It’s going to be a few years before we get to play Diablo 5, but the devs at Blizzard have some high aspirations for the upcoming sequel. While they can’t reveal anything about the story beyond broad strokes, they can say the mandate was simple: it has to be the best one.
In an interview with the official Xbox podcast, Matt Zitterman, executive producer on Diablo 5, revealed they got word from on high on what approach to take. “Someone on the team, I don’t know who, wrote a sticky note and put it in our director’s office, and it says, ‘Best campaign ever,'” he recalls.
“He looks at that all the time, and it’s really become a pillar of how we think about the game,” he continues. “That’s an example of us taking what was great in Diablo 4, and taking it further.”
In Zitterman’s eyes, Diablo 4 “set a new standard for storytelling” within the action-RPG stalwart. You have the most elaborate cutscenes thus far, and an incredibly compelling antagonist in Lillith, as well as all the residual “depth and complexity.” All of that is being taken into consideration when putting together the latest sequel.
“We looked at all those components that made Diablo 4’s campaign really sing and saw that as an opportunity to take it to the next level,” he adds. “One of the things players can look forward to in Diablo 5 is taking everything we’ve learned and built on for Diablo 4 in terms of how we tell an amazing, cinematic story, and really doing it better.”
Lofty goals, but distinctly feasible, given the trajectory of the mainline entries thus far. Diablo 5 is already promising to be an intriguing entry, since it’s going back to the RNG-heavy worldbuilding of the third game and before. How that all manifests narratively, we’ll have to see, but Blizzard’s aiming for another benchmark here.