Dev Updates (Diablo IV)

Dev Updates, also known as Quarterly Updates, are a series of blogs that give information about the systems and features being iterated during the development of Diablo IV.

Diablo IV Quarterly Update-June 2022
Hello and welcome to the mid-year Diablo IV Quarterly Update. We hope you enjoyed last quarter’s behind the scenes look at the art of Sanctuary and its Dungeons. That blog and our previous updates are available here if you missed out. I’d also like to take a moment to congratulate Diablo Immortal on its launch. The Immortal team worked incredibly hard to bring Diablo to life on mobile, and it’s exciting to have another way to enjoy Diablo. Today, we’re going to look at the final launch class: the Necromancer. Now that it's been announced on the big screen, we can jump into some of the grittier details and mechanics of the class. You can think of this blog as a companion to that announcement, with our Lead Class Designer Adam Jackson doing a deep dive into the core playstyles of the Necromancer, some of its skills, and its unique class mechanic: Book of the Dead. We'll also look at a selection of the incredible armor and weapons that Necromancers can use. Diablo IV is committed to the principle of player choice. It shapes how we approach many of our systems, from character customization, to the density and layout of our open world, to the design of our classes and builds. As you'll see below, the Book of the Dead focuses on this idea of choice and what kind of Necromancer you want to be. We hope you enjoy this update and look forward to your thoughts and reactions. Later this year you can expect to hear more about how we plan to support Diablo IV after launch, including our plans for Seasons. We're grateful to have you with us on this journey. Thank you for playing the games we make. -Joe Shely, Game Director, Diablo IV

Greetings, Heroes of Sanctuary!

Today we are thrilled to announce that a fan favorite, the Necromancer, is once again returning to slay and subjugate their enemies with necrotic magics. We had a blast working on this iconic class, and we can’t wait to get it into your hands.

We know that the Necromancer has a storied history in our franchise, and we are taking a lot of care to give players an experience that lives up to the hype. We have also spent a considerable amount of time making sure that fans of the Diablo II, Diablo III, and Diablo Immortal versions of the Necromancer see something familiar with what we have to offer while at the same time creating something unique for Diablo IV. Read on to see what the Necromancer is all about!

Class Features
The Necromancer has two different types of resources that they use: Essence and Corpses. Essence is their primary resource, which restores itself automatically at a slow rate. Using Basic skills on the Necromancer will also grant Essence, allowing them to cast their skills more often. Corpses, on the other hand, are the leftover remains of enemies who die near the Necromancer. These remains can be used to summon skeletal minions or to power various other skills, such as Corpse Explosion. In addition to appearing when enemies are killed near the Necromancer, Corpses can also be generated via various effects, giving you additional control over how often you want to interact with them. While there will be plenty of Corpses at a baseline level, we’re aware that some players will want to lean into this resource, and as a result have included plenty of options to ensure that they are not left wanting.

As far as weapons and other unique gear, Necromancers use Swords, Daggers, Wands, Focuses, and Shields. In addition to these, they are also the only class that can use Scythes.

Additionally, what self-respecting Necromancer would be running around the world of Sanctuary without Curses? We’re happy to say that you will be able to put these nasty debuffs on your enemies to your heart’s content with skills like Decrepify and Iron Maiden making a return.

Playstyles
The Necromancer has four high-level playstyles that players can choose between. These playstyles are Bone, Darkness, Blood, and the Army.

Bone Bone skills are relatively physical in nature, and thus benefit more heavily from effects such as Critical Strike. These skills also benefit from having and spending large amounts of Essence, as they have various effects that can cause each of their individual attacks to be even more powerful.

Bone Spirit is back in Diablo IV, and it now has a unique twist that exemplifies what Bone skills are all about. Bone Spirit not only has a cooldown, but also consumes all Essence the player currently has. Once cast, a spirit of bone is conjured that seeks out the nearest enemy. Upon reaching them, the spirit will explode, dealing a high amount of damage to the target and all other enemies in the area. This damage is increased by a certain percentage per point of Essence spent, meaning that players who spend the maximum amount of Essence will deal a significant amount of damage to enemies hit. This skill can also be upgraded so that when it Critically Strikes its cooldown is significantly reduced, meaning that players who commit to generating lots of Essence while also having a high Critical Strike chance will get a lot of damage from this skill.

Another Bone skill that Necromancers will have access to is Bone Prison. When the player casts Bone Prison, they slam their weapon into the ground, calling forth a circular wall of Bone to surround the targeted enemy or area. Enemies cannot move through this space while the Bone Prison persists, which makes it incredibly versatile and able to be combined with many other skills, even those that are not themed around Bone. Bone Prison is great for blocking off hallways, trapping groups of enemies inside to set them up for an AoE attack, or for simply sectioning off a group of enemies to deal with later while you handle higher priority targets.

Darkness Darkness skills use Shadow magic to overwhelm their enemies. These kinds of attacks tend to be DoT-based or attack multiple times in a short window, with various benefits and rewards being granted for damaging enemies in this way. Darkness skills also tend to have various debuffs and crowd control elements so that they can keep their enemies at bay while they die a slow, painful death.

Decompose is a Basic Darkness skill that allows you to channel dark magic onto enemies, dealing damage to them while also generating Essence. Unlike other Basic skills, Decompose also periodically summons Corpses, making it much easier to ensure that you have a steady supply on hand to use for summoning Skeletons.

Another Darkness skill is Blight. Blight launches a ball of dark energy in a direction. Upon hitting an enemy or expiring, it deals an explosion of damage while leaving behind a defiled area, dealing periodic damage to enemies inside over time. This skill deals a high amount of damage to enemies who are standing in place, whether that’s due to fighting your undead minions or to being contained via other skills like Bone Prison.

Blood Necromancers can also use the power of Blood magic to siphon the life from their enemies. Not only do these skills tend to have defensive-oriented benefits, they also have many ways to turn that defense into offense for the player, empowering them and rewarding them for having large amounts of maximum Health as well as keeping their current Health total high.

Blood Surge draws a small amount of blood from nearby enemies to the Necromancer that then expels a blood nova, dealing damage near the player’s location. The damage of the blood nova is increased per enemy drained, which incentivizes you to be in the middle of a pack of enemies for maximum effect.

Another Blood skill is Blood Mist. Upon activation, the Necromancer disperses into a bloody mist, becoming temporarily Immune to all damage while draining the life of any nearby enemies that they pass through. This is a universally powerful defensive skill that can give you the time you need to regroup in those dire moments where you become overwhelmed.

The Army As you would expect, Necromancers can summon the undead to do their bidding. We also allow players to specialize into empowering their army as much as possible, which includes various kinds of Skeletons as well as the classic Golem. One advantage to this method of playing is that it can easily incorporate the benefits of Bone, Darkness, or Blood skills, allowing you to have a great deal of customization to how you want to interact with your army.

As an example, we believe it will be perfectly viable to have a player pursue a Darkness themed army build with Decompose as their Basic skill to generate Corpses, as there is an obvious synergy there. However, if the player wishes to generate Corpses via other means, they can just as easily take a nostalgia trip to the year 2000 and just chuck Bone Spears at their enemies from a distance while opting for all of the Bone skill synergies that the Necromancer has to offer.

We went through a lot of iteration on how we want the experience of summoning the undead to feel for the player, and how much of their skill bar should be dedicated to this part of the class. To that end, we’ve come up with what we feel is the best possible version to ensure that players have as much customization as possible over not only their army itself, but also in which other skills they want to use to support their own unique playstyle.

If a player wants to have the maximum number of summoned units possible then they will only have to dedicate two buttons to their skill bar: one to raising Skeletons and the other for their Golem. The Raise Skeleton button is a one-stop shop to raise all the different Skeletons a player can summon, and the Golem button is used to command the Golem to use a unique effect that is dependent on the type of Golem that is currently active. With this setup, we’ve found a great balance between having the necessary tools for raising and commanding a Necromancer army while also leaving room for player expression in what additional skills they want to put on their bar.

BOOK OF THE DEAD Speaking of armies, what self-respecting Necromancer isn’t wandering around with one? Well, actually, that might be you! While we absolutely have the full support you would expect to fulfill all your undead summoning needs, we are also giving some love to players who want a more independent playstyle.

Cue the Book of the Dead, the Necromancer’s unique class mechanic. Right from the moment you log in, you will start with an extra skill on your bar—Raise Skeleton. With this button, you will immediately be able to raise undead warriors to fight by your side. In addition to this, you will have access to the Book of the Dead. This is a space where you can customize your army (or lack thereof), with increasing options as you level your character.

There are three customizable summons in this space: Skeletal Warriors, Skeletal Mages, and the Golem. Each summon also has one of three specializations that you can choose from. As an example, you can have your Skeletal Warriors be Skirmishers, Defenders, or Reapers. Skirmishers are a more standard warrior but have increased damage and reduced Health, Defenders have bonus Health, and Reapers have slower attacks, deal damage in a AoE in front of them, and have a special wind-up attack that deals a high amount of damage. In addition to this, each specialized unit in the army has unique upgrades available to them, giving you even more customization over how each unit in their army functions in their overall playstyle. These units and upgrades will have synergies with the various playstyles mentioned above, as well as add other potential ways to play.

In addition to all this customization, we have also added the ability for players to sacrifice different components of their army for personal benefits. Next to each unit type in the Book of the Dead is an extra option to sacrifice the ability to summon that unit in exchange for a personal, permanent buff. These buffs are carefully designed and placed so that players can mix and match having none, some, or all the possible summoned units while still having relevant options to enhance their build.

