Speedrunning in Diablo 4

Active speedrunning community

Speedrunning in Diablo 4, or completing the game based on certain rules in the shortest time possible, should attract a large number of talented players. It'll require skill in decision-making (e.g., build, items, and skills) and game knowledge (e.g., bosses, map, and monsters). There's also enough randomness (aka RNG) with loot drops and monster AI to make runs exciting to play and watch.

Speedrunning categories for D4

The Any% speedrunning category, or reaching an important point in the game (e.g., game credits or a certain boss) regardless of whether you completed all of the game's content, is typically the most popular category for any game. Below are some likely categories we'll see for Diablo 4, based on previous Diablo games:

• Any%: fastest to complete the last quest in the game (kill Lilith?)
• Co-op Any%: same as Any%, but with multiple players
• 100%: fastest to complete all quests and find all dungeons and waypoints
• Levels 1-100: fastest to reach the max level of 100
• Boss rush: fastest to kill all of the game's bosses

Note that on top of these general categories, there will likely be subcategories for class and platform.

No load screens to slow down

Because Diablo 4's world is seamless, there's no loading screens, meaning that players don't have to keep track of their run's time with loading screens and time without. One interesting wrinkle will be how speedrunners handle Diablo 4's real-time cutscenes, which auto-play when a player reaches an important story point. These can likely be skipped, but would still slow players down.

Effect of mounts

The introduction of mounts in Diablo 4, which will make traversing Sanctuary much faster, should dramatically affect speedrunning strategy. In past Diablo games, Boots that provided max movement speed were paramount because so much of the game is spent running/moving. An early goal of Diablo 4 speedrunners will likely be to acquire the fastest mount possible.

Differences by platform

Diablo 4 will be released on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Given that each of these has their own quirks in terms of:

• Input devices (Keyboard and mouse vs. controller)
• Display refresh rate (monitor vs. TV)
• Frames per second/FPS (PC GPU vs. console GPU)
• Internet connectivity
• Protection against cheating

We'll likely see speedrunning categories for each platform, like we did for Diablo 3.

Fastest speedrunning class

In Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, the Sorcerer's Teleport skill gave speedrunners a huge advantage over other classes by allowing it to immediately move to the other side of the screen. Given that Teleport is returning in Diablo 4, the Sorcerer will likely be the first class speedrunners test out.

Diablo speedrunning records

As of July 2022, here's the fastest Any% PC times for past Diablo games: