Here’s my honest review of Diablo Immortal during the launch phase and 3 months of play & D4:
Combining the April’s Fool Joke guy and the general consensus of mobile games, DI had a bad rep to begin with from a typical PC gamer standpoint. And with that, I had particularly low expectation specifically because most mobile RPG games usually have the AFK-farming feature opt-in with a lot of P2W microtransactions. Also, the quality of the game and physics/graphics engine tends to underpar in order to optimize on mobile platform.
Surprisingly, Diablo Immortal team was quite serious with the quality of the game. If I would compare the state of the game to an average indie steam PC game, it is definitely an “overwhelmingly positive” level of complete game. Why? because DI team introduced new PVPVE mechanics to the game which the D3 team had never achieved. So, from a PC gamer standpoint, DI is very impressive for a mobile game. Indeed, it proved to be a “certified Blizzard grade”.
What is a certified Blizzard grade?
Even if the graphic engine or physics engine isn’t the latest tech, the content and gaming feature delivers.
What stopped me from playing is the p2w aspect becoming the main source of character power just like any PC gamer have expected. (Actually, it is the semantics the DI team used after the Beta phase that there wasn’t going to be any p2w, but they lied. Hence, Raxxanterax announced to remove their support for DI)
Now, comparing to DI to D4 and other AAA title PC games, D4 DOES NOT certify as the usual Blizzard grade. It’s made for PC/console platform and the content came half-baked or should I say content gated behind seasons/expansions.
The content and game features from DI is the true successor of the D2.
(If you have played through both full cycles of Immortal/Shadow in the game then you know)
Overall, I didn’t expect the rating of DI to be that high. It was quite “mixed” during the launch phase. But I guess for a typical mobile gamer, DI does come very close to Genshin level.
To be fair, yeah I do think that rating for D4 got bombed but I don’t feel unjust about it. It’s one of the prime example of a poorly delivered game.