Many Diablo fans have raged about Diablo Immortal since the game’s announcement over the weekend at BlizzCon 2018, but let’s face the fact – Diablo Immortal will still be launching. While touted as a co-development project with long-time Chinese partner NetEase, the technical development parts are mostly done by NetEase, including the game engine. Several Chinese media outlets managed to speak with NetEase for more details.
• Diablo Immortal is developed using NetEase’s in-house Messiah game engine.
• Development on Messiah started in 2010, and was first used for a game in 2013. The game engine was made specifically for developing optimized 3D mobile games.
• NetEase has a partnership with Qualcomm to optimize Messiah for their mobile chips.
• Messiah supports technologies such as Physically based Rendering (PBR), Normal mapping, GPU Particle, Real-time lighting and more, drastically lowering the number of game details lost while playing.
• Messiah was used to develop mobile games such as NetEase’s Knives Out and a few Chinese mobile MMORPG titles.
• NetEase confirmed that Diablo Immortal will not be as “dark” as the PC game (I am assuming this is referring to Diablo III) as it would be better for mobile gamers (I am guessing this is referring to the in-game brightness).
• NetEase claimed they would have no issues with gamers playing Diablo Immortal using PC emulators.
• NetEase confirmed the business model is not set in stone yet.
• The development team is now focused on raising the quality of the game, and not ready to look into other potential features such as guild, PVP, transmorg, auction house, etc.
• NetEase also has yet to decide if players from Android and iOS will share the same servers.
