Diablo 4 Dungeons

This next dungeon is a hidden druid resting site overrun with demons. As you travel through the dungeon, you’ll see that it is covered with many druidic cultural items, such as talismans and charms. We place a lot of these items on a layer that can be turned on or off, depending on what the theme of the dungeon is. In one dungeon it’s a druid burial site, in another, it’s an uninhabited dark cave.

Adding these sorts of details is a great way to add a lot of visual interest as well as visual storytelling. These assets were made by several teams, so this is a great example of many groups coming together to contribute to a final environment.

ew dungeon features such as seamless floor transitions or traversals are exciting, but my favorite new feature is what we call tile-set transition scenes. These are scenes that allow us to connect two different tile-sets together in the same dungeon. Imagine running through a crypt, only to find a hole in the wall that seamlessly leads you deeper into a vast underground cave network. All while keeping the randomized layouts that change with each dungeon run.

In this final video we show two tile-sets joined together by a tile-set transition scene. The first floor of this ruined keep remains dry and fairly intact, but as you journey deeper into the dungeon, you’ll discover that the lower levels have decayed from the endless floodwaters pouring in. This swampy ruin is perfect for the drowned to move in and fortify themselves deep below. You’ll have to fight your way through their defenses and climb across the rope to transition deeper into the flooded ruined tile-set.

Here we can really see our embrace of Diablo 4’s core pillar of a return to darkness’. Our aim is to subtly lead you through the dungeon whilst revealing fantastically grotesque forms. In dungeons like this we focus a lot on silhouetting the player space and giving the scene a sense of scale and depth; this helps navigation and visibility but also shows the vastness of the environment.