Our goal with this system is that there should be something for everyone to be excited about. There are relevant, powerful options to choose from whether players want to play with the full army, part of the army, or even for those who wish to forgo their army completely and play solo. We’ve had a blast playing with this system so far, and we’re excited to see the various combinations that you all come up with to push your Necromancers to the next level.

Final Thoughts
We’re so excited to be able to bring the Necromancer to Diablo IV, and we can’t wait to get it into your hands. Whether you’re a veteran player who’s put in thousands of hours over many years, or a new adventurer in the world of Sanctuary, we hope you will have a lot of fun with what we’ve been able to create.

As always, please leave us your feedback on what we’ve shown you so far. While we’re confident that we’re on the right track, we know that the best ideas and the best games are created with input from the community. Thank you all so much for your patience, and for joining us on this epic journey through the world of Sanctuary—we promise it will be worth the wait.

-Adam Jackson, Lead Class Designer, Diablo IV

Diablo IV Quarterly Update-March 2022
Hello and welcome to the first Diablo IV Quarterly Update of 2022. We hope you enjoyed last quarter's update on systems, itemization, and visual effects. That blog and our previous updates are available if you missed out.

I'm struck by how much the game has evolved since our first blogs. It's difficult for these updates to showcase all the work our engineers, designers, artists, QA team, and producers have done--how do you show a bug that doesn't happen anymore, or explain how the planning in a burn-down chart resulted in a feature making it into the game instead of getting cut? While you can't see those things, you can see how systems like itemization and skill trees have evolved, incorporating your feedback and internal testing along the way. You can also see how much closer we're getting to our artistic and thematic targets of dark, low-fantasy gothic horror. And keep in mind the images you'll see today still represent a work in progress!

Many artists need to work together to deliver Diablo IV with the top-tier visual quality we can be proud of and the promise of an immersive world you can wander through and enjoy getting lost in. The seamless game you play is a composition of many layers of art and visualization, from lighting, to environments, to props and interactives. Today we have artists from many of these layers here to talk about their craft and everything that goes into building the world of Sanctuary.

We hope you enjoy this update and look forward to your thoughts and reactions. We have exciting things to share this year, and we're grateful to have you with us on this journey.

Thank you for playing the games we make, and without further ado, artists!

-Joe Shely,

Game Director, Diablo IV

Chris Ryder, Art Director, Environments Diablo IV
The team has been hard at work, and we're excited to take you behind the scenes on how we've developed the environments of Diablo IV. You will hear from our Associate Art Director, Environments, Brian Fletcher; Associate Lighting Director, Ben Hutchings; Lead Exterior Environment Artist, Matt McDaid; and Lead Props and Interactives Artist, Chaz Head. They will be sharing how they approach each of their distinct areas that ultimately come together to form the environment art of Diablo IV. While many of the locations we will be sharing are in various states of progress, this is an excellent opportunity to showcase the amazing work our teams are creating for the next installment of Diablo.

The environments of Diablo IV cover a lot of territory and visual real estate of the game: five distinct regions and hundreds of dungeons that you will experience. It is where all the monster-slaying, loot gathering, and exploration happens. Of course, none of this would be possible without the collective efforts of our talented designers, worldbuilders, engineers, environment artists, lighting artists, and technical artists.

We approach creating the environments of Diablo IV through a darker and more grounded interpretation than earlier installments. The aim is for believability, not realism. Believability comes through our use of materials and deliberate construction of architecture and artifacts you will come across as you play through dungeons and the open world. In addition, regional weather conditions, varied local biomes, and a sense of history set the foundation of how an object or place should look visually in a medieval world like Sanctuary. After all, Sanctuary is full of history, struggle, and conflict, giving us many opportunities to depict a diverse world full of compelling locations in a dark gothic-medieval setting. Even the wealthiest areas in Sanctuary are challenging to exist in. Leaning into these characteristics adds to the richness of the world. It gives us a springboard to elaborate on the space visually, giving it a sense of identity we can lock onto and build around. The atmosphere is almost tangible in places, with weather and lighting play a more prominent visual role in Diablo IV. When it rains, surfaces get wet, puddles form in ruts and hoof prints, the ground feels muddy, the atmosphere is heavy and damp. Contrast that by making your way into a hazy fire-lit tavern that instantly contrasts with the atmosphere outside, a rare place of refuge and warmth. We want to take you on a journey, hinting at a location's past or recent events. The satisfying part of our work is developing and jamming on a location's unique visual story, pushing and pulling the art until it becomes an iconic backdrop for combat, exploration finally screams Diablo.

Diablo IV's art is built with modern techniques and utilizes physically-based lighting. As we handcraft locations across the Eastern Continent, we are mindful of our approach to support combat, navigation, narrative intent, and stylistic direction. To accomplish this, we filter concepts, locations, and final implementation through the dual pillars of "old masters" and "a return to darkness." Using these pillars has been instrumental in keeping us consistent and aligned with the visual tone of Diablo IV. The "old masters" pillar gives us a lens to filter our art through, considering the techniques classical painters like Rembrandt used, with their controlled use of detail, tonal range, and expert use of color palettes. The "return to darkness" pillar is a through-line in everything from dungeons to lighting and embodies the idea that Sanctuary is a dangerous and dark medieval gothic world. Additionally, we play to the iconic Diablo game camera, choosing where to add or remove detail to help the readability of the gameplay space or accentuate visual interest as needed. It is a balancing act that results in a handcrafted look with a distinct visual style that expands on the lineage of Diablo.

It is exciting and inspiring to see the daily progress and hard work the environment art teams are creating. Let's jump into more specifics and hear from Brian, Ben, Matt, and Chaz on six locations we feel illustrate our approach and the concepts we keep top of mind when building the environments of Diablo IV.

The World of Sanctuary
Matt McDaid: “I’m excited to talk about the Open World of Diablo IV! We have 5 captivating zones to explore. Each region is fraught with dangers of their own kind. Many routes, and hidden corners to uncover. How you chose to make your way through this vast world is up to you. The Art and Design teams have constructed a contiguous world where you can roam from coast to coast, or high up into the glacial ridges. For the Environment Art team, we want to ensure each handcrafted location is distinct and immersive. Looking through the Diablo IV lens that Chris alluded to earlier, the Environment Art, Interactives, and Lighting teams strive to hit the tone that supports the ’return to darkness’ pillar.

SCOSGLEN COAST

Matt McDaid: For the Scosglen coast the Environment Art team set out to tell the story of untamed, wild shorelines and headlands.As you transition toward the shores from inland, the coastal biome is first evidenced by the longer, more directional grasses that react to the driving offshore winds. The beaches are bleak and littered with seaweed, kelp and rotting carcasses. Rugged clifftops ascend high whilst promontories are carved by the continual pounding of waves below. Through the process of creating our biomes, the Environment Art team has set out to communicate that this coastline is rife with peril.

For the main settlements along the coast, it is important to us that they feel woven deep into the fabric of the coastline. Dwellings with deep-rooted foundations skirt the clifftops. In a futile attempt to withstand the harsh elements, these structures are comprised of whatever materials the locals could lay their hands on and are in various forms of disrepair. Stone walls, salvaged wood, and thatch for the roofs. A place of consolation for the brave fishermen that trawl these treacherous seas.

Fishing plays a significant part in the day-to-day life of these weary locals, so we’ve latched on to that idea and placed emphasis on these villages being centered around fishing. By adding supporting elements like rudimentary docks and slipways, it really helps set the stage for the Interactives team to come in and layer on their culture kit throughout the area.

Chaz Head: Many of the props here are dynamic. The ships swaying in the ocean waves, the fish mongers’ nets hanging to dry in the marketplace. Our main purpose here is to breathe life into the awesome architecture and terrain work. Our props and culture kits help provide that tangible real-world scale that the Diablo world represents.

The Drowned culture kit here is all interactable or breakable. When we set up these props, we push ourselves in terms of destruction. We use a constraint system to hinge specific pieces together. This allows us to orchestrate distinct, realistic and variable types of destruction.

We do our best to tell the story of what has happened here. The drowned dredging with them hoards from beneath the sea, littering their conquest with relics of long-lost cultures as they raid across the beaches of Sanctuary.

Ben Hutchings: As you explore Diablo 4’s open world you’ll experience a lot of variation in the lighting and weather – here in the Scosglen coast you can see the foggy, frigid atmosphere taking cues from highlands and moors. Across the game we’re striving for a grounded and natural palette,allowing us to create visual space for gameplay that also achieves a gritty tone suiting the world of Sanctuary.

Orbei Monastery

Matt McDaid: The Orbei Monastery is an isolated and secretive feature in the rural Dry Steppes. While the Zakarum’s presence has diminished, the Orbei Monastery carries evidence that places of worship for the Zakarum can still quietly function. Since the location here is in the desiccated plains of the Dry Steppes, we aim to push the notion of dusty grasslands with sparse vegetation. We’ve made the conscious decision to add dark rocks that complement the pale blonde and rusty grasses. Poplar and Saxaul trees cling to the ground which really helps provide parallax movement on screen. This contributes to greater depth as elements in the foreground move quicker than those further back in the scene.

To help provide extra visual interest in the region, the Environment Art team created a Salt flats biome. Being able to have blue alkaline lakes skirted with salt-encrusted tufas, and vivid geothermal pools really helps add pockets of vibrancy to the Dry Steppes and create compelling natural landmarks.

