Since I was producer on Diablo 2, a lot of people have been asking for my thoughts on the whole “Diablo Immortal” fiasco. I hate to say it, but what you are seeing is Blizzard not understanding gamers anymore.— Mark Kern (@Grummz) November 4, 2018
Actually, I would say it is more like Blizzard has been slowly losing touch with their own player communities (and that was more so with the Diablo franchise given that its chief principal game play designers were part of the separate Blizzard North studio). This blog (pre-November 2015) was pretty much “written diarrhea” about the D3 game designers (Team 3) operating in their own bubble (somewhat following the World of Warcraft teams thought process of “you [the player] think you know what you want but actually don’t” but to a greater extent where it has turned into trying to control the entire game play experience (not what you want to do with an ARPG).
I’m fine with designers performing that legwork and fleshing out those details; but there’s also a point where there needs to be a working process that is able to take the actual feedback, distill it, and make actual changes (compromises). If the feedback is full of noise (which is often the case), that is where communication is the key. And that has always been an issue with Team 3 (more so after the whole Jay Wilson thing with David Brevik and after former Blizzard community manager Micah “Bashiok” Whipple’s sarcastic “aren’t you thankful” comment which drew a lot of backlash) where internally, the player feedback was probably looked at as “toxic sludge”. To be fair, this is also not unique to Blizzard. It’s a game industry issue (lot of these folks have chips on their shoulders and believe everyone else doesn’t know what they are talking about).
So I believe we’re just at this stage where the internal changes at Blizzard will continue as some of their teams continue to operate in their bubble and push out products that while good, will also miss the mark with their core demographic. That’s why there were issues with Battle for Azeroth and this negative reaction to Diablo: Immortal (or more so, it being the major Diablo focus at BlizzCon with absolutely nothing new on the PC side; a theme dating back to BlizzCon 2015). This is Blizzard with all of their resources…. which as I mentioned before, compare to Echtra which was formed after Max Schaefer quietly left Runic in 2016, and managed to silently put together a team filled with so much ARPG braintrust, to then out of the blue, announce Torchlight Frontiers back in August. We already knew Blizzard has been working on this “unannounced Diablo project” based on job postings that began in 2015. It’s not like a small teaser wouldn’t have gone over poorly.
My point is that they haven’t managed expectations well at all. Normally there is a chain of command in that area starting with the executive producer and that is part of the problem. Blizzard is trying to keep those folks hidden from view (so we don’t know who the producer or even the new game director is). They are trying to handle all of this through community management and the results are what they are today (unfortunately) with the poor reception of this mobile version.
