Diablo Immortal Test – looting & leveling, MMO aspects, side hustles

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Hardly any game has experienced such a shit storm as Blizzard’s mobile offshoot of the hack and slash series. After many hours in Sanctuary on PC and iOS, we have to break a lance.

All screenshots and video scenes are from GamersGlobal

It is certainly not an exaggeration when I say: The Diabloseries is one of the big ones. And by that I mean not only in the field of action role-playing games, but in the games world in general. Nobody at Blizzard thought that when the first part was published in 1996. At the latest with diablo 2 by 2000 and at the very latest with the Lord of Destruction expansion, the legendary status was consolidated. And yes, even the initially poorly received one Diablo 3 (Auction house, cough) now has a solid footing with fans. Everything seemed so beautiful in Blizzard land. Until one fateful day in November 2018.

In the course of the taking place BlizzCon the company announced Diablo Immortal. A mobile offshoot. The indignation of the fans in the room was great and the now legendary statement “Do You Guys Not Have Phones” by the game designer didn’t make it any better Wyatt Cheng in response to the outrage.

But I’m not a fan of herding unlaid eggs around the village. That’s what the saying went, wasn’t it? Anyway, no matter how well or badly Blizzard handled the criticism, I was excited for Diablo Immortal and have now spent a few hours in and around Sanctuary. And I can anticipate so much from my test: the shitstorm wasn’t really justified. I’ll tell you everything else about the game developed by NetEase in my test video and in the following text. FYI: I was playing on an iPhone 11 Pro Max most of the time, so the screenshots and video scenes aren’t of the best possible quality, thanks to the phone’s internal recording function.

Series veterans can look forward to old acquaintances like Leoric.

Diablo Light

Right from the start it is clear that the developers wanted to deliver the full Diablo experience. It all starts with class selection. There are six professions available to you, most of which should be known from Diablo 3: Barbarian, Crusader, Sorcerer, Necromancer, Demon Hunter and Monk. So the witch doctor is missing, but there is the similarly functioning scavenger.

But even apart from the choice of characters, Immortal feels like a real series part, just with touch controls. The core of the game is still looting, leveling and beating up tons of monsters. I was on the road as a demon hunter and after a short period of getting used to it, the long-distance combat with the two crossbows was very precise and I was able to use the skills quickly and precisely. You either drag them to an appropriate spot to unleash a hail of arrows, for example, or hold down the barrage icon to spin through the monsters until the skill needs to be recharged.

However, the game cannot hide the casualization either. The skill system has been significantly reduced, as you level up you unlock new skills that you can then freely distribute to your slots at any time. There is very little you can do with your other attributes, except for equipment and gems. The hardcore gamers among you may not like this, but I found this approach to be quite successful in the context of a mobile game. It’s also nice that Blizzard has integrated a couple of build examples directly into Immortal to give newcomers a starting point on how to use the system.

Even minor puzzles will be presented to you as the story progresses.

Give me MMOre

On the other hand, I don’t find the strong MMO elements that great. I keep seeing other players dashing through the areas, even if I’m only playing solo missions. That in itself doesn’t bother us much, but it can sometimes be a bit confusing. Rather, what upsets me is a resulting factor: the always-on compulsion. Because if you’re offline, you can’t play Diablo Immortal. And that’s really a problem for a smartphone game in the digital wasteland. Because even in the city center it can happen that you have no reception in the waiting room. In my experience, the network code at least manages to cushion shaky LTE reception. After all.

When the online elements become useful again is with the portals or larger raids. Because even if you can tackle many elements alone, they are easier to handle in a group. The developers have built in a troop search for this, which always found three players quickly and reliably during my test period. And also in the dungeons themselves there were no problems with rubber banding.

I still have a second big problem with Diablo Immortal: the compulsion to grind. In my approximately 15 to 20 hours, I repeatedly came to a point in the campaign where it said: Reach level XY, otherwise you can’t go any further. Then there were two hours of bounties hunting and portal farming on the program. It really doesn’t have to be.

You can also enter the portals without emblems, but there are more rewards.

Bounties and Portals

After all, Blizzard offers you some options to boost your level. First, there are Bounty Hunts, mini-missions that you can pick up from bulletin boards around town. It is usually sufficient to kill a defined number of opponents in a given area, with experience points and loot as a reward. Nice thing, but: There are only a maximum of eight orders per day. I cannot understand why this is so.

Presumably Blizzard wants to push the player more to visit the portals. These randomly generated dungeons are usually completed in a maximum of five minutes and, in the case of the challenge portals, are also pleasantly crisp. If the story is too easy for you, you will find a challenging task here.

The elder portals, on the other hand, also help with level advancements and can in principle be entered free of charge. But it’s only by using emblems that you earn the runes needed to craft gems. And you only get these emblems very rarely in the actual game, for example when you level up in the Battle Pass. Or you can just buy them with real money.

The shop offers the typical categories in which you can get rid of your real money.