Against the efforts of the Zakarum worshipers, and like many of the buildings in Sanctuary, the Orbei Monastery is in a state of dilapidation. It is a goal of ours to visually communicate that whilst this place is in the early stages of ruin, it was once a prominent base of learning for the Zakarum monks. Compared to the native architecture in the Dry Steppes, the Zakarum architecture is more distinct and refined. These structures are adorned with ornate details, and often accompanied by elaborate statuary. Chaz will elaborate more on the interesting relics that can be found on the Zakarum estates.

Chaz Head: Many followers of Zakarum come to pilgrimage in Orbei Monastery. Caravans along the road reinforce this idea; making these wagons explode is always a fun time!

As you can see it has fallen on hard times. Much of the storage and keep-sakes of the Zakarum have been laid to waste. You can pick through the ruins of the abandoned monastery, perhaps there are still treasures to find?

As you venture outside the monastery into the geothermal region, many of its natural inhabitants to contend with. If you look closely, you will find their dwellings among the cliffs.

Kyovashad

Matt McDaid: Our goal with Kyovashad is to really drive home the idea that this medieval settlement feels oppressive, frigid, and harsh. However, we still need to convey that this is a place of refuge afforded to those who reside within its boundaries. This is a militaristic settlement, so it is important that we give it a heavily defended presence straight off the bat. We believe it appropriate to provide a gradual buildup of smaller defense structures upon approach to the settlement. Doing this hints to you that something greater lies ahead. Upon reaching the gates you are confronted with steep stone, perimeter walls and a deep cavernous moat that wards off any unwelcoming visitors.

Upon entering the town, you see the architecture typical throughout Fractured Peaks. Making use of the wood from the many forests in the region, structures here are clad with natural pine boards and birch shingles. As with most dwellings in Sanctuary these buildings are very much function over form.

In the video we can see a large portion of the southern end of Kyovashad, which contains the simplest of shelters. Some clinging to the town walls overlooking the glacial flow beneath. When you happen upon this area, we want you to draw similarities with slum-type encampments where densely packed living quarters are in abundance. The interactives team has done a fantastic job of really driving home that narrative with their culture pass.

Chaz Head: Kyovashad has many districts, with each one set dressed in unique culture kits. Here we have the slums where the downtrodden seek shelter from the extreme elements: we support this idea by layering details of frayed cloth, broken shelters, and general unhappiness. Can you believe this is an example of high-end living in Sanctuary?

Ben Hutchings: For this nighttime look at Kyovashad we can see the use of fog, soft shadows and bounce lighting to create a softness to the lighting. This softness is a core part of Diablo 4’s lighting aesthetic – providing a natural and grounded frame.

We aim to give Kyovashad a thick and lived-in atmosphere with warm and earthy tones, giving it a sense of reprieve from Fractured Peaks cooler, frigid palette.

Dungeons of Sanctuary
Brian Fletcher: Dungeons are still that randomized content that you know and love from previous Diablo titles. However, we added new and exciting features that allow us to make even more dungeons across the world of Sanctuary than ever before. In order to support over 150+ dungeons, we’ve had to shift the way we make environment art so that it's flexible enough to be used in multiple locations and not just in a single dungeon. We break it all down into what we call tile-sets. We would like to share with you a handful of our tile-sets, and a few ways we can mix and match them with props, interactives, and lighting to create dungeons that are varied, handcrafted and yet procedurally created. It takes a lot of hard work from many teams to make a Dungeon, and we are proud to show you what we have been working on.

Forgotten Places in the World

Brian Fletcher: This tile-set is an example of how we have ‘returned to darkness.’ We want to take you deep underground to the darkest recesses of Sanctuary, where a mysterious (and gross) corruption has taken root. This ancient temple is a great place to push some primal horror vibes. The fixed camera is one of our best tools since it allows us to place assets in the foreground without blocking the playable space. Because we always know where you are looking, we can dial in and customize the layouts, vistas, and foreground elements to make sure there's a good composition. The spider legs are placed in specific locations for their unnerving silhouettes twitching in the background. Our dungeon design counterparts give us some great layouts to play with, which allow us to push the depth of each scene. We want you to have the impression that the dungeon goes on forever, and you’re only seeing a small part of a large underground labyrinth.

Chaz Head: The props and interactives team seek to maintain the mystique and horror settings Brian described. Our hope for this culture kit is to make you feel uneasy whilst being rewarded for venturing forward. Nothing here should feel like it was crafted in Sanctuary by the people living on the surface. We were able to focus on different styles of shape language: monolithic and twisted. This is not a place you would want to explore alone!

Ben Hutchings: Here we can really see our embrace of Diablo 4’s core pillar of a return to darkness’. Our aim is to subtly lead you through the dungeon whilst revealing fantastically grotesque forms. In dungeons like this we focus a lot on silhouetting the player space and giving the scene a sense of scale and depth; this helps navigation and visibility but also shows the vastness of the environment.

Wretched Caves

Brian Fletcher: The world of Diablo IV is incredibly large, utilizing numerous unique tile-sets to cover all the various zones, biomes, and cultures. In order to create so much high-quality content, we found clever ways to reuse our tile-sets and add enough variety to cover 150+ dungeons. All while providing fresh experiences each time. One way we can do that is by dressing up tile-sets with various themes. This next dungeon is a hidden druid resting site overrun with demons. As you travel through the dungeon, you'll see that it is covered with many druidic cultural items, such as talismans and charms. We place a lot of these items on a layer that can be turned on or off, depending on what the theme of the dungeon is. In one dungeon it's a druid burial site, in another, it's an uninhabited dark cave. Adding these sorts of details is a great way to add a lot of visual interest as well as visual storytelling. These assets were made by several teams, so this is a great example of many groups coming together to contribute to a final environment.

Chaz Head: We were able to expand on the Druid culture kit in this dungeon. In many ways the druid is an exciting return to the Diablo franchise, no less for Props and Interactives, expanding on this unique class by providing a full kit for its reclusive people. It would be easy to make the druid props fantastic, but we’ve stretched ourselves to come up with fun ways to keep the culture kit grounded while not turning the druids into something they are not. I hope when you play Diablo IV, you get a sense of their magic while not betraying the dark and gritty world the druids reside in.

Flooded Depths

Brian Fletcher: New dungeon features such as seamless floor transitions or traversals are exciting, but my favorite new feature is what we call tile-set transition scenes. These are scenes that allow us to connect two different tile-sets together in the same dungeon. Imagine running through a crypt, only to find a hole in the wall that seamlessly leads you deeper into a vast underground cave network. All while keeping the randomized layouts that change with each dungeon run. In this final video we show two tile-sets joined together by a tile-set transition scene. The first floor of this ruined keep remains dry and fairly intact, but as you journey deeper into the dungeon, you'll discover that the lower levels have decayed from the endless floodwaters pouring in. This swampy ruin is perfect for the drowned to move in and fortify themselves deep below. You'll have to fight your way through their defenses and climb across the rope to transition deeper into the flooded ruined tile-set.

Chaz Head: I love this dungeon; it was one our first where we dialed in the style for props and interactives in Diablo IV. On the surface we have that definitive gothic medieval style fans love. Pikes, suits of armor and iron chandeliers. I hope this set reminds you of what Diablo means to so many of us. Part of that vision is the sense of danger of exploration; as you dig deeper things get gritty. As you descend you will encounter obstacles seemingly out of place. The drowned have invaded this ancient manor and dragged their obscene valuables across the floors. This gives us the opportunity to mix kits, and I hope you agree the mold encrusted assets are gross. Things should feel familiar but tainted by the sodden hands of the drowned hordes.

Ben Hutchings: It's exciting to be able to merge two distinct visual styles. Here we see the dark, foreboding hallways of the keep lead down into the putrid aqua tones of its depths.

In both we can see the same approach to lighting these dungeons, with different executions. The keep has an oppressively dark, very selective lighting scheme - hinting at paths through the corridors subtly with soft lighting. ”By contrast, the flooded depths use putrid green and yellow tones to really give the dungeon a feeling of a damp, heavy atmosphere.

That was a quick overview of how we approach the environment art of Diablo IV. We love creating the stage for all the action while still delivering subtle visual cues that make Diablo games so iconic. Lastly, it's not too often that we get to share and appreciate the incredible work of our teammates and the progress of Diablo IV. We're glad you stopped by for a look and hope you are excited by what you see.

Thank you for joining us and keep an eye out for our upcoming blog update next quarter!

-The Diablo IV Team

Diablo IV Quarterly Update-December 2021
Hello and welcome to the year-end Diablo IV Quarterly Update.

We hope you enjoyed October's deep dive into sound design, the atmospheric ambient tracks, and peeking behind the scenes of how game sounds are made.

Since our last blog, we've been hard at work adding new content and systems to the game. We’ve made big strides, with every build of the game containing a host of expanded content, new art, balance changes, and other iterations. In fact, the team is currently playtesting an internal release of the game that represents a significant milestone. We have much to share with you today as a result, so let's dive in.

First, Lead Systems Designer Joe Piepiora will discuss updates to key elements of itemization. These include the return of +Skills on items, a new way to interact with legendary powers, and some early work on targeted drops. After that, grab a warm beverage and a comfortable chair as he walks us through Diablo IV's completely new end-game character growth system: the Paragon Board.

Next, Lead Visual Effects Artist Daniel Briggs will describe the philosophy that allows our talented VFX team to create huge explosions and eye-popping skill effects while keeping the game clear and readable, even when there are many players and monsters on the screen at the same time. He'll also go into detail on how Diablo IV's new game engine has allowed us to make frame-by-frame combat more precise and nuanced, while leveling up our effects to take advantage of the new lighting system. Finally, feast your eyes upon a plethora of skills across all four announced classes that show off our skill-driven death system.

