Diablo 4 is deep in development at Blizzard and today, we got a new look at the game thanks to their quarterly update. There’s a lot to cover so we’ll break down the highlights below but you can also find the full post from Game Director Luis Barriga here.
New Skill System
Lead System Designer, David Kim, provided some details on the new skill system including allocations and passive assignments.
As Luis mentioned, we have made some major changes to Diablo IV’s Skills and Talent systems. We’ve been reading through a lot of the comments from the community and agree that the Talent system needs more depth. Similarly, Skill system progression felt too simple, which created issues where a player would have no meaningful reason to spend their skill points. With this valuable feedback in mind, we’ve have been iterating on a new Skill System. As you can see from the screenshot below, we have separate sections for Skills and Passives in our freshly painted Skill Tree.
The upper Skills section is where you will spend the Skill Points that you earn by leveling up. Here, you unlock brand new skills, unlock additional functionality for these skills, and unlock Passive Points that you can then spend on the lower Passive section of the tree.
Sorceress Enchantment System
Many of you might remember the Barbarian’s unique Arsenal system—their ability to carry and smoothly swap between multiple deadly weapons—which greatly increased their power. We’ve also been exploring unique class mechanics for our other classes. The main goal for us here is to have very unique class-specific mechanics in Diablo IV. We have this goal because Diablo is the kind of game where many players try out different builds or classes, especially during seasonal play. We believe that unique class mechanics with very different strengths and playstyles compared to other classes will make exploring the different classes—and playing the game—much more fun. For the Sorceress, we’ve been trying out the Enchantment System. This is how it works:
Sorceress skills can be placed into two locations: an active skill slot (that every other class also has access to), and an Enchantment slot. If you place a skill in the Enchantment slot, you can no longer use it as an active skill, but your character instead gains a secondary bonus power.
End Game Progression
Kim also shared the following comments on the end game progression system in the title
Lastly, we have been hard at work on our end game character progression system. This important feature is going to take a little more time (it won’t be in the next blog), but we wanted to mention it here because it will be the other significant source of power that comes from your class. This system is intended to provide more depth and replayability than what Paragon currently offers in Diablo III. We, and many Blizzard gamers, have talked about the concept of “easy to learn, difficult to master.” We believe that the end game progression system is where the difficult to master component will come in, and should meet the expectations of the most hardcore Diablo players out there.
Our Take
Diablo 4 is easily one of our most anticipated titles across the entire industry. Diablo is a legendary franchise and Diablo 3 has grown into one of the greatest ARPGs ever developed in our opinion. We cannot wait to see more.
