IIRC Netease essentially developed the core of the game because Diablo Immortal is a reskin of a game they've previously made which in itself was already a clone of a Diablo-style ARPG anyway. Blizzard then in turn provide art assets and such in conjunction with Incubation to impliment the existing foundation by Netease into Immortal itself. That being the case, I would assume that most of the core programing and system foundations would be based off Netease's design.
Back in 2019, or early 2020. Netease even made a statement that the game was ready but was being held back from release by Blizzard. If I had to speculate, I would say that Netease basically reskined their game with Blizzard provide assets and got Immortal ready to ship in early 2019. However the backlash from Blizzcon 2018, gave Blizzard pause so they likely took the game Netease had made for them and began to do whatever they could to modify it to be as paletable as possible based of the fan reaction at Blizzcon. Thus why the game is now coming to PC at launch (though technically only a beta version).
It's debatable. It's a fact that Diablo Immortal was built from the ground-up. It's possible that NetEase used Crusaders of Light as a template (which DI has been compared to), but it's not a reskin in the sense of taking pre-existing code and grafting Diablo assets onto it.
Second, if we're talking about the game being more palatable, it's a decision that already occurred prior to development. The original idea, at some point, was to release DI in the East first and then port it to the West, but Blizzard later made the decision to give it extra development and carry out a simultanious release. This was all before the game's reveal at BlizzCon. I actually agree that the backlash influenced the decision to release it on PC, but I'm not sure how that's a bad thing.
A beta is hardly an example of how microtransactions will work in the final product. How many times have we seen publishers add Mt's to games post launch? I cannot think of a single mobile F2P game that isn't filled with microtransactions for power and/or time buffs.
If there's a difference between MT's now and MT's in the final product, it's a difference that's only got 2 months to be implemented. And if you want to talk about MT's beyond that, that's purely in the realm of hypotheticals. I'm sure many F2P games got microtransactions changed and/or added as time went on, I don't see that as inherently bad or good. If a game's F2P, someone is going to want your money somehow, in some way.
So they aren't selling items directly, but they are selling drop rate buffs? Which means that they've likely tuned the drop rates of good shit in such a way that you'll want those drop rate buffs, and/or the special enemies with higher drop rates for good items. Hmm...those don't sound shitty at all.
Bear in mind that you can get those same buffs through playing the game as well.
It's certainly not an entirely level playing field, in that hypothetically, someone could just gorge on crests for instance, but they still need to run through the same rifts that everyone else has to. This in exchange for everything else being free at launch and post-launch. Nothing's gated behind purchases.
Hell, there's that entire unplumbed era of the Scattering from the later books when everything just kind of went free for all after Leto II dies and that lasts for like a couple thousand years talked about in only retrospect.
Not sure if you could get an RTS out of the Scattering though. Maybe a space adventure story, but I generally got the sense that space travel in Dune isn't meant to be easy, and there shouldn't really be anything out there for humans to encounter.
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