Diablo IV Quarterly Update—December 2020 Is here!
Hello, and welcome once again to the Diablo IV Quarterly Update—our last for 2020!
Progress on the game continues at a steady clip and we’re excited about several big updates and revisions that the team’s worked on for a long time that we are trying to complete before the holidays. Today’s topic centers on one such major revision, which also happens to be the most requested topic this year: Itemization.
Items are the lifeblood of Diablo. They are the element of the game that captures your imagination and keeps you playing and wondering, “What if?” after you put the game down. Whether it’s anticipating the next piece of perfectly rolled godly gear or kicking around item combinations in your head like a mad scientist, items are undoubtedly a major part of what makes Diablo so compelling and so different from other games.
Understanding how important it is to get itemization right, we paid special attention to early player feedback about this part of the game. We knew that many more iterations awaited between what we showed you at BlizzCon 2019, our follow-up blogs, and the final game release. We also knew from past Diablo entries that we will need to have the time and resources to make these iterations—thankfully, we have that baked into our current schedule. Getting all of your feedback encouraged us to move some of that iteration time forward so that we could get our newest direction in front of you sooner.
Lead Game Designer Joe Shely is going to walk us through all of our major itemization updates today. We’ve reviewed every aspect of itemization from top to bottom and reworked elements that we felt weren’t living up to their potential—from the individual stats that our classes tap into to the visual representation of items in your inventory. Of course, it’s still early and we still have lots more playtesting and iterating to do, but we think this direction puts us down a more solid foundational path and we couldn’t be happier to share it with you today.
You can keep tabs on what we’re up to on social media, and as always, please tell us what you think of this update on our forums and all your favorite places to talk Diablo! We’re probably hanging out there too, and we’ll continue to look out for popular topics to tackle in future blogs.
Speaking of which, our next update will take place during BlizzConline, rather than in blog form. We’ve read speculation about what it could be and want to ensure you that it is something chunky indeed. Without spoiling the surprise, Iet’s just say it involves a new version of the campfire scene we showed you last BlizzCon.
Today we’re going to look at some changes to items in Diablo IV and update you on a few things we’ve shared in our previous development blogs. In deciding what changes to make, we focused on three core ideals:
- First, we want to strengthen class identity by providing intuitive fantasy hooks. Items and skills that lean into the fantasy of your class are best.
- Second, we want to support deeper customization through our itemization. Items should support and enhance your class, not define it.
- Finally, we’re landing on overall depth somewhere between Diablo II and Diablo III. We aim to provide years of things to discover and countless ways to build a class.
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