Diablo 4 is now showing off Vessel of Hatred’s new Spiritborn class in full with a new of hands-on tech demos, trailers, interviews and more. While I couldn’t attend the in-person demo, I had the chance to talk with Game Director Brent Gibson and Class Designer Bjorn Mikkelson about the main question everyone asked when the Spiritborn was revealed.
Why this class? Why make an entirely new class at this point when so many fans are still requesting old reprisals from Paladin/Crusader to Amazon to Monk and more? Well, they had a lot to say and mainly it’s about the freedom an entirely new class offers, rather than needing to pull from old roles and movesets, even though they did that with the base game.
“When we started off, Gibson said, “we were still in development of the base game which was interesting because we were very happy with where the original five classes were going, and we knew they were really going to nail the archetypes those existing classes represented in the previous games.”
“There were a couple of things we wanted to make sure of,” Gibson continued. “The first thing was that we wanted it to feel fresh, we wanted it to feel new, as opposed to continuing to reimagine what we’d done before. Here’s an opportunity to take a look at the gaps we have in our combat style, take a look at the power fantasies we haven’t done yet and develop something that was fresh that could stand next to those original classes. The other thing was that we wanted it to come from the place we were going, and we knew we were going to the jungle…and that led us on the journey to creating something brand new.”
They confirmed to me that yes, the Spiritborn will have a major role in the actual story of Vessel of Hatred, rather than just being handed to you and kept on the sidelines. They will also have a specialization quest at a low level that will unlock the ability to combine spirit bonuses of its four main summoned spirits, the fire-based Jaguar, physical Gorilla, poison Centipede and lighting-shooting Eagle. These spirits aid you in combat rather than have you transform into them like a Drruid.
One of the main points of making a new class like the Spirtborn was that they would be able to make it exactly what they wanted rather than needing to draw from older classes. In that case, they wanted it to excel at “hybridization.”
“It’s kind of a cop-out to say the role we’re filling is the “flex” role which is sort of all the slots, said Mikkelson, “but the big experimentation was what can we do if we start from the top thinking what if we make a character that is really able to hybridize? A lot of our classes can be a little bit more like “stick to your lane” and do one thing or the other, and those all have their place.
“The relationship with the spirits being a really personal choice, a really self-expressive choice where everyone’s kind of different,” Mikkelson continued. “You getting to pick your spirits and what combination you want just felt like a very natural connection between making this very personalizable and making it have options for hybridization.”
You can see a lot of Spiritborn footage bouncing around the internet, and with at least some focus on martial arts, Gibson says that Monk fans will be happy, but yes, it should feel unique to all past classes with the giant spirits you can summon in battle.
It is certainly not being ruled out that previous classes that remain missing in Diablo 4 could be added in future content, including expansions, though nothing was even close to confirmed. They indicated making a brand new class from concept to execution takes longer than revisiting a previous one, but either way, I’m not going to expect more than one of these a year.
Blizzard has shown a lot of interest lately in new Diablo classes between this and Diablo Immortal’s Blood Knight. I bet they’ll head back to an old class next time (my money is still on Paladin) but if Spiritborn blows everyone away, maybe not. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it when Vessel of Hatred releases on October 8.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