We hope you enjoy this update and look forward to your thoughts and reactions. We'll be back in the new year and are ever grateful to have you with us on this journey.

-Joe Shely,

Game Director, Diablo IV

The Itemization of Diablo IV
Greetings, Heroes of Sanctuary!

We are thrilled to once again dole out a whole heap of info on the state of systems and endgame in Diablo IV. I’m Joe Piepiora, the Lead Systems Designer, and today I’m going to share some details on two major features of Diablo IV: itemization updates and our plans for Paragon.

+Skill Rank Affixes

In Diablo IV, the +Skill Rank affix returns. As players invest points in skills, they grow in potency, and finding items with +Skill Rank can speed that along. As a bonus, when the player equips an item with +Skill Rank for a skill they haven’t learned, they will have access to that new ability. It’s a great way to try out new skills before you’re able to invest in them. Getting a lucky drop that nets you a skill you’d like for your build ten levels before you would otherwise have access to it is a huge boost!

As Joe Shely discussed back in our December 2020 update, Legendary and Unique Items remain a core part of the Diablo item chase experience. We’ve made a foundational change to Legendary items in Diablo 4 by allowing legendary powers to appear on multiple item slots. Now, if you’re searching for a legendary power, like Martial Arts—which enhances the Barbarian’s kick ability—you may find it on rings, chestplates, or helmets; there’s no need to hunt for a specific item type any longer.

Now, the real question is what happens when you find a power on an axe when you really wanted it on a ring? Or you found a great legendary amulet, but can’t use the power? Well, that is when we get to introduce our new friend, the Occultist.

The Occultist can extract a legendary power from a Legendary item, crystallizing it into Essence while destroying the item in the process. That Essence can then be implanted into another Legendary item, overriding the power that was present in the item at that time. Essence material can also be stored and used at a later time.

Unique Items cannot be modified in this way, keeping their fantasies intact—and as their name implies—unique.

Hunting for Items
Sanctuary is a vast world, filled with forlorn trails through werewolf-infested forests, withered heaths crawling with cannibals, and fog-choked graveyards crawling with the restless dead. There are plenty of enemies and monsters for the hero to encounter. Each of these monsters seem to enjoy collecting certain types of items and will be somewhat more likely to drop those items than others. While bandits are fond of Maces, Crossbows, and Boots, if you’re hunting for a new pair of Pants, you'd do well to kill some of the Drowned instead.

In past discussions, we’ve received feedback that it seems deflating for so much of a character’s power to be delivered through the gear that they have equipped. Customizing and planning a character feels less rewarding if it doesn’t play a big role in how the character performs in combat. We hear you loud and clear, and in Diablo IV, we have placed a stronger emphasis on character power that is earned by all the little decisions you make while leveling up and exploring the world of Sanctuary. While we aren’t talking about everything we have planned for character power today, I’m happy to talk about one feature in particular, the Paragon Board.

The Paragon Board
In Diablo IV, we have placed a heavy emphasis on build customization, ensuring that you can have plenty of control over how your hero grows. The Paragon Board unlocks for each class at level 50 and is a distillation of this focus. Your hero begins their journey through the Paragon system at the central starting tile of their class’s intro board, and from there, you make selections radiating outward. Once your hero reaches a gate tile, you’ll choose which new paragon board you would like to attach to at that location. The desired outcome is a personalized set of bonuses that will empower your hero and honor your dedication to their progression, that will remain fun to tweak and adjust over many playthroughs.

There is a lot to take in with the image below, so I’ll walk through some aspects of what we’re looking at here.

The Paragon Board is comprised of many fixed tiles. As the Barbarian earns experience, they will earn Paragon points, which are used to unlock a connected tile. There are a few varieties of tiles that I want to walk through.

Normal Tiles

These tiles are straightforward, providing a small but meaningful stat boost. Normal Tiles are connective tissues that can be found throughout the board and are quite common.

Magic Tiles

Magic Tiles are found in clusters throughout the board and provide a potent, more diverse set of benefits. As you might expect, they are less common than Normal Tiles, but are still plentiful.

Rare Tiles

Rare Tiles offer significant boosts in power. Upon entering the Paragon Board for the first time, these represent great goals for players to chase, particularly once you’ve narrowed builds down towards highly specific goals. Rare Tiles also have additional powers that unlock once the hero has raised an attribute to a sufficient level, requiring some choices to be made when plotting your path through the board.

Legendary Tile

After the first Paragon Board, each new board has a single Legendary Tile that can be found at its center. Legendary Tiles impart a new Legendary Power to the character that earns it.

Glyphs and Sockets

A Socket is a special tile that can contain a Glyph. Glyphs are items found throughout Sanctuary that, when embedded into a Paragon Board, confer various benefits based upon the number of active tiles within their radius.

Glyphs can also be leveled up by delving into some particularly dangerous dungeons. Leveling up a Glyph extends the radius of their effect, allowing each one to draw power from or impart power to even more active tiles.

Gate Tiles and Board Selection

A single Gate Tile lies at each edge of the Paragon Board. As you progress through the Paragon Board, you will eventually reach a Gate Tile, which upon unlocking will allow you to select a new Paragon Board to attach to your existing Board. Each of these boards has unique Tile layouts, new Magic and Rare Tiles, and a new Legendary Tile at the center.

The Paragon Board is extended from these Gate Tiles. Upon selecting from the Paragon Board list, you will be able to place the board down, connecting it to the newly unlocked Gate Tile. You may also optionally rotate that newly placed board.

We’re hard at work on these and other features that we’ll be able to share more about in future updates. Though for now that’s all from the systems team. Thanks for reading and please share any feedback you have on social media, Reddit, or our forums! We’ll see you in Hell!

Visual Effects in Diablo IV
Thanks for joining us! My name is Daniel Briggs, and I am the Lead Visual Effects Artist for Diablo IV. The VFX team gets to contribute to features across the entire game, but today we will focus on the work we do to support combat. VFX artists collaborate with designers and other art teams to create strong thematic identities for the hero classes and breathe life into monsters, in order to deliver the visceral, gruesome combat players have come to expect.

VFX is an integral part of the combat experience for all Diablo games. With Diablo IV, we wanted to step up the fidelity of our effects using Physically Based Rendering (PBR), as well as better support the core pillars of gameplay: deep hero customization, itemization, and combat readability.

Visual Effects - Philosophy

Every effect plays a role in the final composition of our game. It is important to understand the context of an effect, and how it best serves your experience.

One of our core values at Blizzard Entertainment is “Gameplay First,” and this drives a lot of the artistic decisions we make while developing visual effects for the game. Moment-to-moment gameplay is the focal point within the composition of Diablo IV: it should draw your attention. To achieve this, we must consider things like player skills, monster telegraphs, traps, damage areas, and character states. The visual effects for each of these components must be readable in all areas and lighting conditions, so you can quickly understand what is happening and use that information to make informed decisions.

In the chaos of combat, you’ll need to be smart—seeing a Legendary item drop is exciting, but picking it up is not as important as reacting to a monster’s attack that can one-shot Hardcore characters! Our goal is to balance the primary, secondary, and tertiary reads to help you understand what is happening. To do this, we reserve visually loud FX for powerful skills, like ultimate abilities, while weaker skills meld into the background. Each class has abilities that range from low to high in costs, cooldowns, and power. In tandem, classes have a range of visual intensity that increases with skill power.

Combat Improvements

To enhance the feel of combat, we have made several improvements to the way damage is applied in our game. In previous iterations of Diablo, an area-of-effect (AOE) or melee skill would be a single area of damage that is applied on a single frame. Thanks to our gameplay engineers, we can now animate target areas (what we call payloads) over multiple frames, which allows us to line up the animated target areas with the animated VFX that play out.

For example, Whirlwind in Diablo III is a cylinder shape surrounding your Barbarian, which applies damage every couple of frames at a rate based on your attack speed. In Diablo IV, Whirlwind is an animated pie shape that animates with your character. AOEs expand outward with time, and melee swings match the motion of your weapon. Animated target areas improve accuracy to the way we apply damage in Diablo IV; it makes combat feel more impactful, and monster ragdolls more visceral. Animated payloads also add a subtle timing aspect to a variety of skills.

Additionally, we have revamped the way we apply hit effects to monsters, so impacts flow with the direction of a spell or melee attack. We use data defined in the animation and animated target area to find the most accurate place to hit a monster, and where to apply a directional physics force to the ragdoll. In so few words, if you hit a goat-man in the knee, the blood spray would come from his knee. The physics force applied to the goat-man’s knee would send it flying as if you kicked the legs out from under him.

Visual Effects - Casting and Receiving Light

In Diablo IV, we use a PBR (physically based rendering) lighting model, which means our materials look and react to light in a realistic way. This approach brings huge rendering improvements, but this can be counterintuitive to what a player might expect for class and monster abilities. As an example, think about what a campfire looks like in full daylight—pretty lackluster, right? Next, imagine what a dust cloud or smoke plume would look like in the dead of night—it'd be nearly impossible to see. To account for this, we’ve built an engine and shader library that lets us break PBR rulesets in artistic ways. This ensures important gameplay moments shine through as clearly as possible while keeping immersive elements full PBR so they can realistically react to lighting.

Previous iterations of Diablo use primarily “unlit” particles, meaning they are not affected by the environment’s lighting. These particles give you amazing control over what the art will look like: what you paint is what you get. The downside to unlit particles is that art may look too bright in a dark dungeon, or VFX color schemes may not feel cohesive within every environment.

