BlizzCon 2019 Diablo IV: World and Lore Panel Transcript

WORLD BUILDING

Jesse: Alright. Okay. So I was talking earlier about our influences and our biggest influence for making Diablo IV is every other Diablo game; and just a little bit of our process. The first thing that we knew about the world of Sanctuary with Diablo 1 was the town of Tristram, and that’s basically all you knew about the world.

There was a town, there’s some people in it, there’s a chapel; and in that chapel, there’s a way down into a dungeon, and in that dungeon is a lot of really bad stuff. If you wandered around the town, there’s something like a bridge, and you can’t cross it; and you’re like: oh what else is out there?

If you happen to read the manuals, so this is all we knew about the world; and if you happen to read the manuals for Diablo 1, you found out a lot of stuff about the Lore of the world that wasn’t included necessarily in the game or that wasn’t as easy to access. Things like the High Heavens, The Crystal Arch, The Burning Hells, The Great Evils, and Inarius that we talked about earlier, the Cathedral of Light, The Horadrim, The Sin War, the Zackarum. There is a lot of information there, and that’s really our starting point for everything that we’ve done from that point forward.

With Diablo 2, we finally have a map with the manual, and we have a little bit more of the world; and so we can finally start to look at things and connect them. We can see like, oh this is where Tristram is; oh there’s an ocean, what’s outside of that; and your imagination can start to get carried away; and you can start to think like: oh man these are places I could go, what are they like, and there’s names and words there that you don’t know what they are, and it’s really exciting to think about.

Gameplay-wise, the way you interacted with the world, because everything was built kind of separated, is you would Waypoint around and that totally worked; and its waypoints are Horadric magic, it’s totally safe. You probably won’t get disintegrated when you use it. So, the waypoint system totally worked for us, and then in Diablo III, we added even more areas but it was still built in a not connected way; and so we continued to use waypoints as the way to get around; and it totally still works and we had way more places to explore. More than there are on this map, because we went extra dimensional into Heaven and places like that.

With Reaper of Souls, we finally added Adventure Mode; and with Adventure Mode, we added a map; and the map is an abstract. So things weren’t exactly where they were, and it served as a waypoint and an activity map; and everything wasn’t where it appeared to be because it was abstract.

When we added places — for example, The Shrouded Moors, we didn’t really have Scosglen on the map, so we couldn’t put it in its spot, and we stuck it in a corner in Act 2. But, it’s in Scosglen; and now finally with the spaces that we’re building in Diablo IV, we’re building one large contiguous space, and everything is connected.

So you don’t have to portal around in this space on the map. It’s all going to be there for you to interact with, and we’ll also have dungeons underneath, and dungeons above; and there’s a lot to the world here; and the way that you interact with this world now in Diablo IV, we have a different kind of map.

So things are where you think they are, and you can zoom in and out, and you can see what’s going on, and you can find your friends on here; and you can kind of see the space that we’re building. The area that’s uncovered is the demo that we brought to BlizzCon.

And the rest of the world is what we’re building out; and it’s– (audience applauds), thank you. I have a huge affinity for maps, and I really like this stuff. So being able to work on The Reaper map and then turn it into this has been a lot of fun, and hopefully it works well and you guys like it. But, in order to talk about what’s hidden under that stuff, I’d like to hand it off to Harrison to talk about the regions that we’re building for Diablo IV.

NEXT: THE WORLD

BLIZZCON 2019 DIABLO IV: WORLD AND LORE PANEL TRANSCRIPT
1. Intro	2. The Tone of Sanctuary	3. Lore	4. World Building
5. The World	6. Monsters	7. Q&A
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