Diablo 4

[DjchunKfunK]

A guy on reddit who has been spot on with leaks in the past had the following to say about Diablo 4.

Diablo 4 is actually going to look dark, gritty and gross - no more rainbow shiny bullshit this time! Loactions are toned down, infrequently laid with corpses, wasteland, greyish deserts, clut caves surrounded by flesh, rotten crypts, marshes and bogs, plagued cities you name it. They are also seemingly much bigger, maybe even open? Characters now are able to ride horses (possibly other mounts), also there's contextual interaction with environment ? - climbing a wall Lost Ark style. Blood splatters look more like blood and not splashed jam too.

So far i can confirm 3 classes: mage (uses fire, ice and lightning so far), barbarian (swords, clubs, axes, kicks etc), and druid (lightning, wind, and transforming into beasts - so far bear and werewolf!).

Possibly there will be PvP from the start?. 4 player coop is there for sure.

All this game seems to be is a W I N K to the Diablo 2 fans, Lilith being the new diablo (she's covered in blood veil kinda), characters being shown sitting at a campfire as character selection, nitty gritty dark style that 2 was praised for, some skills also seem to be just taken from it and put in here (like sorceress' charged bolt). I'm interested and hope they don't fuck this up. The company is bad, but the game might not be this time.

2 points with "?" are just because it's not clear to me tbh... let's see what they say at the conference

no date yet too.. sorry.. If any questions I will answer later

I don't like the sound of larger areas as I think loot games feel much better to play when they are in compact areas, that way you are not having to uncover a massive map in fear of missing out on some loot. I wasn't that bothered about the look of Diablo 3 so the move back to a darker world is whatever.

[Wrathbone]

Will be keeping an eye on it. I enjoyed Diablo 3, though nowhere near as much as Diablo 2. It felt like they'd over-complicated certain things.

[Raid]

Diablo 3 was, after the expansion pack, a fantastic game, and I'm eager to see a new one. I don't think it needs to be more open though; getting penned in behind too many enemies is part of the game, and something you need to be conscious of. The more open world areas from the previous game were expansive enough. I too had no issues with the visuals.

I've seen rumours that a full HD remaster of Diablo 2 is going to be shown off this year, so there should be something to please most fans of the series.

[Mantis]

I'm not sure I have enough faith in Blizzard as a developer anymore to produce something on a level with their classic output. A HD remaster of D2 might just be the more preferable title. As good as Path of Exile and Grim Dawn are, Diablo 2 remains the absolute pinnacle of Action RPG games.

3 was good after the expansion but it still felt lacking overall. A return to the gothic setting would be very welcome for 4.

[Maturin]

I never actually got round to trying Diablo 3. I think all the server-side game asset nonsense put me off initially, then as the years went by it never occurred to me to try it out.

Grim Dawn is immense though.

[Raid]

I don't have much experience of the genre outside of the Diablos 2 and 3, but I don't think a lot of the criticism the third received was warranted, at least after the expansion patch. Perhaps the damage was done by that point, but it was a really solid game, and I loved the amount of granularity in the difficulty settings you could apply.

[DjchunKfunK]

Diablo 3 eventually had a really good end-game but it was a pretty bad game at the start with some terrible design decisions like the real-money auction house. It wasn't until loot 2.0 that it started to get better and the release of the expansion is when it really hit it's stride but for quite a while after release it was a bad game.

[Rusty]

I still play Diablo 3 regularly and have done since launch. It's one of the longest serving games I have so it must have something going for it
It' been 7 years now.

[Snowy]

Grim Dawn is immense though.

I agree, I am not a huge fan of ARPGs but Grim Dawn is awesome.

[Hatredsheart]

[Raid]

Yup, it's definitely more Diablo. It's a good looking game, no doubt, but given they opened by saying how this was a return to the Gothic stylings of the early games, I don't think the art direction looks all that different to 3, further reinforcing my thought that Diablo 3 really wasn't as big a departure as people thought.

Worth noting that he said it was in development for PC, PS4 and XBox One, suggesting to me that it's going to be out within a year, given those consoles will be replaced in 2020.

[Mantis]

It looks noticeably more muted with the colours to me. 3 was too vibrant and a lot of the assets looked cartoony.

Hopefully the writing will be okay. 2 didn't have the most complicated plot but it was very well written, 3 was nowhere near that level.

[DjchunKfunK]

It looks like someone took Diablo 3 and turned down the saturation. I'm glad that the areas look quite constrained, ultimately its going to depend on the skills and loot. Hopefully they can get that right this time.

[Raid]

In places, sure, in others not so much. I took a couple of random screenshots from places I thought I'd be able to replicate the rough look of with Diablo III:



Clearly the bridge setting is more saturated in III, but the desert is more vibrant in IV.

In terms of actual art style, I really don't think Diablo III looks in any way cartoonish. The models are much lower detail which perhaps adds to that effect, but I just don't see it as a cartoonish looking game.

[DjchunKfunK]

It's had a boost to the graphical detail for sure, as you would expect, but I think it has a similar vibe and all the talk about the game being dark only really seems to manifest itself in the more muted graphics so far. Like you Raid I had no issue with the graphics in 3 so this isn't a knock against the game.