A new Diablo 4 update offers a fresh look at what’s going on with Blizzard’s upcoming demon-hunting extravaganza. Diablo 4’s developers recently ran a two-day playtest, and have reported back on some of their findings. That includes the game’s open world side activities, how its shared world shouldn’t ever feel crowded, and more.
The update doesn’t include any major announcements—no release date yet—but it does reveal more about some of the game’s underlying systems, including how it’s approaching multiplayer action and some of the changes it will make in the way it tells its story.
“For simple interactions with NPCs we bring the camera in closer to the characters (while still maintaining an overall isometric feel) and use a library of animations to deliver the general gist of the conversations. For more complex conversations, we take a similar camera approach but here the character’s movements and animations are more deliberately hand-crafted. This lets us deliver story moments that are complex while keeping you in the world as much as possible,” Blizzard explained.
Blizzard is also planning to use real-time cutscenes, which will allow the angles to be more cinematic, but the player will still be shown as their own character with any visual elements like the currently equipped armor.On the multiplayer side, Blizzard said its broad goal is to include elements of shared worlds without going whole-hog into MMO territory, the idea being that if you see other player roaming around too often, the world starts to feel less dangerous.
“Dungeons and key story moments are always private—just the player and their party.Once story moments are complete and towns turned into social hubs, you’d run into a few people in town. While on the road, you’d sometimes run into a player here and there. And then finally, if you went to a location where a world event was happening, you would see a larger congregation of players trying to defend against an attack by a cannibal horde or trying to take down Ashava, the demonic world boss we showed at BlizzCon,” Blizzard said.
