Kotaku posted an article yesterday talking about Diablo / Blizzard's mobile plans and quoted supposedly anonymous Blizzard employees mentioning the possibility of a Warcraft version of Pokemon Go. Here are some of the highlights that the article mentions. Most of these highlights are unconfirmed by Blizzard.
- Warcraft Go?
- Some Blizzard developers are genuinely excited to make mobile games.
- A lot of Blizzard developers play Pokemon Go.
- A natural extension of this was for the new Incubation Team to develop a Warcraft version of Pokémon Go, which is supposedly in development for smartphones now.
- People who have played the Warcraft mobile game say it’s also got a lot more to it than Pokémon Go, including single-player mechanics.
- Diablo
- Diablo III had a second expansion that was canceled.
- Blizzard says cancellations show commitment to quality and that they have only released about 50% of the projects that they have worked on in the past 3 decades.
- Project Hades was reportedly a Diablo game in development that would be more like Dark Souls, an over the shoulder dungeon crawler that was also canceled.
- Project Fenris is the current incarnation of Diablo IV and the team is optimistic about it. Their art direction is to embrace the darkness.
- Project Fenris is still early in development and will likely not launch until 2020 or later.
- They still claim that there was talks to announce Diablo IV at BlizzCon, but it wasn't far enough along in time, yet one dev disputes this.
- Blizzard is careful to announce games before they are ready now because of what happened with Project Titan.
- Project Fenris is being worked on by a separate team from Diablo: Immortal known as Incubation.
- Diablo: Immortal exists because they heard that China really wanted a Diablo mobile game.
- Activision and Blizzard
- Blizzard employees say one of the biggest ongoing conversations this year has been cutting costs.
- Blizzard's response for comment was “Blizzard has been and continues to be a developer-driven company. All of the games we create represent ideas our game developers themselves are passionate about. This is as true for Diablo Immortal as it was for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, or Overwatch, or any game we’ve ever made. We believe that the best games to make are ones that our developers believe in.”
- The perception is that Activision is starting to get more and more involved with Blizzard because 2018 had been a weak year for them.
- The meetings this year was the first time many employees heard things like cutting costs or showing growth.
- Activision wants to boost Blizzard's content output by adding more developers and release more games on a regular schedule.
- Mike Morhaime stepping down was a big blow because he was seen as the Anti-CEO and just wanted to make good games and keep employees happy without worrying about profitability.
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