Diablo IV
Blizzard’s live-service game Diablo IV launches today on Game Pass on both Xbox and PC. This is one of the biggest games to drop on Microsoft’s subscription service in quite some time, and the first major Game Pass launch for an Activision-Blizzard product since Microsoft purchased the video game publisher for $68.7 billion, a deal that concluded last October.
This lays the groundwork for other big Activision-Blizzard titles to make their way to Game Pass, from Overwatch to Call Of Duty.
Diablo IV launched last June. The isometric action-RPG (ARPG) is currently in its third season, with a fourth season landing on May 14th. This is good news for new players, as they can get started with the game with plenty of time before Season 4. As with most live-service games these days, each season comes with its own Battle Pass, special events and other new content.
Players can choose between five classes—Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Rogue and Sorcerer—and hack-and-slash-and-loot their way through the campaign first. If you’re new to the game, when you create a character make sure it’s a character in the Seasonal realm, but don’t check the “Skip Campaign” box, as you’ll want to finish that first. At the end of the season, your current seasonal characters will be converted to non-seasonal characters and you can roll a brand new one for Season 4.
The game is launching on both Xbox consoles and PC, but there’s a couple hoops to jump through if you’re playing on PC. Here’s what you should do:
- Open the Xbox App on your PC and be sure you’re signed in with the same account that’s tied to your Game Pass membership. You’ll see the Diablo IV icon and can click Install.
- This will bring up a prompt for you to install Battle.net—Blizzard’s online game hosting service—so you’ll need to either have that installed already or install it at this point. If you don’t have a Battle.net account, you’ll need to create one. You’ll be prompted to connect this to your Microsoft account.
- After all these steps are done, the game will download and you’re off to slay demons and gather up all the treasure you can get your grubby mitts on.
And that’s pretty much everything you need to know. If you’re on Xbox rather than PC, the install process is much easier. You don’t need any previous experience with the series to start with Diablo IV, though hopefully all the Diablo games will make their way to Game Pass.
Another nice update to the game that dropped just before its Game Pass launch: Raytracing support for all platforms, as well as a bunch of other graphics improvements and changes to ambient occlusion and contact shadows. Raytracing is supported on the Xbox Series X as well as PS5 (and obviously PC) but it doesn’t appear to be available on the weaker Xbox Series S.
