Announced on BlizzCon in 2019, Diablo 4 has since showcased its design choices, art direction, and game mechanics in a steady stream of developer blogs dubbed as quarterly updates, released in roughly-even intervals of 3 months. The quarterly updates represented an openness from Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo 4 team to engage with its playerbase concerning the ongoing development of the next Diablo game, and the development team's efforts have been positively met by the community thus far.
In contrast to its predecessor in the franchise, often critiqued for its art direction becoming too vibrant and benign compared to the iconic look of Diablo 2, Blizzard Entertainment made a conscious decision very early on to return Diablo to its artistic roots, offering the graphical fidelity of modern games, but still keeping that gloomy, dark atmosphere of the early Diablo titles. The developers explained the art direction of Diablo 4 as being one inspired by Renaissance and Romantic landscape paintings.
Players will get a detailed look into how this aesthetic translates into Diablo 4's depiction of Sanctuary next week, as the upcoming quarterly update was teased by Community Lead Adam Fletcher on Twitter, bringing Diablo 4's developer blogs back to its regular schedule following a short delay. The focus will be on environment art, and given how much emphasis the developers of the game have teased Diablo 4's open world, there will no doubt be a lot of locations to showcase.
Diablo 4 will feature five distinct regions of Sanctuary at launch, covering the lands of Scosglen, Dry Steppes, Fractured Peaks, Kehjistan, and Hawezar – offering locations both familiar and foreign to longtime Diablo players. With Kehjistan returning to Diablo 4 after being featured in Diablo 3's second Act, the game will also revisit its sprawling capital city of Caldeum – now fallen into ruin in the aftermath of Malthael's reaping.
Players will be able to explore these five regions with five iconic Diablo classes, of which only one has yet to be revealed. This unknown hero will join the Barbarian, Sorceress, Druid, and Rogue in combating the monsters of Sanctuary and beyond. While there have been no hints as to what this fifth class will end up being, fans expect that it will likely be an entirely new take on one of many archetypes that the Diablo games have tried to cover, whether it's a Knight archetype or a Bard, or even a different take on the Amazon class from Diablo 2.
Diablo 4 is in development for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
