A giant, demonic creature with black horns and a long tail is only one of the images the name “Diablo” invokes. Throughout the years, Blizzard’s long-running series of action RPGs has worked with the somber tone of the dark fantasy, a language players have become used to. While preserving this valuable tradition, the team responsible for Diablo Immortal has found that they can still create a fun game even if they don’t take the whole dark fantasy setting too seriously.
During the 2025 Brasil Game Show, Polygon spoke to Emil Salim, the lead artist for Diablo Immortal, and learned what has been creatively driving the team since launch. And how to design a cool druid.
Diablo Immortal was released in June 2022 and was met with negative feedback about its monetization system. It has survived since then, recently having just started its latest season, Vessels of the Husk. Since its first updates, Diablo Immortal has not only let players enjoy some classic demon-slaying action but also introduced unexpected updates, like the Berserk collab, which brought elements from Kentaro Miura’s famous manga Berserk to the game.
The game has been receiving updates for three years already, and what could have just turned into a classic Diablo experience — but on mobile — turned into a game with its own identity. While it still has the dark fantasy aesthetic that must be present in any Diablo game, surrounding it all, there’s a sense of play that we can see in the marketing material created by Salim’s team. Instead of serious and grim trailers like we’ve seen for Diablo 4, Immortal has a lighter tone. From artwork referencing old movie posters to signs suggesting readers should be aware of the dangers involving a clearly nefarious blob added with the Flesh Harvest update, the artists behind Immortal learned with their audience how to make the right game for their players.
“We work very closely with our players,” Salim tells Polygon. “What they want is what we work on. And for Diablo Immortal, our players have always been a bit more, I would say, looser. They almost challenge us to push the boundaries. That has then allowed us, the art team, to try a lot of new things.”
That community has a specific trait that makes working with new ideas easier: “A lot of our players for the Diablo Immortal are not just new to Diablo, they’re new to Blizzard games overall.”
Helping new players learn about the Diablo franchise has been one of the reasons Salim started working with Blizzard. He had come from companies like Disney, and his experience in working with IPs and expanding them to new audiences made the opportunity to work on Immortal a “natural progression” for his career, Salim says. By dealing with a group of players who are getting to know about the lore, characters, and important events in the world of Diablo, they can present their own interpretation of iconic elements.
For instance, older players who watched the trailer introducing the Druid to Diablo Immortal saw another iteration of this classic concept getting life. It felt familiar until the end of the video, where the Druid throws a fish to the woman he just saved, and tells her to be careful since there are many bears around that area. Watching the fierce man who can turn into a giant animal and use elemental magic crack the equivalent of a dad joke is not what one might expect from Diablo. Making him a jokester was part of what Emil and his team envisioned that would make the Druid feel authentically part of Diablo Immortal, but not before fully understanding what the class means.
“When we first started, I worked very closely with the other art directors on Diablo 4, on Diablo 2 and on the original Diablo,” Salim says. “We started to educate ourselves first on who is a Druid in Diablo. We looked at Diablo 2, we looked at Diablo 4, and we looked into all the details. We looked into all of their thinking processes from all of their perspectives. And only after we fully understand where the Druid is currently, that’s where we start to discuss ‘Where do we push the Druid?’ One of the areas that we really push for Diablo Immortal is personality. We wanted our Druid to have a sense of humor. That’s, again, a very Diablo Immortal thing.”
When making something new based on such an already established franchise like Diablo, it’s easy to imagine one getting lost while trying to meet the fanbase’s expectations. Risk taking is an important part of the creative process, but it doesn’t necessarily have to mean ignoring the original material. By merging the traditions of Diablo work with the ideas Immortal is bringing, Salim and his team are making a game that stays true to the series’ roots while still having fun with it, above all else.
