While not specifically mentioning “Diablo 4”, Blizzard has decided once again (like last year) to throw ice water onto the burning hells by tacitly stating “we won’t be ready to announce all of our projects”. This again is not something Blizzard marketing likes to do (more so this year when Diablo was given the main stage for BlizzCon even if it were to be just the start of the teaser material that they normally like to do before the actual major announcement).
Last years preemption came several weeks earlier though compared to the above (that is just 2 weeks prior to the convention) which reading between the lines, could mean production blocking (like say cinematic not being ready or being up to par). The more cynical part of me is that they knew earlier, but (the bean counters) decided to embargo this news until all the pre-BlizzCon virtual ticket info has been put out in order to cash in on some of the expectations (which unlike past years, wasn’t wholly out of the question).
To put this into perspective, Blizzard began announcing job positions for this “unannounced Diablo project” in 2015. It’s not like there hasn’t been any work done while these positions were being advertised over the past 3 years. Echtra Games’ Max Schaefer left Runic in 2016 to form that studio and managed to put together a team by sucking up a lot of ARPG brain trust in the process (all of this without much fanfare or even inklings of what he was up to) where they announced Torchlight Frontiers in August 2018 (which is fairly deep into development and will be available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One in 2019).
This isn’t a Diablo III scenario again where back then, you had the Blizzard North principles leaving, the eventual shuttering of the Blizzard North studio, the entire Diablo franchise put into limbo for awhile as Blizzard worked on StarCraft II along with the new Battle.net, then a whole new Diablo III team (led by an RTS game designer) who had to figure out how to bring the franchise into the future and then, scrapping several design iterations in the process. Additionally, Blizzard now has an actual production pipeline in place for modeling, animations, and visual effects alongside their own custom physics engine.
They control the moving parts and have the budget and engineering resources to rapidly prototype stuff. What I don’t deny is the potential “lack of vision” regarding what a Diablo game should be like from a Blizzard South (Irvine) perspective since the company has always lacked designers who had a good sense for rogue-like, ARPG style games (core philosophical differences which is why Diablo III turned out the way it did and why Reaper of Souls was merely a bandaid on top of core design flaws).
But getting a peek at Torchlight Frontiers may have given them pause as to the designs that they had gone with. I already know that whatever the next “Diablo 4” game is called, it will be visually stunning. But what about the actual game play itself and how much of it will return to its actual ARPG roots? Echtra has shown their hand with how they plan to implement ARPG designs onto an MMO foundation (what they are calling shared worlds) and how they are going to deal with open world randomization/fog of war while incorporating more MMO design elements into the character progression system (using gear level) and scrapping the visual notion of character levels (an abstraction anyway) in the process.
I pretty much understand why Echtra is trying to call it a shared world instead of an MMO because even myself, my initial concern was how the game would be monetized given that it will be published by Perfect Worlds. But I look at how Torchlight I and II weren’t nickel and dimed with extra DLC once Runic Games was acquired by Perfect World (and remained B2P). Torchlight Frontiers will likely also be B2P and Schaefer must have had a good working relationship with Perfect Worlds while he was at Runic in order to tap them again for investment along with the publishing rights.
Digressing back to the prior paragraph, I’m also not saying that Blizzard is making wholesale design changes as a result of Torchlight Frontiers; my point is more or less the marketing of the next title and just how large or small the shared world hubs will end up being since I still do believe they will make use of Brevik’s “Battle.net Town” idea that never made it into Diablo II.
If anything, this will be disappointing for Diablo fans who have stuck with D3 for these past few years, where they won’t even get a sneak peek of that next title when the game has the main stage this year.
