Blizzard's announcement of their new mobile title, Diablo Immortal, didn't quite get the reaction the studio expected. It was met with nothing but confusion, scorn, and ridicule from the fan-base, to the point where it caused a massive drop in the company's stock.

While some chalked this up to fans just being ungrateful and entitled, others have defended the backlash and accused Blizzard of simply not understanding their fans, since many expected that their big BlizzCon 2018 announcement would be Diablo 4.

It only became more bizarre when recent reports suggested that Blizzard had intended to announce Diablo 4 at the event but pulled it. Blizzard claimed this to be false but new information courtesy of a lengthy article on Kotaku about the Diablo franchise's history may have shed some light as to why there's no sign of Diablo 4 yet. Apparently, Blizzard's canceled MMO, Titan, had a role to play in the decision not to announce Diablo 4.

“Titan was the code-name for a brand new MMO that Blizzard started developing around 2007,” says the article. “Envisioned as a cross between The Sims, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2, where you’d run businesses during the day and turn into a superhero at night, Titan was meant to be a different twist on the genre that Blizzard had already mastered with World of Warcraft.

“In the beginning of 2013, after a long and protracted development cycle, Blizzard canceled Titan. Part of the team went on to make Overwatch, which would become a big success, but the project became a black eye for Blizzard -- a massive sink of time and money that was also, much to some people’s dismay, public knowledge. Not only had they wasted resources on this failed game -- everybody knew about it. Blizzard had acknowledged the project in 2008, and its existence had been frequently hinted and asked about in the years that followed.”

So what does this have to do with Diablo 4? Simply put, Blizzard became worried about a similar thing happening - announcing a new Diablo sequel only for it to suffer delays and risk cancelation would probably upset fans even more than no announcement at all. A former Blizzard developer supported this, stating “The Diablo team is very paranoid about saying something too soon and then getting stuck in a loop. They don’t want to show the game until they have a trailer, a demo.” Another developer added "Titan looms over all of us... people don’t look at Titan and see a success.”

Blizzard themselves released an official statement on the matter. “In terms of unannounced games, so much can change over the course of development based on how we’re feeling about the progress and direction of the project,” they said. “So we try not to share details about unannounced projects before we’re ready. Our preference is to have a clear announcement plan with some concrete details and hopefully a playable demo of the game when we announce. That applies to our Diablo projects and our other games as well.”

This seems like an understandable justification for the lack of an announcement, and means that Diablo 4 will most likely happen at some point, though it's unlikely to change peoples' opinions on Diablo Immortal. Not that that's going to stop Blizzard making more mobile titles in the future, with reports of Blizzard working on their own version of Pokemon GO with the World of Warcraft IP.

Diablo Immortal will release on mobile devices but no set release date has been confirmed.

Source: Kotaku