Activision Blizzard has kept relatively quiet about its upcoming release Diablo 4, but fans of the series did a bit of online sleuthing and uncovered evidence that the game could be close to completion – or perhaps even finished already. The last time news of the game, first announced in late 2019, came out was the most recent quarterly update which Blizzard posted on its news page on June 30. The update consisted mainly of some impressive character models and animations, and featured notes from John Mueller and Nick Chilano, Diablo 4’s art director and associate art director respectively, as well as Arnaud Kotelnikoff, the game’s lead character artist.
In the weeks following this update, Activision Blizzard has gotten caught up in a high profile lawsuit from the state of California alleging heinous sexual harassment and gender discrimination, which has interrupted the development of some of the company’s projects, including World of Warcraft. This news has caused updates on its upcoming games' progress to fall by the wayside, but in the last few days a site that follows the company’s progress quietly posted an update -- which was then noticed by an observant Redditor.
RandomMan00, a Reddit user posting to the r/Diablo subreddit noting an update on the company’s content delivery network through BlizzTrack.com, a site that keeps track of whenever Blizzard adds new patches of makes changes to its games’ source code. BlizzTrack indicated that the current version of the game up until a few days ago was 0.0.1, which was followed by version 0.2.0. According to a comment on the post, Blizzard typically goes by a pattern of changing the second digit of the version number when a major patch featuring news game mechanics and content has been added. The original poster optimistically predicts that the game is playable from start to finish but with much of the content still missing.
Jesse McCree, one of the game’s lead designers, was recently in the news regarding the lawsuit as opposed to Diablo 4’s development. Fans of Overwatch have been calling for McCree’s namesake hero to be renamed after he posed for a photo with Alex Afrasiabi, named in the lawsuit for harassment, in the former World of Warcraft developer’s infamous “Cosby Suite.”
There has been no news about whether the game’s development has been interrupted by the lawsuit or about whether it has had any effect on McCree’s involvement. Either way, the game being fully or even mostly complete is unlikely given the tentative release window. A release in 2021 has been ruled out altogether – and that was before the lawsuit.
Diablo 4 is set to release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.