Diablo 4 has been confirmed, Lilith is the daughter demon… but there’s so much we still don’t know.
Can’t wait to sink your teeth into Diablo 4? Then look no further than our comprehensive guide to everything there is to know about Blizzard’s upcoming, hotly-anticipated hack ‘n slash adventure that will continue the series’ tried and tested demon slaying action. Diablo series is undergoing quite the resurgence right now. Diablo 4 was first announced at Blizzcon 2019, and development has been steadily progressing since. Diablo 2 Resurrected, a remaster of the PC classic, is also on the horizon, as well as Diablo Immortal releasing on Android and iOS devices soon. Even with so much to look forward to, we’re most excited about the release of Diablo 4, and thanks to Blizzard’s quarterly development updates on the game, we’re learning more about it all the time. A key thing we don’t know, though, is Diablo 4’s release date and it seems pretty much certain that the game won’t be released in 2021. In the meantime, here’s everything we know so far about the long-awaited RPG from Blizzard. [Update: The latest Diablo 4 quarterly update sheds a light on the game’s extensive customization system and gives us a better look at some of the monsters we’ll be facing. Read on to find out more.] Bad news here: Diablo 4 probably won’t be released anytime soon. At a Blizzcon 2019 deep dive on the game, the game’s director said that he doesn’t expect the game to be finished anytime soon, «even by Blizzard’s standards of soon.» That said, the fact that the team is developing the game for PS4 and Xbox One heavily implies that the game will be released within the next two to three years — as the lifespan of those consoles won’t be long now the PS5 and Xbox Series S are on the market. In February 2021, Activision Blizzard confirmed that it doesn’t expect Diablo 4 to launch in 2021. During a financial call, Activision Blizzard’s CFO, Dennis Durkin, said the company’s outlook doesn’t involve Overwatch 2 or Diablo 4 releasing in 2021. According to Durkin, the company expects “Blizzard’s net bookings to grow given the momentum in World of Warcraft and the other growth initiatives we have in the business,” but added, “Our outlook does not include Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 launching in 2021. And while Diablo Immortal is progressing well, and we anticipate its launch later this year we don’t have any material contribution from the title in our outlook presently.” So, at the moment, Diablo 4’s release date is still a mystery. The latest glimpse at Diablo 4 came during BlizzCon 2021, when Blizzard unveiled the game’s fourth character class: the Rogue. In her very own trailer, the Rogue is shown to be fast and deadly in some brief gameplay clips accompanied by an overarching cinematic. Post BlizzCon 2019, GameInformer brought us plenty of gameplay from Diablo 4 to pore over. Familiar in the best possible way, this footage showcases Diablo 4’s return to an intensely Gothic game world and that addictive gameplay loop that’s made it so famous. Given the game’s release is some time away (maybe years) it’s possible that everything in this footage could change. But it’s exciting to get a glimpse of the direction in which the game’s development is going. Below you can watch videos of the game’s three classes in action: Barbarian, Sorceress and then Druid. All in all it’s about an hour of gameplay which is quite something. Given the game is still a while off yet, maybe ration it. Diablo 4 was officially announced at Blizzcon 2019 where we got the chance to see both the announcement story cinemati and the first gameplay trailer. Check both trailers out below: Enhanced character customization Blizzard is pushing player character uniqueness harder than ever before in Diablo 4. Diablo 3 did a good job of changing your hero’s appearance over time based on what gear they had equipped, but it looks like Diablo 4 is taking it to the next level in terms of the options players will have creating a style all of their own. Announced during Blizzard’s quarterly update on Diablo 4, players will be able to carve out a unique look for themselves with armor styles, tattoos, makeup, jewelry, facial hair and more. “You will be able to change the face of your character, the hairstyle, the facial hair (beards and eyebrows), and add jewelry (nose piercing or earrings), makeup, and body markings such as tattoos or body paint,” explained Arnaud Kotelnikoff, Lead Character Artist for Diablo 4. “You will also be able to change the color values of your character’s skin, eyes, hair/facial hair, and body markings. Some elements will be class specific, to support the classes’ unique backgrounds, but many will be shared between classes allowing more possibilities to mix and match.” In what the team calls “the Lair Scene”, players will also be able to customize their character with a new wardrobe system “that allows you to mix and match hundreds of armor components unique to your class, alongside custom color palettes to create the class fantasy that best represents your character.” «The look and feel of the classes has always been one of Diablo’s secret ingredients, each class instantly recognizable and imbued with a strong and unique personality,» Diablo 4 game director Luis Barriga said. «Diablo IV offers players more customization options than ever in a Diablo game, which makes achieving that result more challenging, but the outcome is well worth it. Your Barbarian is different from anyone else’s but still feels undeniably like a Barbarian. With monsters, the focus has been on creating new foes and updating classics drawn from the pantheon of atrocities in our previous games, while using new processes and technology to their fullest.» Blizzard emphasized its commitment to making deeper visual customization possible, with art director John Mueller explaining the developer had to «completely rebuild [its] rendering engine and authoring tools…» “We wanted to use the latest tools and techniques, but we did have a concern about leaning into ‘realism’ in a way that wouldn’t have that hand-crafted feeling we felt was fundamental to a Blizzard game. We didn’t want the characters to feel procedural or generic because of these processes. We also embraced realism in terms of materials and character appearance. I think the touchpoint being the amazing pre-rendered look from the Diablo III cinematics.” According to Mueller, “massive improvements” were made to “the level of detail, the surfacing of complex materials like skin, cloth simulation, hair, fur, metal, even down to the details of the highlights of the eyes and rivulets of perspiration.” He describes the completely new character customization system as “robust” and adds “it was a