Diablo Immortal: A first look

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Back in 2018 Blizzard made one of its largest public relations blunders ever when it announced the development of Diablo Immortal. After playing Diablo III and its many updates and iterations for six years fans were ready for something new. Something bigger, something better, something like I don't know, Diablo 4 maybe?

Instead, the collective community was slapped in the face with the promise of a mobile game that absolutely no one was asking for in the first place. Blizzard backtracked a bit and tried to give the players a remastered Diablo II to placate them, but in my opinion it wasn't that impressive. Meanwhile, development on Diablo Immortal continued in the background.

I've been a Diablo fan for quite some time, and although I too was hoping for Diablo IV, I didn't entirely give up on the possibility that Diablo Immortal might be okay. In fact, I signed up for early access to the game knowing that it would probably cost me $14 (the listed price at the time) to play it.

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Imagine my surprise the other day when I got an alert on my phone that Diablo Immortal was finally ready for installation. I had honestly kind of forgotten about it given how long they had been dragging the development out.

Imagine my greater surprise when I discovered that instead of having to pay $14 to $15 the game was absolutely free.

I checked my phone to make sure I had enough free space and I started the install.

It's a pretty big install, so make sure you have plenty of room on your mobile device if you are going to dive in. If I were you I would assume twice the space that it tells you in the Play or iTunes store. After the initial installation there are a bunch of additional files that need to be downloaded and installed.

The cool thing is you can start playing the game while some of those files download in the background.

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Chronologically, Diablo Immortal takes place between the events of Diablo II and Diablo III. If you have played Diablo III at all, you will recognize all of the classes that are available to you to play. They basically just moved them over including many (but not all) of the same skills.

At first I thought there was only one playable class (the barbarian) similar to the original game, but in a later playing session I realized I could create all of the other classes available in D3.

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I had to cut down the resolution and size of the images for this post, but I assure you the graphics are pretty great on this game. Fun fact, I don't know if you can see it at the bottom of the picture above, but in another 180 by Blizzard, Diablo Immortal isn't a mobile only game. It is cross platform, so you can download and install it on your tablet or PC/MAC as well.

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It took me a little bit to get used to the controls, but if you have played a mobile game like this in the past, you are probably pretty familiar with them. There is a virtual "D" pad on the lower left side of the screen, and your attack/abilities buttons on the lower right side.

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If you played D3, you will likely recognize a lot of similarities between this game and that one. Many of the same enemies, themes, and story lines carry over between the two games. I'll be honest with you, I don't really pay too much attention to the story. I am not really a "lore" guy like some of you folks out there. I skip the cut scenes and I skip all of the dialog too. Oh yeah, I am one of those crazy mofo's that plays without sound as well... I know weird right?

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The game dumps you right into the action require you to battle some monsters before making your way to Wortham which is the first "town" area. There are tutorials that pop up on the screen, but they are not too annoying. I'd call them tips more than tutorials I guess. The game is actually pretty intuitive, so it doesn't take much to dive right into it.

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One thing I forgot to mention is the fact that Immortal allows you a lot more cosmetic customization on your characters than users had in the past. I am guessing since Blizzard is billing this as a MMORPG they want players to be able to make each of their "toons" unique.

Additionally, there is a crafting aspect that I haven't dug into too deep yet. You can salvage your excess equipment to give you materials to improve or craft other equipment. Again, very similar to D3. It kind of makes you wonder how much code they might have just reused between the two games.

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These are just some more screenshots of the combat. I tried to get some good ones so you can see the effects of some of the special abilities. One thing I have noticed which is different from D3 is that each class of character has a "super special ability" or something like that. It is an ability that takes a while to charge, but when it does, you can activate it to increase attack/defense/spell power or whatever of your character. It lasts a fixed amount of time before it needs to be recharged again. Likely something you will want to save up and "pop" right before you face off against a boss.

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As I said, if you played D3, you will likely recognize a lot of the skills as they are pretty much mirror images of the ones in that game.

Of course there will be some different applications of them since they have to assume most players are likely playing on a mobile device.

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This was the first big boss encounter and like many other Diablo bosses, they split the battle up into stages. In fact, they seem to have done that with several of the bosses that I have encountered so far. For example, once you defeat the boss, it transforms into something else and you have to then fight that monster. I think it is cool once or twice, but if they keep reusing that through the whole game, it will get old pretty fast.

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Loot is just as plentiful in this game as it has been in past iterations and it follows the same white/blue/yellow/? scheme that past games have. I haven't gotten anything better than yellow yet, so I can't say for sure there will be orange items as well. I wouldn't be shocked though.

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Town portals and waypoints haven't been left behind in this game either. Although the maps are much smaller, I was happy to see I wasn't going to have to hoof it all over the world anytime I wanted to go somewhere.

I read that they kept the zones, quests, and other aspects of the game short on purpose. They want people to be able to spend a quick 10 to 15 minute session playing if they want and not be totally engulfed in the game. Although, I am sure they wouldn't mind if you spent longer playing either.

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You probably won't be too surprised to see good old Deckard Cain still kicking around. Given he is in the third game, it might not be that surprising I guess. You also probably won't be surprised to learn that Blizzard has implemented a micro-transaction system where you can purchase equipment bundles and things like that will real world money. Hopefully they remember the past follies of the D3 Real World Auction House and we won't see the whole buying your way to the top metric again.

Although I am over 1000 words by this point, this is a very cursory overview of the game. If you are a Diblo fan (and you have the space), I highly encourage you to download this game and check it out. I haven't tried it out yet, but apparently you can connect to your Battle.Net account so you can pick up where you left off across multiple devices.

Have you played Diablo Immortal yet?

Let me know what you think about it in the comments!

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced