BlizzCon 2019: Diablo IV Gameplay Videos by Livestreamers

During the Diablo IV panel, Blizzard Entertainment posted a list of livestreamers who would share gameplay videos. Below you can watch their adventures.

The BlizzCon 2019 Diablo IV demo starts with only three heroes in the lobby: Barbarian, Sorceress, and Druid.

The demo only showed two customization options: Long hair or short hair. It is still in Alpha, so it is logical that not everything we will see in the shipped product is yet implented; and the UI itself is a placeholder.

Exclusively in the demo, the player spawns in the Corbach Crypts with the quest titled “A Light in the Dark” with the objective: Take the Old Chieftain’s Lantern.

Immediately, you may notice the dark and gritty onscreen. Mostly black, and shades of gray. The bright areas might indicate the game engine uses PBR — a realistic lightning.

The Inventory is much narrower, placing the 30-slots to the right of the character, instead of at the bottom. You can also see a 15-slot Utility window. You can stack 50 Health Potions in a single slot, and here is where Runes go when you loot them.

Another observation is the absence of a shoulder slot and a belt slot in the Character. At this point, this means shoulder items won’t drop in Diablo IV. Unsure about the belt, considering there is a 15-slot Utility — which I assume is the Diablo II belt for potions.

Stats looked pretty simple: Attack, Defense, and Life. The Sorceress gear seen in the video, each contains one stat. Among them:

% Attack Speed
% Damage Reduction
% Damage Reduction from Enemies out of Melee Range
% Damage Reduction from Enemies within Melee Range
% Damage to Enemies within Melee Range
% Damage to Enemies out of Melee Range
% Damage to Stunned Targets
% Critical Strike Chance
% Critical Strike Damage
% Reduced Duration of Enemy Control Imparing Effects
% Attack Speed (Weapon)
Max Life
% Damage
% Poison Resistance
% Fire Resistance
%Lightning Resistance
Empty Sockets
6% Reduced damage from Elites, Bosses, and Players
Hit Effect: Up to 7.0% Chance to Slow on Crit
Hit Effect: Up to % Chance to Stun
Hit Effect: Your attacks have up to a 9% chance to spawn a hydra that will aid you in combat
% Reduced Fury cost for skills (Barbarian Only)
% Reduced Mana cost for skills (Sorcerer Only)
% Duration of Control Impairing Effects

All the gear has Defense stat, but the Weapon, Amulet and two Rings had something missing in the other equipment items: 184 Attack, 120 Attack, and 115 Attack. The Weapon had 881 Weapon Attack. So it seems these items in specific help increase your base Attack damage.

Players can “EVADE” enemy attacks in Diablo IV.

There is a scrollbar in the Character window to scroll down the bags. It turns out there is also a Quest Items bag with 20 Slots; and a Materials bag with 15-slots.

Diablo II Runes are back in Diablo IV. Here you can see the Vex and Dol runes dropping from a treasure chest. You can drag and drop the Runes into Gear Sockets — like you do gems in Diablo III. Something I noticed is that each time both runes dropped for different runs and different classes — the runes always had the same stats. No RNG. Same as Diablo III Gems.

When you use the Town Portal, it will close once you leave town. Quests are marked as blue exclamation marks on the mini-map.

Better view stitched in Photoshop to read the special location’s names. The demo takes place in Scosglen. The land of the druids.

Here is the Scosglen Map stitched together in Photoshop.

You can right-click on the Map (TAB) to create a custom pin anywhere. When the pin is active, a path is drawn on the map and in the mini-map as a visual guide to show the closest path to reach your destination. Basically, a GPS that tells you where to turn, and if you stray from the path, it re-calculates the best possible route toward the destination. Awesome.

 

The Create Clan button is seen alongside the Friends List.

When the mini-map shows a UP/DOWN arrow icon, that means you can climb up or down to lower ground, which is something no other Diablo game has ever had. If you are near an Event, even if it is not shown in the mini-map, you get an alert onscreen, below the mini-map with some kind of flag standard icon displaying the title of the event, and informing you to press TAB to open the map.

Potions = Q
Town Portal = T
Character = C
Evade = Spacebar

Those can be seen around the Health Globe as buttons as well.

There are Open World Events that multiple players can participate in. In the Bluddshed video at 15:10 the Ashava the Pestilent event had a 3-minute countdown. At least 13 players were waiting around for him to spawn.

Something I didn’t like as much is that a Legendary amulet named Esadora’s Overflowing Cameo dropped from the World Event boss Ashava the Pestilent. That was a super intense fight along over 13-players in the open world. The same exact item dropped from a trash mob at the beginning of the Scosglen demo. I think really good items should have a priority to drop from the hardest bosses, and not be shared in the loot table of trash mobs. We’ll see. (Update: David Kim said Legendaries were dropping from specific locations only in the demo, and that it would be different in the shipped product.)

When players die, you can see their ghost hovering above the corpse for a few seconds before release.

Defeating the Ashava the Pestilent world event granted 975 XP and 1050 GP (gold) at level 20.

 

Some shrines are hidden inside events. In Scosglen, at the Kealer Farm, there is a world quest named Corrupted Shrine. You must destroy it. Optionally, you can prevent the ritual from completing to 100% — but if you chose to prevent it, an elite named Raythe the Undeniable spawns. Once defeated, the Shrine pops onscreen with the message: “Wherever the brave strike, riches follow. Enemies drop gold when hit.”

The only setback is there is no buff icon to read a tooltip. You simply get an icon above your head to show you have the shrine blessing — kinda the same way as in Diablo II. The buff system is possibly not implemented yet, so I’m not too worried now.

Another shrine that says “Fate guides the deft hand to strike true. All of your hits are critical strikes.”

 

Another thing I learned is that when you open your inventory, an icon appears at the top-right corner of items you haven’t hovered your mouse over yet. This alerts you when you have a new item.

When you are in a dungeon, and open the map — you can scroll up and down to zoom in/out — it shows you the old-school transparent dungeon map; but if you look at the screenshot below, there are two toggle buttons to switch between the dungeon map and the Sanctuary map.

This is what happens when your character is dying or dies. Your ghost hovers above your corpse for 5 seconds or until you press the “Revive at Checkpoint” button.

 

When you hover the cursor over an item in your inventory, you can hold down ALT to compare it with the off-hand. This happened with a Ring. As you know, you can hold up to two rings at once. By pressing down ALT, you can compare it with the second Ring.

 

Some quest givers have multiple quests which are shown as a list. You can choose which to do first.

Are there Treasure Goblins in the Diablo IV demo? Yes, but after watching gameplay videos for over 5 hours, I only saw two spawning. One of them in the Garan Hold. Another in the open world.

David Kim said there will be new Classes in Diablo IV through future expansions.

 

CONCLUSION

I am very impressed that Blizzard Entertainment brought a Diablo IV demo to BlizzCon with almost a complete SKILL system and Talent Tree. This is usually missing in past game demos, which gives me the impression that Beta Testing is not so far away than we think. I’d dare to guestimate we might be playing Beta as early as Spring-Summer 2020, if not sooner. No beta or release date has been announced at the moment of this posting.

I also like the mobility with the SPACEBAR which sorta lunges you forward, and you can also dodge frontal attacks with it — moving behind the enemy. I also like that players will be able to mount. As seen in the Scosglen map, the world is immensely big. It makes sense to be able to travel on a mount. The portal system in Diablo III, while useful, it takes away from exploring the world, and killing stuff.

I have been watching some hour and a half gameplay videos. I’m enamored with the idea of playing Diablo IV, and explore the world, and engage with other players against world quest and dungeon bosses.

 

NOTE: I will add more content as I watch more gameplay videos. Follow @blizzplanetcom for updates.

 

DIABLO IV GAMEPLAY VIDEOS

BLIZZCON 2019: DIABLO IV CONTENT
1. Impressions & Gameplay Videos	2. Barbarian Skills & Talent Tree	3. Sorceress Skills & Talent Tree	4. Druid Skills & Talent Tree
5. Legendary Loot in the demo

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