Diablo 4 is no MMO – you’ll be “blowing up screens of monsters”
pcgamesn.comIf the Diablo 4 endgame video didn’t get you excited for Blizzard’s upcoming action RPG game, then I don’t know what will. There’s fearsome world bosses, all-new Nightmare Dungeons, a tree made of literal faces – take your pick, Sanctuary has it. With a heavy focus on exploration, though, Diablo 4 seems to be blurring the lines between dungeon crawler and MMORPG, but the devs are resolute that it’s the ARPG we know and love, updated and improved upon for a 2023 audience.
Speaking to associate game director Joseph Piepiora and lead game producer Kayleigh Calder in an endgame-focused roundtable, I asked how the devs have walked the tightrope between MMO and dungeon crawler; a question inspired by several comments I’d seen online debating the game’s genre identity.
“That’s a question the team asked itself continuously over the course of development,” Piepiora tells PCGamesN. “The answer is that Diablo 4 is an ARPG first. It is a dungeon crawling, monster-slashing, monster-killing, loot-collecting game. It has these persistent online elements where you can run into other players in the interconnected overworld, but we want these things to feel like they’re married together well.
“One of the things we don’t have at the launch of Diablo 4 is content designed explicitly for organised groups,” he continues. “We don’t have this notion of roles – in Diablo, everyone’s sort-of a damage dealer. The fantasy of playing Diablo games in many cases is making overpowered builds and blowing up screens full of monsters. We wanted to make sure those kinds of elements are preserved, without having to create a curated set of balances between multiple players in a party who need to work a particular way together.”
While upholding the pillars of
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