Diablo Immortal had to be a Mobile Game First, and here is why. After insisting over the past three years insisting that Diablo Immortal would be a mobile exclusive, Blizzard revealed that they were bluffing all along. The next entry in the infernal action RPG series is, as a matter of fact coming to PC, and we would be launching on both platforms in the coming months.
Diablo Immortal had to be a Mobile Game First
That was what the fans were looking forward to. Skeptics have initially balked at Diablo immortal’s mobile exclusivity, but a lot has been won over since they know they can face sanctuary’s fiends using a mouse and keyboard. Others had been worried about the game and would be little more than a pared-down Diablo clone designed for the Mobile market, but are now excited at the thought of Playing the very first original Diablo release in the next five years.
Announcing the Diablo Immortal’s PC port has certainly done wonders for the image of the game, but it’s a great thing that it started life as a mobile exclusive. As a game director Wyatt Cheng told TechRadar, that by designing the game for Mobile, the team was able to explore amazing new design principles and experiment with novel gameplay concepts that the previous diablo titles could not achieve.
Slippery Moves
Senior combat designer Julian Love and I worked on Diablo 3 together, and back on Diablo 3, we really wanted to have affixes {modifiers that offer bonus abilities to your character and enemies] that played around a little bit with your movement,” As stated by Cheng.
“There was one monster affix that we wanted to do at the time, but we didn’t which was Icy Ground – the idea that you are kind of skating around.”
The concept is quite simple, and it is one that might not hit you as particularly challenging to implement. Platformers like Mario, Kirby, and Rayman have had players sliding through slippery surfaces for some years now, But Cheng stated that Diablo’s traditional, indirect control scheme made the feature even more tricky to implement.
With each player controlling the movement of their characters by point and clicking around the map, the game’s auto-pathing takes over to compensate for the icy ground beneath them. Point your character to move through a lake that is frozen, and watching them automatically take care of the slippery surface, does not feel nearly as engaged as it does to control their movement and slide your way through the tundra.
“But with the Diablo Immortal, “Cheng Stated, “we thought, Hey, we know that we’re a mobile-first game, we are going to have most people make use of direct control; let’s go ahead and add the Icy ground property.’ And now you really feel like you’re sliding around on a slippery surface.”
Fluid Fighting
Designing for Mobile would enable the team to work around other gameplay mechanics also. It allows them to make use of the tactile interface of a smartphone screen to explore new combat features that were not compatible with the mouse and keyboard setup of the previous Diablo games.
Cheng stated that “we have what I call charge-up skills,” Cheng says. “Arcane wind for the Wizard is a great example. You push down on the Arcane wind button, and as your thumb holds that button-down, it begins to charge up. The damage would increase the longer you hold the button and the area-of-effect increases. But you also get to aim it while it is charging up. And through all of that, you can move your character around to really line up that perfect shot.
“This is something that we would be able to carry out with just a mouse input, and so that was an opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of. this is also the reason why the WASD Keyboard control for people that wanted to be able to do that.”
Diablo Immortal would be the very first game in the series to offer support to the 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 intricate combat maneuvers. What this means is that the fights would no longer prolong static wrestles. You’ll be able to aim your weapons, charge-up spells, and unleash each blow while circling your enemies for the best position possible.
This is a major change for the series. While Diablo 3 is now on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch allowing for this kind of direct control by typing your character’s movement right into the analog stick, A WASD-based control scheme was never implemented to the version of the Game on PC. Even some other huge contemporary RPGs, that include 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 hallmarked the genre for decades now.
Equal Platforms
But while working on some Diablo games for mobile has given the team some room for experimentation, it’s also thrown up some challenges. Inventory management, for example, can be quite tricky to implement when the players cannot hover through items with a cursor to reveal their descriptions and stats. Whether you would be Playing the Diablo Immortal on your Mobile device or PC, you would have to tap on the items in other to pull up their descriptions.
