https://in.ign.com/diablo-immortal/129811/news/update-blizzard-says-it-didnt-pull-any-announcements-from-bl

[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.

Now I have always liked Wyatt as a person but I’ve grown to dislike how he deals with technical design related topics as if all of us out there are clueless about some of those details.  Let me put this another way.  Blizzard has the resources and technical know how to create their own mobile version of Diablo (which they would have full control over unlike this project).  This partnership with NetEase is (despite what Cheng has said as having been in development for awhile) something much more recent with several different angles including tapping the mobile demographic.  It however comes across as something to help fill the void left by what could have been an aborted D4 announcement (after the surprise announcement of Torchlight Frontiers and it being an MMOARPG).  Secondly, it provides immediate access to the Chinese game market which right now, has a roadblock in place with approving new games from outside the country.

Basically, it’s a win-win on the business side of the equation for the two companies.  NetEase being Blizzard’s publishing partner for China will have a major say in how this is monetized in China.  Blizzard will control their monetization for their primary regions (Americas, Asia, Europe).  I am sure Blizzard is going to try to pressure NetEase to not go full on P2W in China so as to not mar the Diablo name.  Unfortunately, Chinese mobile players don’t think much of NetEase as it is because of all the tactics they’ve used there when it comes to how the P2W manifests itself.  NetEase is naturally going to prefer this being totally F2P with micro transactions in China.  And since they are the ones primarily coding the game, it will be easier for them if there isn’t a lot of deviation for the design when deployed elsewhere.

At this point, there is no use with continuing to postulate or venting out endless verbiage about this game because Blizzard sees nothing wrong with how and where it was announced and believe the product will speak for itself when they launch it (probably next year while their PC and console players who are still playing D3, will go another couple of months without any new content since the Necromancer was released in June 2017).  This content drought with the franchise is something they seem oblivious to which again, speaks to how out of touch they have been with their own community.

P.S. Maybe “Happy Reaper” (their 2014 April Fool’s joke) would’ve actually been a huge mobile seller if Blizzard actually made it….

— 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.

These are as of 5:45PM Pacific.  Again, I felt that the cinematic itself was well done but I realize people are expressing their dissatisfaction with this mobile title.

I made a short posting on the official forums in a thread where someone mentioned that this is exactly what “all” Activision Blizzard investors care about.  And I had to set the record straight that even though I am an investor in ATVI myself, I’m also not one who believes that a company should only care about revenue growth/profits at the expense of everything else.  The day that executives only care about those numbers is the day they mortgage the future longterm viability of their own company (it just takes time for things to manifest itself).

Seeing the reaction of dislikes on these two videos is something that Blizzard executives shouldn’t take lightly because as I noted, this will have a detrimental domino effect on goodwill.  As I have mentioned many times in the past on this blog, I went from someone who was a “guaranteed sale of Blizzard’s franchises that I was interested in” to non-customer/non-player that no longer has much feeling left for this company or its iconic franchises.  Blizzard will have their work cut out to even half-convince me that I should spend money on this drek, a Diablo II re-master, or “Diablo 4” (where this one attempts to at least be more ARPG like even if the direction does shift to something similar to what Torchlight Frontiers has aimed for).

UPDATE: I spent some time looking at Reddit as well as other gaming sites and the overall reaction is just not very positive at all.  The general gist echoes my own past thoughts about how Blizzard’s designers/dev teams have had this arrogant tendency to “believe they know what is right or what it is that the players want” (and being too out of touch) which is not the design objective with ARPG’s (which is what this entire blog ended up devolving into when it came to D3) where the game designers are determining the best builds or game play styles.

I’m afraid that if they follow the same patronizing tactics which they used with Diablo III (not really listening to the feedback), they will end up alienating a lot more of even their most dedicated Diablo fans (which are those folks who have stuck with the game over the past few years).  That is not the sort of loyal customers you want to give up even though there may be other untapped ones (those folks aren’t as “sticky” due to that exact lack of history with Blizzard or the franchise).

With that said, given there are still a few senior/leads on Team 3 (the exact ones which I had mentioned in the past who I don’t even want to see near “Diablo 4”) that have been around since Jay Wilson was the game director, my feeling is that they will remain tone deaf and proceed with this project (especially if once again, there is a higher level executive directive to make it happen just like the Real Money Auction House experiment).  I guess the ball is in Blizzard’s court on this one.

Blizzard announced a completely new mobile MMOARPG game in the Diablo franchise; Diablo: Immortal at BlizzCon 2018 this morning.  The game takes place in between the ending of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction and the beginning of Diablo III.

Blizzard is collaborating with their Chinese partner NetEase (which publishes their titles in China) to develop the game.  NetEase of course has several years of MMO (Revelation Online) and mobile gaming development behind them and will be using that knowledge and expertise to bring the Diablo game play experience to mobile devices (Android and iOS).