It’s only been a few weeks sinceBlizzard officially announcedDiablo 4, but fans are already wondering where exactly it’s taking the game’s story–both in this next installment and perhaps beyond.Diablo 4Game Director Luis Barriga and Art Director John Mueller recently spoke with AusGamers about theDiablofranchise’s future and more.
Diablo 4’s first trailer revealed its main antagonist,the demon Lilith; she’s the daughter of Mephisto and Queen of the Succubi. Mueller and Barriga’s interview covered just how they settled on Lilith as a villain, and what the new story forDiablo 4means for the series as a whole.
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When Mueller, Barriga and the rest of the development team discovered Lilith (who has long been a demonic biblical character) they “were inspired,” and proceeded to build the story ofDiablo 4around her. Early on they realized they making Diablo the sole antagonist hadalready been done multiple times, deciding that they shouldn’t bring him back right away and instead “change the formula.” TheDiabloteam began looking into the creation myth and other novels with useful lore to find their new angle.
Through this process, the team also found a path forward for theDiablofranchise; as Mueller put it, “Diablo IVis like the first chapter of a book. We want to tell a big story and we want to tell it, hopefully, for a very long time. Treating this like the first chapter of a book and Lilith as a key characterin this story, it feels great knowing that there are still all these other characters that could come back in the future. Or, new characters that we haven’t seen before.”
In their interview, Mueller and Barriga also shared a little aboutDiablo 4’s developmentand the open game world of Sanctuary, which will be one big, seamless world with no loading screens. To do this, theDiabloteam looked at all their favorite open-world games and “not just RPGs,” to see how that could translate intoDiablo 4. “There’s going to be five contiguous regions in the world and you can actually go from the north, the northernmost point of Scosglen, which is the area seen in the demo, all the way down through the Dry Steppes and into the deserts of Kejhistan,” Mueller said. “That’s the level of detail we’ve added into creating the world.”
Beyond that, not too much else about theDiablo 4’s story is being unveiled–andeven less about its endgame progression, which is “still undecided.” There’s a long road ahead until its highly anticipated release.
Diablo 4is in development for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
