In an interview with IGN, Blizzard game director Joe Shely and general manager Rod Fergusson explained what players can expect from Blizzard.open the world from Diablo 4. From your words we learn that the game has to offer lots of freedom and side questshowever, the focus remains on the story and the main campaign.
“One concern of emphasizing the term ‘open world’ is that people have Breath of the Wild in relation to this genre, like ‘oh, it’s totally organic, I can go anywhere and do anything, and I can finally figure this out by myself.’ It’s really ours. not our situation,” Fergusson said. “Our story allows for a non-linear approach but there is a story. We wanted it to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We wanted to start in a certain place and end in a certain place.”
Fergusson explains that Diablo 4 offers quite a lot. “branching story”, where players can choose the order in which they will take the main episodes. In between there will be the possibility to explore the game world and enter or ignore side quests.
“That’s the beauty of the open world, there are a lot of side quests, a lot of things you can do outside of the ‘golden path’ of the main scenario,” Fergusson added. “A campaign path is a branching path where you then decide when and in what order to tackle those branches.”
Looks like Diablo 4 will be flooded with secondary activitiesso much so that, as director Joe Shely explained, the Blizzard team had to actually reduce some of the content because the game world was “too busy.”
“There is so much to do when exploring the game world, whether on horseback or on foot,” Shely said. “We actually had so many activities to do that it was challenging to travel the world on horseback.”
Speaking of open worlds, Fergusson told a very interesting anecdote. While the development team was working on Gears of War 5 (before moving to Blizzard), he had the opportunity to meet the open world designers of other games. open world idea “a bit of illusion”considering that most of the players who actually want to do this also want to be guided during the adventure.
“Gamers say they want open worlds and freedom of choice,” Fergusson said. “But they also want to be told where to go.”
Diablo 4 is currently in development for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. It doesn’t have a firm release date at the moment, but according to some rumors it will be released in the spring of 2023 with the official announcement scheduled for The Game Awards 2022 in December.
Source: Multiplayer
