Diablo: Immortal Closed Beta Learnings

Following several months of closed beta, Wyatt Cheng, the game director on Blizzard Entertainment’s mobile action-RPG Diablo: Immortal, brings us this detailed developer blog post summarizing everything his team was able to glean from the playtest, and listing some planned improvements to the game.

Here’s a couple of items to get you started:

From October of last year to early January, the Closed Beta was in full swing! Test participants had the chance to play a breadth of new content and features, including the Necromancer class, Cycle of Strife Updates, Set Items, Helliquary Updates, and Controller Support. Whether you participated directly in the playtest, sent us valuable feedback, or watched the game from a livestream, your input has been greatly appreciated. Let’s join our Game Director, Wyatt Cheng, and Senior System Designer, Kris Zierhut as they explain our learnings, philosophies, and planned improvements!

Hi everyone, my name is Wyatt Cheng, I’m the Game Director of Diablo Immortal. Following this playtest, our team continues to make substantial progress towards getting the game into everyone’s hands. We’re still planning for release in 2022 and today we’d like to share what we learned from Closed Beta, leading to critical changes around the social aspect of the game, raids, in-game purchases, a Cycle of Strife overhaul, and more. To kick things off I’ll take you through some General Updates we’re making, following the Closed Beta. Let’s jump in!

GENERAL UPDATES

SOCIAL & GROUP-PLAY IMPROVEMENTS

Diablo Immortal is an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game), and an important part of any MMO is the friendships you form and the sense of community you belong in. Our game’s social communities start with parties, and we want to promote party formation between like-minded players to complete shared goals.

Bounties were one system that led to a lot of group play, but also some challenges in beta. They’re repeatable, randomly-selected quests that you can complete in quick succession, earning bonus rewards for every four you turn in. During the Closed Beta, we received feedback that a lot of players who got assigned dungeon bounties felt like they were forced to group in order to complete them. Groupmates receiving that player often wanted to do multiple dungeon runs, and would be disappointed when a player immediately left the party after completing their bounty.

We’ll be adjusting bounties so that they’re exclusively solo, and we’re looking into making the Shadows’ Contracts more flexible in the future. We want to provide concrete incentives for grouping, but we also want to empower you to choose whether you want to play all-solo or all-group content.

RAID IMPROVEMENTS

We’re excited to see many of you enjoying the Helliquary—massive 8-player raid boss encounters that demand extra coordination to overcome.

Our intention is to release one new Helliquary boss every month, but in order to provide more granularity and a better sense of progression, we are going to also provide multiple difficulty levels for each boss. During beta, a number of you expressed feedback that the gap in difficulty between the bosses, Lassal and Vitaath, was too large; with this change, we think the Helliquary will remain rewarding to all types of players, but also close the difficulty gap for those who may feel too daunted to play this content.

We also heard lots of requests for better grouping, matchmaking, and raid management tools, and we’re happy to oblige! The raid UI in the Closed Beta was a first-pass implementation, and you can expect visual and functionality improvements in the future.