We’re still waiting for the PC game industry to widely adopt DirectStorage, Microsoft’s solution for speeding up game load times. But one major title is preparing to implement it: Diablo IV.
“MS DirectStorage is currently not enabled," the Diablo team told PC Gamer, "but we are planning on enabling it in the future." A Blizzard spokesperson also confirmed the news to PCMag.
That means gamers with PCs that run SSD drives can expect even faster load times when playing Diablo IV, possibly in 2 seconds or less.
In March, users spotted files in the beta version of Diablo IV that mentioned Microsoft’s DirectStorage API. Since then, gamers have been anticipating DirectStorage support, which can fully leverage the higher bandwidth in today’s NVMe SSD drives to accelerate load times.
If Diablo IV does implement DirectStorage soon, it’ll be only the second game to support the technology—a sign the API can be hard for software developers to fully implement.
Currently, the only game to support DirectStorage is another fantasy title, Forspoken, from Square Enix. Although the game received mediocre reviews, Forspoken can load game scenes and environments in around 1 second over an NVMe SSD drive and around 5 to 7 seconds over a SATA SSD drive, according to benchmarks.
Blizzard didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But we’re also curious if the company is considering implementing DirectStorage 1.1, which promises to cut down load times even more by leveraging not just the SSD, but also a PC’s graphics card to further streamline the game-loading process.