For the first time in the series, Diablo 4 is going to allow players to fully customise their characters’ appearance. Blizzard has a new quarterly blog post up with new details about the upcoming action RPG game’s distinctive visual design, and art director John Mueller tells us that this should be the most inclusive title in the series to date.
As in Diablo 3, Diablo 4 lets you play as masculine or feminine characters in any class. This time, however, there are more choices to make. You’ll be able to pick a skin tone and specify racial features for your character, and the various Diablo 4 classes feature a range body types. An image in the latest blog post features the female barbarian: wearing a set of skins and furs, with bracers studded in glinting steel, she’s shown wielding a staff. As she completes a strike, her right arm is positioned forward and down, showing off powerful shoulders and tricep muscles.
“Across the board with all the classes, and all the personas, our goal is to make the most inclusive experience we’ve ever made with a Diablo game,” Mueller says. “At Blizzard, this is a really important pillar of all of our games these days. I’m super happy with the variety that we’ve achieved through the character customisation.”
Mueller told us the team has continued to add more and content to the ‘buckets’ for each character and persona. A personal test for how successful that’s been, he says, is this: when he hits the ‘randomise’ button, does the character creator produce something cool? “The more content we put into that system, the better and better it gets,” he said.
With different options for body types, facial structure, makeup, hairstyles, and hundreds of armour sets, there’s always the possibility of pieces not lining up or looking too ‘procedural,’ Mueller explains. For Blizzard, he tells us, it’s important for everything to look hand-crafted.
“We’ve leaned into a lot of different body types, a lot of different personas,” Mueller says. “However you identify, there’s something there for you.”