Editing Diablo (section)

==A FUCKING PHONE GAME==
{{topquote|Is this an out-of-season April's Fools joke?|The Unspoken Hero of this fucking mess of a conference.}}

With four years having passed since the release of ''Reaper of Souls'' with only a trickle of additional content released over the years -besides shit like finally porting a six-year old game to a Nintendo console- fans of the series craved something to look forward to. But, having learned nothing from what seemed like Activision-Blizzard's deliberate intent to run ''D3'' with a skeleton crew in favor of games that provided more constant cash influx from micro-transactions, even those fans were flabbergasted by the lengths of Blizzard's stunning incompetence. At their own convention Blizzard announced the next entry in the franchise: ''Diablo Immortal!'' A FUCKING MOBILE GAME!

Set in the more immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Worldstone at the conclusion of ''Lord of Destruction'', ''Immortal'' will likely serve to bridge the gap between the events of ''Diablo II'' and ''III''. Shards of the shattered Worldstone have become a hot commodity across a ravaged Sanctuary and a powerful demon named Skarn seeks to gather as much of the corrupted shards as possible to use them to return the defeated Prime Evils to prominence. Classes revealed thus far are the Barbarian, Crusader, Demon Hunter, Monk, Necromancer and Wizard.

Fan reaction was over-overwhelmingly negative out the gate. With most vidyagaymers being inherently distrustful of mobile games, it certainly did not help that this game would not even be developed in-house! Instead, this game would be developed and run by a [[China|Chinese]] company whose only other games were the typical micro-transaction schlock expected from the Chinese. Accusations were leveled that the game was just a re-skin of a different mobile game, and Blizzard's hamfisted attempts at damage control through media and social media (including deleting tons of thousands of negative comments and hundreds of thousands of downvotes on their video) only made shit worse. Blizzard employees were roundly booed at a Q&A when they announced no plans for PC, deriding the audience by asking "do you guys not have phones?" With fans and gamers once more being insulted and divided into camps, the future looks dark for ''Diablo'' with nothing but desperate rumors of a Diablo 4 in early production to keep the meager and weakening flames of hope alive. Though considering a circle of perpetual degradation, it would perhaps be like an anime.

The game would eventually come out in May 2022, but the damage to everyone's reception to this mistake of a game was already done. Hilariously a PC port actually did come out, with the hilariously flimsy excuse of "people were going to emulate it anyways". And it was a microtransaction hell hole. We're left to wonder where have all the neckbeards and geniuses who were behind the first great games of the company went, but this shit is beyond heresy. The gameplay is repetitive, story is non-existant and everything is pretty much dulled out and unsavory. Yeah, it's all subjective, but you know what is ''objectively'' bad game design? The leveling system. See, Bobby Kotick's minions weren't dumb, they knew that people were going to complain that you can't progress without paying, and so to circumvent those complaints, they actually made sure you could ''theoritically'' progress without sparing a couple bucks. In practice, the pace at which you progressed without spending a single dollar was so fucking slow that it made [[Nurgle]] [[FAIL|look like Usain Bolt]] in comparison. In other words, Activision ruins everybody's day yet again. But what were you expecting at this point, really?

To anyone whose brain wasn't bought out by ActiBlizzion, you can tell how desperately they were to release this, as between the acquisition by Microsoft and the many, many accusations towards the company's top brass they needed that income but had nobody able to work on the big games.