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Diablo is resurrecting both Blizzard’s past and its futureStay awhile, and listen
Stay awhile, and listen
“We fought that transition for a long time,” Condor founder Max Schaefer toldGameSpotin a 2002 retrospective. “The amount of time we argued about it was totally ridiculous, considering it only took us about three hours to mock the game up in real time.”
Diablo® II: Resurrected ™ Announce TrailerWatch on YouTube
Diablo® II: Resurrected ™ Announce Trailer
Its history since then is emblematic of the old tug of war that once took place between the two Blizzards. Blizzard North was shuttered in 2005, the principal developers - among them lead designer David Brevik - departing to found Flagship Studios. WhenDiablo 3was finally released in 2012, it was deemed a disaster,with Brevik among its critics. Blizzard eventually managed to right the ship with a popular expansion and a successful console transition, but upper management opted to move on toDiablo IV,reportedly pulling the plug on a second expansion in the process.
Still, despite this checkered history, Blizzard are more invested than ever in Diablo. There are no fewer than three Diablo games in development at this time: a mobile game originally conceived for Chinese audiences, the previously-announced sequel, and nowa remaster of Diablo II, which is still its most successful entry to date. That’s three more games than poorStarCraft, which recently saw active development end on StarCraft II.
Why is Diablo such a large part of Blizzard’s future? Consider these quotes fromKotaku’s 2018 report on Diablo IV, then-codenamed Fenris, published shortly after Blizzard’s disastrous Diablo: Immortals reveal:
Another pillar of Fenris is to make Diablo more social, taking inspiration from Destiny to add what one current Blizzard developer called “light MMO elements,” further drawing on Blizzard’s past massively multiplayer online success. Previous Diablo games have featured hub cities full of computer-controlled quest-givers and vendors — imagine if, while exploring those hubs, you could meet and group up with other players? And then what if you could go off and take on instanced dungeons with them, sort of like Destiny’s strikes or World Of Warcraft’s instances?
“The question that kept getting asked is, ‘If there’s going to be a ‘strike’ equivalent, where you’re forced into a very story-focused, well-designed level of a dungeon, what does that look like in Diablo?” said one person familiar with the project. “What if we still had a core Diablo game that just happened to have a bunch of people on the map to do other cool stuff?”
Yes, Blizzard want Diablo, the series that once inspired Destiny with its loot-based mechanics… to be their new Destiny. Time truly is a flat circle.
While no one is really saying it out loud, speculation has centered around Activision tightening Blizzard’s leash, sending them anxiously searching for additional revenue generators. They appear to have settled on Diablo, with its persistent endgame and loyal fanbase, as an ideal candidate.
“You know, when I returned to Blizzard about five years ago after taking a little time off, Diablo was one of the opportunities that we looked at in incubation, and there were so many cool things that we could do with it,” Blizzard senior vice president Allen Adham recently told me, in an interview I conducted on behalf ofThe Washington Post. “There’s just so much love for that franchise, both inside of Blizzard and with our player base; they were all just such obvious ideas, they just naturally fell from the heavens, so to speak.”
Resurrected isreusing the wings from the original 3D model of Tyrael.
World Of Warcraft remains Blizzard’s most popular game, and with WoW Classic continuing to thrive there’s no reason to suppose that it will go away anytime soon. But with StarCraft on hiatus andOverwatchcurrently on the wane, Blizzard badly need a series that can take it forward. More than ever, Diablo appears to be that series.