In Diablo IV, we use lit VFX that meld into the environment’s lighting, creating a more immersive experience. Using Whirlwind as an example (seen in the video above)—in bright daylight, the blade reflects light from the sun. In a dark dungeon, it will reflect more subtle light sources, like torches. The dust kicked up by the skill is also lit by the environment, so it blends artfully into the world.

If we rely solely on environment lighting and follow true PBR rules, then gameplay readability is muddied, particularly in dark environments where a weapon swing would naturally be hard to see. To counteract this, many VFX have emissivity to cast light onto the environment. Several ultimates in our game will even allow you to change the weather and lighting of the environment for a limited duration. We strive for a healthy balance of gameplay clarity and thematic immersion.

Dynamic Player Skills
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the art looks like if the gameplay isn’t fun. One of the goals for creating player skills is to ensure that the System Design team has a variety of modifiers they can utilize to create meaningful skill trees, class mechanics, Legendary items, and Paragon Boards.

Choices should affect more than your character’s stats. Once we have a class skill we are happy with, the VFX team adds the ability for developers to dynamically change the size, intensity, and duration of a skill. The visual intensity of a skill will increase as you stack upgrades and items that increase the power of that ability.

In addition to these skill modifiers, we create variants of abilities that completely change the functionality of a skill or the damage type that it deals. These skill variants can be changed by the scale, intensity, and duration modifiers as well. This allows variants of skills to be affected by a wider range of legendary modifier groupings. Your skill tree/paragon decisions, along with the items you have equipped, will make your character look and play differently from other characters of the same class.

Each of these ranges is handcrafted by an artist to ensure the art holds up at all supported sizes and intensities. We do not uniformly scale every piece of an effect when changing size and intensity; we modify things like spawn rate, velocity, emissivity, and color ranges to make certain the art still fits in the world of Diablo.

We want your character to look incredible as well! Our items are built in a way that allows us to easily apply weapon buffs to any weapon in the game. Not only will your legendary items do awesome things, but they will make your character look amazing as well. Here is an example where we apply the same fire and poison buff to several weapons in our game.

Skill Driven Deaths

Sanctuary is a dark, gothic world filled with horrific monsters that do horrendous things. To survive in this bleak landscape, you must be merciless toward your enemies. We are bringing back a popular feature from Diablo III: skill-driven deaths. This system allows you to decapitate, bisect, freeze, shatter, eviscerate, and burn your enemies, to give a few examples.

With our new PBR pipeline, we can make blood, viscera, and gore even more realistic by having it react properly to the lighting of an environment. Every monster is built with a skeletal and muscular structure used for killing them in brutal ways. If your character is in the thick of combat, they will be covered in the blood spatter of nearby monsters. Over time, your character’s armor will transition back to being spotless.

The Sorceress studies the art of elemental magic. They slow enemies with cold before freezing them solid and shattering them to pieces. They strike their enemies with stunning bursts of lightning, causing bodies to pop and sizzle. Enemies collapse to the floor and char to the bone as the Sorceress engulfs foes in fire.

Some examples of death types that Sorceresses can trigger:

Freeze/Shatter - Break frozen monsters into pieces

Char - Singe the corpse of a monster with lightning

Burn – Scorch the monster’s flesh, leaving the remains of a charred skeleton

The Barbarian takes pride in their physical capabilities. Their arsenal of weaponry makes them deadly in close combat. With the power of their ancient bloodline, Barbarians crush foes into piles of gore or send them flying across the battlefield. Their brute strength is equally matched by their speed and ferocity as they unleash fury on the battlefield, dismembering limbs from all that stand in their way.

Some examples of death types that Barbarians can trigger:

Crush – Flatten a monster under the weight of a heavy object

Decapitate - Remove a monster’s head from its body

Cut In Half - Sweet :)

Break Lower Limbs- The monster’s lower body is shattered, splitting several of their joints

The Rogue is dexterous; their attacks are methodical. Monsters are often oblivious to their presence until it is far too late. A precise stab from one of their daggers, or a well-placed arrow, is enough to bring most monsters to the floor. The Rogue finds the most opportune time to take on a fight, and they imbue weapons to gain an advantage. Shadow magic can make a superb distraction, but their shadow clones are as deadly as their blades.

Some examples of death types that Rogues can trigger:

Eviscerate – Spill the insides of a monster

Shadow – Shadow energy deteriorates the life from a monster's flesh.

Freeze/Shatter - Break frozen monsters into pieces

Poison – The monster’s skin melts off leaving a heap of muscle and bone

Flay – Flay the skin from an enemy, leaving the muscle structure intact

The Druid is one with nature magic. They conjure storms and call down lightning on their enemies. They control the battlefield with gusts of wind as their animal companions tear the flesh from monsters. Druids manipulate the earth with nature magic, molding it to their will and bludgeoning enemies from afar. As their enemies approach, they see the innate power of the Druid, shapeshifting fluidly between an agile werewolf and a hulking werebear.

Some examples of death types that Druids can trigger:

Roadkill – The monster is crushed by a moving object, leaving a smear of blood on the ground

Devoured– The monster's flesh is eaten away by a swarm of ferocious bites

Lightning Gib – Lightning causes the monster’s body to pop, exploding into pieces

Maul – The monster’s skin is completely mangled, covering them in blood

That is everything we have to share with you today. It has been a dream to work on this franchise, and I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to share some of our development process with the community.

Thank you for reading our last quarterly update blog for 2021. I hope you found it exciting and interesting. We are actively listening to your feedback, and we strive to make Diablo IV the dark, gothic game we all want to play. Please continue to share your thoughts and provide feedback on social media, Reddit, and our forums!

Diablo IV Quarterly Update-October 2021
Hello, and welcome once again to a new Diablo IV Quarterly Update.

I'm Joe Shely from the Diablo IV team. As a design lead who has been working on this dark, shared, open world action role-playing game from the beginning, I’m honored to continue the vision of Diablo IV as its new Game Director, and I’m humbled to represent the team pouring their hearts into this game.

Like many of you, our team has been reflecting upon recent events. A lot has happened since our last blog and the hard work of practicing the values we aspire to must continue. In parallel with that important work, development of Diablo IV continues too.

Over the past few years, we've assembled a strong team with incredible passion for Diablo IV. You, Diablo’s fans, are a critical part of this team. With the help of your valuable feedback, we've steadily refined and deepened the game experience. We have ways to go, and while much has changed, our commitment to the game is unwavering.

Sanctuary should always be items glittering in dark dungeons. Tales of powerful heroes standing against the onslaught of hell. Lands where trials, treasure, and terrible monsters lie around every corner, equal parts familiar and boundless in its possibilities. Doing this world justice is a solemn responsibility. Today, we're taking a deep dive into the sound design of Diablo IV. Sound is a sometimes underappreciated yet integral element of the game's design, serving as a channel for communicating everything from incoming damage, to confirmation that a button press was registered by the game, to the intensity of a combat sequence. Try turning off the sound in a Diablo game sometime; you'll find your eyes have to work a lot harder to follow the action.

Sound also conveys the subtext of the world through which you adventure. It supports the rising and falling action of the campaign and immerses you into the ambient life of a region, transporting you into the game world. While you're reading through the blog, I encourage you to listen to the ambient tracks and pay attention to their effect on your heartrate and emotions. Try closing your eyes while listening to get a better sense of how much is being communicated.

Crafting Diablo's sound requires science, art... and the occasional ball of fire. Sound Supervisor Kris Giampa and his team have fascinating insights to share in this behind-the-scenes look at how it all works.

We hope you enjoy this update and look forward to your thoughts and reactions. As promised, our next blog will cover endgame systems and visual effects. It's been a while since we looked at systems, and there's a lot we're excited to share. Let us know what topics you'd like to hear about in the future too!

We are grateful to have you with us on this journey. Thank you for playing the stuff we make.

-Joe Shely,

Game Director, Diablo IV

The Sound Design of Diablo IV
Hello traveler, I’m Kris Giampa, Sound Supervisor for Diablo IV.

The sound team has been steadily cranking away on the soundscape for a while now, and while we aren’t ready to go in depth about the music side of Diablo IV quite yet, we wanted to start to give you some insight into some of the audio processes, content, and motivations behind the sound for the game.

Before we begin, we wanted to give you something to listen to while you are reading this quarterly update blog. Please enjoy the snowy, dark, and stormy ambience of Fractured Peaks below as you start on your journey.

Sound and music in games are the invisible glue that supports the storytelling and ties you to your character and their actions during gameplay. Creating sound for games is an exciting artistic endeavor that you can’t see— only hear. However, you can feel it literally, with the soundwaves against your body depending on what you are listening back on. It’s an amazing medium that can also affect how you feel emotionally while playing a game. A lot of the time it’s subtle, and other times it’s over the top, but always there to support the moment-to-moment gameplay. We hope you enjoy this dive into various aspects of the game’s soundscape, and you’ll have plenty more to look forward to and experience when you finally get to play it!

Naturally, we want anyone and everyone who might be hearing impaired to enjoy the experience of Diablo IV as well. So, we are taking measures to broaden the experience to be inclusive for people with hearing or visual disabilities. There are various accessibility features underway that we hope to talk about more in the future.

For the Diablo IV soundscape we’ve continued the tradition of gratifying combat, expanded upon the ambience to support the epic open world, continued to embrace the darkness in tone and gore while also trying to deliver a cleaner-yet-punchy audio mix that’s adapting to the situations as you play.

