Diablo IV confirmed for DirectStorage support - so the question now is 'when', not 'if'

Diablo IV will eventually get DirectStorage support on PC, according to a report that cites a developer from the team.

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Diablo IV could be the second game on PC to get the benefit of DirectStorage (Image Credit: Blizzard)

PC Gamer delved into the issue - we already know that DirectStorage files are in the code for the action RPG, thanks to keen-eyed data miners - and came up trumps with a confirmation direct from the horse's mouth.

A member of the Diablo IV team told the gaming website: "MS DirectStorage is currently not enabled, but we are planning on enabling it in the future."

Okay, there is a slight caveat in that the developer is 'planning' on getting DirectStorage working to bring better performance levels to the PC version, and sometimes plans go astray.

So, this isn't 100% confirmation, but this is certainly still the intention of Blizzard. What we don't have is an even vague indication of what sort of timeframe we might be looking at.

Currently, only one game supports DirectStorage on the PC, and that's Forspoken. It's a superb tech in terms of speeding up load times, and in-game performance (loading assets on-the-fly in open-world environments) too, but it remains sat on the sidelines, twiddling its thumbs, for the time being.

Frustratingly, hardly any games seem to be planning on getting DirectStorage on board for their Windows versions. For the time being, it remains a case of Forspoken, and (hopefully) Diablo IV eventually, plus we've heard Hunt: Showdown will get it with a big game engine update (to CryEngine 5.11).

In other Diablo IV news, the RPG was hit by a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the weekend, which booted a bunch of players off the game and made logging back in impossible (at least for some folks, for a time).