You’d be at pains to say that any game in the Diablo franchise is light-hearted, in fact, they’re all pretty grim if we’re being honest, but there are a few more flashes of levity and mental reprieve in Diablo III than there perhaps was in any prior entry. Diablo IV, coming from Blizzard in June intends to get back to the franchise’s roots and “Return To Darkness.” Australia’s Press-Start had the opportunity to talk to Lead Class Designer Adam Jackson and Producer Ash Sweetring about the tone of Diablo IV, source material and inspirations, and this apparent brief on Blizzard’s side to embrace the darkest parts of the IP.
Speaking about this tonal focus, the Blizzard duo responded, saying,
Really, I think a lot of our source material comes from our older games. As a team, we knew that we really liked that tone, especially in Diablo. You’re out there, you’re alone, and you can’t even run. You’re walking around these tiny caves and dungeons, and the world is closed in and scary and dark. We wanted to really go back to that gothic horror sense of the world. Diablo II had a decent amount of it too, but we’ve gone a little bit lighter over time. This was kind of us resetting and being like no, we wanna go back there. That was really cool, we thought it was really awesome.
he fantasy, the visuals, the art, the gameplay, there’s a lot more to it than just – oh, it’s a dark game. There are a lot of ways that you can make that happen, and some of the more exciting ways that maybe you wouldn’t think of are the way we translated that into combat. The evade button came from wanting monsters to be scarier and more threatening, and if everyone has an evade button, that means we can do that. A lot of people think oh, an evade button makes me more powerful, but we don’t see it that way. The way we see it; evade means that we get to make players more scared of the stuff that we could do to them because we know they have this ability.
There’s a lot that went into it, but I really think the biggest thing was just us wanting to go back to our roots a little bit and explore the world of Sanctuary. This being an open-world game means we can go to that dark theme way more than in our other titles, where you couldn’t really explore the world in this way. We thought, if we’re going to let people see Sanctuary, we want to really show Sanctuary the way it was meant to be seen.
Adam Jackson
One of the cool things about working with a team as talented as we have is that they’re able to have an idea in their head and equally pool reference material and scour the internet for all sorts of things and also just able to brain game these ideas that are just horrific and terrifying, and then we’re able to bring those to life and fit them in a way that is so compelling in our story and fit our needs in general. It’s so incredible to be able to work with people like that and to actually see the gears in their heads turning as they’re going through from concept to interaction and everything in between.
Really, Diablo IV isn’t for the weak of heart and it’s going to be a game that we will say you probably shouldn’t play with your children. It’s going to have a lot of different horrors and gothic aspects to it. It’s a shocking story, really. I think that is a good way to describe it. It’s very shocking but in the most tasteful way possible. It pulls you in and keeps you wanting more and more. We’ve harnessed that energy, we understand it, and we want to give more of that to the players.
Ash Sweetring
If there’s one thing that is very clear from this interview, it’s the fact that Diablo IV is going to be the brutal and soul-straining Diablo experience that the longest-lasting fans know well. Now you just need to wait until you can play Diablo IV on June 6, 2023 on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
