Diablo IV will be the darkest, most realistic-looking entry in the series, but the team focused more on creating an immersive game environment than outright realism. To achieve this goal, the design team set two basic principles for concept art, game scene and actual design: “medieval style art” and “return to darkness”. Under the guidance of these two basic principles, the game environment designed by the team pays special attention to detail and color matching, and is committed to creating a unique visual style. Climate and physically oriented light are also important in creating the dangerous atmosphere of Santius Ari, which will give the world a more realistic feel.
Diablo IV will feature a shared open world for the first time in the franchise’s history, with a total of 5 fascinating areas to explore. From the Great Plains, the Scots Glen Coast to the Glacier Ridge, each area has been crafted by Diablo’s art and design teams. There are dynamic objects in many areas, making the building structure and terrain environment full of vitality; this time, the team has further created a realistic and diverse destruction mechanism, and interactive and destructible objects will also appear in the environment.
Additionally, Diablo IV will feature over 150 random dungeons through a combination of handcrafted and automatically generated gameplay. To make the dungeon design process more efficient and flexible, the team decided to create a series of landscape pattern sets that could be used and reused in clever ways with a variety of different objects, interactive props, and lights. In order to make the landscape look natural, the team specially designed the pattern group transition scene as a new feature to facilitate seamless transition between two different pattern groups in the same dungeon.
Hope the player community enjoys this year’s first quarterly update on Diablo IV’s development progress, and the team looks forward to sharing more information with you this year. More information on Diablo IV can be found on the official website and the official media material website.
