Gamers just love action role-playing games, or ARPGs as we call them. Thrilling gameplay, complex storylines, and challenging systems have won over the hearts of millions of players from around the globe. To live up to the high standards set by their audience, game dev companies are using modern tech solutions to bring their gaming products to a whole new level. The newly launched fourth game in Blizzard Entertainment’s legendary Diablo franchise serves as a perfect illustration of this.
You will hardly get bored when playing this game. In Diablo IV, players can engage in a variety of activities — from exploring Sanctuary to completing different dungeons. Like most other popular ARPGs, the game requires gold to craft Elixirs, improve gems, reroll stats on legendary items, etc. For those who don’t want to waste hours on boring gold farming, there is a cool alternative — they can buy Diablo 4 gold at the best prices on the market. If you want to explore the game content to the fullest, then you are always welcome to do that.
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Technological Solutions Behind Diablo IV
Since it came out, Diablo IV has been a huge commercial and critical hit. The game quickly became Blizzard Entertainment’s best-selling game ever. In just five days, Diablo IV made more than $666 million, which was more than all the money that all the horror movies released in 2023 made together. Many professional reviewers gave the game scores of 9/10 or higher, which once again proves Diablo IV was a success. Both critics and players have praised how exciting it is to play, how dark the story is, and how far the accessibility features have come. All these are good to know. But let’s dig a bit deeper and shed some light on the new technologies that were added to Diablo IV and have helped it become such a huge hit with gamers.
#1 — Physically Based Rendering
Physically based rendering, or PBR, has completely changed the way images are produced in the game industry. Lead graphics engineer John Buckley explained how the team was able to create a darker, more realistic look for Diablo by using PBR. Thanks to this physics-based technology, objects in the game may interact with light in a manner that closely resembles real-world phenomena. For example, in some sections of the game, the idea of a “negative light source” was added to create a feeling of menacing atmosphere and black magic.
PBR was made possible in large part by the art team, who created new data for the graphics engine to handle physically based materials. The engine uses this data to visualize how light should reflect off surfaces, what colors light should emanate from different materials, how smooth or rough texture details should be, how metallic surfaces should be, and many other things.
#2 — Crafting Shadows: The Science Behind Diablo IV’s Dark Art Direction
Developers realized early on that the graphic style needed to communicate a darker tone for Diablo IV. The intricacy of this situation arises from the requirement to calculate shadows for every individual light source. Developers opted to use a graphics technology called a deferred renderer for that purpose. The solution distributes complicated material calculations among several light sources. As a result, they created a whole new set of potent artistic tools for Diablo IV just for this purpose. There is a lot of physics in these tools, including concepts like candelas, lumens, and irradiance.
To create a realistic and gritty environment with a gloomy tone, engineers had to simulate the dust and particles that exist between objects and lighting. This process, known as volumetric rendering, is essential to capturing the essence of Diablo IV’s artwork. Previously, graphic developers imitated similar effects with particle systems. Images were put on top of rectangular forms and then stacked in front of the camera. The outcome was crude but conveyed the impression of smoke and dust.
The air in Diablo IV is designed to have illuminated particles in it. Light travels through the non-empty space between the particles, sometimes scattering and other times absorbing, as it makes its way to a virtual camera in the game world. Light even comes from the stained-glass windows and enters the room.
#3 — HDR’s Role in Diablo IV’s Visuals
High-dynamic range displays are another recent advancement in technology that is facilitating the transition back to darkness, according to Kevin Todisco, a lead graphics engineer. As more and more displays supporting HDR hit the market, the technology has become somewhat of a hot issue. For instance, older screens could only provide a limited range of brightness. The low end was, strictly speaking, around 0.1 nits; one nit equals the brightness of a candle in a square meter. Nits are units of brightness on a flat surface. These earlier screens had a maximum brightness of 80 nits, which is not very bright.
That range has now been further increased to a maximum of 10,000 nits by the HDR display standard. What is more, true black can now be achieved on any given area of a screen thanks to OLED technology. Thanks to these developments, a game engine’s internal HDR rendering may now be delivered straight to the screen. This reduces the need for the range compression required by the SDR standard. As a result, game developers can produce not just brighter brights but, more crucially for Diablo IV, the deepest of darks as well.
However, there was a problem during the Open Beta when the game’s black levels seemed to be “lifted” above the dark values that HDR displays — OLEDs in particular — can achieve. The development team concluded that this was caused by a log() method in their color lookup tables, which was intended to aid with sample distribution. This problem was resolved in time for the Server Slam event. The inclusion of a new tone-mapping curve designed exclusively for HDR was another significant modification made by the graphics team between Open Beta and Server Slam. The creative team was able to achieve the desired HDR contrast and color saturation by implementing this new, state-of-the-art technology.
Modern Tech Solutions Make Our Favorite Games Better
Diablo IV once again proves how modern technologies are transforming ARPGs. By integrating advancements like physically based rendering, sophisticated shadow crafting, and high-dynamic range displays, Blizzard Entertainment has elevated both visual fidelity and immersive gameplay. As ARPGs continue to develop, tech innovations set a new benchmark, illustrating the genre’s exciting future.
