The team has a lot of ideas, and the vast majority of them never came to fruition, although they did have some ideas that make you wonder how successful they could still be today…

Blizzard has canceled a lot of games, but even more ideas have been swept off the table. Bloomberg editor Jason Schreier talked about this in the latest episode of the MinnMax podcast. He is promoting his own book about Blizzard. The book, which will be released on October 8, is called Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment.

There was a game that was set in space with vampires called Bloodlines. Blizzard was going to bring Diablo to the Game Boy (presumably for the Game Boy Color). Then the now-defunct Blizzard North (which was in California) was working on Star-blo after Diablo, which was supposed to be a sci-fi version of Diablo, and that’s probably just a code name. These were mentioned by Ben Hanson, founder of MinnMax, during the interview.

Schreier gave other examples: Nomad was a post-apocalyptic project; Diablo 4 had an early third-person version (Hades); World of Warcraft had a Pokémon Go-style spin-off (Orbits); there was a Helldivers-style World of Warcraft; there was mention of a canceled survival game (Odyssey); there was a God of War-style World of Warcraft spin-off (Andromeda); and a World of Warcraft/Minecraft hybrid was planned (Avalon). Schreier revealed that Avalon was discussed publicly for the first time. It had been in development for two years under the direction of Jay Wilson (Diablo III director) and Mike Booth (Left 4 Dead creator).

Schreier said that everyone who tried Avalon thought it was cool, and it had more of a Dragon Quest Builders style sandbox action-RPG with missions and story, but it was very Minecraft influenced. Too bad it never materialized…

Source: Gamesradar