Activision Blizzard debuted this year’s Diablo IV development diary. Activision’s statement on this development process update reads:
Diablo IV, the darkest and most robust-based game in the series, seeks to achieve credibility rather than realism in its environment. To achieve this, the team built two basic columns to separate concepts, locations, and implementation. These are “old masters” and “return to darkness.” The environment was created to have a different visual style with controlled use of details and color palettes using these columns. Air and physically based lighting also played a major role in creating the dangerous Sanctuary world and providing a more tangible feel to the atmosphere.
For the first time in the series, Diablo IV comes with a shared open world with 5 fascinating regions to explore. From the Dry Steppe to the Scosglen coast and from there to the glacier ridges, each area was carefully and carefully created by the Diablo Art and Design teams. Many of these regions have dynamic objects that will give the structures and the terrain a sense of vitality. The team forced itself to create a realistic and varied element of destruction, placing interactable and demolishable objects in most environments.
Diablo IV also offers more than 150 randomly generated dungeons that benefit from the combination of manual and procedural creation. To make dungeon creation effective and flexible, the team set out to create a variety of floor sets that could be cleverly re-used with different objects, interaction elements and lighting. New transition scenes have been created to smooth the transition between two different floor sets in the same dungeon to give the flooring sets a more natural feel.
In this update, Arts Director Chris Ryder, Assistant Artistic Director Brian Fletcher, Assistant Lighting Director Ben Hutchings, Chief Outdoor Artist Matt McDaid and Head Objects and Interactions Artist Chaz Head discuss how they approach different regions in Diablo IV and bring them together to create the environmental art that draws the player in.
Full details can be found here.