Chris Haga, former Diablo III Technical Artist uploaded a video shortly after the Diablo Immortal announcement at BlizzCon to share his point of view about the game, but more importantly to defend Wyatt Cheng, Mike Morhaime, and Allen Adham.
Chris Haga worked at Blizzard for 7 years until December 2011. A year before the Diablo III launch. He admits the game was not good upon launch, and praises Wyatt Cheng for turning around things until it felt more like Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.
NOTE: Not family or job safe. Some profanity spoken in both videos.
Diablo Immortal was announced as an MMOARPG (or massively multiplayer online action roleplaying game). However, there weren’t many elements we could see of this in the BlizzCon demo.
You never saw other players cross paths with any of the livestreamers while traversing the Bilefen. Only when they queued for the dungeon as a Group, did we see other players.
Of course, this is only a demo; and Wyatt Cheng mentioned you can see other people in the Westmarch capital city.
However, how much of a MMO features are we really going to see in Diablo Immortal when it comes to seeing other ungrouped people in the world? Better yet, why is the world of Sanctuary not a real world?
As I pointed out recently in a tweet addressed to @Diablo and in a forum thread at Diablofans, when I hear the term MMO wrapped around a Diablo video game, I have very steep and high expectations.
I knitted together the full map of the Bilefen by taking screenshots of the BlizzCon Diablo Immortal livestream by Bahjeera and Kraxell. For an “MMO” this doesn’t look like an MMO open world. I coined it a spaghetti string that goes from Point A to Point B.
Watching a Diablo Immortal gameplay video, I put together in Adobe Photoshop all the mini-map pieces to build the Bilefen map, as seen in the BlizzCon demo. I also added the quests and small areas within the Bilefen: such as the Abandoned Village, the Deathmire, and the Court of Madness.
During BlizzCon 2018, the Diablo developers announced a new MMO-Action RPG game for mobile devices. Diablo Immortal is set 5 years after the destruction of the Worldstone, filling the gap storywise for what happened between Diablo II: Lord of Destruction and Diablo III.
