Blizzard says designing a new class benefits every current and future class in the game.
The mainline Diablo series hasn't seen a new class for 10 years. The spiritborn, coming in Diablo 4's Vessel of Hatred expansion on October 8, are an entirely new class for the series who fight with the power of animal spirits and only slightly resemble classes from prior games, like Diablo 3's monks.
Blizzard deliberately created something new to keep Diablo from getting stale, associate game director Brent Gibson told PC Gamer in a recent interview. Even if that means fans will continue to beg Blizzard to add paladins one day.
Blizzard started by trying to "break all the boundaries and go big with the idea" of the spiritborn, rather than updating a class that has been done before, Gibson said. "The thing we cannot do is say 'This is too hard, this is too risky, we're not going to add anything new to the game,' because the game is just going to die on the vine."
"I know [when] we come out and we say we're going to do a brand new class and there are a lot of fans that are like, 'Well, what about my favorite class from 20 years ago?' And I respect that because I'm like, yeah, I know right? But that's not the state we're in today," he said.
In the two hours I spent with the spiritborn during a preview event earlier this month, it felt like nothing I'd ever played before in a Diablo game. They can reach into the spirit realm and throw animal guardians at their enemies, like an eagle made out of lightning or a gorilla that pummels the ground. Even their most basic skills work like a fighting game combo with a final hit that packs a hefty punch, and you can mix and match which spirit guardian's power they're imbued with.
Even Diablo 4's existing classes don't feel quite as dynamic as the spiritborn, which had me a little worried that it might outshine the others simply by being newer. But class designer Bjorn Mikkelson explained that the benefits of such a bold design ethos lets the team take what they learned back to the rest of the game.
"We've been developing spiritborn right next to [the live development team], 10 feet away," Mikkelson said. "There have been things we're trying on spiritborn that they see and they go 'Oh, that's actually really cool,' or like we get new tech for spiritborn that now maybe existing classes can leverage to solve their problems."
In my interview—and in many others over the last year—Blizzard has been open about wanting to return to those old classes in Diablo 4 at some point, but it also seems confident that it isn't the right time to do that yet. Part of that reason is probably because of how much developing a new class can bring to the game. So if we ever get the paladin some day, it might look a lot different than it did in Diablo 2. In fact, it might be even better.
"I hope people see why we did this," Gibson said of the spiritborn. "It definitely fills a gameplay space that I think is very fresh for what people want right now."
