Since the presentation of Diablo Immortal, I have met conflicting feelings. Those of you who read us daily already know that I am a veteran player of the franchise, I was lucky enough to enjoy the original on my now old Pentium at 133 MHz when it hit the market, and I also played both Diablo II and Diablo for many years III. I currently play Diablo II Resurrected frequently, a remake that surprised me for good and that is certainly a clear example to follow.
The thing is that Diablo Immortal it is quite far from the most important keys of the Blizzard saga. On the one hand, we must remember that it is a title focused on the smartphone sector, although it will also reach PC. From what I have seen in numerous videos, the gameplay has changed considerably, the artistic design of Diablo III has been maintained and micropayments are going to have an important weight in this game.
I don’t like the gameplay changes at all. Diablo Immortal causes you to kill a handful of normal enemies be very slow even when starting to play, which ends with that dynamic touch that the action in the franchise has always had. At a graphic level, Diablo Immortal is in line with what we saw in Diablo III, and is far behind Diablo II Resurrected, but without a doubt the biggest problem is found in its “free” game approach with micropayments, in quotation marks because, In the end, these types of games can end up being more expensive than traditional titles.
Diablo Immortal: An example of what a free game should not be
A free game must offer a good player experience even if the player does not spend money. That is the basic pillar on which any title that starts from this type of business must be developed, regardless of whether it decides to offer a monetization system based on micropayments or an optional subscription that provides certain advantages.
When you get out of that concept your game It stops being a “free to play” title and becomes a “pay to win” game. In this scenario, players feel like they can’t move forward if they don’t spend money, or that they can’t keep up with others who have decided to cash out, and will most likely end up quitting the game in the end. This can also happen with players who once made micropayments, but end up feeling overwhelmed by the need to keep spending money.
There are many options to keep a free game from becoming a pay-to-win game, but unfortunately it seems that Diablo Immortal has chosen to go its own way. Blizzard itself has confirmed that the game will feature the criticized loot boxes, a mechanism that starts from the classic idea of gambling, in which we buy something that gives us the possibility of obtaining certain objects. We may be lucky and we get something good (the possibility is usually minimal), but the opposite can also happen (the most common).
The controversy of loot boxes has been around for a long time, and the reasons are more than obvious, but Diablo Immortal will have them as a monetization system. Belgium made the decision to ban the use of loot boxes in video games because it considers them to be a form of gambling, and the Netherlands did the same, although from a less radical perspective, since it considered that they could be legal with some variations.
To avoid getting your fingers caught, Blizzard has confirmed that Diablo Immortal will not be available in both countries, and that if the nationals of Belgium and the Netherlands try to play it they could be expelled. It is a full-fledged ban, and at the same time it is a decision that has generated a lot of controversy, since Blizzard has given absolute priority to loot boxes.
On the other hand, it is also confirmed that the micropayments offered by Diablo Immortal will affect gameplay, and can create significant imbalances, as certain items such as “Rare Crests” or “Legendary Gems” and other materials for crafting items can be obtained by playing or paying for real money. According to Blizzard, they have balanced the gameplay to make them easier to get without paying, but in the end we already know where this will take us.
The release of Diablo Immortal is scheduled for June 2, and will be available for terminals iOS, for Android and also for PC. In this article we already tell you the requirements that we must meet to run it on any of these three systems. Personally, I already confirm that I’m going to totally pass on Diablo Immortal. Curiously, the opposite happens to me with Diablo II Resurrected, since it is one of the games that I am dedicating the most time to, and the ones that I am enjoying the most.
