Diablo Immortal has arrived

 It's Morbing time

Have you ever been introduced to something, a game, a movie, a person, and known instantly from the very first moment exactly where this relationship between you is going? I'm not talking a 'love at first sight' sort of thing, no I mean rather the opposite. I mean you know from the very first word that you two are going to bitterly clash until there's nothing but hatred and anger shared between the two of your totally incompatible personalities? How about a situation where you've felt that exact friction only to be proven completely and utterly false as something magical and special blossoms from fields you'd thought initially barren? Diablo Immortal falls into one of those two camps. Can you guess which one? Shocker, it's the "We knew it would be a disgrace to the brand and company and that is exactly what it is." What, do you guys at Blizzard not have integrity or something?

Diablo Immortal is an attempt by Blizzard to move their popular ARPG property, the Diablo series, onto the mobile market in order to cater to the plethora of mobile addicted players in China and Japan. If you want to be an optimist you could say that this is a Diablo game made for our Eastern Asian brothers that is trying to clue them in on something we already love over here, although you'd have to be almost reductively optimistic not to acknowledge the ways in which Blizzard is trying to actively exploit their platform of choice in order to squeeze bucks out of them. Because you see, despite the pedigree of the name attached to this product, despite the months of press junkets where the Diablo development team have promised that this game is going to rewrite what we expect from mobile games and has as big of a development team working on it as Diablo 3 and 4, (that's just sad if it's true) this is a blatant cash-grap, yo!

At least it's not a lazy one. I mean, the way in which they try and squeeze money out of everyone is lazy, tired and uninventive; but the actual quality of the mobile gameplay in question here is decent. It's not the world's best ARPG by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't find the early story to be any type of engaging or interesting, but the core ARPG experience of killing things is fun enough. Would I choose to play Immortal over Diablo 3? Not currently. But then I am early game, maybe the endgame is some super wild amazing feast of chaos and I just need to spend a couple of hundred real life currency on in order to boost my way to the great content. Oh, did I say money boosting? Yeah, this game has it's pay-to-win elements which is obscured behind distanced 'fake' currency and upgrade percentage chances that has the option to eat up premium currency. (That's how you sneak all the chance based money generating fun of Lootboxes without bringing the inherent backlash that Lootboxes come with. Class.)

What gets me is I thought Diablo Immortal had come out years ago and just faded from the public consciousness super quickly, but I guess Wyatt Cheng took the verbal tongue lashing he got at the Blizzcon reveal to heart and crawled under that rock he spawned from in order to wait out the backlash. Of course his absence and this game's gave the time for emotions to cool into a simmer, but it also gave us a chance to see more stolen snippets of Wyatt, such as that one screenshot of him presenting the pay-to-win equipment reinforcing systems to a board of, what I can only assume are, NetEase employees. Leaving no one in any doubt for ages exactly what this game was about and who it was being made for. People were sharpening their pitchforks for this game for a long time in advance and now they're ready to cut it to ribbons. Of course, Wyatt and his Diablo don't give two handshakes and a wink about the actual Blizzard and Diablo fans; they're out for them casuals, baby!

It's at the heart of the gameplay loop, a regular stream of unimposing simple combat encounters that inundate the player with levels and loot at a quick pace to get new casual players, unfamiliar to ARPGs, thinking "Wow, I'm progressing really quickly and having fun", so that as the later levels kick in and the experience starts to hit against that inevitable wall, these same players are incentivised and encouraged to stick around and push themselves up against that wall, typically a pay wall in this instance, in order to relive some of that power fantasy fun they had at the beginning of their playthrough. Gear becomes outpaced by hoards of trash mobs, forcing players to fall back on the monetised-to-hell upgrade systems or to grind side content during which they are assaulted with pop-ups trying to sell them extra completion loot for some real money fee. I completed the damn dungeon, why not just give me all the loot! It's not as though dungeon loot isn't going to depreciate within a level or two, why flog extra units on the side? Because it's a way to get the casual player to make that all-important first purchase, because once they're in the door it's oh so much easier to lock them into the loop of recurrent purchases. 

But there are other points of contention beyond the monetisation that has people dubious about Diablo Immortal, one of which being the mysterious and so-far unutilised files in the game folder that make explicit mention of facial recognition. This isn't just laymen misunderstanding of file naming conventions, either; the community manager responded to one concerned Tweet highlighting it with the excuse that their team was at one point looking to have the ingame character's facial expressions match the player's face but they scrapped the system for not meeting their quality standards. An alright explanation, but it rings a little odd, doesn't it? You wanted facial match-up tech in your uninspired casual mobile game? Seems like a strangely innovative tech angle totally not-in line with all the other middle-of-the-road and unambitious design decisions for the game. Also, what use is matched facial expression in an APRG? A zoomed-out top down game where you can't see your character's face? Surely they can't be talking about the character portrait, because that portrait can't even be customised to the player's liking beyond picking the class featured. I can't say for sure, but I think they're lying to our faces.

Of all of this I think the most galling knowledge is what I mentioned earlier; how the team working on this game is apparently 1:1 comparable to Diablo 4's in size, if not in ambition. Blizzard truly value this game as much as they do their core franchise, and you can bet your bottom dollar that renewed intrest in the mobile markets comes directly from the success of an actual innovative little free-to-play game called Genshin Impact. Another game which wears it's monetisation on it's sleeve but slathers so much content which can be enjoyed totally for free that people just let it slide. Can Diablo Immortal slither it's way into a similar position with it's content proposal? With some finesse, but after all the garish tactics being shoved in our face and artificial difficulty pseudo-paywalls being erected, I don't think this development team knows what 'Finesse' is. I wonder what the team at Diablo 4 are doing to differentiate that game from Immortal, or if the mandate is for all Blizzard games to follow this formula into the future in the blind hope that one strikes it big. I'm being alarmist, perhaps; but not unrealistically so, and that's the problem. 

Diablo Immortal presented itself as the game that would rewrite our preconceived notions on what a mobile game is, greedy, exploitative and low effort; when it ended up pretty much sliding into the perfect ballpark for two out of three of those tags. The problem is that the accolade for 'so good it's allowed to nickel and dime' was given out two years ago and Blizzard lacks the talent and passion to steal that podium position for the folks at MiHiYo. What we're left with is a decent stop-gap ARPG for people who can't afford a mainline Diablo game, but is it really any better than 'Path of Exile'? I guess if you have to play a CRPG on your phone, than Diablo Immortal and all of it's ugliness is your only choice; that's about as glowing of an endorsement as I can lay on Immortal's door. Let's hope this whole experience doesn't end up being prophetic towards the eventual state of Diablo 4, eh.