Within the past 24 hours, Blizzard Entertainment posted a job opening for a Associate Test Analyst for the Diablo Immortal team specifying the role as QA/Test Developer.
After finding the job opening, I used a known technique to find out when a page was first published. In this case: 1 day ago.
Something extraordinarily awkward happened last week when Netflix tweeted a question, and the Diablo Twitter account replied out of the blue.
NETFLIX: what’s something you can say during sex but also when you manage a brand twitter account?
DIABLO: By Three They Come.
A chinese streamer was allowed by Blizzard Entertainment to livestream his Diablo Immortal gameplay for nearly two hours.
The game starts with the hero being rowed through the river by a ferryman.
Ferryman: This is it… the dock for Wortham. That whole village has gone to hell… You sure I can’t take you someplace else?
Demon Hunter: Yes, I am. Wortham is beyond the forest I take it?
Ferryman: Aye, follow the road and be on your guard. Unfortunate things happen to travelers in that forest…
Personally, I haven’t heard any developer confirm that the character welcoming Lilith in the cinematic is in fact her son Rathma. I might have missed that if otherwise.
PiZZaPatriZZa shared in Reddit a link to a thread response by Customer Support Tyryndar where he “unofficially” confirms that was Rathma. I’d prefer a developer to confirm this, but this is what we got so far. So you should hold it cautiously for what it is.
Diablo IV lead system designer David Kim posted a letter to the community today addressing feedback concerns and highlighting plans for the Diablo IV System Design ranging Itemization, Elective Mode, Ancient Items, the end-game progression system, sources of power, and keyed dungeons.
Recently, we were told fans would get a quarterly update on Diablo IV. It’s great to have two letters from the developers barely two weeks after BlizzCon. Hopefully, we will continue to have this openness in between those quarterly updates. That’s the right path.
Itemization
We’re still working through all the feedback that came in regarding itemization and we’re actively discussing ways to add more depth and complexity to base items (including Rares), ways to add greater variety to item affixes to make those powers interesting and your choices meaningful, and ways to give players more freedom to choose how to customize items, so you can have fun exploring a wide range of effective gameplay possibilities instead of just looking up “the optimal build” online.
We’ll go into way more depth regarding itemization in a separate post soon, but we don’t want to leave you hanging until then—so we’re going to update you on a few other topics now.
These are some of the topics that we’re seeing come up most often, but if we’re missing something, please let us know and we will try to share our thoughts on those subjects as well in future updates.
Elective Mode in Diablo IV
There’s a misconception that Diablo IV will lock skills to specific slots because of the BlizzCon demo user interface. Like many other things in the demo, the UI is not final and we will support Elective Mode-style skill selection. Skill selection and assignment will always be completely open for all players.
Ancient Items
We completely agree with the community sentiment—Ancients as they are don’t really serve a clear purpose in Diablo IV. We should have done a better job of explaining the role of Ancient Items in Diablo IV. We had a preliminary direction to share, but you’ve brought up some great points, so we’re revisiting our designs with your feedback in mind. We hope to have more details to share in the follow-up itemization update.
Endgame Progression System
We haven’t decided whether the character leveling and experience system should be finite or infinite. We’ve been discussing the pros and cons of both and would love to hear your thoughts. There seems to be some concern around infinite being worse because it will eventually overshadow all the power granted by other sources. However, we can control how much power each system gives, whether it’s infinite or finite.
For example, say we’re talking about thousands of hours of gameplay . . . within those thousands of hours, we could choose to create a finite system that grants 1,000,000 times more power than an infinite system, making it practically impossible for the infinite system to catch up in power.
Also, power increase doesn’t need to be linear throughout the ranks—it can slow down as players reach higher levels. We believe the more important question is what experience feels best for players, and we can playtest various approaches to tuning to find the power curve that makes the most sense.
We have a couple reasons for having a different experience system in addition to a level cap. A level cap gives us the ability to grant players a sense of completion. But for players who want to go deeper into the game, a second experience system allows us to capture the fun of achieving those really difficult endgame goals and ranks. We can also introduce additional depth through this system, because players will be more experienced with the game at this point. Ultimately, our goal is to create a meaningful system that provides clear choices depending on your preferred playstyle in the endgame.
