Since the beginning of the series, Diablo has always had a look: dark and gothic, even the grainy pixels of the original RPG game exuded a specific mood. It's seen changes in the quarter century since the first game launched, but there's an unmistakable continuity. Diablo 4 art director John Mueller spoke with us about how his team has approached maintaining and advancing that visual style in the upcoming game.
"We look at a lot of 'old masters,' essentially, is what we call them," Mueller says, referring to a broad range of artists active during the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age of painting. But Mueller and the Diablo 4 art team haven't restricted themselves to these periods: the visuals they're producing often evoke much more modern creators like Frank Frazetta and John Carpenter.
"When we were starting, it's a great place to begin and cultivate an art style for Diablo 4 – an identity," Mueller tells us. "If you look at old medieval paintings, it's a lot of angels and demons, and mankind being tortured in the middle. It's really the only thing we have from that period to look at and say, well, this is what was going on. And if you take those things literally, then you kind of have a lot of things that feel like Diablo."
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