Blizzard Entertainment announced that Diablo Immortal is releasing on June 2nd for both mobile devices. The PC open beta will also begin the same day. I guess not everyone had phones after all.
All kidding aside, Diablo Immortal Game Director Wyatt Chang announced the release date via YouTube video. He speaks about what’s to come alongside Adam Fletcher, Senior Manager of Community Development.
Diablo Immortal is the free-to-play “authentic Diablo experience.” Announced at BlizzCon 2018, the game was derided for its (at the time) strictly mobile release. When Diablo IV was rumored to be announced and highly anticipated, Diablo fans were very upset.
Since then, the team behind Diablo Immortal has done a great job in turning around the public’s perception. For the past couple of years, Blizzard and its development partners have continued to work on improving the game. Caleb Arseneaux, the Lead Game Producer, mentioned that “at the end of our Technical Alpha, we looked at every single piece of feedback we got. There’s a few different channels of it. One, there is an in-game feedback tool, which allowed any player to capture screenshots or video, type up some feedback, and send it in. That actually went directly to a a project tracking system we had inside Blizzard, and then our production team and Quality Assurance team actually went through and pulled all of those over, and our Design Team, and we went through them all. We basically did a summit where we had all the team on a Zoom, and I was sharing my screen, and we just went line-by-line.”
Like the cross-play and cross-progressions systems between Android and iOS, players on PC will be able to carry data over to mobile devices. All progress will be saved and maintained when the PC Open Beta ends. A key difference between PC and mobile will be the UI and controller functionality. Diablo Immortal will deliver “an uncompromised AAA mobile experience when played on Windows PC.” The Open Beta will use feedback to ensure this remains true.
