At BlizzCon this weekend Blizard announced that Diablo IV will be released for the Xbox One and PS4. This, of course, assumed they did not have an idea when the next-gen systems from Sony and Microsoft would release.
According to AMD’s CEO Lisa Su speaking to wccftech, AMD is expecting their console business to boom in the second half of 2020 ahead of a holiday season release of Microsoft’s ‘Project Scarlett’ Xbox and the PS5 which will include AMD’s Zen 2/RDNA CPU/GPU architectures.
Su stated:
The console business is a great business for us. We’re very happy to be in the next-generation Sony and Microsoft consoles for 2020. We’re going through a product transition at the moment. Most of the energies have turned to the new consoles. But our expectation is that as this generation ramps down, we’ll have a strong ramp to the next generation, particularly as we go into the second half of 2020.
The question is, are Blizzard further ahead with Diablo IV development than they are letting on or were they simply not prepared to announce Diablo IV for the next-gen systems? We are assuming that the PS4 and Xbox One announcement was because there was no concrete dates for next-gen, but assuming the new consoles arrive in 2020, will Blizzard shift from PS4 and Xbox One to next-gen to make use of the improved hardware or will the game be released on the older consoles too?
We do know that the demo machines at BlizzCon for the PC version of Diablo IV were as follows:
BlizzCon 2019 Diablo IV Demo PC Specs
Corsair Case (iCUE 465X RGB)
Intel CPU (i9-9900k)
MSI Motherboard (MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon)
NVIDIA GPU (RTX 2080)
Samsung SSD (970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 2TB)
HyperX Memory (Predator RGB DDR4 3000MHz 2x16GB)
Corsair Power Supply (RM750x)
Corsair Keyboard (STRAFE RGB MK.2)
Corsair Mouse (M65 RGB ELITE)
Corsair Headset (VOID PRO RGB)
Corsair Mousepad (MM300)
MSI Monitor (Optix MAG271CQR)
These are some pretty beefy specs but there will be a lot of optimisation on the game prior to release as this was just a demo version at BlizzCon 2019. The console version of Diablo IV will have to come close to the PC version so perhaps Blizzard will ditch plans for the PS4 and Xbox One or make some sacrifices. We’ll have to wait and see.
Thanks In the Name of Zod.