I’ll be honest; the whole thing felt anti-climatic for me because this (at least some teaser) was supposed to be last year where the stage was literally set for a major announcement. But after watching the overview panel (Diablo IV Unveiled) where they mention that this is not coming anytime soon; not even Blizzard soon, is a good tipoff why.
They probably did have a game concept last year but nothing like what they previewed today (a reboot per se) since if people will recall, Ecthra Games announced Torchlight Frontiers in August 2018. So when they pre-empted last years BlizzCon just a few weeks prior, I personally felt Blizzard looked at what they had compared to what Max Schaefer’s team was working on, and may have felt they were off the mark in terms of maybe marketing and messaging (but not necessarily the entire design).
However, not “even Blizzard soon” is pretty much a sign that they scrapped the design they had previously been working on (and may have been set to show off last year as they were leading into the final few months towards BlizzCon 2018). As per the press release, it’s a shared open world (this aspect was leaked by one of many insiders who have managed to get details right on several occasions; this particular one was from around February 2019 which is what ended up being previewed today) and from the panel, will have several zones much larger than the largest zones that were in any other Diablo game (thus the addition of mounts).
We finally know who the game director is; Luis Barriga (a lead designer from World of Warcraft). The art director position was known from BlizzCon 2016 when John Mueller was noted for one of the Diablo III panels (he had been hired by Blizzard in January 2016 for the position that was advertised in August 2015. Senior producer Tiffany Wat worked on the Diablo III console team (often times appearing along side former Reaper of Souls game director Josh Mosqueira when he was also a Diablo III console designer and former Diablo III console lead designer, Jonny Ebbert; Ebbert left Blizzard in 2016 for Daybreak and is now Chief Creative Officer at Bungie).
There’s a lot of harkening back and homage paid to all 3 versions of Diablo as well as the original 2008 Diablo III game play trailer (like the character sheet). As they mentioned, this is all still early (and we’ve seen how D3 changed from earlier previews until it was finally released). So it remains to be seen how all of this will actually end up coming together. What will be telling to me is who the senior/lead designers are (that will be known from Saturdays panels. If (Kevin) Martens or (Wyatt) Cheng are senior/leads for D4, I’m not going to have much faith that the game will live up to the billing in the unveil. This version needs completely different people in those roles (else will end up being burdened with the same philosophies that caused a lot of D3 designs and systems to be over iterated into what ended up being a mostly on rails design).
As expected, the cinematic itself was extremely well done. As for the actual (early) game play footage, I still don’t know what to make of it because none of the footage shown managed to grab me. Plus it’s all very early and going to be subject to a lot of change. To put it more simply, I am not sold if this is something that will make me reconsider my stance on playing any Blizzard title again (and this has nothing to do with recent events since I stopped playing (D3 and StarCraft II) back in 2015 when I just became tired of way too many of their designers, having too big a chip on their shoulder when it came to their decisions).
