Diablo 4 launched summer 2023 across PC and console, including the last generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. That means it was built to run well on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, hardware now over a decade old.
Although Blizzard has yet to release new features for Diablo 4 that leave the last generation of consoles, and indeed the current minimum specifications on PC, behind, Diablo boss Rod Fergusson told IGN in a recent interview that the time may well come for such a tough decision to be made. Right now, though, with the upcoming launch of Season 4 and, later this year, the game’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, Blizzard is maintaining parity.
“There’s always a time and a place for when maybe it’s time to no longer support a platform,” Fergusson said. “I don’t think we’re at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, ‘hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it’s not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it’s not something we can do today.’ But we keep pushing the boundaries on that.”
Fergusson and Diablo art director John Mueller spoke to IGN about various features coming to Diablo 4 with Season 4 next month, including a significant increase in monster density to make the action role-playing game feel more action-packed. This density increase comes with associated performance demands, however, although Blizzard was able to make it work across all platforms while maintaining a solid frame-rate.
Meanwhile, Blizzard just added ray tracing graphics technology to Diablo 4 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X. It is not available on Xbox Series S, Xbox One, or PS4. On console, in order not to compromise overall performance, this feature is locked at 30 frames per second.
“We’re pretty good at finding fallbacks,” Mueller explained. “That’s how we think of it. We’ll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there’s something really awesome we want to do. I don’t think we’ve been gated by it. We’ve generally leaned into it, and it’s been a creative challenge to figure out, okay, how do we accomplish that on gen eight? So the two things will look slightly different depending on the platform. We just got ray-tracing in, that was a huge feature we added. It scales up and down depending on whatever you’re playing it on.”
By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion launched later in 2024, the Xbox One and PS4 will be 11 years old. Plenty of developers have left these consoles behind to focus on the more powerful current generation, or Gen 9 as it’s called, but Blizzard isn’t ready to let go just yet.
“We’re looking at that,” Fergusson said. “It’s part of the conversation, always. Like, we have this idea for a new feature, can we do it based on what we’re supporting today? Yes or no? And generally, as John was saying, we can. We find ways to do it.”
For more on Diablo 4 Season 4, datamining and secrets, and the Game Pass launch, check out IGN’s interview in full.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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