

This sparked debate across the board, with many believing the decision would leave a sour taste in the mouths of Diablo 4's more casual players.ĭiablo 4 Season of the Malignant announcement trailer.īut while controversial, this move is similar to how seasonal content worked in Diablo 2's ladders and Diablo 3's seasons. You can also play offline if you prefer - and whenever your Switch has an online connection, it'll upload your characters as a cloud save, so you can use them if you pop over to a friend's house for some demon-slaying on their Switch.Blizzard has suggested Diablo 3's Rebirth feature could come to Diablo 4.Įarlier this year, Blizzard confirmed that Diablo 4 required players to create new characters each season. You and three other Switch-owning friends can team up via local, Bluetooth-enabled multiplayer, crowd around a single Switch with four controllers connected, or band together via the internet if you're subscribed to the upcoming Nintendo Switch Online service. In screenshots, the 720p undocked / 960p docked resolution looks a bit blurrier than my memories of the PC version - but in person, the textures and effects all look great, especially on the small screen. And no matter how many explosive spells, lightning lasers, and crashing meteors filled the screen at any given moment, the chaos all ran at a perfectly smooth 60fps on an undocked Switch. Through pure chance - or a shared attunement with magic - associate producer Matt Cederquist and I both chose to play as max-level Wizards in our speedy run of the Switch demo. "There's, I think, a bond, because they're also a development-first kind of studio, and they were super excited to have this product, because it offers something that they don't really have in that space yet."

"Nintendo's actually been really awesome," Stilwell says with a smile. "The challenges we did encounter were just coming to a new platform and making sure server things were working, making sure that we were running at our target of 60 frames per second and things like that." And Nintendo was happy to assist Blizzard with any hurdles faced in bringing the game to Switch. "We'd already done so much of that challenging work when we had brought it from PC to Xbox and PlayStation," says Stilwell. Bringing Diablo 3 to Nintendo Switch (complete with exclusive Zelda-themed goodies) just made sense, and senior producer Pete Stilwell tells me that making the transition was fairly simple.
