There was a conspicuous absence during the Diablo anniversary ‘spotlight’ broadcast yesterday: no mention of a Switch 2 release for Diablo 4 or for Diablo 2: Resurrected.
This was something I had intended to find out about when I visited Blizzard headquarters a couple of weeks ago, while exploring these ‘spotlight’ announcements under embargo. But when I raised the question of a Switch 2 release in a group Diablo 2: Resurrected interview, it was commandeered by a Blizzard PR who explained to me the company had nothing to say on the matter – either about a Switch 2 version of Diablo 2: Resurrected or Diablo 4.
Incidentally, Diablo 2: Resurrected is available for Switch 1, but people are eager for a Switch 2 version to make use of the newer hardware’s greater power.
Why the silence? I would be amazed if Blizzard was not doing Switch 2 versions of either game. Blizzard had great success bringing Diablo 3 to the original Switch hardware, after all, so a precedent is already there. And I don’t see that Diablo 4, a three-year-old game, does anything too demanding for Switch 2 to cope with. The exception is the always-online nature of the game, whereby you log-in to Blizzard’s Battle.net servers to play. But Blizzard is bringing Overwatch to Switch 2 this year, which works in the same way.
As for Diablo 2: Resurrected, an upgraded Switch 2 version simply makes sense, especially in light of Blizzard’s recent warlock class release and apparent ongoing active development of the game.
But there’s a bigger reason why I think Switch 2 versions of Diablo are an inevitability, and it has to do with what Hearthstone’s executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith said during a different interview on the same Blizzard trip. While talking about a possible Switch 2 or Steam Deck release, he said, “In the future as we explore console and handheld, we’d probably go as wide as we could. Certainly we have a different owner now than we did three years ago and they’re more invested in Xbox and ‘anything’s an Xbox’. Their high-level goal [being] games playable anywhere.”
That’s a point worth underlining: it’s been three years now since Xbox owner Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for a colossal sum of money, which is more than enough time to impress itself and its values upon Blizzard. And Microsoft’s big current gaming push is, as Lyons-Smith mentioned, having Xbox everywhere, be it on PlayStation 5, PC, or the Asus Rog Ally X handheld it collaborated on recently. The Play Anywhere pitch is that you buy an Xbox game once and can play it on any device Xbox exists on. Surely that expands to Switch 2, too?
I think it’s only a matter of time before we see Diablo 4 and Diablo 2: Resurrected on Switch 2; perhaps even the Blizzard silence could be interpreted as a hint such things are in development. But if not now then when could such an announcement happen? Well, the Diablo 3 Switch 1 announcement happened around Gamescom 2018, an event Blizzard tends to favour, which takes place in August. But I think it’s more likely Blizzard is keeping its powder dry for its own show, BlizzCon, in September. Time, I suppose, will tell.
