What you need to know
- Today at Gamescom 2024, Blizzard released a new trailer for Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, the game’s first expansion, which launches on October 8.
- The trailer showed the ‘Pale Hand’ mercenaries, which appear to be a choice of 4 player support characters, including a demon ‘Vengeance’ character’.
As we neared the end of the Gamescom 2024 opening night, I feared I’d hallucinated the promise of a new Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred trailer, but alas, they saved the best till last with this new offering near the end of the show, showing the new Mercenaries mechanic and a suspiciously pointy-eared and tailed Mercenary in particular…
Mercenaries will aid our player character in the Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred expansion and are not a new concept to the franchise. We’ve had mercenaries in Diablo 2: Resurrected and ‘followers’ in Diablo 3, but what is surprising is the direction Diablo 4 seems to be going with its take on the Mercenaries. This one line in the trailer gave away something new immediately, “we were left with only our inner demons, but the return of Hatred has pulled us back into the light.” Following this, we see some of the mercenaries in action, named ‘The Pale Hand.’ They are split into 4 archetypes: Guardian, Redemption, Vengeance, and Rage. Vengeance appears to be a full-blown demon, with the other mercenaries taking on a more traditional class role, but the premise appears to be the same: are these previously corrupted inhabitants of Sanctuary?
Developing…
