Less than a week after launch, Diablo Immortal has already secured the title of the worst-rated video game in Blizzard’s entire history.
It took Diablo Immortal just a few days to secure the rank of the worst-rated game in Blizzard’s entire history. Users’ backlash is most obviously related to the pay-to-win mechanics present in the game, as it requires over thousands of dollars to fully upgrade a single character – or many years of exhausting free-to-play gameplay.
According to a detailed breakdown of the game’s microtransactions and the overall monetization system, it costs Diablo Immortal players a whopping $110,000 to upgrade just a single playable character. The figure includes both paid gameplay enhancements and cosmetics. With a money pile like that, gamers can pass restrictive timers and level up their heroes on the go while also spending money on additional chests and gems. The free-to-play option would be to wait each time the game forces to, in which case upgrading a character might take almost a decade of a lifetime.
On Metacritic, Diablo Immortal has been review-bombed into oblivion, resulting in the lowest ever user score in Blizzard’s history (via VGC). The current figure stands at 0.5, with users addressing Diablo Immortal’s pay-to-win mechanics as the key reason for disliking the game. Its score corresponds with World of Warcraft Classic: Burning Crusade’s score and settles just a one-tenth lower than the notorious Warcraft 3 remake with its 0.6 user score. It is worth mentioning that while both Diablo Immortal and Burning Crusade Classic have accumulated the same ratings from the audience, the former stands at a higher percentage of negative reviews while also attracting a more significant amount of players expressing their frustrations. Critics have been a lot more favorable towards Blizzard’s latest game, resulting in an average score of 75 out of 100.
With all the criticism surrounding Diablo Immortal, it’s easy to get under the influence of misleading information. Recently, the game’s been blamed for incorporating a game-breaking kind of microtransaction, which forced Game Director Wyatt Cheng to address such claims on Twitter. According to Cheng, reports on Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions were misleading and harmful to the game’s reception. The in-game store indeed works differently, but in reality, it takes just an extra step to achieve the same result of acquiring powered items.
Diablo Immortal being globally hated by the franchise’s core audience isn’t hard to process. Fans have been hoping for a signature gaming experience despite the initial negative response to the announcement. And while Diablo Immortal is performing somewhat confidently on phones amongst numerous other money-grabbing mobile grinders, the game has flopped hard on PC with its predatory monetization system. Perhaps, Blizzard’s biggest mistake was to keep all the mechanics intact for the PC release. Reducing microtransactions and narrowing them down might’ve helped a lot, along with selling the game at a full price, which would have been a fair offer.
Source: Metacritic (via VGC)
Dmitry Lapunov is a video game writer and journalist based in Minsk, Belarus. A passionate gamer at his heart, Dmitry’s been enjoying video games since mid-nineties before moving on to a more professional kind of interaction with the gaming industry. His career started back in 2006 in a local newspaper. Since that very time, he’s been working with various gaming media outlets covering the hottest topics in the gaming industry. He’s now working for Valnet, Inc., focusing on Screen Rant’s gaming department and Game Rant.
