Path of Exile mocks Blizzard and Diablo during mobile announcement
Developers of Path of Exile took a dig at Blizzard’s botched Diablo Immortal announcement from 2018 when announcing their own mobile version at ExileCon.
The Diablo Immortal announcement will probably be remembered forever for giving fans something almost no one in attendance at BlizzCon 2018 actually wanted.
The announcement and the infamous “don’t you guys have phones?” line seemed to be everywhere after it all went down, and there’s been so sign of Diablo Immortal either, despite a supposed 2019 release date.
At ExileCon 2019 on November 15, Path of Exile developers joked that the controversy surrounding Blizzard’s announcement caused them to delay a mobile announcement from 2018.
PoE takes another shot at Diablo
Grinding Gear CEO Chris Wilson announced a mobile version of Grinding Gear’s RPG dungeon crawler on November 15.
“So needless to say, about a year ago it became real difficult to announce that,” Wilson joked on stage to laughs from the crowd of fans.
The CEO said developers thought fans would be more receptive to a mobile version if they announced a sequel, Path of Exile 2, first.
It seemed to go over much better than the Diablo Immortal announcement did, but Wilson also said the game is currently “experimental,” and development will continue based on fan feedback.
Grinding Gears has said they want to stay away from current trends in F2P (free-to-play) mobile gaming like microtransactions, and the like, while bringing a true version of Path of Exile to mobile.
Path of Exile surprises players with new campaign
Other big news out of ExileCon in 2019 was the announcement of Path of Exile 2 – a new campaign with new classes, challenges, and features for players to dive into.
Armor, weapons, character models and animation have also been completely redone, but all previous microtransaction purchases will still carry over from PoE 1.
There’s no release date for PoE 2 yet, but Grinding Gear did say they don’t intend to start a beta until very late in 2020. In the meantime, they will continue to release regular expansions every six months.