Luis Barriga (game director): Ever since we announced Diablo IV at the last BlizzCon in 2019, we’ve been sharing updates with you guys through our blog, whether it’s items, skills, zones, even user interface updates. You guys seem to have really enjoyed that.
The Diablo Immortal: Alpha and Beyond panel was held on February 19, 2021 at 6:45pm EST. The next Diablo Immortal test will be soon up to level 60. One of the two remaining known Classes will be playable in this upcoming test, and it will be longer than Technical Alpha (which lasted two weeks).
Fergusson: Hey, everyone. I’m Rod Ferguson, executive producer for the Diablo Franchise, and welcome to the Diablo Q&A. I’m joined today by three of my favorite Diablo designers. We have Luis Barriga, who has forbade me to roll my R’s when trying to say his name. I feel really bad about myself, but he’s the Game Director for Diablo 4.
We have Wyatt Chang, who is the Lead Designer for Diablo Immortal; and Rob Gallerani who is the Principal Designer for Vicarious Visions who works on Diablo II: Resurrected.
Several gaming sites and fansites were invited to a private Zoom call with two Diablo 4 developers to discuss details of the new Rogue class. Below you can read through some of the non-verbatim highlights of the Q&A.
Developers: Careena Kingdom (lead animator) and Joseph Piepiora (lead systems designer).
The Blizzard Tech Support site out of the blue updated the Diablo 4 Beta Access page 11 hours ago. Merely 3 days before BlizzConline 2021. Coincidence?
Right off the bat. This is bordering between wild speculation and a longshot.
The BlizzConline schedule seems to only have room for two Diablo games on Day 1. It could be Diablo 4 and Diablo Immortal. Or it could be Diablo 4 and D2R announcement — leaving Diablo Immortal out as Blizzard did in BlizzCon 2019.
I will lay out both possible scenarios.
The BlizzConline 2021 schedule is now available and from the Blizzard Channel we can see that Diablo is intended to be the main dish of the event.
For Friday, the Blizzard Channel focuses mainly on one World of Warcraft panel, one Overwatch 2 panel and two Diablo panels.
Someone with username Azimuthus posted in Reddit an image of what he claims is spotting the Diablo 4 downloader in the Blizzard Launcher. The download isn’t possible with a decryption key — which means this build is only accessible by Blizzard employees — most likely only the Diablo 4 team.
If this truly happened, it was very likely a mistake by someone at Blizzard who flagged it for public view, accidentally.
Blizzard Entertainment published today the Diablo 4 Quarterly Update with some juicy details. Something to note is that the images are tagged as Pre-Alpha.
So we can assume the game is played only by the Diablo 4 team at this point. Not company-wide, yet. Still the UI looks pretty good this early.
Tip: To view full size images below, hold the mouse’s right-button on the image and open the image in a new tab.
Blizzard Entertainment has definitely changed the way audiobooks are presented in Amazon. They no longer open pre-orders that launch months later, up to a year. They drop them overnight into the store.
The Diablo: The Sin War, Scales of the Serpent Audiobook is available for sale and you can listen to it whole right away.
Originally, this novel by Richard A. Knaak was released before Diablo III’s announcement. Most of the themes and concepts in the game are based on the novel trilogy — such as the origin of the nephalem.
