After the groan-inducing Diablo Immortal announcement at BlizzCon last year, Blizzard needs a win. A Diablo 4 announcement would do the trick, but even that’s probably going to be overshadowed thanks to the company’s botched handling surrounding the Hong Kong protests.
Recently, an advertisement for ‘The Art of Diablo’ claimed the book, which comes out after BlizzCon on November 3, has “more than 500 artworks from Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Diablo 3, and Diablo 4.”
An Amazon listing for the book teases it as “featuring never before seen content.” This could be concept art from previous games or a hint at art from a yet unreleased Diablo game.
Diablo 4’s development and pending announcement have been known about for nearly a year thanks to Kotaku.
Last year, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier reported Diablo IV has been in the works for a while now with its current iteration in development since 2016. Jason’s article is a fantastic glimpse at the behind-the-scenes work going on with the Diablo franchise. Here’s a snippet from one of his sources:
“[Design director] Luis [Barriga] has a very strong vision for that game,” said a former employee, “one that a lot of people are excited about at Blizzard.”
“They want to make [Diablo IV] gross, make it dark, [get rid of] anything that was considered cartoony in Diablo III.”
With BlizzCon fast approaching, remarks like the one above are just what Diablo diehards want to hear.
I enjoyed Diablo 3 after its rough launch, but returning to a darker take on the Diablo franchise sounds great to me. Path of Exile shows how well the darker tone works these days, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Diablo 4 give us more options as far as class builds go. Maybe not to the extremes of Path of Exile’s skill tree, but more than what was offered in Diablo 3.
BlizzCon kicks off on November 1, and all signs are pointing to a Diablo 4 reveal.