Blizzard announced during today's Campfire Chat livestream that the big Diablo 4 announced in February will go live on a public test realm on April 2, giving players one week—until April 9—to put the update through its paces and see what's changing.
Diablo 4 players may note that the PTR dates put it awfully close to the planned end of season 3, which could make for a bit of a crunch if the update needs significant work. To ensure that's not a problem, Blizzard has extended the current season from its planned conclusion on April 16 yono all app to May 14.
"We're pushing it back a few weeks to ensure that we get all the feedback from this PTR, and we apply it to season 4 to make sure that all these new system changes that we're doing are right and work for the community based off of everyone's feedback," Diablo community lead Adam Fletcher said during today's Campfire Chat livestream. "So season 3 is now going to end on May 14, and of course with that, season 4 also starts on May 14."
This PTR will only be available to players on PC via the Battle.net client, which Fletcher said "allows us to be a little more agile," presumably because of the more stringent compatibility requirements on console.
He added, however, that Blizzard is looking at ways of enabling access in the future for console players as well: "We are going to try to explore other ways of being able to bring PTR, when we do have a PTR, to players in the future."
Players in the PTR will start fresh, but "boosting options" will be provided so players can quickly get to the good stuff, and other aspects of the game will be cleared or unlocked to facilitate testing.
Full instructions on how to get into the PTR client will be posted next week in a fully-detailed blog post. A PTR-specific will also be activated to enable testers to more easily share feedback.
Today's Diablo 4 livestream goes deep into major itemization changes coming to the game in season 4—we'll have a detailed breakdown of what players can look forward to when the stream is over.