The Chinese loving Blizzard Entertainment is currently working on Diablo IV, and while it’s still under the development hood, the title in question will sport ganking, a somewhat non-balanced PvP, semi-destructible environments, and limited trading.

In the meantime, we know that the controversial company plans on releasing the next installment in the Diablo series across PC and home consoles. However, it’s unclear when the game will hit the games market — given that the fourth iteration has no release date.

While we wait for info on a due date, ausgamers.com struck up an interview with the game’s director Luis Barriga and art director John Mueller regarding the aforesaid topics in the introductory paragraph.

With that said, Diablo IV will have PvP in the form of “specific PvP zones.” These areas will be “more dangerous and hostile” than others with Barriga saying:

“Rather than being super balanced arena matches, it will be more reminiscent of Diablo II open games where someone might gank you. We’re not promising players that it will be a fair fight. John and I could run into you and we might murder you and being two versus one that’s not fair. There’s no expectation that it will be finely tuned, but we are building the game with PvP in mind from the beginning. And that is because it’s difficult to kind of back into PvP later.”

I should note that the destruction at hand is nothing groundbreaking, but all placed pieces of pottery and the like in Diablo IV’s environments aren’t like the previous titles in the series according to Mueller:

“The sheer amount of destruction in our Dungeons has increased dramatically. When you’re in a space killing monsters and everything’s smashed and breaking, you’ve essentially put your fingerprint on the world and changed it.”

Later, Barriga mentions that certain items can only be traded a limited time to “control” the market. In other words, this system is designed to stop people from making a dupe account to trade a powerful item to another player to speed through the game.

In addition to the above, both powerful and super powerful items cannot be traded. The only way to gain these items is to either grind it out or complete an event as per Barriga:

“We’re going to have three categories, items that can just be fully traded, items that become bound after being traded once, which helps control the economy, and then items that can never be traded because they’re so powerful and special. These are items we want to ensure you got from doing some sort of high skill or demanding activity. And with all that what we will have is knobs, so we can decide which buckets get filled, and how many items we put into each bucket. The hope is that when we’re done filling and testing and iterating, players feel like they can trade a good number of items. But also, that many items they’re wearing have come from their own exploits. Their own kills. That is a core value for us.”

Given that there will be limits on valuable items via trading, I do wonder if this is a way to push people into buying expansions, seasonal content, microtransactions, and other things through the auction system?

Speaking of those things, Diablo IV will have expansions, seasonal content, microtransactions, and an auction system according to an IGN report. The real question that remains unanswered is, how egregious will they all be at launch?

Lastly, for more info on this game, you can head on over to ausgamers.com.