Five months after the first test, I once again entered Diablo: Immortal, stepping onto the land of the Immortal Land. In addition to the familiar cabin that makes memories immediately come to mind, this time, I am more prepared for a "new experience", such as a new class necromancer, a new two-faction confrontation, and, of course, how to pay for the dark mobile game.
I have to say that even if the overall framework, gameplay, and activities of Diablo: Immortal have been quite mature and perfected at the time of the first test, the second test has still been outputting some new experiences and surprises.
First of all, is the new career strong enough?
Instead of analyzing the strength of the class, I think the biggest attraction of the new class necromancer is that it can be output, controllable, milky, and regimental weapon.
Although the Necromancer sounds like it should be a summoning class, in fact, the official design concept for its skill matching is that one set of self-output, one set of summon routes, and one set of team battle configurations.
Of course, necromancers can both output and summon monsters, which is very reasonable, but when you participate in various activities and quests in Diablo: Immortal, switching skill forms as needed, this experience is different, at least, we can rarely experience "what it is like to have all skills familiar and skillfully matched" in Dark Games.
For a simple example, we can see three sets of schemes in the official recommended skill combinations, but these three schemes have only three skills, but the skill bar has four. Therefore, when brushing the Immortal Secret Realm, you can put a group attack and group control skill on the fourth grid to quickly brush the mobs, and after the boss, you can quickly switch to a single point output skill or add armor, and when you encounter a team battle, you can quickly match a set of control skills to make up for the team's shortcomings.
This game style of switching skills at any time is greatly related to the overall design idea of the game itself: first of all, all skills do not need to add additional points, and there is no need for players to upgrade their skills, after level 50 of the week is full, all skills will be unlocked; secondly, the game movement itself has high mobility, and the daily key brush of bounties, immortal secrets, quests, faction activities, etc., can be quickly teleported to the vicinity of the destination with one click. High mobility means that players will quickly switch between various battle scenarios to achieve their goals, and naturally they will be able to use various skills on a high frequency basis.
Overall, the new class Necromancer is indeed particularly suitable for the current version, allowing you to play to your strengths regardless of the occasion and maximizing the cool point of the game's maneuverability design.
New World after level 43: The Immortals and the Shadow Society faction
If the new profession of necromancer has made me experience a "pro-son" treatment in the second test, then the "Eternal Dispute" after level 43 can be said to really open the door to the new world of this game.
In Diablo: Immortality, the Creator Dadesha created the "Crown of Eternity" to protect St. Hugh Ari from demonic attacks, and the Legion of The Immortals is the guardian who inherits the powerful relics and protects the sanctuary. However, powerful forces make people fall, and the immortal is not eternal.
The Shadows will stand up when the Immortals fall, testing the Immortals, waiting for the opportunity to overthrow the Fallen Immortals, and then take the Crown of Eternity with them.
The endless cycle of disputes and entanglements between the two camps, "immortality" is the eternal light, but the immortal position is not eternal, this is the core color of "Diablo: Immortal", and it is also the main theme of the player's emotional integration - the two camps, the immortal and the shadow society.
Based on the season, the Immortals and shadow will always maintain a secret struggle. But instead of simply dividing the factions, the Immortals will always maintain a streamlined lineup of 200-300 people, while the Shadow Club will be almost unlimited.
The reason for this design is first of all because the goals and aspirations of the two camps are different.
Immortals mean guardianship, and all immortals follow the immortal leaders and lieutenants who will receive the blessing of the crown divine power and protect the immortal land in the face of the demon king's invasion during the trials of Dedessa.
But on the other hand, the immortals must always accept the trials of the Shadow Society, and the members of the Shadow Society will constantly bite the slack immortals, harass the immortals' treasure house, face the immortals in the battle of exile, and destroy the ancient heart. The Immortals must maintain their high desire to fight and their exuberant combat prowess at all times, otherwise they will end their reign after the Battle of Exile.
If you want to wear a crown, you will bear its weight.
The Shadow Will mean judgment, they are always lurking in the shadows, no honor, no aura, only eternal trials for the immortals.
Within the Shadow Society, a distinction begins to be made between unions, and at the end of one season, the top ten guilds will have the power to test the immortals, and then replace the fallen immortals as the immortals who guard the sanctuary the next season. And so on and so on, and so on.
Of course, it is not so simple to physically divide the camps and trade unions, the two camps themselves have different directions of daily activities, and there is an antagonistic relationship.
The Shadow Society's faction theme is "Judgment of the Fallen Immortals", so in the Seven Factions event, both the Treasure Chest and the Holy Relic Battle Song may directly engage players in the Immortal faction. Of course, due to the difference in the number of immortals and the Shadow Society, we can also immediately understand the average combat strength gap between the two camps, which on the one hand stimulates the leading forces in the Shadow Society to attack the immortal level combat strength, on the other hand, it also unites the many players of the Shadow Society against the powerful immortals.
Leveling support: motivation and approach
The main line of Diablo Immortal is not long, and it ends after level 55 of the week is full, and the main line corresponds not only to the plot experience, but also to a large number of upgrade experiences.
Yes, the growing theme of Diablo Immortal is leveling up.
It is not that the character's training degree is purely based on the level increase, but the level increase is a prerequisite for achieving an average "graduation outfit" and is the basis for the improvement of combat strength.
Here we need to talk about the second test version, the player experience after adding the paid point.
Undoubtedly, Diablo Immortal needs to go through some settings to open up the gap between civilian players and big R players, but it can't spoil the game experience of ordinary players.
