by After spending the last three years insisting that Diablo Immortal will be a mobile exclusive, Blizzard revealed last month that it was lying the whole time. The next entry in the hellish action RPG series is, in fact, coming to PC and launching on both platforms next month.
That’s exactly what the fans wanted. Skeptics had initially balked at Diablo Immortal’s mobile exclusivity, but many have now become convinced that they know they can take on the demons of Sanctuary using a mouse and keyboard. Others worried that the game was little more than a stripped-down Diablo clone made for the mobile market, but now they’re excited to play the first original Diablo release in five years.
The announcement of the Diablo Immortal PC port has certainly done wonders for the game’s image, but it’s a good thing it started as a mobile exclusive. As game director Wyatt Cheng tells TechRadar, by designing the game for mobile, the team was able to explore new design principles and experiment with novel gameplay concepts that were beyond the scope of previous Diablo titles.
slippery moves
“Senior Combat Designer Julian Love and I worked together on Diablo 3, and back in Diablo 3, we really wanted to have affixes [modifiers that grant bonus abilities to your character and enemies] that messed with your movement a little bit,” says Cheng.
“There was a monster affix that we wanted to do at the time, but didn’t, which was Icy Ground, the idea that you’re skating.”
It’s a simple concept and one that you may not find particularly difficult to implement. Platform games like Mario, Kirby and Rayman have had players sliding down slippery surfaces for decades, but Cheng says Diablo’s traditional indirect control scheme made the feature difficult to implement.
“Diablo Immortal is probably the most ambitious Diablo game”
Rod Fergusson
With players controlling their character’s movement by pointing and clicking on the map, the game’s auto-routing takes over to compensate for the icy ground below them. Pointing your character to walk across a frozen lake and watching the game automatically take care of the slippery surface doesn’t feel as appealing as directly controlling their movement and sliding across the tundra.
“But with Diablo Immortal,” says Cheng, “we thought, ‘Hey, we know we’re a mobile game, we’re going to have most people [using] direct control; let’s go ahead and add the Icy Ground property.’ And now you really feel like you’re sliding on a slippery surface.”
fluid fight
The mobile design also allowed the team to play with other game mechanics. It allowed them to use the touch interface of a phone screen to explore new combat features that were not supported by the keyboard and mouse setup of previous Diablo games.
“We have what I call loading abilities,” says Cheng. “Arcane Wind for the Wizard is a great example. You press the Arcane Wind button, and while your thumb is holding that button down, it begins to charge. The damage increases the longer you hold it down, and the area of effect increases. But you can also point it while it’s charging. And through all of that, you can move your character around to really line up that perfect shot.
“This is something we couldn’t do with just mouse input, so it was an opportunity we wanted to take advantage of. That’s also why we added WASD keyboard control for people who wanted to be able to do that.”
Designing for mobile devices allowed the team to play with new game mechanics.
Diablo Immortal will be the first game in the series to support a WASD-based control scheme, allowing you to move your character around the map with your left hand, while freeing up your right hand for more complex combat maneuvers. That means the fights will no longer be prolonged static fights. You’ll be able to aim your weapons, charge spells, and unleash every hit as you circle your enemies to find the best position possible.
It’s a big change for the series. While Diablo 3 on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch allowed for this type of direct control by linking your character’s movement to the analog stick, a WASD-based control scheme was never implemented for the PC version of the game. Even other massive contemporary RPGs, like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3, have been slow to move away from the traditional point-and-click control scheme that has characterized the genre for decades.
equal platforms
But while creating a mobile Diablo game has given the team some room for experimentation, it also presents some challenges. Inventory management, for example, is tricky to implement when players can’t hover over items to reveal their descriptions and stats. Whether you’re playing Diablo Immortal on mobile or PC, you’ll need to tap on items to see their descriptions.
“And that immediately [makes people go]’Oh, this is a game created for [a] first mobile client,’” says Cheng. “But the advantage of that is that the game is identical. when you come and go [between the mobile and PC version], we have full feature parity. There is no hidden functionality that is available on one platform or another.”
Fights will no longer be prolonged static fights.
That feature parity is part of Blizzard’s attempt to present Diablo Immortal as a full-fledged action RPG that can stand alongside its PC brethren. As Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson says, the team’s primary goal in creating Diablo Immortal was to bring a triple-A experience to mobile devices; to create a mobile game that would not only rival previous releases in the series, but continue to surpass them.
“Diablo Immortal is probably the most ambitious Diablo game we’ve done to date,” says Fergusson. “And it is something that we are very excited about. Part of the free-to-play nature of the game is [the] support for the game as we move beyond launch, and see new zones, new dungeons, even new classes. They will all be available for free as we continue to support Diablo for years to come.”
