This year’s BlizzCon brought the announcement of Diablo 5. Although we’re still a few years out from the sequel, development is already winding down on Diablo 4, to the point we’re not getting any more major expansions. One of the co-creators of fellow action-RPG Path of Exile isn’t enamored by Blizzard‘s strategy here, believing it undermines the series and the fanbase.
Chris Wilson, one of the central designers of Path of Exile, made these points in a YouTube video. “It feels like they’re abandoning Diablo 4,” he says of the announcement. “They even clarified there would be no more expansions developed for Diablo 4, but there would be some content released, I assume by the small team left running it.”
He finds the proposed roadmap disappointing, to say the least. “One of those pieces of Diablo 4 content is a 30th anniversary event called Season of Hell’s Legacy,” he comments. “To be honest, this event feels pretty distasteful to me. I feel that games should have respect for their core storylines, and treat their antagonists with the respect that they deserve.”
As you might have guessed, he doesn’t believe the proposed gameplay additions or their presentation manage this. “Diablo 4 was slowly building up to you eventually getting to fight the Prime Evils, and then they introduce them all at once in this special event that isn’t really tied into the game’s storyline,” he observes.
“They brought back Deckard Cain for the event, even though he was canonically killed in Diablo 3,” he adds. In his mind, this makes it seem like “causality and story events” don’t hold the appropriate weight, and “that we shouldn’t take them seriously.”
This is compounded by Blizzard calling Diablo, the big bad himself, “the birthday boy” on-stage. “If your franchise is called Diablo, and you’ve made billions of dollars from games that sell a fantasy of players working towards getting to confront and defeat Diablo, the Lord of Terror, then you should treat him with the utmost respect,” Wilson states.
Not really the place for kiddy nicknames, is it? Despite all of this, Wilson is “tentatively hopeful” for Diablo 5. It’s going back to more RNG-heavy world design, it has a truly desolate worldview, and he’s pleased by the font choice for the logo. Hopefully Blizzard stays the course in its decision-making.