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Diablo is getting a 'full-fledged' mobile RPG
Blizzard is bringing Diablo to mobile devices, the company announced today during BlizzCon 2018. The game's creators promised a "full-fledged action RPG" called Diablo Immortal. Diablo Immortal picks up after Diablo II: Lord of Destruction and will launch for iOS and Android.
The mobile RPG is a massively multiplayer online action game; players will be able to drop in and out of groups and play through "dynamic events" as they travel through Sanctuary. Classes include monk, wizard, crusader, demon hunter, necromancer, and barbarian. Blizzard is currently allowing players to pre-register for a chance to join the game's upcoming beta.
Fingers do massive damage to phones.
Also at Ars Technica.
Related: Blizzard Releases an Update for Diablo II... 16 Years After its Release
Animated "Diablo" Series Reportedly Coming to Netflix
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday November 03 2018, @04:11PM (15 children)
This shows all the signs of being driven by the suits and not by anybody on the creative side. "Hmm, mobile games seem popular. And maybe we can sell in-game content and such to make a boatload!"
Mobile games don't lend themselves to linear storytelling, which is something that was definitely a part of Diablo I and Diablo II and kinda sorta a part of Diablo III. So I doubt that we're going to get anything remotely like that, it's all going to be on getting people to shovel out money to get MOAR POWER! for their characters.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by TechieRefugee on Saturday November 03 2018, @04:35PM (3 children)
There's a pretty insightful video in which Steve Jobs talked about how big businesses either fall out of favor or fail entirely, and it's exactly because of that reason: the people who make the most money (marketing and sales) are the ones who get promoted, while the actual creatives get left behind, leading to, well... this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday November 03 2018, @07:22PM
I'm probably going to get a lot of flak over this rant but... Holy shit! What a load of crap. The Xerox Star failed commercially for the exact opposite reason: The PARC researchers were all Berkeley hippies that refused to build the word processing computers the corporations and governments wanted as specified by the market research done by those very same marketing people Jobs villainized. They came up with an overspeced and overpriced box filled to the brim with proprietary parts no one could afford that was too slow even for the Xerox personal to use internally. When Apple tried doing the same thing with Lisa two years later it also failed. Similarly the Macintosh, despite removing shit ton of features and outsourcing many parts to on-shelf parts, ended up barely breaking even 2 years following.
It was Bill Gates who truly got it. He listened to those "evil" marketeers' advice and begged, bribed and cutthroat his way into the corporate and government offices by giving them exactly what they wanted: Cheap paper pushing workstations. It was ugly. It was clunky. And it made him a fortune.
If you're seriously interested in the genuine history of Xerox PARC and what really happened, I strongly suggest you start with Paul A. Strassmann's The Computers Nobody Wanted. Sure those suites and ties aren't as sexy as Jobs' black T shirt and long hair. But there's a limit to the Apple cool-aid anyone should consume. Fact of the matter is, Jobs and Gates were/are thieves and Gates was better at it. However, the researchers were all hippy fools that repeated their Berkeley style proto permissive-licensing ideological nonsense right up until they drove Xerox out of computing and LISP machines and the UNIX workstation into an early grave. It was Richard Stallman who finally realized that his fellow hippies smoked one ganja too many and there's an urgent need to enforce the sharing of research and code contractually thus ending 30 years of corporate exploration of too-trusting-for-their-own-good researchers.
And before people pick up the flamethrowers, understand me calling those hippies fools is actually doing them a kindness. Strassmann's version of events (mildly?) suggests the researchers deliberately tricked upper management into letting Jobs and Gates visit the facilities so the research won't be a trade secret and they'll be able to write papers about it...
Either way, stop quoting Jobs. His version of events and his analysis is inconsistent with everything that happened following. Apple was never an innovative company to begin with and never came up with an original product throughout its existence. Jobs is just the less successful consumer-friendly version of Gates. And neither were saints or some genius innovators.
Sent from my iPhone (not).
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @07:52PM (1 child)
And yet he left a logistics man in charge of Apple before he died...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @08:00PM
He had made plenty of unwise decisions.
Selecting alternative treatments like acupuncture, dietary supplements, and juices [forbes.com] over surgery for pancreatic cancer is another such example.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Saturday November 03 2018, @05:07PM (9 children)
It is interesting, they outsourced development to a Chinese development firm that has done Diablo III clones on mobile already.
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I have played my share of mobile games, but the big thing appears to be in-app purchases. If they go for the same loot-box/microtransaction advancement that has become a darling of other developers I'll give it a pass very quickly if not immediately.
