Diablo fans tuning in to today’s developer live stream to learn about Diablo 4’s first season were met with a bundle of news about a totally different game in the franchise, and the community’s overwhelming reaction has been cold at best.
The first 20-plus minutes of the stream on July 6 was dedicated to Diablo Immortal, the mobile game which is getting a brand new character class, the Blood Knight, in its next update.
As the main draw for many who were tuning into the highly-publicized stream was to hear about the upcoming first season of the newest Diablo game, Season of the Malignant, players very quickly became vocal about their distaste for having to sit through info dumps about Immortal before finally getting to any of the “real” news.
“Diablo 4 is just the stealth marketing campaign to get people into Immortal,” one commenter said.
Others were left confused by the stream with Immortal devs talking about the new class. Some thought they were talking about Diablo 4, only to soon find out it was for the other current live-service Diablo title.
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“I joined the stream a bit later and was confused at the sudden addition of a new class to Diablo 4 before they mentioned Immortal again,” another commenter said soon after the stream ended. “Also confused Fractured Peaks with Fractured Plains. They should really separate their Diablo 4 content from everything else and save people time. If they do this again in the future, I’m going to skip and wait for the posted video.”
While Immortal only took up about 25 to 30 minutes of the 90-minute presentation, including some questions in the Q&A session at the end, many are just hoping to see only Diablo 4 the next time Blizzard goes live.
Others considered Immortal’s inclusion in the stream a ploy to try to get players invested in the microtransaction-heavy free-to-play title.
“They know no one gives a fuck about Immortal,” another Redditor said in the same July 6 discussion thread. “They’re just trying to scrape the dregs on the off chance someone has a momentary lapse of judgment.”
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All that being said, Diablo Immortal’s player base as a free-to-play mobile title is likely way larger than that of Diablo 4, regardless of any timeliness. Immortal has already been downloaded well over 30 million times since launch, so it appears the mobile-first title may continue to have airtime on streams for the foreseeable future.
