First, Blizzard hyped us up about multiple upcoming Diablo projects, with an S. We’ve already covered this in detail, but it bears mentioning here because the seed for this moment was planted months ago. The real tragedy of the entire episode is just how easily it could have been avoided. With a poor PR plan from the outset, and poor handling of the announcement, Blizzard has to shoulder the lion’s share of the fault for this situation. Every person deserves respect.īut we can’t put all the blame on the fans here. We should always, always keep conversation civil, especially when it comes to the things that we’re passionate about. I condemn those fans and their behavior unequivocally. Plenty of sites that I won’t link to here are now attacking Blizzard’s fans for being “entitled asses.” Sure, some of them, a very vocal minority, have crossed lines that shouldn’t be crossed over a video game. The backlash to the Immortal announcement was immediate and ferocious, across social media and in person. It was spellbinding in its unmitigated awfulness. In my eleven years of writing for Blizzard Watch and its predecessor, I’ve never seen anything like what happened at BlizzCon yesterday. Principal game designer Wyatt Cheng, tasked with sharing his vision of a Diablo game that he’s assuredly worked very hard on, was almost in tears by the end of his presentation. The scene was heartbreaking for pretty much everyone involved: fans, guests developers from NetEase, and Blizzard staff alike.

Diablo immortal hype fail