Diablo 4 - June Update

Storytelling

A couple of things have evolved with how we deliver story in Diablo IV. First, we have conversations. In D3 we relied on UI panes with a character's name and portrait. We're experimenting with a mix of tool-generated and manually choreographed cameras to tackle conversations. For simple interactions with NPCs we bring the camera in closer to the characters (while still maintaining an overall isometric feel) and use a library of animations to deliver the general gist of the conversations. For more complex conversations, we take a similar camera approach but here the character's movements and animations are more deliberately hand-crafted. This lets us deliver story moments that are complex while keeping you in the world as much as possible. Here's a shot from one such interaction.

A more zoomed in overhead camera helps us deliver simple story beats.​

The second storytelling method we are developing is real-time cutscenes (or RTCs). Here we grab your camera and treat the storytelling more like a movie, so we're reserving this technique for the most important story moments. Having these be real-time has great advantages--we can show your character with their currently equipped armor as part of the scene, for example. But we can also display them at your current resolution and with your currently enabled graphics settings, so they end up feeling more seamless and like a part of the game.

We showed you some early work on real time in-game cinematics during the BlizzCon demo. Our cinematics and engine teams have made a lot of improvements since then, so we were excited to see a fully produced cinematic serve as the climax to the Dry Steppes experience, and the team was not disappointed. Here's a couple screengrabs that the story and cinematics folks have given us the go ahead to share with you as it shouldn't spoil the details of what's to come.

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They Live said:

from some gameplay i watched months ago i noticed gear had oversimplified stats "defense" ,"attack" without any specific resistance or more detailed stat like crit chance, crit damage or some other form of dmg mitigation on gear (idk dodge, armor absorption, etc…). Long story made short i'm afraid loot progression will be linear and as a consequence - in terms of freedom of building - something will be "just better".
Got a bad feeling.

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fadedc said:

That was true about early gear in every version of diablo though. Armor would just have defence and weapons would just have damage and attack speed. It wasn't until you played for a bit and started finding magic items that you began to find the more complex stats.

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Metro said:

Not its not

Armor in D2 is like evasion in PoE, D2 itemization have much more depth in general, you can have blue item drop that going to carry you up to end game
Meanwhile D3 have absolutely zero depth and garbage itemization, blue items are compliantly useless and you change them immediately after yellow drop, and yes so far D4 looks like D3 all over again

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fadedc said:

I’m not talking about blue items. I’m talking about the basic non magic armor You find in Diablo, which has always only had 1 stat….defense. The fact that similar armor exists in d4 is hardly surprising and doesn’t tell us much.

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They Live said:

in d2 there were 7 kind of resistances. It could have sockets, +x to lelvels or + to a single skill, + stats, etc…

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fadedc said:

Basic non-magical items did not have any of that in any version of Diablo.

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