While Diablo 4 won’t be hitting the scene in 2022, Blizzard is (thankfully) providing semi-consistent updates to keep the fanbase appeased. In the most recent quarterly update for the title, the dev team is giving players a glimpse at some of the locations ready to be explored in the long-awaited title, and is filling out the hype with a fairly large amount of gameplay footage.
Check out the video below.
The video shows three locations: the Scosglen Coast, Orbei Monastery, and Kyovoshad. In the blog post, art director Chris Ryder teased that Diablo 4 will include “five distinct regions and hundreds of dungeons,” with environments that had been created “through a darker and more grounded interpretation than earlier installments.”
Associate lighting director Brian Fletcher discussed his favorite addition in the post.
“New dungeon features such as seamless floor transitions or traversals are exciting, but my favorite new feature is what we call tile-set transition scenes. These are scenes that allow us to connect two different tile sets together in the same dungeon,” Fletcher said. “Imagine running through a crypt, only to find a hole in the wall that seamlessly leads you deeper into a vast underground cave network. All while keeping the randomized layouts that change with each dungeon run.”
Read the full update here.
In December 2021, Blizzard put out a lengthy blog post detailing changes to the game’s Paragon system. Once a character reaches level 50, they will begin gaining Paragon points–but rather than investing them in different stat increases, players will unlock nodes on a giant board. The layout of these boards will vary depending on class, and there isn’t one way to progress through them. The nodes will vary in rarity, with some able to be socketed with glyphs to give different benefits.
Diablo 4 does not yet have a concrete launch date. In late 2021, Blizzard revealed that players shouldn’t expect to see it before 2023, so next year remains a possibility.