Diablo Immortal won’t have Diablo 3-style seasons

On Thursday, Blizzard revealed a host of new details around Immortal Diablo – its mobile game Diablo – and even launched an alpha test in Australia. Immortal Diablo is similar in many ways to Diablo 3, but during a preview event on Monday, Blizzard told us their mobile game was more of a single character experience than the current Diablo game for console and PC. This means that a major feature will be absent for Immortal Diablo at launch: Seasons.

Diablo 3The seasons have kept the game going for years now. If you are unfamiliar, every few months Blizzard launches a new season in Diablo 3. Each new season requires players to create a new character and prepare it from scratch. Players then push this character – engaging with unique seasonal effects – for a few months, trying to see how far they can go. Then Blizzard kicks off a new season and they start over.

Instead of rebuilding a character every few months to abandon it, Blizzard wants to take more of a single character approach to Immortal. So while players may have several different classes on their account, Blizzard expects most players to primarily play with one.

Immortal Diablo seems influenced by World of warcraft in this way. Instead of seasons, Immortal could entice gamers with major expansions and fixes to keep the game fresh. We can imagine that players will have characters in years in which they have devoted almost all of their time.

This is a substantial change in philosophy for Diablo, especially for hardcore gamers. I spent time with over 30 characters in Diablo 3 since Blizzard launched this game in 2012. But the characters Diablo 3 are quick to come and easy to drop – seasonal models depend on players upgrading to a new one every few months, swapping character classes based on the seasonal event. Some players even create hardcore characters, which disappear after their first death. Blizzard wants players to invest in their Immortal Diablo characters for years to come, and Diablo 3The seasons are not compatible with this kind of playstyle.