In May 2022, it will already be ten years since Diablo III was born. However, despite regular communication from Blizzard and some gameplay videos revealed, its sequel does not seem ready to land. A finding that tends to worry fans, but the studio wants to reassure them.
Diablo IVthe hack ‘n’ slash that’s long in coming
If the franchise Uncharted is the benchmark for adventure games, Fifa the benchmark for football games, or even The Elder Scrolls that of western-style role-playing games, Diablo is undoubtedly the standard bearer of hack ‘n’ slash, this video game genre focused on nervous fights against hordes of enemies. While the first two games in Blizzard’s franchise originally came out in 1996 and 2000 (Diablo II having had the right to a remake at the end of last year), it will then have been necessary to wait twelve years so players can lay their hands on Diablo III.
To their great misfortune, it is a safe bet that this delay will be as long – or even longer – for Diablo IV. Announced in 2019, the game hasn’t shown much since then, although Blizzard maintains a blog where they share quarterly updates on the progress of the title’s development. Recently, developer and community manager Adam Fletcher posted a tweet congratulating that the studio teams are now fully focused on designing the game’s environments.
Excited for the Diablo IV Quarterly Update blog next week!
The team dives into environment art. Most of the past updates have had a good amount of block out levels so this is a great peek into the updates on the art side. Lots of eye candy including videos to check out!
March 22, 2022
Not all the players seemed thrilled, so Fletcher spoke again.
One (or more?) beta to be expected
On Reddit, some users did not greet the news with great enthusiasm and conversely were skeptical about the lack of scope of the latest updates communicated by Blizzard. Adam Fletcher, again him, therefore decided to answer them by explaining the reason for their concern and by wanting to be reassuring, sinceit hints that players will have multiple opportunities to put their hands on Diablo IV before its release.
We share some system updates through different blogs, but I think we’re getting to a point where we’re using words that are getting hard to understand, so it becomes more complicated to get interesting feedback because it depends on people’s interpretation. We will always post updates on these blogs and they will evolve continuously until the release, but it would be better for people to experiment and play by testing [le jeu]. There will be time for that once we enter the testing phases. I’m looking forward to that. Adam Fletcher
If the words “alpha” or “beta” are therefore not written in black and white, Adam Fletcher’s message leaves little room for doubt: Blizzard should allow players to test Diablo IV several times before its release, in order to obtain maximum feedback and improve the software accordingly. Still a little patience !