You'll never see this in Diablo 4.
It's interesting because the art director for Diablo 4 was none other than John Mueller, who in the past worked on less anemic games, such as SiN, the UT series and before he got gobbled up by Blizzard, the Darksiders games. People often like to say that it's the fault of the new blood within development studios and that they are responsible for how generic, toothless, by-the-numbers souless and woke games feel these days in terms of their art. Throughout the ages though the young artists would simply do whatever they are told in the studio of an experienced master and whatever Mueller said was law. The reality though isn't that the man suddely turned into a soyboy, rather this is simply what the (((people controlling finance))) want and the man isn't getting paid to put things for boys and men into video games anymore. Culture is always downstream from power.
Another thing that's interesting is that D4 more or less stole the design of Lilith from... Lilith from Darksiders 2, which was likely a Joe Madureira design. Not 1:1, mind you, but there are similarities.
Speaking of Mueller, SiN has languished in obscurity for a long time and is very forgotten when it comes to first person shooters these days. Partly because Half-Life overshadowed it on release, and partly because the modifications Ritual made to the Quake 2 engine made the game hard to run on modern systems until recently. They did fix compatibility issues for the Steam release recently, removed some censorship and included the expansion pack. Playing it in 2023 it is the better game, Half-Life as a cinematic shooter was okay, but SiN was the natural progression from the best of the genre, like Build games. Everything is interactive, levels are tight, there's location damage, visible wounds on enemies and just great shooting.
The level design in Half-Life was very much on rails, with little exploration being rewarded, few secrets and the meat of the game, the gunplay, was mediocre. SiN was a lot like the Duke Nukem Forever of 2001 that we never got, what you do in one level affects things in later levels, you can cut off routes and change the layout of levels by your decisions. Blow up an underwater powerplant in one optional section you get to by exploring and not going directly to your main objective in one area and much later you'll be met by lava floods instead of water in the jungle.
If there ever was an underrated shooter then it's SiN, with usable terminals, that 90's edge and design sensibilities, the entire game focusing on making shooting and blowing things up satisfying. That this branch of the genre didn't see much in a followup, with SiN 2 turning into the cancelled Episodes (even if the first one was good), DNF suffering development hell so long it turned into a console shooter and all the other studios that cut their teeth by making id Software third party content, like Raven, shut their doors or started making shovelware.
We did get a nice offering from Human Head with the real Prey before Bethesda scammed and killed the company during Prey 2's development. The retroshooter meme resurgence of games pretending to be anything like 90's shooters also gave us the rare genuine deal with Ion Fury. There's also F.E.A.R. which did the highly interactive action-film shooter with an emphasis on new technology for perhaps the last time, with light sources being affected by the gunfights. Other than far between scraps like those the genre niche seems to be more or less dead these days, whereas in the late 90's everyone wanted to make one and there were multiple releases each year. Halo and the rise in popularity in console shooters killed it, and even Halo is now old school since all the money is in multiplayer live service games.
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