Why Diablo Immortal had to be a mobile game first

techradar.com:

After spending the last three years insisting that Diablo Immortal will be a mobile exclusive, Blizzard revealed last month that it was bluffing all along. The next entry in the infernal action RPG series is, in fact, coming to PC, and will release on both platforms next month.

That’s exactly what fans wanted. Skeptics had initially balked at Diablo Immortal’s mobile exclusivity, but many have been won over now they know they can face Sanctuary’s fiends using a mouse and keyboard. Others had worried the game would be little more than a pared-down Diablo clone created for the mobile market, but are now excited at the thought of playing the first original Diablo release in five years.

The announcement of Diablo Immortal’s PC port has certainly done wonders for the game’s image, but it’s a good thing that it started life as a mobile exclusive. As game director Wyatt Cheng tells TechRadar, by designing the game for mobile, the team was able to explore new design principles and experiment with novel gameplay concepts that were beyond the reach of past Diablo titles.

“Senior combat designer Julian Love and I worked on Diablo 3 together, and back on Diablo 3, we really wanted to have affixes [modifiers that grant bonus abilities to your character and enemies] that played around a little bit with your movement,” Cheng says.

“There was one monster affix that we wanted to do at the time, but we didn't, which was Icy Ground – the idea that you're kind of skating around.”

It’s a simple concept and one that may not strike you as particularly challenging to implement. Platformers like Mario, Kirby and Rayman have had players sliding across slippery surfaces for decades, but Cheng says Diablo’s traditional, indirect control scheme made the