One of the biggest goals we try to focus on as sound designers is to make the highest quality sounds to be triggered back in the game real-time and make them seem believable as well as grounded within the game world, tied to what you are experiencing. The randomness of audio playback is of the utmost importance when it comes to gameplay. If you think about real life, nothing is ever heard the exact same way twice due to your listening environment and the positioning of a sound source. Sounds never play back at the same exact sound pressure level along with the reflections within your environment and everything else happening around you at that moment in time. In essence, there are always subtle, real-life reasons as to why nothing ever sounds exactly the same. So, as sound designers for video games, we always strive to introduce subtle, randomized variation to not only the sound design itself, but also for when you hear it in the game. When we are doing our job correctly, it’s something you tend to not notice and supports your immersion into the game world by backing up the incredible visuals, story, and end-to-end experience.

Another huge goal we have when creating audio for Diablo IV is to fill in sounds for just about everything that’s occurring on your screen. Whether it’s the world ambience, monsters idling offscreen, the tiny chunks of wood that are colliding off a wall when you break an object... everything should make a sound. We pour countless hours of effort into covering almost everything you see and don’t see, while also keeping it subtle enough to not be distracting and just feel right. The devil certainly lurks within the details...

However, just because we are filling in as much sound as we can, it doesn’t mean you need to hear it every time. The playback engine within the game will not trigger too many instances of a sound if they are trying to play at the same time based on strict settings we create as basic rules. Because of the isometric camera view and being able to see so much on screen at once, we must limit how many instances of each sound will playback at any given moment. Once dialed in correctly, you tend not to notice that some instances were never triggered, and that helps with the clarity of the audio mix. It’s a fine line we straddle during big moments with a lot going on screen.

How about we get on to more of the creative side of sound design? Naturally, there is no Diablo game without the heroes who do your bidding to vanquish the various evils that lie in your path. Let’s talk about some of the fire-based Sorcerer skills that partly define the class...

The sound crew luckily gets to record all kinds of neat and unique sounds for the game so that we have plenty of sound source to edit from when it comes time to start sound designing. Sound Design is technically described as taking a recorded audio source, editing it, and processing it to be used in another medium. In the case of Sound Design for games, we’ll record raw audio, re-process them, and edit it for our gameplay needs in various ways to achieve something that sounds clean, usable, and replayable for gameplay. The sound could be exactly what it was originally meant for or end up sounding completely different and used for something else entirely.

Something we always tend to need for a game like Diablo is, of course, fire! When time permits, we plan for some time to record sounds out in the field. For Diablo IV, one of the first big recordings we did as a team was a desert fire session before the lockdown for COVID-19. We traveled far from Blizzard HQ to record various types of fire sounds in the deserts of California, armed with multiple recording rigs and microphones. Thankfully, since it was wintertime, it wasn’t too hot during the day and just a bit cold at night. While our main goal was to capture fire, we ended up capturing all kinds of other sounds we have used during production, like ambience, rocks impacts, foliage movements, wood impacts, door slams, wooden cabin creaks, metal impacts, and scrapes.

Some of the fire recordings were then used specifically for the Sorcerer skills Firebolt and Inferno. For the skill Firebolt, we recorded sets of wispy and smoldering flame whooshes using a fire staff or a dried-out medium-sized log of wood and performed the sound in various ways around sets of microphones. Once we had a nice assortment of different types of fire sounds, we then edited and processed those fire whooshes into game-ready one-shot audio files for the casting and impact sounds, as well as longer loops for the projectile traveling through the air. It all comes together as one cohesive-sounding experience once we get it hooked up in the game to play back as the entire skill sound effect set for Firebolt.

For the Inferno Sorcerer skill, we then used other takes of the fire recordings and processed them to sound more aggressive and powerful for the larger skill. Just like Firebolt, there’s a set of casting one-shot sounds, a set of loops, and another set of one-shots for when the snake form constricts its body. One cool thing about the Inferno skill is that while it’s fire, it’s fire that has taken the form of a snake. Because of this form, we are able to take some liberties on pushing it away from just fire sound design. We added some light snake-rattling SFX paired with a darker-toned ethereal end to the skill sound to make it feel a bit more magical. When all these pieces re-trigger in-game, it will always sound like the same skill, but be slightly different each time—which increases the replayability sound-wise.

Diablo games wouldn't be as fun if you didn't have monsters to slay. One of the most fun things about working on a Diablo game is the vast amount and variance of monsters that exist. This makes monsters ripe for both experimental and more traditional sound design, so let's dig into some monster sound design for foley and voice.

The combination of expert animation and AI brings life and personality to the creatures as they undertake their nefarious activities. When we start the audio process for a brand-new monster, I always recommend that the sound designers start by adding footsteps and foley (clothing or skin) to their movement animations. The moment the creature has footsteps and foley, the creature's cadence and rhythm of their movement really comes to life. It’s at this point I consider that they are becoming grounded and attached to the world. This also dictates how vocal they might sound based on their patterns of movement.

The next layer that finishes the birthing of the creature into existence is their voice exertions. These are the grunting or yelling sounds of them exerting at the player as they attack, or the screams of pain as you take them out one-by-one. Each monster family can be quite different from the next, so depending on the type of monster, we might have intense sound design layers of animalistic-type sounds or even everyday objects that we will manipulate to sound like a screech or scream to create a layer within that final voice. Other times it can be simpler, as we’ll hire creature voice actors to help create the core tone of the monster’s voice that we can then build around with other sounds.

In the case of the Wood Wraith, it's almost fully sound designed from wood creaks and strains processed to extreme lengths and choosing the right sounds to convey emotion. The Wood Wraith was a blast to sound design as it’s mostly freaky and creaky wood sounds, with a touch of very low-pitched human tone underneath it all.

Another monster we had the pleasure of working on is the disgustingly awesome Fly Host. This beast walks around birthing flies to attack the player. We ended up using some of our early gore session recordings where we ripped and smacked cabbages and melons, and stirred and squished mayonnaise, salsa and a delicious 7-layer dip into a not-so-great smelling slurry to make some great slimy and disgusting sounds to use in our sound design.

One of the audio pillars for Diablo IV is “Living Audio”. What this means is that the soundscape is ever evolving and never static. This pillar is built deep into the sound design variations we create for all types sounds, including when it plays back real-time in the game— especially the ambience. Because of the importance of the massive open world, we wanted to give the ambience as much detail as possible and think of it on the same level of Hero sound design. Having the audio and the systems changing subtly over time is key to this pillar. We always want the subtle changes in ambience (that might not be very noticeable) less repeatable and feel more natural and immersive overall.

The World Building team has done an amazing job giving us huge amounts of inspiration in filling out the regions visually so that we can follow it up with immersive ambient audio.

Since the player might be in the open world for a large amount of time, we wanted to support each exterior region with unique-sounding environments that also include subtle changes to the audio mix over time. To help achieve this, we use audio systems like real-time occlusion, high-quality reverbs, and environment reactive delay/echoes.

We’ve provided some long-form recordings of in-game footage with a static shot where you can hear the ambience changing over time. Not only does this show some cool ambient sound design, but we also wanted to provide these to you for your tabletop RPG sessions, or even just to sit back and get lost in while working. The clips were recorded around 5-6 minutes and looped to be almost one hour.

When it comes to the Diablo dungeon crawling-style ambience, we take a special delight in creating various and unique sounding experiences to heighten your immersion. Our approach to the dungeon ambiences is a bit less intense compared to the new open world, as we don’t want to distract you away from a key part of what makes a Diablo game fun— dungeon crawling. This is one area where we can take more liberties in diving deeply into the hellish and creepy soundscapes while having the monsters onscreen to accompany the audible experience. For Diablo IV we are taking a more realistic approach to “what you hear is what you get” when within a dungeon. With long reverberation and sound occlusion, we want you to pay close attention to what might be just around the corner, mentally preparing you for the next pack of enemies.

Scattered around the dungeons are a plethora of gratifyingly great breakables. The Interactives team have been creating hundreds of amazingly detailed breakable objects in Diablo IV. For the amazing amount of detail they put into objects as they break, we in turn wanted to fill in every sliver and chunk of destruction you see with believable physics audio. Destroying objects in Diablo should sound just as gratifying and believable as taking down monsters. We put a lot of effort into making sure that all objects have an extremely gratifying break sound, while supporting the debris with tiny bits of audio to accompany the pieces that break apart and fly across a room. I’m still amazed at the level of detail we have for the breakables in Diablo IV. One of my favorite things to do when I see a room full of them is to have at em’!

Finally, I wanted to talk a little about the isometric camera. It provides some interesting challenges when it comes to bringing all the elements of the game mix together. Because you can see battlefield at a certain angle out to a certain range, we have to make sure that the monsters existing on the screen are covered with audio, but have the overall mix not feel too cluttered, nor too empty. There’s a lot of real-time juggling of sound playback based on priorities and importance to you, the player.

For Diablo IV we are able drive the real-time audio mix more than ever before. Because of the isometric camera view, we must trigger sounds on just about everything you see but focus your ears on the most important sounds you should be paying attention to. We've been carving away at audio mix states and an audio importance system that will allow certain important monster sounds to poke out when they are needed. Clarity of game audio mix is hard to achieve in a game where you can have multiple heroes as well as various amounts of monsters on screen, while having detailed ambiences means we need to craft different audible mix states depending on the situation.

We hope you have enjoyed this brief look into the sound design of Diablo IV. There’s so much more to talk about, but alas, we will have to save it for another time. We welcome any feedback you might have about anything you have heard in the videos or learned about in this quarter’s blog. Thank you for taking the time to learn more about the soundscape of Diablo IV!

