Diablo IV is an action RPG first. Blizzard is trying to make Sanctuary feel bigger by including local events and players appearing alongside you to help with these events. However, this design approach should feel more organic and not feel like group activities in an MMO.
Players will be able to use mounts to traverse across long distances. World Bosses are encountered in the open-world areas. The open-world is fixed, and not randomized. While the game has shared-world elements, it is not an MMO.
Towns may become social hubs for a player once key story elements have been completed. Roads link various areas—sticking to the roads allows players to bypass monsters, while heading off the path will take them towards higher monster densities. Each zone has associated renown that the player can earn. The campaign is expected to take 45–50 hours to complete on a first playthrough.
How have you tried to retain that traditional sense of what Diablo feels like to play with these light MMO elements, where you get these social experiences?
Joe Piepiora: From the design side, it is important to us that the player feels they are isolated as they wander around the world. Particularly when you're not in cities, the likelihood of you coming across other players is fairly low. We don't allow for a very high number of players to exist in the regular regions around the world.
While Diablo IV has MMO-esque features, it is not divided into server regions. The game's regions are all their own separate instances with varying numbers of players in each, meaning that players will gracefully transition from one densely populated area to a more sparsely populated one without realizing it. For instance, towns have high population caps, and players will generally see each other here. Overworld zones have lower caps, so player encounters will be less frequent. The cap soars for World Bosses, in order to allow players to team up to defeat them.
In a Diablo 4 dev update, game director Luis Barriga took the time to clarify that Blizzard’s sequel definitely isn’t an MMORPG, despite some similar features. “Our goal has always been to incorporate elements from shared world games without the game ever feeling like it’s veering into massively multiplayer territory,” Barriga explained.
“To be clear, this is a philosophy rather than a tech limitation. We find that the game stops feeling like Diablo and the world feels less dangerous when you see other players too often or in too high numbers,” he continued.
Despite technically existing in a shared world, all dungeons and key story beats are experienced privately between you and your party – no interruptions from randoms. However, you will find other players roaming around in towns when there isn’t a story moment happening, and you’ll probably want to coordinate with others during large world events.
- Kevin Martens
A Diablo MMO was intended for development by Blizzard Entertainment. It was the goal of the Diablo III development team to "evolve" the setting in such a manner that it would be able to support an MMO (Jay Wilson had previously voiced the opinion that the lore as it stood in Diablo II was not diverse enough to support an MMO). It has been postulated that the Auction House and always-online requirement of the PC version of the game were signs of this.
The idea has since been dropped.
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