The Diablo 4 June quarterly update dives into character design and art direction

What you need to know

• The latest quarterly update for Diablo 4 focuses on the designs on characters and foes.
• Blizzard Entertainment is using physically-based rendering to create assets that hold up at close-up angles.
• Blizzard also touched on character customization options.

Blizzard Entertainment shared the latest quarterly update for its upcoming action-RPG, Diablo 4, on Wednesday. In this update, the team at Blizzard talked about using a physically-based rendering pipeline, ensuring that the different materials such as metal, leather and flesh all react to light properly. Notably, the asset quality is high enough that different cutscenes, such as the reveal trailer for the Rogue, were all created in-engine.

There are also some new looks at character designs, such as for the big bad Lilith, as well as the player Sorceress character.

Source: Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard is also providing customization options for player characters, such as your character's face, hairstyle, facial hair, jewelry, makeup, and body markings such as tattoos or body paint. You can see some examples below.

Finally, there are some new animations, providing examples of what different monsters look like in motion. You can check out one of these videos below, featuring a disgusting foe called the Blood Bishop.

Diablo 4 isn't set to be available this year, thought the upcoming Diablo 2: Resurrected remaster is currently scheduled to be released on September 23, 2021.

Whenever Diablo 4 does arrive, it'll be available on Xbox One, PC and PS4. Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and PS5 versions have not technically been confirmed yet but are all but guaranteed to be coming as well. For more on this ambitious upcoming title, you can take a look at our BlizzConline 2021 interview, where Blizzard talked about PvP, cross-play and more.