Which is borderline click bait I suppose.

This is an interesting one to me, where Wyatt Chang’s infamous “do you guys not have phones?!” in that the game is exactly what was expected.

It is a well-polished action rpg, built specifically for smartphones with an underlying gatcha mechanic. There are hundreds of these games available, have been for years. I’ve played a fair chunk and always uninstalled when I hit the pay wall. And further, as with the genre, it’s primarily a reskin of an existing game and re-use of assets from the Diablo franchise. There is nothing special about this game, if you look at it from the context of mobile games in the genre before it.

Where people seem to be taking issue is that this is against everything that the Diablo franchise stood for, as a shining pinnacle of the genre with a 1 time purchase and hundreds of hours of content. Agreed, but that was in 2013. The last Starcraft 2 DLC was 2015. Everything launched since has been either with lootboxes or a monthly fee or game-store supported. Blizzard barely held the line with some level of integrity while Morhaime and Metzen were around and it all died when Kaplan left. In that regard, Diablo Immortal is again, exactly what Blizzard was going to launch and certainly makes you question their next Warcraft mobile game model.

Blizzard is a company being still being sued for harassments, with some insane allegations. They banned someone for supporting Hong Kong and fired everyone involved. They hired a woman to co-lead only to pay her less than her equal partner, in part leading her to quit in 3 months. They pulled every union-busting trick in the book against Raven. Hell, we’re not even at the 1 year mark of J Allen Brack quitting because of the non-stop rollercoaster.

I am not quite sure what people were expecting here. Diablo Immortal is exactly what I thought it was going to be. What did others?