Blizzard has unleashed a new quarterly update concerning the development of Diablo IV. It’s quite the extensive update, too, offering insight into progress on storytelling, multiplayer, the open-world, and more. A post via Blizzard News notes that like other gaming and tech companies, the team is working remotely from home at this time. While such a transition presents its fair share of challenges, Blizzard manages to “keep momentum going strong on the development of Diablo IV.”
In one section of the update, the studio reveals that “team milestones” serve as a guiding light for production. The most recent milestone, for instance, centered on “blocking in all the elements in a region known as the Dry Steppes.” This level of progress resulted in the creation of story-mode content, itemization, dungeons, various open-world elements, a PvP subzone, and a cinematic that bookends the completion of the narrative in Dry Steppes. Afterwards, team members played the segment from start to finish over the course of two days for analyzation purposes.
Blizzard further divulged that changes are at play for the way in which Diablo IV will tackle storytelling. Most notably, conversations are in the works, providing a system far more dynamic than that which featured in Diablo III. The post reads in part: “In [Diablo III] we relied on UI panes with a character’s name and portrait. We’re experimenting with a mix of tool-generated and manually choreographed cameras to tackle conversations.”
As a result, simpler interactions with NPCs will see the camera brought in closer to characters, while maintaining an isometric perspective. The team is taking advantage of “a library of animations to deliver the general gist of the conversations.” Character animations are “more deliberately hand-crafted” for complex interactions, though they utilize camerawork that’s similar to simpler encounters.
Another intriguing addition to Diablo IV is Sanctuary, an open-world that allows players to break from the campaign to explore, craft, experience PvP, and so on. While working through the main campaign, Sanctuary will also offer a variety of “open-world systems and pieces of content” that players will stumble across as they move along.
Diablo fans can expect more updates of this nature as development continues to progress.
[Source: Blizzard News]
