Speaking from my own experience, what truly made the game experience dark and scary for me when i played Diablo 1 23 years ago was the Atmosphere set by the music.ĭistant screams and ominous sounds of creatures, indistinguishable muttering and voices of whispers.

The drowned zombies are pretty frkin ugly gory too, did you see that sea witch or whatever that fat bloated zombie lady when she dies? She burst, and bile and blood is spewing out as her bloated intestines cover the floor. There's ALOT of blood, and it looks great, your character gets blood on him when you swing. I mean, there are camps where tents are basically bloody, fleshy, flapping around. The game looks wayyyy more gory than any other games we've had so far. If you inspect the values from what you get in twitch, the pixels who should be pure black (outside the walls in a dungeon say) are floored at like a value of 20 grey, which is a bid deal, you lose about 10% of your dynamic range, so game looks a bit milky on stream. The blacks are totally lost, either from compression or I dont know, so yeah, it's a bit weird they didn't try to get the brightness right. A little note here for people who watch Twitch streamers play. So value-wise, it's really not that far off, colors are much tamer than D3, values are pretty good. TBH, Diablo 1 Cathedral is the darkest place, it's dark, it's grey.ĭiablo 2 dark places also are things like Cathedral, Flayer's Dungeon, things like that, it's dark, gloomy, but again. If you would only see the Caves in Diablo 1 which is grey but clearly not dark, or Act2 or Act5 of Diablo 2, you would also say, meh, not really dark.

It might be important to point out we've also only seen like 5% of the overall map and dungeons. It's somewhat as dark or darker than D2, it's clearly isn't as dark as D1, not looking at the stream at least.

Diablo 4 playable demo