Inside the Design of Diablo 4's Heavy Metal Monsters

I f you’ve never heard of Diablo , here’s a primer. Thrust into the hellish world of Sanctuary, where reanimated corpses crawl out of sinkholes and giant pus-dribbling trolls lurk around every cursed corner, you must slash, bewitch and repel such horrifying enemies while searching cavernous dungeons for shiny loot. This is a seriously badass collection of video games. The titular, horned big bad, a supreme demon descended from the shattered remains of a seven-headed dragon, looks like something you’d find on a particularly nasty emo gig poster or your coolest metal band t-shirt.

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In fact, there are more skulls to be crushed in a Diablo  level than you’ll find on all 17 Iron Maiden album covers put together. Which begs the question: to which assortment of occult-obsessed crazies, to what rogues’ gallery of Satanic spooksters and to whose bloodthirsty, depraved imaginations was the task of creating all these monsters actually given?

Two of those responsible are Jayne Johnston, senior lead VFX artist, and Owen Leach, lead monster designer – who both worked on the latest and most successful instalment, Diablo 4 . Here’s what we learned from peering into their perverse, twisted minds for a few minutes…

Korn and Slipknot inspired some of the beasties

Like most games in 2026, Diablo 4 ’s toughest job is keeping people playing beyond a few months after purchase. To do this, they occasionally partner with famous people on shiny new content drops. But where Fortnite raids the pop charts for stars with mainstream followings ( Madison Beer , Sabrina Carpenter , Lil Tecca ), Diablo ’s closest collaborators can be found in the darker corners of pop culture.

“We did Korn , Slipknot , Beast In Black… We try to get wrapped up in [metal] culture,” says Leach. “It’s funny how the two [worlds] start to blend together. You could put metal over any Diablo footage and it just sort of vibes.”

Of the playable character classes, Johnston says each has a music-adjacent personality: “The necromancer is our emo guy and the warlock listens to a lot of metal.”

It can be difficult to leave hell at the office

With loud music blaring and Satanic imagery on-screen throughout the day, the Diablo 4 design team can struggle to relax at quitting time. “Disconnecting in that way, I feel, is really important to maintaining a balance,” says Johnston. And when you have kids to think about, as Leach does, extra care is needed not to bring work home with you: “My eldest son is three, so we don’t let him see what Daddy works on. He’ll want to come down and sit on my lap [while I’m designing a monster on my computer] so I’ll be like, ‘Oh, nope. We gotta close that!’

How do they wind down from the apocalypse? The Great British Bake-Off , of course. “Oh my god, it’s brilliant!” says Leach. You’ll find Johnston at home prepping for future family holidays with “an unpacking simulator”.

Game design is seriously misunderstood

According to Leach, who used to teach game design at university, a lot of gamers think developers sit in the office all day “thinking of ideas” while someone “magically makes the game”. The reality, he says, is very different.

“There is no such thing as an ideas guy who just gets to sit there,” Leach continues. “Everyone works an engine with tools and scripts every single day and it’s highly technical… We’re all working really, really hard.” Johnston adds that each member of the Diablo team needs to work together to make sure that they “deliver an experience for the player that they enjoy.”

You should be excited about Diablo 5

At BlizzCon 2026, the huge gaming convention held in Anaheim’s cavernous convention centre, games company Blizzard dropped a surprise teaser for Diablo 5 during the glitzy opening ceremony. And 35,000 fantasy nerds lost their shit.

“The angels were supposed to save us…” whispered a pained voice as the trailer played on the jumbotron-sized screen. An unprecedented age of darkness is taking shape in Sanctuary, it seems, with the war lost and supervillain Diablo properly in charge. How will players save a world that has already been obliterated when Diablo 5 launches in spring 2029?

“They really went hard! We’re super excited,” says Leach. “Those folks are working super hard on the game and it was such a cool moment for them to finally be able to show what they’ve been working on. I know a lot of players didn’t expect that but, you know, it’s still three years away, so we got some time and we’re still churning away on Diablo 4 … We’re still gonna be making awesome content while they’re working on Diablo 5 .”

The post Designing ‘Diablo 4’s heavy metal monsters sounds like the coolest job in gaming appeared first on NME .

_Originally reported by [NME](https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/diablo-4-monsters-slipknot-korn-game-designers-heavy-metal-life-3971867?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=diablo-4-monsters-slipknot-korn-game-designers-heavy-metal-life)._