Diablo Immortal isn’t the only mobile game Blizzard Entertainment is launching this year as a quarterly earnings report just revealed a mobile Warcraft experience is imminent.
The confirmation in the report is scant on details, stating “Blizzard is planning substantial new content for the Warcraft franchise in 2022, including new experiences in World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, and getting all-new mobile Warcraft content into players’ hands for the first time.”
World of Warcraft and Hearthstone players will be pleased to see new content is heading their way, but everyone is now left wondering what kind of Warcraft experience we’re going to get on smartphones and tablets. The best reference we have is the forthcoming Diablo Immortal, which Blizzard confirmed in the report has completed its public testing with “positive feedback.”
Diablo Immortal is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online action role-playing game. It’s purely for mobile devices, requires an online connection at all times, and is linked to Battlenet so you can play across multiple devices without losing any progress. Gameplay is meant to be very similar to Diablo III (the closed beta trailer for the game offers a good idea of what to expect).
Warcraft will of course be a different experience, but it’s highly likely the free-to-play model will be adopted and the same link to Battlenet included. It’s difficult to predict when Blizzard will choose to launch the game, but Immortal is expected to release before the end of Q2 this year, so mobile Warcraft is likely to be a Q3/Q4 release.
There may actually be more than one mobile Warcraft game planned. In February last year, IGN reported that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick confirmed “we’ve made multiple, mobile, free-to-play Warcraft experiences and they’re now in advanced development.” So perhaps the “all-new mobile Warcraft content” isn’t a single game.
