Blizzard say the Diablo series is "extremely poised" for more experiments like the shift to open world

rockpapershotgun.com:

I do not greatly enjoy the playing of Diablo 4, but I do rather enjoy its hellish setting, which I would characterise as a Warhammer table-top diorama dunked in a bucket of frozen offal. As such, I'm tickled gall-bladder-pink to hear that Blizzard consider the action-RPG series "a wonderful platform" for different types of game, now that they've made the leap to an open world format.

For the most part, said experimentation will occur in the course of Diablo 4 expansions - the first of which, Diablo 2 throwback Vessel of Hatred, will launch in late 2024, adding a new class to the game described as "never before seen in the Diablo universe". But from the sounds of things, there's scope for the "franchise in general" to evolve too.

All that's from a big roundtable chat from Blizzcon featuring several developers, published by Wccftech. A lot of it is about adding to or tweaking Diablo 4 in smaller ways - there is talk of loot filters and Malignant rings and monster "intensity". But there's also some Big Picture stuff about the future of Diablo.

"Diablo is known as a big dungeon crawler and we added this huge open world to it," the developers observe. "That's a pretty big evolution for the franchise as a whole and it's a wonderful platform for us to continue to experiment with a lot more things."

"You're going to see some of that stuff happening in the seasons," the assembled Blizzonauts go on. "The hope is that we take larger steps when we go into the expansions as well, so really it's about creating a platform to do more. I think Diablo as a franchise in general is extremely poised to do that."

The developers argue that there has never been more ways to play Diablo than right now, though I'm not sure the