Kris Giampa,

Sound Supervisor, Diablo IV

Diablo IV Quarterly Update-June 2021
Hello, and welcome once again to a new Diablo IV Quarterly Update! We hope you enjoyed the Rogue class announcement during BlizzConline. We had a blast creating the Rogue and open-world video segments, sharing them with you, and seeing your reactions. It was especially cool to share our updates as part of the larger Diablo family alongside Diablo Immortal and the all-new Diablo II: Resurrected (both of which I personally can’t wait to play with you all).

As we transition back to a blog format, we will continue to spotlight different aspects of development. Today we’re going to be focusing on Diablo IV character art—player characters, monsters, and allies.

Art is a critical part of what makes Diablo, well... Diablo. Our signature randomized dungeons would not feel like Diablo without the ominous lighting setting the mood as players uncover horrifying details around every dark corner. Combat only feels visceral thanks to carefully crafted animations and visual effects that make spells and abilities sing. And while stats might make or break an item, we often can’t wait to get our hands on a piece of gear purely because of how incredible it looks.

Character art is equally important as it encompasses two of Diablo’s key elements: classes and monsters. 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 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.

To give us a better look at everything involved in this process, I now leave the rest of the update in the hands of our very own Art Director, John Mueller, and his team.

We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your thoughts and reactions! As always, let us know what topics you want to hear about in the future. Be sure to stay tuned, as we’re planning to delve deeper into the topics of sound design and endgame systems later this year.

Thank you, and until next time!

-Luis Barriga,

Game Director, Diablo IV

John Mueller, Art Director
Hi all,

We are excited to do a deep dive on the character art for Diablo IV! This is a pretty exciting topic for our team, because so damn much has changed from Diablo III! You will get to hear from our Lead Character Artist, Arnaud Kotelnikof, and Nick Chilano, our Associate Character Art Director. They will be sharing a lot of cool visuals from our ongoing development related to character art that we’re revealing here for the first time. There’s a lot of ‘work in progress’ here; our goal is to give you an early look at content to get a sense of the direction we are taking. I don’t have a lot of caveats, though, as at this point the work is a very good representation of what you will see when the game is in your hands.

When it comes to the topic of character art, I can say we've had an epic journey during development, so let's pull back the curtain and take a look! First, I need to give a big shout-out to our amazing character art team, engineering team, animators, lighting artists, and technical artists—without them, none of this would be possible!

When I think back to the beginning, I think at the highest level, our goal was to make the characters in Diablo IV look as artistic and as hand-crafted as possible using the latest tools and techniques. Over time, our ambitions around what we thought we could achieve evolved and really solidified into what you see today. 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. We loved those and it felt like a strong foundation to build upon in regards to the characters and achieving that warm quality that came through in the cinematics but in a real-time game environment. We thought it was ambitious, but possible. This of course is a simplified summary of the thousands of conversations it took to achieve the results we have today, but what's meaningful is that during the journey nobody was arguing for our limitations. Nobody ever said we shouldn't, we couldn't, or we can't...everyone said yes, even when it meant starting over or throwing out work, everyone really pushed and brought their best to this work. I think this is one of the truly unique aspects of Blizzard...we all said 'Yes, and...' instead of 'No, because...' it's a wonderful aspect of working here.

That singular focus and commitment to quality led us down a very long, winding, and challenging path to where we are today. The challenges required us to completely rebuild our rendering engine and authoring tools. We needed to assemble a world-class character team comprised of artists, tools engineers, rigging specialists, lighting and surfacing experts. This was a complete overhaul.

We made massive improvements 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. We built a robust character customization system that is entirely new to Diablo and 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.

I can say now (with the hard work behind us and the comforting steady hum of our pipeline) that it was all worth it. We hope you agree (when you play it) that it really enhances the overall experience of the character's journey exploring the world of Sanctuary and makes the story, the gear, and the ways you see the characters of Sanctuary that much more enjoyable.

Most importantly, we hope you feel the love and care we've put into creating the gear and characters you will see in the game. Beyond just living out my most awesome Barbarian fantasy, we're honored to bring this work to you!

One of the benefits of the investments we've made in our character art development pipeline is that now most of our story cutscenes will be rendered in our engine using the game models. In previous Diablo games, the high fidelity cinematic story moments were all pre-rendered. We will still have those amazing cinematic moments from Blizzard Animation, but now we also have cinematic moments that feature your character up close, rendered in our game engine. We have been working closely with the legendary Blizzard Animation team to bring as much of their knowledge into our process as possible. The Rogue Announce trailer was a really fantastic collaboration where we were able to push the limits of our tech and tools.

We are getting to geek out about how good things look up close, but all things Diablo are in service to our isometric point of view. The fidelity we put into the characters and the balance of detail all has to work with our game camera. Those looking closely will notice we like to work with bigger shapes on the armor, and we tend to reduce things that affect readability. I think we've found a sweet spot of detail that retains the readability, works well with the environments, but also keeps things looking grounded, which is super important for this vision for Sanctuary and how we present the world to you, our most important critic.

While I’m really happy with where we have arrived. I know we are going to keep pushing the bar at every opportunity and at Blizzard, releasing a game is just the beginning! I hope you enjoy the rest of the deep dive on character art with Arnaud and Nick!

Arnaud Kotelnikoff, Lead Character Artist
Thanks for joining us! I’d like to dive into character customization and some of the visual improvements we developed for Diablo IV.

Diablo IV has more in-depth customization for your characters than we’ve had in any previous Diablo games. 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. 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. You can see some examples of these customization options throughout this blog.

Now I want to talk about some of the challenges we faced.

Diablo IV is intended to have a look that is grounded in reality, and to achieve that we need to follow some basic rules of color value, such as PBR, which means our materials look and react to light in a realistic way. The challenge for the 3D artists is to transfer the color of a concept drawing to a PBR value. For example, in PBR, silver is a very bright grey, almost white, and the reflection of the material makes it look darker. All the characters in Diablo IV follow the PBR rules, to ensure that our characters look as good in daylight as they do in a dark dungeon.

Tools that empower players to customize the look of their characters help build a stronger connection to those characters and the game. Our dye system allows you to change the color palette of your armor pieces, such as changing silver to gold or replacing a white cloth for a black cloth, etc.

Each part of the armor can be dyed, including the helmet, chest, gloves, legs, and boots. You can dye each piece with a different color palette if you choose, or apply the same palette to all of them.

This system was challenging to implement because materials such as metal do not allow themselves to be dyed with inappropriate colors when they follow PBR rules. To address this, we added data to our armor that identifies specific material types and tells the dye system what color goes on what material, such as leather, fabric, metal, and other specific surfaces. The result is armor that is dyable in a range of colors that still feeling grounded and realistic in the world we’re building for Diablo IV.

The game camera is one of our top priorities, as we want to make sure the character looks good and readable from the isometric perspective. It’s the first thing we consider in character development. That said, the player character will be displayed in a lot of different ways throughout the game, whether that’s the character customization screen, the inventory paper doll, social screens, and in our real-time cinematics, which will often zoom in for a closer view of the character than in the rest of the game. To support that, we have added an extra layer of texture called detail mapping—detail mapping is a small, repetitive texture applied on top of the material that bring more sharpness and detail to the main texture.

Every armor set in Diablo IV has two body types. Here is an armor set for Barbarians with some subtle differences between the two.

Here is a video clip in slow motion of the Rogues, which we recorded in our real-time engine. You can really enjoy the details and see how the light reacts with the materials. You will also be able to see some of our customization elements that I talked about earlier. Please note, the environment is a test scene that modelers use to look at their characters and many of these armors are works in progress and subject to change and polish.

Here is another slow motion video of the Barbarians. Please note that all these armors are a work in progress and are subject to some adjustment.

This is just scratching the surface of what’s to come in Diablo IV in terms of character customization. The team is dedicated to delivering the best quality possible, and we hope that players will enjoy all the options we have available for customizing their characters in Diablo IV.

Nick Chilano, Associate Art Directors, Characters
Hello everyone,

I'm excited to share with you our vision and our process for making monsters in Diablo IV.

With monsters, success requires that many different things come together, but it starts with the player feeling satisfied in killing it. That means the monster needs to visually match its gameplay and have a gory/demonic twist to it. They should look like something you have not seen before as well as taking something visually familiar and brushing it with a Diablo paint brush. That Diablo brush applies a level of detail, an understanding of gameplay needs, a level of artistry, and the demonic Diablo theme to all our monsters.

For me, everything starts with a goal. Typically, it's a goal from design on what this monster needs to do and what the player experience should be. Making games is a collaboration. Sometimes a visual concept helps drive an idea, while in others a paper design is enough.

Our game design goal for the Blood Bishop was to make a caster who would cast direct damage and create AOE bombs for area of denial. As for the visual notes, we wanted a high-level boss based on vampiric blood and magic. We knew we wanted to double down on the notion of a heart shape for the function of the blood magic. That naturally led to the notion of arteries creating these blood clots that explode to cast the AOE effect design needs. An exposed beating heart was the natural visual choice. So, the organic pulsing we see, the flowing arteries, and the blood-based VFX all combined to reach an aligned goal the team could get behind. The success here is when the game design needs were met visually in a true Diablo way.

This process was similar, but this time we had a visual concept to work from.

This undead Skeleton Lord is made of fused skeleton and body parts, with sinew and blood connecting it together—something we felt fit our game visually. That led to a Design Lead wanting to create a fight based on this character. The Design team was able to create a unique fight based on bone visuals, summoning skeletons, bone walls to restrict pathing, and leveraging the giant staff—one attack has the Skeleton Lord smashing the staff into the ground and creating a shower of exploding bone shards. Even though the art was created first, the Design team leveraged its look to help theme a fun and interesting fight we all enjoy.

