Diablo Immortal: Closed Beta Learnings

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From October of last year to early January, the Closed Beta was in full swing! Test participants had the chance to play a breadth of new content and features, including the Necromancer class, Cycle of Strife Updates, Set Items, Helliquary Updates, and Controller Support. Whether you participated directly in the playtest, sent us valuable feedback, or watched the game from a livestream, your input has been greatly appreciated. Let’s join our Game Director, Wyatt Cheng, and Senior System Designer, Kris Zierhut as they explain our learnings, philosophies, and planned improvements!

Hi everyone, my name is Wyatt Cheng, I'm the Game Director of Diablo Immortal. Following this playtest, our team continues to make substantial progress towards getting the game into everyone’s hands. We’re still planning for release in 2022 and today we’d like to share what we learned from Closed Beta, leading to critical changes around the social aspect of the game, raids, in-game purchases, a Cycle of Strife overhaul, and more. To kick things off I'll take you through some General Updates we're making, following the Closed Beta. Let's jump in!

Diablo Immortal is an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game), and an important part of any MMO is the friendships you form and the sense of community you belong in. Our game’s social communities start with parties, and we want to promote party formation between like-minded players to complete shared goals.

Bounties were one system that led to a lot of group play, but also some challenges in beta. They’re repeatable, randomly-selected quests that you can complete in quick succession, earning bonus rewards for every four you turn in. During the Closed Beta, we received feedback that a lot of players who got