If there are ads taking up screen real estate, again, pass (unless I can pay to ditch them)
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On the other hand if it really maintains a decent amount of the playability (and replayability) of the Diablo lines I'll be interested. Even if it requires a phablet/tablet to play.
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Blizzard has always been really good about making the Diablo franchise something enjoyable (to me, ignoring some quickly remedied mistakes in the D3 line) and I'll pay a decent up-front cost based on trust, they haven't let me down yet.
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On the other hand....Blizzard isn't Netease, and Netease isn't Blizzard. And phoneapps are never as engaging as PC apps anyway (for me, ymmv)
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Regardless I pre-registered on Play and Blizzard's site. Maybe I'll win the lottery and get a beta invite :-)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday November 03 2018, @06:05PM (8 children)
Considering that Blizzard owns King who makes Candy Crush I can think of several horrible things that will go wrong with this game-app.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Saturday November 03 2018, @11:07PM (7 children)
Also, like... if you hate microtransactions, have you looked at basically any of the last 3 blizzard games? They're all rife with them.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday November 04 2018, @01:07AM (5 children)
Are there even AAA-tier games released any more that doesn't come with umpteen DLC:s and Microtransactions? Combined with Pre-Orders I guess that is how they pay for the development these days.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 04 2018, @01:19AM (4 children)
There are games that come with microtransactions that do not affect gameplay, i.e. you can buy skins, emotes, and other things of that nature, but not pay-to-win or expansion type content.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday November 04 2018, @01:37AM (3 children)
I'm ok with paid expansions the way they were done in WoW and D3. Those were serious world building, new continents, new races, new classes, new functionality.
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Dunno why, but that approach just didn't bother me and I'ld always pre-order collectors editions to boot. Expansions were as expensive as a new game almost, but on the flip side, you really almost got an entire new game when you got one.
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Loot boxes seem kind of like playing card games where you keep buying another pack of cards to get another chance to get a rare card. Like gambling and lottery tickets, this really appeals to quite a lot of people. I just do not happen to be one of them.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday November 04 2018, @02:20AM (1 child)
I'm fine with that to, certainly so considering that I still play WOW -- just not as much as I used to. But then the expansions for something like WOW is really more like a new game, you just get to keep and play all of the old game to. But yes it's more about the lootboxes, the weird and expensive downloadable content that really just add what feels should have been in the game to begin with but they took it out so they could charge $5 extra for it.
If one takes WOW as an example we have the endless amounts of mounts and pets, those are the things you can buy with real money, nothing really game changing even tho there has been some really overpowered pets that you could only obtain for money (the pandaren monk comes to mind). WOW do seem to have loot boxes thou, you just don't have to pay actual money for them, but there is the Black Market auction house chests that can if you are lucky contain upgraded current content loot and another example would be the Mythic+ weekly chest that contains "random" loot depending on the highest level M+ dungeon you did that week. Then we have that other aspect of people paying in-game gold to be carried thru content, which is beyond stupid but to each their own and such.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday November 04 2018, @09:40PM
I went an grabbed Crusader of Light and played it on a high end gaming tablet.
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Buttery smooth, honestly it felt like some things were built for a slower device and flashed up and were gone too quickly.
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It seemed more WoW clone than D3 clone. That said it already pretty much lost me. Looks like the standard cookie cutter daily rewards box/reward crystals BS.
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First time buyer screen popped up repeatedly to entice purchase.
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I did really appreciate the auto quest following/completion though. That made mobile play much less thumb destroying.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @08:27PM
Dopamine is a powerful drug...
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday November 04 2018, @01:21AM
Well, no...
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Diablo III is the most recent thing I've played of theirs (and actually the most recent thing I've played period...)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Informative) by edIII on Saturday November 03 2018, @09:07PM
Don't forget fremium bullshit. Where it is designed to be almost as impossible to get a killscreen on an 80's arcade machine as it is to beat the game normally. Which is a good analogy, because those arcade games were designed to eat quarters. So you will start out the game at a deep disadvantage, and may not even be able to beat the game, or beat in a timely manner (10 years at the drop rate for some items).
On top of all of that.... how well does a touchscreen act as an input device for a video game like Diablo? I don't think RPGs work all that well without a mouse for one, and certainly a keyboard. The serious gamers will miss their custom macros and whatnot.
Could be interesting, but the chances it's not fucked up with advertisements, freemium bullshit, or poor interfaces is fairly low.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.