When you’ve been working on a franchise for 25 years, there’s always a possibility that the next entry might suffer for feeling too similar to the games that came before it and then be perceived as stale. This isn’t a concern that fans have had with the Diablo franchise up until now, but can be something that strikes a franchise at any time if the team isn’t careful throughout the development of the game. Ahead of Diablo IV, several new features of the game have been revealed, including an evade function, the ability to climb, and even tweaks to inventory management, and Austalia’s Press-Start had a chance to talk to Diablo IV‘s Lead Class Designer Adam Jackson and Producer Ash Sweetring to discuss those new additions and changes.
Speaking to Press-Start, both Jackson and Sweetring discussed their favourite tweaks and changes made for Diablo IV, saying,
Evade is the big one. We’ve talked about that a lot lately. The ability to have that snappy movement in combat is something the class team is really proud of. There are a lot of quality-of-life things that are unique to our game, like when you open your map, you can put a little pin down, and it’ll tell you where to go without having a complete overlay so that you’re not really seeing your character most of the time. The town portal can now be used all the time, that’s a recent change we made to our game that is a little bit more convenient so that you have to worry less about inventory management.
Ash Sweetring
There’s the emote section, that’s something new that we’re adding to the game. Then traversals, where a player can actually hang or leap or slide between different platforms. That has been really fun to play with. In general, I totally echo Adam, and because we have so many quality-of-life improvements, it’s kind of hard to list them all. I think what is important there is that they’re noticeable when you’re playing. It’s one thing to have a quality-of-life action taken on a game, and you don’t really feel or emphasize it at all, really. The Diablo team took a lot of liberties in making sure that those quality-of-life experiences are actually noticed by the player inside of Diablo IV.
Adam Jackson
Diablo IV launches on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on June 6, 2023.
