Blizzard Entertainment: New survival game borrowed from Diablo and WoW

In early 2022, Blizzard Entertainment confirmed that they were working behind the scenes on a new survival game. It had been quiet about this for a long time, but thanks to a few new job advertisements, there are now fresh bits of information again.

While the focus right now is primarily on the upcoming Diablo IV, Blizzard Entertainment is also working behind the scenes on an all-new survival game. The new brand was announced at the beginning of 2022, but we haven’t really received many details about the title so far.

Now the cult developer is looking for new staff for the survival project for PC and consoles – and the associated job postings have some information snippets ready. The IP was last briefly discussed in an internal review in December. At the time, it was said that the development team led by former Far Cry director Dan Hay had doubled over the course of 2022 and should continue to grow in 2023.

Since the end of March, new job offers have been popping up that confirm, among other things, that the survival game will be set in a fantasy world; the first artworks for the 2022 announcement already suggested this. Furthermore, the game will follow an open-world approach and will therefore have all kinds of side activities to offer.

In general, it seems that various elements from World of WarCraft and Diablo are to be implemented in the game, because elsewhere there is also talk of dungeons, raids and boss fights – and the latter in particular is not always a trademark of survival games. There should be PvP and PvE elements in equal measure and another focus of the development work should be on the AI ​​that should be used. Blizzard itself speaks of a “modular AI as a service”; behind it are likely to be behaviors of the inhabitants of the fantasy world, which should be modularly adapted to game situations.

Last but not least, there are a number of direct references for live service elements – a fact that should not come as a surprise and suggests that post-launch monetization is planned for the longer term.