The moment Diablo Immortal fans have been waiting for is just around the corner, as they’ll soon be facing off with the Lord of Terror himself in the upcoming Shattered Sanctuary expansion. While Diablo Immortal‘s largest expansion to date includes a bevy of new features, a massive new zone, and new forms of content, the highlight is undoubtedly its final confrontation with Diablo. As the series’ namesake and traditional final boss, the Diablo Immortal team needed to nail the execution of its encounter design and art style.
In a group interview, Game Rant spoke with Diablo Immortal lead content designer Scott Burgess and art lead Emil Salim about the team’s handling of this epic encounter. On the gameplay side, Burgess spoke about how the team looked to past Diablo encounters for inspiration while dialing up the intensity as much as possible. On the art side, Salim weighed in on how the team sought to preserve the essence of the iconic character, while Diablo’s possession of the reality-bending Worldstone opened the door for some creative differences.
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Diablo Is Bigger and Badder Than Ever In Diablo Immortal
Players who tackled Diablo in Diablo 2 will likely notice a few familiar mechanics in Diablo Immortal‘s rendition, as Burgess cites this series entry as the team’s main inspiration. That said, Diablo in Diablo Immortal is a complex, multi-phase fight, and it’s mostly in the final phase where those similarities come into play. Once the platform is destroyed and players are standing toe-to-claw with Diablo, among other mechanics, they’ll find themselves dodging his lightning hose just like old times. As Burgess said,
We were probably inspired by the Diablo 2 encounter the most. There are a few old attacks, like the lightning hose and the hellfire that you’ll see, but then we’re also saying, “Hey, this is also the worst Diablo, because he has a Worldstone Shard, which makes him basically uber-powerful.” He can bend reality in front of you. The goal here was, “Let’s make this the most badass, frightening Diablo that we’ve seen yet.”
Diablo in Diablo Immortal dwarfs his earlier appearances, dominating a large portion of the screen and unleashing huge area attacks that demand quick reflexes. Burgess pointed out that since Diablo Immortal is receiving ray tracing capabilities on mobile and PC, it’ll also be one of the most visually spectacular fights Diablo Immortal players have experienced thus far.
And the awesome thing is our game is going to be getting ray tracing, which makes the effects even louder and more awesome. He is definitely the biggest Diablo, I think, that we’ve faced. He’s huge and frightening, so we took the elements that players love and cranked it up to 11. We just pumped it with a lot of steroids. The result is that you’re like, “Oh, this could backfire,” but when we all played it, it was just an awesome fight that is exciting.
Diablo Immortal Stays True To The Series With Diablo’s Design
With a character as iconic as Diablo, Salim notes that it wouldn’t make much sense to give the Lord of Terror a complete makeover. Diablo Immortal‘s rendition still features his immediately recognizable profile but with some tasteful additions befitting his newfound Worldstone powers. In terms of his design, this Diablo carries some DNA from all his past appearances which are then enhanced by the Worldstone. As Salim explained,
It’s a similar approach to how we visualize Diablo. Obviously, we don’t want to completely redesign Diablo. He’s such an iconic part of the game, there is no need for that. So we still want to deliver to players Diablo with his original look. We did look back into all the different versions of Diablo that have appeared in the previous games, and we took little bits from here and there to combine them together. In addition to all of that, we also added some little tweaks here and there that hopefully will make the overall experience for Diablo a little bit more fresh to this new set of players in Diablo Immortal. I can’t reveal too much yet on that one, you’ll have to play the game to see.
Salim says that the reality-altering power of the world stone helped shape Diablo’s Diablo Immortal appearance in addition to the World’s Crown region and the content leading up to the encounter. Whether exploring the eerie wasteland of World’s Crown or dodging some of Diablo’s more unique mechanics, the goal was to instill a sense of surrealism in players with dreamlike (or nightmare-like) visual themes. As Salim said,
The other thing too that Scott brought up was the fact that Diablo now holds the Worldstone, and he can bend reality. That definitely influenced our approach on the visuals of the environment as well, not just in the final arena where you battle Diablo, but also even before that, all the lead-up of the zones that leads up to the final battle. We really took a lot of inspiration from the surrealist movement in art to convey that sense where you don’t really know anymore if this is in a dream or if this is in reality.
As a result, the Shattered Sanctuary expansion and its pivotal boss fight stand out as some of the most unique and visually striking content Diablo Immortal has delivered so far–and that’s not exactly an easy task when looking back at content like Unending Storm that heralded the Tempest class earlier this year.
Diablo Immortal‘s 3.2 update launches on December 12 for Europe, Asia, and Oceania and on December 13 for the Americas.
