Blizzard announced that the 2022 quarterly update of Diablo IV is officially available. In this update, the artistic director Chris Ryder, associate art director Brian Fletcher, associate lighting director Ben Hutchingsthe chief artist of outdoor environments Matt McDaid and the lead artist of elements and interactions Chaz Head they share their approach to each of Diablo IV’s distinct areas and how they are built to make the art of play environments immersive.
Diablo IV: the quarterly update is available
The darkest and most brutal chapter of the series, Diablo IV, aims for credibility before realism for its environments. To achieve this, the team established two founding pillars for filtering the drafts, locations and implementation: the “old masters” and the “return to darkness”. Having these references, the environments were created through a thoughtful use of details and color palettes to propose a distinct graphic style. Weather and lights also play an important role in refining the dangerous world of Sanctuary.
For the first time in the series, Diablo IV offers an explorable world with five intriguing zones for you to discover. From the Arid Steppes to the Scosglen coast to the frozen ridges, each area has been handcrafted with care by Diablo’s art and design teams.
Many of the areas are decorated with dynamic elements to give a greater sense of life to the architecture and terrain. The interactive and breakable elements they are present in more and more environments as the team strives to deliver a realistic and variable type of destruction.
Diablo IV also features more than 150 randomly generated expeditions that leverage a combination of handmade and procedural creation. To make shipping effective and versatile, the team has worked to make a variety of composable map pieces and wisely reusable thanks to the application of environment elements, interactive objects and lights. To make the map pieces more natural, transition scenes have been created between two different map pieces of the same expedition.