February 12, 2018 News on the other Diablo projects will be revealed over “the coming year,” but it sounds like they won’t be out so soon.
Activision-Blizzard’s financial results for the year are in, and the company expects 2019 to be a sort of transition year – which means you shouldn’t expect many surprise releases in the next 12 months. The most important news there is the massive set of layoffs, but there were some notes about what’s coming up for new releases. The company says in a conference call following the report that Blizzard will not have a “major front line release” for the year.
Of the Blizzard releases we know about, both Diablo Immortal and Warcraft III: Reforged probably fall short of that “major front line” designation. However, a proper new Diablo certainly would. It’s certain that a new title in the series is in development – even if it hasn’t been officially confirmed yet – but if you were holding out hope for a Diablo 4 release date this year you might want to adjust your expectations.
“We have many plans for Diablo across multiple projects which we’ll be revealing over the course of the coming year,” a Blizzard rep said on the official forums last November. “We are eager to share more about all of our projects, but some will have to wait as we prefer to show you, rather than tell you, about them.”
Kotaku reported shortly after BlizzCon that the Blizzard had recorded a video with co-founder Allen Adham, in which he would confirm that Diablo 4 was in development but not yet ready for a public showing.
It was initially reported that this video was scheduled to be shown at BlizzCon, but Blizzard disputes that. “We generally don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” a spokesperson said, “but we can say that we didn’t pull any announcements from BlizzCon this year or have plans for other announcements.”
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One of Kotaku’s sources said that Diablo 4 has “changed drastically” since entering development nearly half-a-decade ago, and it could still be in store for further changes. That’s likely why Blizzard is so skittish about showing off the game.