Shortly after the announcement of the terribly received mobile game “Diablo Immortal”, Activision/Blizzard devised a plan to port the game to expand its potential player base and bandage the deep wounds they’ve been inflicted by the fans on April Fools day of this year. In an interview with Wyatt Cheng, supposed Game Designer for Blizzard, his confidence that “The port of the new entry to the Diablo canon will feature everything fans loved from the previous entries”, and that “Nobody should be alarmed, as the game really has been made from scratch this time”. He insisted a lot on that last point.
Diablo Immortal on mobile systems.
The new mobile game was rumored to be a reskin of one of NetEase’s many cash grab asset flipping games, despite Activision/Blizzard being a triple A publisher, who have time and time again shown the gaming industry how to properly advertise and release a game.
Yesterday, 3 days after the initial announcement of Diablo Immortal, Wyatt announced the port of the upcoming game by pulling back the curtains, revealing a huge statue of a demon, presumably Diablo, dominating the stage. Except it wasn’t a statue of the iconic character: it was Diablo himself, walking forward and decimating the front seats of the theater. Various monsters were then spotted outside of the building where the announcement was made, terrorizing citizens around the city as they spread out. Wyatt shouted to the stage, trying to out-scream the wails of terror and pain, that Diablo Immortal was ported to Planet Earth, a first in the video gaming scene.
Outside the theater, moments after the port was announced and released.
It didn’t take long before Diablo fans on Twitter analyzed the situation. Hours after the announcement of the game, they called out on Blizzard for making the port of Diablo Immortal a reskin of Christianity’s version of “Apocalypse”, a Pay to Win game where your chances to enter the rankings (called “Heaven”) were increased by buying secondary currency (named “Faith”) via microtransactions, and that the monsters were just demons from hell with cardboard suits, making them look like Diablo monsters. Diablo himself looked a bit more like Thanos, although the devs proclaim that it is an intentional creative decision inspired by Disney.
Wyatt quickly responded to his accusators’ claims: “Don’t you gamers have a life?”. Unlike when the mobile version got revealed, he did not get booed, probably because everyone in the theater was occupied with not dying at that moment.
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