Sources of Power
The community has shared many good points on the topic of power sources and we’re reevaluating how much power comes from each source at any given time.
However, we want to clarify that in Diablo IV, power doesn’t come mostly from items. We want to have a good mix of power sources: characters naturally get stronger as they level up, skills have ranks that increase power, talents provide specific playstyle choices and additional character power, and of course items grant power and meaningful choices as well.
Something else to keep in mind is Legendary powers are just one part of an item’s power, and they won’t invalidate all other Affixes due to how powerful they are. For example, two to three normal Affixes are currently equivalent in power to a Legendary power on most items.
Keyed Dungeons
A big question that’s come up is exactly how Keyed Dungeons are different from Rifts. Keyed Dungeons introduce greater challenges as their tiers increase through Dungeon Affixes. The majority of dungeons are real places in the world, and players will know some information about them including what types of monsters, events, and layouts to expect. With this information, as well as the specific Dungeon Affixes being displayed on the key, players will be able to strategize their approach before going into the dungeon. We believe this is the biggest change from Diablo III Rifts: the added planning and strategizing that takes place before you decide to run a Keyed Dungeon.
Please continue to share your thoughts—we want you to be involved in the Diablo IV design process. I personally believe in making the best decisions for the game based on the strongest design ideas, no matter where they come from. My biggest hope is for us to be able to constructively discuss and iterate on the topics that are most important to the community—so keep the feedback coming!
See you in Hell,
David Kim
Lead Systems Designer
The Diablo IV Team — source
Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik were discussed at ExileCon 2019 a range of different topics. The panel moderator asked if they recall a scary moment during the development of Diablo II. The response was quite revealing.
Diablo IV is ripe with potential for new systems, lore, returning features from previous games, and new content. I have many expectations. Some which I know, and others yet to be explored in the deepest corners of my mind.
DIABLO LORE
In terms of Lore, I would like to see quests, and special events based on things we have read before in the Diablo novels and comic books. For example, now that we get to explore Scosglen — how about finding characters like Barbarian Renit, Necromancer Cairo, the Zakarum Paladin Hale and Bay, the spirit of Druid Azgar the werebear and the ghost of Naz. One of the loot items could be the Hand of Naz — after following a series of quests.
Welcome to the Diablo IV Systems and Features panel. I hope everybody is here to hear about our systems and features. That is the only deck we have. So that’s what you get. My name is Tim Ismay. I am a senior producer on the Diablo IV team. I have a moderate amount of knowledge about all the things we work on. Not to worry. I have a collection here of experts that have deep knowledge of all the things that we work on. So they will be talking more than I will.
Diablo 4 game director Luis Barriga has issued his first post-BlizzCon letter to the fans. The essence of the letter is to expect quaterly updates from the Diablo IV team which includes behind-the-scenes looks at the progress made in its development.
Luis Barriga teases there is a cool update coming in February 2020. Hopefully, we get to learn whether the Horadric Cube is back, as that system has not been mentioned at all at BlizzCon 2019. There are many systems that were not revealed for Diablo IV yet such as: Transmog, Enchanting, Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing, Gambling Vendors, and many others.
It is a big departure to have updates every 4-months right after BlizzCon, compared with Diablo Immortal which went completely silent for a whole year. Very good sign, but that means only 3 Diablo IV updates per year.
If you missed the BlizzCon 2019 virtual ticket VODs, feel free to read our full Diablo IV panel transcripts.
Elizabeth: Hello, everyone. I have been waiting a long time to say this, but: Hello, BlizzCon! Hey, guys! Thank you so much. I am Elizabeth Seminario. I’m a producer in the Diablo team, and this is Diablo IV: World and Lore. Are you guys excited? Awesome.
We are excited too. We are excited because we finally get to talk to you about some of the things that make this such an amazing game. So that could be the places that you travel, or the friends and foes that you meet along the way, and the stories that you collect during your adventures. So I ask you to play along a little bit longer with my extended metaphor. Grab your dusty Barbarian pelt, or maybe it is a Sorceress cloak, and stay awhile and listen.
