Character customization in Diablo 4 does just enough

Diablo 4Character creation and customization is better than any Diablo title to date. Players can design their own class by adding beautiful details. A variety of hair styles, skin tones, colors, jewelry, and markings will let players create their own personal Barbarian, Necromancer, or Rogue — but only to a point.

Art direction Diablo 4The concept of character creation, which draws heavily from Old Masters and medieval art, is similar. You can choose from a variety of green hairstyles or brightly colored body paint. However, you will need to create custom characters. Diablo 4 look grounded and realistic — not like they’ve spawned from an episode of Monster Factory, or out of a Saints Row cutscene.

You can choose from dozens of different hair and skin colors. In the preview build that we tested this weekend, there were four female and four male faces for each class. (The game does not appear to actually use male/female descriptors for its characters, for what it’s worth.) This build featured 10 different hairstyles for men, which included pixie cut, loose ponytails and tied-up dreadlocks. Beyond that, there’s a lot of jewelry. Many things.

Thematically, makeup and body paint can be used to express your gender identity. Go dark with your Barbarian dude if you need it. This looks great. If you want some smeary corpse paint for your Necro, that’s there too.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

What players won’t find is a wide variety of body types, at least for each particular class. Barbarians look great and are well built for the role they play. Diablo 4’s five classes. The Sorcerer/Sorceress class looks strong enough to lift some books and wands, but they’re nowhere near as lean and athletic-looking as the Rogue.

Body type, it turns out, is intentionally tied to class roles as part of the game’s fantasy, said Rod Fergusson, executive producer and head of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard Entertainment.

“Body type is something we consider to be part of the class fantasy,” Fergusson said in a roundtable interview, noting that the developer created a “‘dad bod’ Druid and an emaciated Necromancer” on purpose. “Those are parts of what make the class the class, in some respects, so having a dad bod Necro or an emaciated Druid didn’t really play into the class fantasy.

“We wanted to provide as much variety as possible in terms of there [being]Although there are many ethnicities, hair markings, eyes, and hair colors, certain characteristics make a class unique. Diablo 4 it was body type.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

These are tied to body type and class archetypes. Diablo 4’s armor and gear design, and all of the other cosmetics that play into a class, Fergusson said. Also, it would be difficult to create armor that fits the body of a barbararian. “The high-level goal was to give the most high-level choice you had in a Diablo game,” Fergusson said. “We wanted it to be much more about your personalization [and]You can customize, but you are your barbarian [still] being a barbarian — it’s going to be muscular, not a waif.”

Diablo 4It enhances character customization by showing its group of adventurers in random appearances when the player loads the game. There’s no indication from the game itself that the Barbarian is supposed to be a white-haired dude from Mount Arreat, or that any other class need be locked into gender or ethnicity roles by default.

And so on Diablo 4’s character creation options aren’t as deep as other modern role-playing games, these options can still produce great-looking, personalized characters while maintaining the dark, medieval look Blizzard is aiming for.

Diablo 4This is expected to be released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in 2023, as well as Xbox One and Xbox Series X.