There's a chance Diablo IV fans hungry to get their hands on the game again after the beta weekends might get their wishes answered by Blizzard after all.
The studio announced a new live stream due later today, with a supposed surprise being revealed there. A few hours ago, the official Twitter account also answered a fan's please for more Diablo IV game time with 'That can be arranged....'.
Speculation among fans bounces between an early release of the game and a new round of beta testing. Needless to say, the latter is far more likely than the former, even though Diablo IV has already reached the gold status. There's precedents for games bringing their release dates forward, but you can count them on a single hand, and it's usually because of a very good reason. For example, Wube Software brought the release date of Factorio forward by a month and a half as a direct response to Cyberpunk 2077's launch date. CD Projekt RED then delayed the game from September to December, but of course, Wube couldn't have known that at the time. Another recent case was Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Originally scheduled to launch in September, it was released in late July by Nintendo.
The launch version of Diablo IV will feature a number of key improvements decided by Blizzard after they have gathered and evaluated all the beta feedback from the community. Examples include a substantial reduction in dungeon backtracking due to tweaked layouts, improvements to the mechanics of dungeon objectives, higher spawn chances for dungeon events, adjusted boss difficulty for melee characters, and a slew of class changes such as buffs for Barbarians and Druids.
In a recent interview, Blizzard developers confirmed to Wccftech that the only MMO elements in Diablo IV are those related to the shared world, such as the ability to seamlessly help each other while roaming the maps and doing events and world bosses. Even in the future, the studio wants to add features that build upon the core hack-and-slash soul of the game, though they did say they are open to expanding the roles mechanics for support characters and the like, providing more tools for users who'd like to specialize their characters in that fashion.
Diablo IV is set to launch on June 6th for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X with full cross-play and cross-progression.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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