How Diablo 4's composers built a soundtrack that grew with the game

Diablo 4 Lead Composer Ted Reedy and World of Warcraft Lead Composer Leo Kaliski sat down with PCGamesN to talk through the musical evolution of Diablo 4 — from its ambient, question-mark base game score all the way to the more defined, story-driven sound of the Lord of Hatred expansion.

Reedy, who has been at Blizzard for five years, traces the franchise's musical DNA back to the original Tristram theme from Diablo 1 — a deceptively simple piece built on just five notes and a descending cadence. That motif still threads through Diablo 4's score today. For Lord of Hatred's new region of Skovos, Reedy wrote an opening track called Firstborn that also centres on five notes, deliberately tying the new material back to that 30-year-old throughline. The idea isn't to repeat Tristram, but to keep the music feeling unmistakably Diablo without leaning on nostalgia as a crutch.

The base game's soundtrack was, by Reedy's own admission, more atmospheric and exploratory — fitting for an open-world structure where the story's destination wasn't fully mapped out yet. He acknowledges that some players didn't consciously register the music, and suggests the open-world format partly explains why it stayed in the background. As the game's narrative has sharpened across seasons and expansions, so has its musical identity. Kaliski, who worked with Reedy on the base game before moving to World of Warcraft, returned as a collaborator on D4's evolving sound. The interview also touches on the underlying technology that keeps the score feeling fresh across long grinding sessions, though specific details on that system were cut from the published excerpt.

Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is framed as the culmination of the game's first major narrative arc, and the composers clearly treated it as a moment to make the music step forward rather than stay ambient. With the story's next direction still unannounced, Reedy and Kaliski's work on Skovos may set the template for wherever Sanctuary heads next.