“This is something that we couldn't do with just a mouse input, and so that was an opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of. And through all of that, you can move your character around to really line up that perfect shot. But you can also aim it while it's charging up. The damage increases the longer you hold it down, and the area-of-effect increases. You press down on the Arcane Wind button, and as your thumb holds that button down, it starts to charge up. “Arcane Wind for the Wizard is a great example. “We have what I call charge-up skills,” Cheng says. It let them use the tactile interface of a phone screen to explore new combat features that weren’t compatible with the mouse-and-keyboard setup of past Diablo games.

“But with Diablo Immortal,” Cheng says, “we thought, ‘Hey, we know that we're a mobile-first game, we're going to have most people direct control let's go ahead and add the Icy Ground property.’ And now you really feel like you're sliding around on a slippery surface.” Fluid fightingĭesigning for mobile allowed the team to play around with other gameplay mechanics, too. Pointing your character to walk across a frozen lake, and watching as the game automatically takes care of the slippery surface, doesn’t feel nearly as engaging as it does to directly control their movement and slide your way across the tundra. With players controlling their character’s movement by pointing and clicking around the map, the game’s auto-pathing takes over to compensate for the icy ground beneath them.

'Diablo Immortal is probably the most ambitious Diablo game' Rod Fergusson 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 feature tricky to implement. It’s a simple concept and one that may not strike you as particularly challenging to implement.

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