Fans of the venerable Diablo franchise were hyped for a new game in their beloved series and that is exactly what they got – albeit not quite in the way many gamers wanted. Diablo Immortal would indeed be a new game but instead of playing it on PCs or your favorite console, this game would be played on smartphones and tablets. On top of that, the game would be developed in collaboration with a company in China known for mobile games and in-game microtransactions. The folks over at Activision Blizzard were not prepared for the intense backlash from angry gamers who were hoping for an announcement of Diablo 4.
It turns out that there actually were plans to announce the game that fans wanted according to a couple of sources who spoke to Jason Schreier over at Kotaku. According to them, the Diablo Immortal reveal would have been followed by a video featuring Allen Adham (a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment) assuring us that Diablo 4 is indeed in development. A decision was apparently made to pull this video from the presentation at BlizzCon.
But why pull such an announcement? Apparently Diablo 4 has been through a challenging development process. The people at Kotaku claim that the scope of the game is said to have already changed twice under different creative directors and chances are good the game will be changed again at some point in the future. The same two sources also indicated that the developers did not feel the game was ready for an announcement at this time.
Blizzard Entertainment has not commented on this matter but they did indicate via an October blog post that Diablo 4 would not be shown at BlizzCon this year but they do have “multiple” Diablo titles in development and they will announce them when they feel ready.
