Following the Release of Diablo Immortal on June 2nd, the game faced major backlash by players as Metacritic review scores dropped to Blizzard’s third lowest ever.
The long-waited release of Diablo Immortal in 2018 has left fans of the series disappointed when it finally arrived to the public on June 2nd. At first glance the game seems to be very free to play friendly, but as stated in a comment by a fan, when “you reach around level 50+ you start to feel more and more the pay to win aspects.” According to Bellular News’s analysis, the game would require players to spend more than $100,000 of real life currency to max out their characters on transaction alone, otherwise 10 years worth of grinding would be needed.
All this money and time being spent is because of the Legendary Gems; equipment required to upgrade your character’s equipment and unlock new abilities. Usually these are obtained by playing through the main story quests, daily rewards and from random runes acquired, but the main way of getting these is by the loot box like experience involving the Legendary Crests and Rifts that have a slim chance of obtaining a good Legendary Gem. “This is not a game, it is a casino. Possibly the worst ‘game’ ever made” a fan said in a comment on Metacritic.
The negativity has resulted in a ‘review bombing’ on Metacritic, reaching a User Score of 0.8, Blizzard’s third-lowest User Score in any game at the time of writing. The other two games that reached scores as low as Diablo Immortal were War of Warcraft III Reforged (0.6) and World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic (0.4), both of which were released a few years prior to Diablo Immortal’s.
Despite being very heavy in monetizing microtransactions, the gameplay itself would have been actually quite enjoyable without the P2W whales (players that spend outrageous amounts of money on a free-to-play game) ruining the competitiveness of the game.
There was an instance where content creator Raxxanterax posted a video of his team being destroyed by one of these whales, “The pay-to-win has completely ruined the PvP” he said. He was extremely disappointed as he looked at the whale’s high-tier equipment normally obtained from years of grinding.
In the end, Blizzard had released a wonderful game to mobile ports, although being ruined by intense monetization required for getting stronger in the game. Fans of the franchise are left disappointed in Blizzard’s poor execution of the Diablo series’ long-waited game. Hopefully this will set examples and guideline for their future games that involve the gacha system.
