Grand Theft Auto 6 wasn’t the only leaked gameplay from the weekend. Blizzard fans will also want to know that more than 40 minutes of Diablo IV beta footage also made its way onto the internet. It’s our very first look at unedited gameplay, albeit unofficially.
Reddit user iV1rus shared their findings on Reddit. There are two separate video clips — one that runs just five minutes and another around 38 — hosted on a file site. Curiously, it appears the person who released the videos is not the one who played the actual game. You can hear two scrambled voices having a discussion over the five-minute video, referring to the “dude” who was actually playing.
This raises two questions: how was this footage obtained, and what phase of the game’s development cycle is it taken from? We can’t answer the first, but there are watermarks that read “private test build” spread across the screen in both videos. This suggests the gameplay was taken from the “company-wide internal testing” that was mentioned by Blizzard back in April. Diablo IV beta files were also spotted on Battle.net in July, but not one has claimed to have extracted anything from them at this time.
As for the gameplay itself, one standout is the in-game shop. Blizzard recently pledged that items in the shop and rewards from the season pass would be cosmetic, not falling into the infamous “pay to win” category. From these gameplay clips, that promise seems to be upheld. The handful of shop items we can see include things like a wolf hunting hood and an anchor-shaped weapon skin.
Diablo IV has no announced release date at this time, but we do know that it will support cross-play between consoles and PC when it launches. The Diablo series will also be making its way to Xbox Game Pass (along with other Activision Blizzard properties like Call of Duty and Overwatch), though it’s not clear if that includes Diablo IV itself. In the meantime, Blizzard has been releasing quarterly updates on its dev blog to keep fans up to date on how the game is shaping up.
