Last month, Blizzard finally admitted that it had been lying about Diablo Immortal’s mobile exclusivity for the past three years. Next month’s instalment of the hellish action RPG series will be on both PC and PlayStation.
Just what the public desired. Critics had first resisted the mobile exclusivity of Diablo Immortal, but many have changed their minds now that they can battle Sanctuary’s demons with a mouse and keyboard. Those who had feared the game would be nothing more than a simplified version of Diablo, but are now eager to play the first original Diablo game in five years.
A PC adaptation of Diablo Immortal has certainly improved its public image, but it’s a good thing the game began out on mobile. According to TechRadar’s interview with game director Wyatt Cheng, the team was allowed to explore new design principles and experiment with fresh gameplay concepts because of the game’s mobile platform.
Slippery motions
While working on Diablo 3, senior combat designer Julian Love and Cheng wanted affixes (additional abilities for your character and opponents) that messed with your movement, Cheng explains.
When we first started working on the game, “Icy Ground” was one of the monster affixes that we planned to implement, but we never did. “
To put it another way, it’s an idea that shouldn’t be difficult to implement. Mario, Kirby and Rayman have long used sliding mechanics, but Cheng claims Diablo’s traditional, indirect control approach makes the functionality difficult to integrate.
“Diablo Immortal is the most ambitious Diablo game to date,” says one reviewer.
Rod Fergusson is the CEO of the company
In order to compensate for the cold terrain under them, the game’s auto-pathing takes over the movement of the player character. It doesn’t feel nearly as exciting to control your character’s movement and slide across a frozen lake as it does to let the game take care of the slippery surface.
Since the majority of players will be utilising a mobile device to play Diablo Immortal, Cheng explains, “we decided to go ahead and add the Icy Ground property.” And now it’s as though you’re slipping and sliding on a wet floor.
Fighting in a fluid manner
The team was able to experiment with new gameplay features when designing for mobile. Since they could utilise a phone screen instead of a mouse and keyboard in previous Diablo games, they were able to experiment with new combat features.
There are “charge-up skills” that Cheng refers to, he explains. An excellent illustration of this is Arcane Wind, which is used by the Wizard. The Arcane Wind button begins to charge when your thumb is pressed down on it for a short period of time. For every additional second that you hold it down, the damage rises and the area of effect expands. Nevertheless, you have the option to aim it even as it charges. And while you’re at it, you may move your character around to get the perfect shot.
For us, it was an opportunity to take advantage of something that we couldn’t do with a mouse input. Adding WASD keyboard control for those who requested it was also a factor in the game’s creation.
Working on a game for mobile devices gave the team a chance to experiment with new mechanisms for the game
This is the first Diablo game to utilise a WASD-based control scheme that allows you to move your character about the map while allowing you to do more complex combat techniques with your right hand. That means that conflicts will no longer be protracted, tense, and unchanging bouts of combat. Aim your weapons, charge your spells and then unleash each attack while circling your adversaries to get the optimal position.
A major shift in the show’s plot has occurred. This form of direct control was available on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, however a WASD-based control scheme was never adopted for PC version of Diablo 3. Even huge modern RPGs, such as Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3, have been sluggish to abandon the point-and-click control scheme that has been the genre’s trademark for decades.
Equal playing fields
Making Diablo for mobile has offered the team some leeway to experiment, but it has also presented some difficulties. Players can’t hover over things with their cursors to reveal their descriptions and stats, making inventory management difficult. No matter where you play Diablo Immortal, you’ll have to tap the goods to see their descriptions, whether on a mobile device or a computer.
That immediately prompts people to think “Oh, this is a game created for [a] mobile-first client,” Cheng explains. One benefit of this is a completely identical game.” There is no difference between the mobile and PC versions in terms of features. “There are no secret features that are only available on one platform or another.”
In the future, fights will no longer be long, stalemate-filled bouts of grappling.
Blizzard is trying to make Diablo Immortal look like a full-fledged action RPG that can compete with its PC counterparts with this feature parity. Diablo Immortal’s main goal, according to Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson, was to deliver a triple-A experience to mobile devices; to develop a mobile game that not only rivalled but also continued to outperform the series’ previous releases.
According to Fergusson, “Diablo Immortal is perhaps the most ambitious Diablo game we’ve done to date. In addition, we’re quite excited about it. The fact that the game is free-to-play also means that it will continue to receive support in the future when new zones, dungeons, and even classes are added. For years to come, we’ll be releasing all of these freebies as we support Diablo.