We also need to look at our assets from two main focal points. Our game camera and a closer full body size camera. This means we need to understand what is important and what is supporting these elements in terms of overall shape language and finer secondary and tertiary details.

Level of artistic detail is always a challenge. Details need to be readable for the game, colors need to group well, silhouettes need to stand out, as well as being built for performance and movement. Understanding this is key to allowing our monsters to look great from our isometric camera while also delivering stunning details up close.

This Spider feeding upon and birthing spider spawn from a bloated corpse has a great visual design.

The spindly legs and back thorax instantly tell you what it is. That thin look of the legs as it moves down to a thicker body give it a nice balance to settle the shape language from top to bottom. The saturated red of the spider, on top of the cooler and more subdued body, help pop the spider visually so your eye catches it as soon as they show up on screen. When we look closer, you can see the spectacular highlights on the bloated body, the torn and pulled flesh, and the bulging pustules. So, up close gruesome details are visible from the game camera because of the clear shape and color grouping.

This succubus is another great example of an interesting and clear visual read from gameplay, with finer details that don't get in the way of the game camera but really raise the visual bar.

At the game camera we see a familiar silhouette. A winged demon hovering to seduce its prey and attack with magic from a distance. As you look closer, you see intricate details in the cloths, translucent skin on the wings, as well as materials like gold clasps, stitching, and embroidery on the outfit. We also see the wings are attached at the base of the head. A detail that needs a closer look to see but doesn’t complicate the look from different cameras.

In order to achieve this, we needed a process and technology to realize these amazing and, honestly, disturbing creations. To do that we have built a world class team creating monsters and demons at a level of quality that raises the bar for the Diablo series.

PBR gives us the ability to create surfaces and materials that look realistic and accurately react to lighting in the world. Leather can look like leather, metals like metals, and organic surfaces can feel appropriately squishy and fleshy by comparison.

This Knight is covered head to toe in metal and fabric that reacts differently based on lighting. You can see nice details and material breaks on the hard surfaces that your eye expects to see. This detail grounds us in a world we all visually know and understand. The difference from a scale pattern of finer metal to large, hammered iron next to gold trim is readily apparent.

Organic surfaces also are represented accurately in our engine. Fur, bone, flesh, and blood are all visible and react to light correctly. This is a Diablo game, after all, and we know these materials will be important.

So that is a brief rundown of some of the things we look at and value when it comes to monsters in Diablo IV. We really enjoy creating enemies, monsters, and demonic creatures that bring out an emotional response from our players, from fear or revulsion to the excitement of slaying them in true Diablo fashion.

In closing, I'd like to say that there are moments as a developer where you are just making the game, day-in and day-out, and you don't always take time to appreciate the craft on display that you are privileged to see every day. I love that we are doing these blogs to give you all some insight into our progress and process. It's a great opportunity for us to reflect on the journey, share our art, and appreciate the craft of our teammates. We hope you like what you see, and please share your comments on your platform of choice. We love to hear community feedback—it's really been a labor of love and an honor to create for you, and we can't wait for you to play it!

Thank you for joining us and keep an eye out for our upcoming blog update next quarter!

-The Diablo IV Team

Diablo IV Quarterly Update—December 2020
This update prioritizes one of the fans' most anticipated system — itemization. It also details changes to character attributes. Published on the 15th of December, 2020, the update is also the first that David Kim was not a part of the Diablo IV team, and instead, was signed off by Lead Game Designer Joe Shely.

The update marks that the next update would not be in blog format, and would instead take place during BlizzConline. It is also teased that a new class would be revealed in "a new version of the campfire scene".

Three Core Ideals
The developers would rely on three core ideals in deciding what changes to make:
 * First, we want to strengthen class identity by providing intuitive fantasy hooks. Items and skills that lean into the fantasy of your class are best.


 * Second, we want to support deeper customization through our itemization. Items should support and enhance your class, not define it.


 * Finally, we’re landing on overall depth somewhere between Diablo II and Diablo III. We aim to provide years of things to discover and countless ways to build a class.

Skill Tree
The developers expressed confidence with the Skill Tree based on community feedback and internal playtests. One change is that related skill nodes would be clustered together so that players would have an easier time finding them in the tree.

Re-specialization
As with the previous two games, active and passive skills can be re-specialize again. The number of times this can be done is infinite, but there would be a ramping cost.

Re-specializing would be easier at the beginning of a character's progression, but would require significant investment in end-game.

Primary Stats
The previous attributes (Angelic, Demonic, and Ancestral) were scrapped in favor of those found in previous games. This change was made because they didn't "reinforce" the fantasy of the classes and also because the developers wanted to return to the roots of classic RPG elements of early Diablo games.

Some attributes may come from items, but a majority would come from leveling up. Attributes provide benefits to all classes, though some attributes function differently depending on class.

Strength Increases DefenseTo Barbarians, increases Skill Damage Intelligence Increases All ResistancesTo Sorcerer, increases Skill Damage Willpower A returning attribute that was first seen in Blizzcon 2010. Improves Healing Received</li>To Barbarians, increases Resource Regeneration</li> To Sorcerer, increases Critical Strike Chance</li></ul> Dexterity Improves Chance to Dodge attacks</li>To Barbarians, increases Critical Strike Chance</li>To Sorcerer, increases Resource Regeneration</li></ul>

Skill Upgrades
In addition to affecting stats, attributes can be used to enable additional skill effects. Skill upgrades would require specific attributes with a certain threshold to unlock them.

Weapon Types
Weapon types would differentiated from one another. Not only would each weapon type have a visually distinct look — each type would also have its own weapon speed and inherent characteristics as implicit affixes. For example, all shields would have a block value, all wands wands would have a critical strike chance implicit, and all staves would grant additional resource regeneration.

Item Qualities
Similar to Diablo II and unlike Diablo III, magic and rare items would play a more prominent role.

System Design in Diablo IV (Part II)
Though lacking specifics, itemization was focused on the blog. Itemization was described as "very early design". The developers stressed that its depth and customization is valuable to the game.

The dev team "don’t want to create an exact copy of Diablo II or Diablo III" and plan to take best parts of previous games and improve upon them while introducing new elements to make Diablo IV unique. An important philosophy for the dev team is "Easy to learn, difficult to master". Items would be just one part of a character's overall power, and that power would spread out power across different sources, including skill ranks, character level, talent trees, and the endgame character progression system

Affixes
Item affixes have two takeaways: they should be a meaningful part of character power and should create interesting choices when deciding which items to equip.

There is a plan to increase the total number of affixes on items, including Magic (Blue), Rare (Yellow), and Legendary (Orange). This change is intended to raise the importance of non-Legendary affixes and address the issue of Legendary bonus overpowering other affixes.

Three new stats were introduced:
 * Angelic Power, which increases the duration of all beneficial effects (like self-buffs or healing)
 * Demonic Power, which increases the duration of all negative effects (like debuffs or damage over time)
 * Ancestral Power, which increases the chance of on-hit effects (aka increased proc chance)

Additionally, these new stats would act as prerequisites to unlock certain affixes.

Attack/Defense Changes
The developers have made Attack exclusive to weapons, Defense exclusive to armor, and removed Attack and Defense from jewelry. It has also been emphasized that solely picking items based on Attack and Defense will almost never be the optimal way to play, but it does provide a good starting point for newer players.

Ancient Legendary Replacement
Ancient Legendary items were removed from this version of the game. The developers took cues from feedback to focus on addressing the usefulness of Rare (Yellow) items and increasing the depth and complexity of player gear choices in the endgame.

There is also a plan of introducing a new unnamed type of consumable that would have a random Legendary affix that can be applied onto a non-Legendary item. This item type would only drop in late endgame by killing monsters. This would mean:


 * We create an “elective mode for items” that is experienced after players have had time to experience Rare and Legendary items normally, as well as familiarized themselves with a variety of affixes
 * This adds a way to introduce new methods of play without adding even more power to endgame items
 * Rare items with the best affixes on them are always useful and retain value

System Design in Diablo IV (Part I)
The update details what the Diablo IV developers' preliminary direction on what future systems would be in Diablo IV. It emphasizes the importance of parsing through the Diablo community feedback and opinions, as well as internal discussion. The article was published on the 19th of November, 2019.

Itemization
The Diablo IV developers plan to design an itemization system with the intention of adding depth and complexity to items. The developers' aim is to give players "more freedom" to customize items and explore gameplay possibilities instead of "looking for the most optimal build online".

Elective Mode
There was a misconception (due to the way the Blizzcon 2019 demo) that skills were locked in the UI. The Diablo IV developers assured that Elective Mode would be implemented in the game and that skill selection and assignment will be open for all players.

Ancient Items
Due to a backlash by fans against Ancient items and, according to the developers, that these items serve no clear purpose, the developers would be revisiting this item quality.

Endgame Progression System
The developers expressed their ambivalence towards whether character leveling and experience system should be finite or infinite. Among the points discussed is the inclusion of a level cap and a secondary experience system, which is reminiscent of Diablo III's Paragon system.

Sources of Power
An issue among Diablo fans is that items would monopolize power. The developers clarified that power would come from a mix of leveling up, skill ranks, talents, and items. They also rectified that, unlike in Diablo III, bonuses from legendary items would not invalidate other affixes.

Keyed Dungeons
A new feature in Diablo IV are Keyed Dungeons. The majority of these dungeons would be found in "real places" throughout Sanctuary. Unlike Rifts in Diablo III, Keyed Dungeons would introduce challenges through Dungeon Affixes. This would make players plan ahead and strategize before going into one of these dungeons.