Its approach is to stretch the upgrade line shared by all players, as shown in the following figure, before the arrival of the "inflection point", each player basically needs to pay a lot of time and energy to level up, brush copies, brush equipment, etc., in the part before the inflection point, every day can be achieved daily, so I call it the "graduation suit" that everyone has.
Simply put, the strength of the character panel depends on the setting of the increase/decrease level, and when the difference between the two combat units is too large, the low-level side can neither hit the damage nor resist the beating. Of course, this gap is mainly reflected in PVE (especially in the team to fight the wild), and PVP has strong restrictions on this to alleviate the problem of excessive combat power in PVP occasions.
The materials needed to upgrade this attribute can be obtained through passes, as well as indirect transactions in the free market, in short, the season is not waiting for anyone, and the player who rushes the season level faster can naturally have a faster growth rate.
In other words, Diablo Immortal tries to get every player to compete for the graduation outfit for most of each season, which makes the graduation outfit very valuable, that is, the so-called players at every level have a gaming experience.
Among the graduation outfits, the highest value is undoubtedly the upgrade experience, which directly corresponds to the skill level and the bonus point system opened by the second week, and has absolute command over the attributes of the character panel. Diablo: Immortal is thoughtful at this point.
The source of upgrade experience is all kinds of missions and activities, corresponding to daily bounty missions, dungeons, world bosses, secret realms, faction tasks, etc., basically covering all the gameplay in the game, but there are also emphases, such as daily bounties and faction tasks are the first sources of experience.
On the way to completing daily and season missions, players will also frequently come into contact with the game's secondary training modules - amulets, refining equipment entries, rune systems (the nine gems of Hladim's legacy), etc., to comprehensively increase the strength of the character. In these secondary modules, more than half of the content needs to rely on the "liver".
For example, the secondary currency in this game , platinum coins , a currency that can be purchased for money and can also be obtained from in-game missions or bazaar transactions, will be heavily used in various secondary training modules, and the essential meaning of platinum coins is the real "general equivalent" in this game, circulating in the player's bazaar and used to create various types of equipment. In several strength enhancement modules, it can be exchanged and built as currency between materials, but platinum coins belong to "play points" rather than "paid points": first, the frequency of use is not high, because most of the secondary training modules need to be brushed to obtain relevant resources, and the second is the platinum coins obtained through the transaction of excess materials and daily tasks between players, which is enough to meet the needs of most players.
For example, one of the functions of the Platinum Coin is to refine the amulet into a skill stone, and then to enchant the amulet, which needs to be spent on refining the skill stone. However, the entire chain of refining the amulet is:
1. Complete the bounty task and the honor merchant redemption every day, get a first-level amulet, and have a skill bonus entry.
2. Break down the excess amulets, raise one of them to level 5, and refine it into skill stones. The Skill Stone has five skill entries.
3. Enchant the refined skill stone to another 5th order amulet and replace it with an unwanted entry. At the same time, the 5th order amulet has five all-class random skill attribute bonuses, when refined to another amulet, the percentage probability of the bonus is increased, theoretically, the maximum strength of the amulet can be done, and the five skill attributes of a single class are added by 10%.
The platinum coin only participates in one link in the second step, and the rest depends on the liver.
In each strength enhancement module, almost most of the links require players to brush materials with high intensity, and only in very few links, they need monetary participation. This greatly increases the player's motivation to increase the strength of the character.
This part of the content is equivalent to the "graduation suit" shared by all players, if you do not complete these contents, you will assume that the player has not completed the game, and this aspect is completely unrestricted, so the game's "big troop threshold" starts from here.
What about the paid part?
The most concerned part came, because the "Diablo: Immortal" second test added to the payment system, so the question of "how to charge for dark mobile games" was finally revealed.
The first is the Secret Key. This module has always been the essence of dark games, it is equivalent to a level reward, giving the player a premium copy of the material. In Diablo Immortal, the value of the Great Secret Realm is to provide material for crafting gem-encrusted equipment.
In this regard, basically every player can get a complete body of gems, but the gap in the gem upgrade materials, and do not need a key to enter the secret realm, the secret key is equivalent to saving the time cost of upgrading gems.
The second is the smelting stone forging, which is used to equip the entry refining. This is one of the links of the secondary strength module, and the number of equipment entries depends on the equipment level, and the equipment level still depends on daily participation in the game and doing tasks to obtain, so the equipment entry collocation is an area that can only be touched by the top strength party, and it is only considered under the condition of completing the equipment upgrade.
The third, and I think is the most classic paid module, is the benefit package in the game. Diablo: Immortal has two kinds of weekly packages and quest packs, and quest packs are unlocked after completing a quest, and can only be purchased once per account, so each one is very heavy and high value, but very cheap and cost-effective.
On the whole, the second test of "Diablo: Immortal" is already a fairly complete product, whether it is the extraction of the essence of "Diablo" itself, the social creation from the mobile game dimension and the balance of user habits, or the design highlights of the two camps of the Immortal and the Shadow Society, which have been interlocked, the experience is complete and rich. It can be seen that the current changes and adjustments of Diablo: Immortal are based on the core of the "leveling experience", if future versions can have a smoother and richer and more layered experience, and the game always adheres to the "graduation outfit that all players can build", then it is still very promising to be recognized by Dark players and non-Dark players.
Since the dark mobile game market is still relatively blank, the online performance of Diablo: Immortal will be extremely critical, and in every sense, it is a game worth looking forward to.