Blizzard has announced that we dont have followers nor mercenaries in Diablo 4, only temporary followers in the campaign.
Blizzard also didn’t released any informatie yet when we can except followers or mercenaries, and if we ever going to get them in Diablo 4.
But to be honest, I would like to see both in Diablo 4.
What I would like to see.
Mercenaries that you can hire temporary. They come with a random set of items and skills, and you pay them by hour. If you don’t extend their payment, they will go back to the city.
Followers is a bit more indepth. You can equip them, manage their skills and abilites. But you also need to keep them happy. Maintain them, like make sure their armor and weapon need to be repaired, give them potions aswell etc. If they go down, you need to revive them. If they die, they will be temporary unavailable, due the fact that they need to “heal”.
You can unlock different followers with quests but you can only use one.
This would be nice.
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They need content to add to the game over time in DLC and annual patches, I’m hoping for this with personalised hideouts also, rather than everyone publicly sharing the same room in town. You cannot expect what most games have accumulated over 2-5+ years on day 1 launch, or they would have to think of new things to add later and not just replicate previous and other games features 
.
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I think having no followers is a good thing
- its easier to balance the game coz of gear and skills of the follower
- the immersion is not broken. When you see in town 9 people with exact same follower just copypasted to 9 different players - that will look very very bad
- i prefer to have no or close to no help from ai in an ARPG, just a weird random guy getting in the way of my demon slaying and adventuring.
But what if you can customize your own follower. Mercenaries can also be “generated” trait of skills and appareances.
We have in Diablo 4 more customize option available as ever before. Why not for followers aswell?
As a balancing thing, sure that can be true. But i think that Blizzard have enough expierence to balance out things. Its not their first time. 
And even if the followers or mercenaries look the same or not, it doesn’t change the fact that this apply for players aswell. You will definitely see the same skins aswell running around in towns.
In d3 we didnt have that, and that would be a whole lot of extra work i’m sure blizz wouldnt like to do.
Because its a huge lot of extra work and if it isnt monetized then they would have to do it for free.
It will also look extremely crowded, even if followers will be distinct - that will be exactly x2 the amount of character models for each player.
With all the tools we have available: the character creator, transmog system with color pallete system and lobbies of ~20 players with different classes with different builds. I think we will have very distinct looking characters. In my opinion it will be a very rare occurance when 2 characters will look the same.
I would also like to see permanent followers in the game like we had in D2 and D3. But i see a problem with them in the open world.
My solution is that the followers would only show up inside instances, where there are less players around and they are most needed.
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