dinosaurs around (that is really just the changing reality that sort of dove tails with the high level departures that have come over the last few years). Depending on business model, the revenue potential for Diablo: Immortal has a fairly high ceiling when you look at how much money some of these mobile titles pull in. It will bring a completely new demographic into the Blizzard fold and the Diablo franchise (at the expense of others who may feel this was the last straw).
As an ATVI shareholder, that potential should be making me feel giddy. It doesn’t though because I am a firm believer of not constantly disregarding the feedback of your community where it creates this level of animosity and the burning down of goodwill built up through many years. The corrosive effects of that takes years to manifest (it’s like big ships don’t turn around right away when the steering input is applied).
UPDATE: Polygon interview with Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham pretty much re-affirms they aren’t making any apologies for making this announcement (as the major Diablo announcement at what is currently their very PC-centric demographic at BlizzCon) and directly acknowledges the desire to attract the demographic of mostly mobile users. As I mentioned before, that is fine (targeting the mobile demographic). Additionally, it’s not like the player community doesn’t realize they are also working on the next PC version of the game (which they had to nip in the bud about nothing being announced at this time). What this still shows is how Blizzard is missing the point about how this has been building up over years. When the top level execs cannot simply acknowledge their fumbling on multiple occasions with this particular franchise, then it really is at a point where this whole thing will just have to run its course.
