Diablo Immortal Gameplay Trailer Shows Significant Improvements

It’s been a long time since Blizzard has updated us on the status of Diablo Immortal, but a new trailer reveals some fresh gameplay footage for the controversial mobile title.

This trailer features some of the same footage showcased in the Diablo Immortal trailer that Blizzard quietly released as part of the BlizzCon 2019 celebrations, but it focuses much more on the game’s UI and some of the details of its six currently available character classes (Barbarian, Crusader, Demon Hunter, Monk, Necromancer, and Wizard).

The UI and other visual elements are arguably the biggest takeaways from this new footage. As expected, Diablo Immortal will not feature a 1:1 replication of the more complicated UI featured in the PC and console versions of Diablo. Having said that, the UI we do see features many of the core components we’re used to seeing in traditional Diablo games. There’s a wheel for quickly selecting various abilities, enemy health bars, item icons, and even a minimap. In short, it pretty much looks like how you’d imagine a well-produced mobile version of Diablo would look like.

The same is true of some of the action we see. Characters in Diablo Immortal still utilize a diverse range of abilities (many of which are relayed via a cone or circle which shows the area of their effect), and a “hack-and-slash” format still looks to be the core of Immortal‘s combat. It’s certainly also worth noting that characters in Immortal look much better than they did in previous demos, and the effects that accompany special attacks and other interactions are significantly more impressive than those we’ve seen in previous demos.

In short, Diablo Immortal actually looks…quite good. We still have some questions regarding how certain character abilities and progression elements will work based on what’s been revealed so far, but this trailer represents an across the board improvement from what we’ve seen in the past:

Of course, it’s been two years since Diablo Immortal‘s infamously flat debut on the stage of Blizzcon 2018. While some of the game’s initially negative reception can be traced back to unfinished design elements showcased at the time, it had much more to do with the idea that Diablo could return has a half-hearted mobile game.

Now that we know Blizzard is also working on Diablo 4 (and now that we’ve seen some of the improvements Blizzard has made to Diablo Immortal thus far), we’d argue that now is approximately the time to start getting excited about the possibility that Diablo Immortal could actually be a fun mobile distraction.