Diablo 4 updates and Necromancer revealed

Some surprise Diablo 4 action this evening when the game appeared during Microsoft’s showcase event. This is quite a Diablo 4 update out of the blue.

The big news is the next class which unsurprisingly is the Necromancer, the fan favourite.

Diablo 4 Necromancer Art

As well as this new cinematic trailer for the necromancer, a developer gameplay showcase was also released.

Some other bits and pieces worth noting from released info today includes:

Diablo 4 update Notes

• Book of the Dead, which allows you to customize and have a lot of choice in how your minions are deployed on the battlefield, which minions you have, and how they behave. And even if you want to have minions at all.
• Necromancer has the Book of the Dead where you decide, “Oh, I can have skeleton warriors. What skeleton warriors do I want? Do I want aggressive? Defensive? Do I want ones that create corpses for me to use, as raw materials?” and then, “Oh, you can have mages. Okay, what mages do I want to use? And oh, I can have golem, what golem do I want to use?” And so you can mix and match your warriors, your mages and your gollum to really create and customize the army that you have with you. And you never really had that experience before. And that’s what really is one of the things that makes the Necro really unique and interesting.
• Unlike Diablo3, skill selection defines you, and then you take those choices into the game.
• Upgrade dungeons with sigils to make them Nightmare Dungeons Additional affixes are applied to monsters in the dungeon.
• Sigils will have different affixes on them.
• Nightmare dungeons are Diablo 4’s Rifts.
• Fields of Hatred are corrupted areas of the world making them PvP zones. You can be attacked in these zones but you can acquire Shard of Hatred. If you’re attacked and killed items related to PvP can be stolen by the attacker.
• Should you become a prolific PvPer, you get marked and there’s a bounty on your head encouraging others to come and get you.
• Campaign is 35 hours.
• New content will be added continuously as it’s a “live service”. What that content could look like is still being worked on.

You can read more on this in an interview with Gamespot. Much of it we already know but there are some interesting nuggets of info in there.

So when are we expecting the game to appear? Well, what we do know now is that it is planned for release in the next 12 months as shown in the image Microsoft. It’s listed as the first tile in the 2023 section before Starfield which we know is coming out in the first half of next year.

Could we see a beta test over the holiday season and then a release around March? It’s possible because there is now a pre-register beta sign-up page for Diablo 4.

This Diablo 4 update certainly paves the way to a better understanding of how the game will function. Beta testing will be an interesting experience that’s for sure.

Also, note that the next Diablo 4 developer update will be appearing tomorrow so stay tuned for that!