daunting amount of technical character work. These solutions had to work not just for a single character, but for hundreds of componentized armor sets, different body types, dozens of unique personas, and completely unique art for five distinct classes (to start). This was an entirely new challenge for our team to tackle.” According to Mueller, these improvements mean that “most of our story cutscenes will be rendered in our engine using the game models.” So, while there will still be “amazing cinematic moments from Blizzard Animation,” there’ll also be “cinematic moments that feature your character up close, rendered in our game engine.” Character customization is certainly both looking and sounding impressive in Diablo 4, and is sure to be a huge selling point for more casual fans or newcomers, as well as giving those who stick to the game ample reasons to fine tune their character long after the story content has wrapped up. Grotesque new monsters Blizzard is starting to grow more confident in its Diablo 4 development updates, and that showed tremendously with the showcasing of some in-engine monster designs. Rest assured, the beasts, demons and otherworldly creatures we’ll be fighting in Diablo 4 look intimidating and fittingly grotesque: everything you’d want from a Diablo game, really. Diablo 4 art director John Mueller states that “[at] this point the work is a very good representation of what you will see when the game is in your hands.” As such, we can begin to imagine (or perhaps we really can’t, depending on how many of these creatures’ looks will be beyond human comprehension) what manner of creatures we’ll be put up against in Diablo 4. And the best part is that the art direction looks to be taking inspiration from earlier games in the series, deviating from Diablo 3’s colorful, cleaner look. BlizzCon 2021 cancelled Activision Blizzard has announced that the physical version of BlizzCon 2021 will not be taking place this year, reducing our chances of seeing a big Diablo 4 announcement towards the end of the year. «The ongoing complexities and uncertainties of the pandemic have impacted our ability to properly move forward on many of these fronts, and ultimately we’re now past the point where we’d be able to develop the kind of event we’d want to create for you in November,» writes Saralyn Smith, Executive Producer of BlizzCon. Instead, another online event, like this year’s Blizzconline, will be held in early 2022 with «smaller in-person gatherings» of some kind as well. More details on this are expected early in 2022. Advancing the genre In a recent conference call for its financial results in the first quarter of 2021 (via PCGamesN), Activision Blizzard mentioned Diablo 4. The company’s chief operating officer Daniel Alegre said that development is progressing well and that the company feels that Diablo 4 will “advance the art of the action-RPG genre”. PSN upload? Activision has apparently uploaded a game to the PlayStation Network database. With PS4 and PS5 builds, the game is 44GB and, according to Twitter user Justtinxrubin (via Wccftech), there’ a Diablo 4 logo in the distribution assets. While this doesn’t mean that the game will release any time soon, it’s possible that, if this is accurate, it could point towards the game’s developers doing some kind of closed testing soon. Diablo 2 Resurrected’s technical alpha bodes well for Diablo 4 We don’t know the exact release date for Diablo 4 just yet but our recent experience playing in Diablo 2 Resurrected’s technical alpha has made the wait even harder. The modernizations and tweaks that we’ve had the chance to see, including improvements to gameplay, audio and visuals (that 4K facelift!) have made Diablo 2 really enjoyable but they’ve made us more excited for what Diablo 4 is going to bring to the table. We want “something that takes the learnings of Diablo 3, and wraps that in the gothic, gory atmosphere that made Diablo 2 so imitable and inviting. And, from what we’ve heard about and seen so far from Diablo 4, that’s exactly what it will be, bringing open-world mechanics, slick visuals and always-online drop-in-and-out multiplayer on top of all the modern advancements the series has built up over Diablo 3’s lifespan.” While the wait feels painfully long for Diablo 4, at least we know that Diablo 2 Resurrected will be capable of tiding us over. More on Diablo 4’s open world We interviewed Diablo 4’s art director John Mueller and lead designer Joe Shelly at BlizzCon 2021, getting the chance to find out more about the series’ shift to an open world and how it’s going to work, especially with «each of its five regions being up to 10 times bigger than any of those in Diablo 3.» A key element of Diablo 4 is that it won’t follow a standard path of linear Act progression. “There’s an entry point in the game, then there’s a point when things diverge and you have a lot of options about which way you can go”, John Mueller explained. “For the first part of the game there’s a path in, then a lot of options about where you can go from there. At a much later point it converges back together for the final act”. An example of this is that after the opening segment of the game, you’ll be able to pursue three quest lines in three regions of the world in any order you like. That’s not to say that Diablo 4 will stray into completely open territory though; Mueller confirmed that there will be no branching storylines or dialogue options. Beyond the quest, players should expect plenty of “fun things that pull you off the path.” Describing how a day of playing Diablo 4 might look, Joe Shelly said, «You might waypoint into the Fractured Peaks, hop on your mount, ride out to a camp, complete it, along the way you might get distracted by an event… maybe some Goat Men are harassing some villagers. Then, having completed the Camp you might discover that a World Boss has showed up in Scosglen, so maybe you head up there to deal with that with some other players”. There will also be a Camp system which will see players find camps in the open world populated by different kinds of enemies, with Mueller stressing that “every camp that the designers have done has been unique – there’s always cool little scriptures, lore bits, that kind of stuff”. Defeating the enemies in these camps will free the residents of Sanctuary, which results in knock-on effects that show off the newly reactive world. From what we can tell, it looks like Diablo 4 is trying to avoid fragmentation with a world that seamlessly brings together its different elements and encourages players to engage with them. PvP detailed During BlizzCon 2021, the Diablo development team took the chance to do a deep-dive into some of Diablo 4’s PvP elements are going to work when the game launches.
