Rumor: Diablo IV codenamed Fenirs – Dark Souls Diablo Canned and Warcraft Go

Rumor: Warcraft version of Pokemon Go

Despise all the hate and bad comments in regards to recent Blizzard’s behavior drama and the announcement of Diablo Immortal for mobile devices Jason Schreier from Kotaku managed to find out some very interesting things on what Blizzard is also working on besides Diablo Immortal. Apperently there was a Dark Souls genre-like game set in the Diablo universe that was canceled by the codename Project Hades. Fenris is the internal name for Diablo IV that had its development rebooted in 2016 and there is also a Warcraft mobile game that play a lot like Pokemon Go but has its own special twist to it. You can see what we think of the whole Diablo Immortal drama right here.

Remember to take this with a grain of salt because none of this stuff is official itself and none of it has been confirmed by Blizzard yet.

Here are some of the highlights:

Warcraft Go?
- Some Blizzard developers are genuinely excited to make mobile games.
- A lot of Blizzard developers play Pokemon Go.
- A natural extension of this was for the new Incubation Team to develop a Warcraft version of Pokémon Go, which is supposedly in development for smartphones now.
- People who have played the Warcraft mobile game say it’s also got a lot more to it than Pokémon Go, including single-player mechanics.
Diablo
- Diablo III had a second expansion that was canceled.
- Blizzard says cancellations show commitment to quality and that they have only released about 50% of the projects that they have worked on in the past 3 decades.
- Project Hades was reportedly a Diablo game in development that would be more like Dark Souls, an over the shoulder dungeon crawler that was also canceled.
- Project Fenris is the current incarnation of Diablo IV and the team is optimistic about it. Their art direction is to embrace the darkness.
- Project Fenris is still early in development and will likely not launch until 2020 or later.
- They still claim that there was talks to announce Diablo IV at BlizzCon, but it wasn’t far enough along in time, yet one dev disputes this.
- Blizzard is careful to announce games before they are ready now because of what happened with Project Titan.
- Project Fenris is being worked on by a separate team from Diablo: Immortal known as Incubation.
- Diablo: Immortal exists because they heard that China really wanted a Diablo mobile game.
Activision and Blizzard
- Blizzard employees say one of the biggest ongoing conversations this year has been cutting costs.
- Blizzard’s response for comment was “Blizzard has been and continues to be a developer-driven company. All of the games we create represent ideas our game developers themselves are passionate about. This is as true for Diablo Immortal as it was for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, or Overwatch, or any game we’ve ever made. We believe that the best games to make are ones that our developers believe in.”
- The perception is that Activision is starting to get more and more involved with Blizzard because 2018 had been a week year for them.
- The meetings this year was the first time many employees heard things like cutting costs or showing growth.
- Activision wants to boost Blizzard’s content output by adding more developers and release more games on a regular schedule.
- Mike Morhaime stepping down was a big blow because he was seen as the Anti-CEO and just wanted to make good games and keep employees happy without worrying about profitability.