Diablo IV Release Date Trailer and Previews
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Diablo IV, Blizzard Entertainment's next entry in their iconic action-RPG series, is now scheduled to go live on June 6, 2023. With that being the case, we're invited to pre-order the game and join an upcoming developer livestream that should be taking place on December 15, 2022.
There's also this cinematic trailer to marvel at:
And if you'd like to know more about the actual game, you'll find several hands-on previews below:
Blizzard has said that Diablo 4 is a "return to darkness" to evoke the tone of Diablo 2 instead of 3, but the absurdity of playing as a walking winter storm participating in open world events where demons crawl out of the ground like ants at a picnic doesn't quite match the vibe that it's pitching.
Playing Diablo 4 is much closer to playing Elden Ring. Muted colors, broken people, and broken buildings are all over the place. Violin strings fill the space as you poke around the open world and dungeons, but then a treasure goblin pops out and you're a cat who heard the crinkle of a bag of treats. Diablo is still an RPG where you make loot pop out of demons like pinatas. I trust FromSoftware to nail an absurd, gloomy fantasy world with bipedal mushrooms that punch you into another dimension, but these days, Blizzard isn't as practiced at it.
This understanding extends to how Blizzard fills the open world. You'll find small mini-dungeons for short bursts of action, layered alongside larger mini-zones for longer delves. And they'll be nearby ringed areas on the map representing world events, which are usually a variation of wave-based attacks you either have to survive, protect someone against, or beat in a limited amount of time. And they all increase in difficulty and climax in a mini-boss, then reward you with a big chest of loot on top of whatever the enemies dropped. It's enemies, enemies, enemies, loot, loot, loot. It's Diablo at its best.
Accompanying this are exclamation-mark sidequests to pick up in town or out in the world, often leading to an instanced dungeon of their own, and the more lavishly scripted main quests, with cutscenes and cinematics of their own. And it all adds up to a world full of stuff to do, and one that can distract you for hours at a time. After 10 hours, at level 22, I feel like I've barely seen any of it. This place is massive, and you're going to be here for a very long time.
IGN:
One of the first things that struck me in the first couple hours of Diablo 4 was just how much story there is. Relative to previous games in the series, you’ll spend a lot of time watching cutscenes of both the cinematic and in-game variety (the former are, per Blizzard tradition, always gorgeous, and the latter are impressively varied in both camera angle and length). If I’m being honest, I think the frequency of the cutscenes in the early game combined with the unavoidably lousy feeling of being at the lowest point on the power curve when you’re just starting out makes Diablo 4 feel a bit slow for the first hour or two. This isn’t really a complaint, though, as I applaud Blizzard’s effort to layer more story into Sanctuary. Making it feel more alive and filled with more history is a good thing. Besides, you’ll still spend an overwhelming amount of your time slaying monsters in combat.
Being able to easily respec is core to the freedom that Diablo IV is designed to give players. At any point you can choose to use gold to refund points spent on a specific ability, or redo your skill tree entirely. There's no special merchant you need to visit, or scarce resources you need to gather. While the cost is still being iterated on, game director Joe Shely explained in an interview that this decision was made to encourage players to personalize their builds throughout their time with the game.
"We think that having your character feel like a compilation of choices you've made leads to interesting decisions; it leads to interesting opportunities to play with other folks. But we know that as you're engaging with the game, especially early on, you don't have a full understanding of the game. You're going to want to experiment and try things out. When you look at our respec systems, which apply to both our skill tree and Paragon for later levels, which is our endgame progression system, we really tried to approach it in a way that yes, gives that sense of making a choice that matters and [that] your character is not the same as everyone else's character. It's a sum of decisions you've made, and we want to make you think about those."
