There are only so many synonyms for "demonic."
Naming things is hard. Ask anyone in a creative line of work, and they’ll tell you as much. And according to the developers of Diablo 4, it’s particularly challenging to come up with new, morbid names for devilish challenges when the series you’re working on has been burning through death metal-adjacent material for almost 30 years.
Since its launch, Diablo 4 has featured activities with titles including but not limited to: Tormented Bosses, Helltides, Nightmare Dungeons, Seething Realms, and The Dark Citadel. And if I’m being frank, I don’t think Blizzard has a lot of adjective space left for describing encounters with demonic hordes and the miscellaneous hellscapes they inhabit.
Which is why, in an interview for Diablo 4’s upcoming Return of Belial season, I asked lead live game designer Colin Finer and lead seasons designer Deric Nunez just how tough it is for their team to keep coming up with synonyms for “evil.”
“I would say it’s probably one of the most difficult design challenges,” Finer said, with surprisingly little hesitation for someone whose work is judged by millions of players who, statistically, probably spend more time hitting things with axes and fireballs than they do pondering nomenclature.
“I would say so, yeah,” Nunez said. “We go through many rounds of iterations and internal dev names that change on a weekly basis, especially when the season is just getting kicked off and rolling and the identity is still finding its feet.”
Apparently some of those internal placeholder names can be harder to give up than you might expect. In Season 8, players will fight two versions of the archdemon Belial—one little bigger than a person, one King Kong-scale. During the season’s development, they were affectionately referred to as “baby Belial” and “Gigabelial.”
“That carried a lot of weight, and it was really hard to kind of jettison those beloved terms within the team,” Nunez said. “But yeah, much to the chagrin of the producers, we go through a lot of rounds of iterations—on how we can not just make an activity name be menacing, but also straightforward and clear and have its own unique identity.”
I don’t envy them. To whoever’s at Blizzard HQ currently looking at a whiteboard with words like “DOOM LABYRINTH??” on it, I wish you the best of luck.
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