Per IGN, Blizzard has since responded to the original article denying the announcement had been pulled.
[Original Entry]
https://kotaku.com/sources-blizzard-pulled-diablo-4-announcement-from-bli-1830232246
There have been times in the past where I called out past rumors about the second D3 expansion (even during the period prior to BlizzCon 2015 when I also firmly believed there would eventually be a 2nd one until they began releasing parts of what came from that aborted expansion including Kanai’s Cube). I am also not a fan of Kotaku and never will be (and kind of hate linking to them but there are times when it has to be done). But they’ve managed to build themselves up to where they do have sources even if they aren’t consider real journalism.
This one does sort of dovetail with what I’ve been hearing though (my sources are no where as good) and I normally don’t post details since I also know how some companies use planted information in order to weed out suspected leakers. Blizzard themselves are normally very good with keeping a lid on their projects (I mean people knew of Project Titan but had very little idea what it was when it came to concept).
But I had also firmly believed a “Diablo 4” announcement was slated for the 2nd half of this year and had mentioned that Blizzard was under immense pressure to meet deadlines for the game given that more Wall Street analysts were beginning to build revenue projection models for their clients based on a 2019 launch. Unlike in the past, Blizzard doesn’t really have that old luxury of “when it’s ready” because of how single tracked Wall Street is when it comes to guidance and future earnings projections.
The ramping up of some of the hype (before the mid-October message to throw ice water on expecting a big “D4” type of announcement) could have been just typical Blizzard to build up the BlizzCon buzz BUT what doesn’t make sense is the BlizzCon setup itself. Logistically speaking, plans like that are made months in advance and Diablo got the main stage (end of keynote announcement plus the first panel on that stage). Ahead of many major announcements, Blizzard marketing has this thing for teasing things (as was the case when Mephisto was being teased in the HTML for Heroes of the Storm when Blizzard was attending Gamescom. As it turned out, this was for the new Mephisto hero (that and the Project Mephisto thing that turned out to be a project name for a different game, had nothing to do with D4).
This lack of teaser material for D4 is why I ended up thinking they might use BlizzCon 2018 as the start of teasing that material (as opposed to a major announcement like Diablo III at the Worldwide Invitational in 2008). But that obviously didn’t happen and only got this mobile game announcement instead (where I also feel the partnership with NetEase, has these telltale marks of being negotiated fairly recently in order to fill space in an otherwise bare cupboard). As it turns out, Kotaku’s sources mention that was supposed to be the case with teasing D4 after the Diablo: Immortal announcement (the convention hall layout makes sense if that were the original plan).
Kotaku’s sources also mentions the game having undergone at least two different iterations already. That right there is what I was afraid of since there are a bunch of holdovers from Diablo III that have transitioned to D4 (and the same design instincts are going to create similar issues). Now iterations are customary in designing (whether it be a computer game, a hardware product, a business software, etc). Regardless, there is always a fundamental core design objective; in this case, it’s a Diablo game with all of its game systems and core logic. You can go in many directions; will be the same instanced co-operative multiplayer style game, more of a persistent open world/hub design, etc.
The problem with D3 in its early development was design iteration gone wild (fully fleshing out designs only to throw it away to start over from scratch). Many early designs were reminiscent of Diablo II but since one of main executive decisions was for D3 to reach a broader market, the game had to be easy to understand. So part of these iteration processes was to simplify and dumb down portions of the game (leading to this “on rails design” methodology which is also how the game ended up being laid out where as you level, your skills unlock). Later on, an executive decision was made to throw the RMAH into the mix; that (the security considerations) plus the desire for always online DRM nixed the previously planned single player offline mode (which would’ve worked similar to the one in StarCraft II where you can’t earn any achievements playing offline).
So even at this stage (3 years after the initial job postings for this project), the team seems to haven’t even reached a point where you can freeze the feature set to a level where you can’t even tease a small part of the game. Again, my sources are nowhere as good but part of what I was hearing had partly to do with Ecthra’s announcement of Torchlight Frontiers with it being an actual MMOARPG.
Even myself, I was looking at ways of dealing with a persistent open world and losing the whole random procedural generation and fog of war aspects. Echtra floated an idea of how they will be handling that with changing the game worlds layout at specific intervals while providing enough information to the player so that they can continue with their questing and not be completely lost. But it’s not just that; systems wise, the game is very well into the development phase including an entire housing (Fort) design. I do know that at least through to Mosqueira, the general line of thought was that Diablo would remain an instanced multiplayer game in order to keep truer to how an ARPG world presents itself (tileset randomization and fog of war as the basics). After that August announcement by Ecthra, there is that possibility that Team 3 looked at what they had and felt that it was well, underwhelming by comparison.
And even then, ARPG design has never been Blizzard South’s forte (and this is probably still a struggle where the desire to define and control the players best route, is still being thrown into the mix). So yes, Kotaku’s sources at least in this case seem to be closer to the truth with Blizzard making a last minute change in plans to tease D4 at BlizzCon (where indeed, the entire reaction would’ve been completely different).
P.S. – And with this post (unless there is something really newsworthy), I am done writing about this since it is taking me back to pre-2016 where I wasted way too much time on writing about a game that has a design team that is essentially out of touch with their playerbase and are going to do what they want to do.
