Blizzard has revealed the next chapter in its live-service ARPG, Diablo 4, and it revolves around a really handy mechanical spider.
Dubbed the Season of the Construct, the upcoming update will send players into the perilous and trap-riddled vaults of the legendary Zoltun Kulle in search of treasure, battling demonically possessed mechanical constructs in the process.
The main power grind will center on your new robotic companion, a spider-like friend called the Seneschal who comes with its own management UI and can be customized with magical stones of different rarities and power levels to alter its behaviors and abilities to your liking. With nearly 40 different stones to collect, there will be a wide variety of options for how your multi-legged buddy can complement your playstyle.
“You can make a build on the utility side that’s there to suppot and healing you. You can also build out one that does a little more defense and get a combination of stones that intercept any incoming projectiles and further modify that to pull all enemies in for a big hit,” lead designer on Diablo 4 season 3 Dan Tanguay told IGN. “We’ve tried to bake in a lot of possibilities there for players to discover.”
Season 3 also brings some hotly anticipated quality of life changes, the most noticable of which is WASD key control support for more direct control over your heroes on PC — seemingly a necessity in a season that will feature so many deadly traps that you would really be best off avoiding.
There will also be a plethora of competitive leaderboards driven by ladder-based trials called The Gauntlet, where players compete for a high score, the mightest of which will be greanted “a permanent home in the Hall of the Ancients,” and medals to show off on their profiles.
Other notable additions include an extra stash tab to store your ever-increasing pile of loot, and a reworking of Helltide events so that you don’t have to wait for short windows to engage in one of the Diablo 4 endgame’s most profitable events.
Diablo 4: Season of the Construct will launch on January 23rd.
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.
