Joe Shely, Diablo IV’s director, and Rod Fergusson, Diablo’s general manager, have explained their understanding of the open world in the game in a new interview.

“One of the concerns about putting ‘open world’ in a big neon sign and flashing that sign is that people have that notion of the Breath of the Wild kind of, ‘Oh, it’s completely organic, and I can go anywhere and do anything and eventually I can figure it out for myself’. That’s not our story. Our story allows for non-linearity, but there is a story. We wanted to have a beginning, middle, and end.

We wanted to start at a specific place, and we wanted to end at a particular location. That’s the nice thing about the open world; there are a lot of side quests, there are a lot of things in the world that you can go and do that isn’t on the campaign golden path and the fact that the golden path is a branching path that you can decide when you want to do those branches and what order. [Players] say they want open worlds and free choice, but they also want to be told where to go,” Fergusson said. So it’s up to us to decide when to play which essential parts of the story, and if we replay it, we can do it in a different order, and it will feel different.

“As you’re going through [the game world], there’s lots of stuff to do, whether you’re mounted or navigating through on foot. We had so much stuff that getting through on a mount was challenging. So we had to say, okay, let’s make sure that the roads are connected to good places, are a good way to travel through this area so that you can get through, get to places that you’re going expediently, and also have the opportunity to go off the path and see interesting things,” Shely added. Content-wise, they had to scale back the game world because they saw it too dense. The open world feels a bit illusionary, but Fergusson has experience with that, having worked on Gears 5 before joining Blizzard.

Diablo IV is coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2023.

Source: PCGamer