Diablo remains a power fantasy at heart, letting you build your own personal murder machine of a barbarian, rogue, or sorcerer (the three classes available to test) and help them grow into their own unique kind of combatant. Those areas are full of countless beasts and ghouls for your character to carve a path through, of course. The surrounding areas feel cold, dark, and desolate, and the dungeons feel suitably grim. After helping some seemingly needy village folk, you’re shanghaied and dragged away to be disembowelled. In the opening moments, your character’s horse dies. Image: Blizzard Entertainmentįriendly faces are few and far between in Diablo 4’s new Slavic-inspired setting of Sanctuary. If you also consider the realistic art direction of the series, and Diablo 4’s clear intentions to return to the gruesome, dark roots of the franchise, then you might forgive me for feeling a little bit nauseous before I even stepped foot in the game’s world.īlizzard has long been promoting Diablo 4 as a return to the gothic atmosphere of the original Diablo game – a dungeon crawler that was dark (thematically and literally) and oppressive, where you feared for what might find as you ventured toward the pitch-black edges of the screen, and the characters you encountered had lost all hope.Īfter playing a preview build of Diablo 4 on both PC and PlayStation 5, which contained the game’s still-in-development opening areas, I can assure you that it seems like the team behind the game is certainly on the right track. If you’re familiar with the quality of Blizzard’s cinematics team, you’ll have a good idea of how vivid this scene is. As she makes her grand entrance, she’s adorned with a majestic cape made of some thin membrane of flesh. The opening cinematic of Diablo 4 sees Lilith - the game’s focal antagonist and the ‘Daughter of Hatred’ - summoned in a grisly ritual that sees the blood of three hapless individuals ripped out of the torsos.

Diablo 4 lilith in game