“Welcome to Hell. Diablo IV is now available.” With last evening’s announcement, a new era for the long-running Diablo franchise began. The online ARPG rolled out to all regions and all editions of the game, ushering out the 11-year reign of Diablo III and welcoming in a bleaker, grittier, and somewhat more MMOier experience.
With the greatly expanded population over last week’s head start, Diablo IV’s servers started to buckle under the strain. Outages and unceremonious booting were reported by several players, while others happily reported the absence of any queues when the game was up and running. (Our own writer saw queues, rubberbanding, and map issues, even into the middle of the night; Blizzard’s own customer service Twitter confirmed the problems overnight but said they were resolved as of this morning.)
For those curious about the future, there’s some good news to be had: Blizzard’s already confirmed that it is working on not one, but two expansions for Diablo IV. “As I sit here we’re about to launch the main game, we’re finishing up season one, we’re working on season two, we’re working on expansion one, we’re kicking off expansion two,” said Diablo General Manager Rod Fergusson.
The first quarterly Diablo IV season is scheduled to go live in July.
If you were hoping to become the world’s first level 100 hardcore player, well, that mantle has already been claimed. And controversy is still swirling about the somewhat outrageous prices in the cash shop, such as horse armor that puts Oblivion’s infamous microtransaction to shame.
The Diablo art team spent some time discussing the grimdark tones of this entry in a new blog post, saying, “Because Diablo IV has a darker tone, we asked ourselves ‘what can we do as a graphics team to specifically support that idea?’ To answer, we selected a small number of solid features, prioritizing a highly polished result over a wider range of options.”
“Diablo® IV, the highly anticipated new installment of the iconic Diablo series, is now live. Already, it is Blizzard Entertainment’s fastest-selling game of all time, with Blizzard’s highest pre-launch unit sales ever on both console and PC*. In the four days since early access started on June 1, Diablo IV has been played for 93 million hours, or over 10,000 years — the equivalent playing 24 hours a day since the beginning of human civilization.” […] *Fastest selling based on more units sold on all platforms before launch (through June 5, 2023). Sell-through figures based on reporting received from digital partners and Blizzard internal reports.”
