It’s official: Diablo Immortal has been delayed to 1H 2022. Now, depending on your point of view, you’re either bummed out that we’ll all have to wait even longer to get our hands on this peculiar dungeon crawler/hack-and-slash or are completely indifferent to its existence and couldn’t care less. 

It feels like this particular game — ever since that disastrous reveal — can only trigger those two reactions; it’s like there’s nothing in between. 

The reason why Diablo Immortal has been pushed to 2022 is quite simple: the developers want to “substantially improve” the game and need a bit more time to get the job done. 

“Following feedback provided by test participants of the Closed Alpha, our team has been tuning core and endgame features. For example, we’re iterating on PvP content like the Cycle of Strife to make it more accessible, alongside late-game PvE content like the Helliquary to make it more engaging. We’re also working to provide controller support for those who want to play our game differently. However, these changes and additional opportunities to improve our gameplay experience will not be realized in the 2021 timeframe we had previously communicated. So, the game is now planned for release in the first half of 2022, which will allow us to add substantial improvements to the whole game,” said Blizzard in an official dev post. 

It sounds like the dev team still has a lot of work to do. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has surely affected the speed at which they can make these adjustments and create new content, so a delay to H1 2022 for Diablo Immortal is justified. 

Regardless of how you feel about Diablo Immortal, it’s impossible not to be intrigued by its existence and the fact that it’ll bring the whole Diablo experience to mobile. Will it be as good as, say, Diablo 2 or 3? Of course not — it’ll surely be watered-down and slightly diluted (at least ever so slightly), but it’ll still be a lot better than most folks expect.

Blizzard has invested a lot of time and money to make the absolute best mobile Diablo it can, so there’s a reason for optimism. Head over to Blizzard’s official website for a more detailed look at what the dev team is currently working on!