Diablo 4 impressed the Hell out of me (pun intended). After I spent roughly 12 hours romping through Act 1 and reaching level 25 before I couldn’t progress any further, Blizzard’s latest dungeon-crawling action-RPG sequel had its hooks firmly into me. After I had to put it down, I spoke with lead designers Zaven Harouotunian and Angela Del Priore about their approach to the design of a franchise that is now over 25 years old. With the finish line of the project now in sight, I asked each of them about the contributions to the game that they’re most proud of.
“[I’m most proud of] how we’re supporting multiple inputs and platforms all at the same time,” said Del Priore, whose duties include UI and user experience design. “It makes the game more accessible and approachable. You’re choosing how you get to play. And it’s not a simple thing to do. To design the entire game with an entire unified interface and interactions that work on keyboard and controller that support cross-progression on all the differnet consoles that we’re launching on and support local [multiplayer] on consoles. I think the fact that we were able to do that is no small feat and I’m really proud of the team.”
Harouotunian, meanwhile, answered the same question thusly: “There hasn’t really been a really meaty endgame emphasis [in past Diablo games]. Players have kind of just found their own endgame with the pieces that were in place, and we’ve added stuff in the long-term via patches in the past. But this is the first time we’ve really put a major emphasis on adding endgame right from the get-go and supporting it like we would support any other feature. I’m proud that we’ve been able to do so without detracting from any of the other aspects that makes Diablo so special. It was a super ambitious thing but I think we’ve nailed it and I’m super proud of the team for being able to do so.”
“[Endgame content] was a super ambitious thing but I think we’ve nailed it and I’m super proud of the team.”
The pair also answered a few of my other design-related questions during our 30-minute conversation. One fascinating answer from Harouotunian revealed that the team actually had to cut BACK the amount of content stuffed into it at launch. “Really really early on in the project we were building an example of what we’d like the content density to feel like, and we kept adding there,” he said. “And then from there we extrapolated out. As we went through we course corrected. We try to figure out as early as possible what’s the right amount of events and dungeons and so on.” He continued: “Putting 50 things on the screen at once is competing for the player’s attention and then we’re not letting each one of those pieces of content shine and have its place in the sun. The other thing is making sure things are right tonally.
“There’s a lot of content settling and figuring out who its neighbors are going to be is kind of a thing that happens over time. But if you have a bunch of developers and you throw them at a specific part of the world they’re going to try and fill it with a lot of cool things. And then it’s incumbent upon us as part of the design process to figure out [where in the game it should go].”
Del Priore added with a laugh, “As part of game development we do need a stopping point.”
“If you have a bunch of developers and you throw them at a specific part of the world they’re going to try and fill it with a lot of cool things.”
I also asked about how the team approaches dungeon design. “For side quests that have their own dungeons purpose built for them, the intent of those is to tell a compelling narrative. We want this to be about what’s happening in this space and how it relates to the themes and narrative of the campaign. Those elements are given a premium. For side dungeons, the star of the show is repeatability and replayability, so there are different aspects of that that need to shine through. High level it’s “What is this place intended for?” and let’s have all of the systems that we can bring to bear work to play up the strengths of what we’re trying to do here. For campaign it’s pretty clear: we want to have great tone, mood, storytelling, surprises as paced out and necessary by the narrative that we’re trying to tell. Side dungeons are more chaotic. We don’t want you to know what’s going to happen at all when you go back to a place. Treasure goblin is a great example. I don’t always have those and I see one. Maybe that treasure goblin runs by a big pack of enemies and they all start whaling on you and you’re dying and you see a Healing Well. And you go click the Healing Well and it turns out it’s a cursed well. Oops! And now you have more monsters to contend with. It’s those kinds of stories, right? Not necessarily the story of the side dungeon, but the player story. Here is my experience that I can share and look forward to different crazy experiences. And that’s a real one, by the way. That actually happened to me. We have all of these various pieces in place to make sure they can combine in different and exciting ways so that every time you play there can be a novel experience and a new combination of things you’ve never seen before. And this gets expanded as you hit endgame systems.”
He continued. “We try to avoid checklist design. ‘Does a quest need a dungeon?’ That’s actually the thing drives the decision-making. It’s not trying to hit a number. If the quest doesn’t need a dungeon to be great, then adding a dungeon is arguably detracting from what that quest is about. We try to be very mindful. We have all of these various systems and tools to have gameplay. We try to avoid having to repeat the same thing over and over again in terms of when you author this stuff. We try to make sure we’re using the right tools for the right content every time.”
Diablo 4 is expected to be released for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms in the first half of 2023. During a media presentation prior to receiving my preview build, Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson strongly implied, without explicitly saying so, that a major announcement might be coming at tomorrow’s Game Awards. A release date trailer, perhaps? Or maybe an open beta announcement? We’ll find out tomorrow.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
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