There has been speculation about whether a Diablo 4 reveal was pulled from the BlizzCon presentation and according to “sources” this was the case.
According to Kotaku, sources say that a brief Diablo 4 announcement was planned. Apparently, Blizard co-founder Allen Adham was to tell the audience Diablo 4 was in development but this idea was dropped because it was not ready to be shown. These plans were supposedly changed at the last minute.
Now we don’t know who these “sources” are but there could be some damage limitation at play because Blizzard had already stated there would be no big announcements this year and that would surely include Diablo 4. During the development session, Wyatt Cheng also kicked things off stating that there were “multiple projects” in the works for Diablo so it would seem strange to cancel a quick announcement statement from Adham only for Cheng to do exactly that later on without using the words Diablo 4.
The article also states that Diablo 4 has “changed drastically” over the past four years and may change further which is why nothing was mentioned or shown. That doesn’t really explain why they would pull a quick announcement at the last minute. Also, the fact that it’s “changing drastically” during development gets my alarm bells ringing. Surely Blizzard should know exactly what a Diablo fan wants from a Diablo game by now? If not, then something is going horribly wrong.
Update: As I suspected the Kotaku “sources” was a load of hogwash and Blizzard subsequently made the following comment to IGN saying they, “didn’t pull any announcements from BlizzCon this year or have plans for other announcements.”