Diablo 4: Was the Open World Wasted Potential?

I ran across a small rant on reddit where someone mentioned #Diablo4’s open world having more potential than what we’ve seen. I mulled over the notion since the open world has been criticized as having a negative impact on the game. In my case, I never gave the open world aspect much thought outside of the rubber banding that seemed to stem from transitioning between zones or possibly because of player load. However, I think some of the arguments and points from the post are interesting enough to examine from a broader scope.

The idea of MMORPG aspects are things I think were intended in the original Diablo 3 game. I recall reading about similar ideas of towns being these major areas where players could hang out. I’m not sure if they wanted an open world at that point but one article by David Brevik himself mentioned how some of the original Diablo 3 aspects were influenced by Ultima Online. The big idea in that article points to the social interaction between hundreds of people in a town hub. Apparently, you still would have instanced areas but I have to imagine certain aspects made its way into Diablo 4 as it was compared in that article with that vision. In addition, the original Diablo 3 had begun development in 2001 with Blizzard North, which was pre-World of Warcraft release, although WoW started after Starcraft’s release in ’98.

Now, I focused on the MMORPG aspects of Diablo 3/4 because I feel both were somewhat linked in designing the open world. I really don’t know what the actual goal was in having an open world. At least the way it was initially implemented and presented, Diablo 4’s open world seemed as a nod towards World of Warcraft since Blizzard has heavy experience in creating that type of setting. I feel that part of the idea here was to provide an exploratory experience where players could discover things along the way such as the tiny Cellar mini dungeons or the old Altars of Lilith. Along with that aspect, the game was meant to be more atmospheric with slower play initially. I remember during the original campaign at how overwhelming the world map felt initially as it slowly opened itself up over the course of the campaign and you were able to gain access to these colorful regions.

However, once the campaign was done and you conquered each region, your Renown would progress to provide rewards such as paragon points, skill points, increase Obol storage, etc. Later, this system was phased out in favor of the seasonal system. But having this old Renown system in place made exploration a huge deal originally. Part of the problem though was the tedious nature of certain aspects such as Altars of Lilith (which I think wasn’t a bad idea but the designers probably had too many which made it a pain to hunt down)

Then as Seasons became a larger part of the game where each season represented roughly 2-3 months total of effectively a specialized larger patch, Renown gradually was reduced then completely removed. In addition, having this shorter lifecycle for playing a character meant increasing the optimization for that character’s growth (or characters for alt-a-holics like myself). Increased quality of life would show up in the form of being able to teleport to dungeons rather than ride to them (which was silly in the first place), improving the horrible jankiness of the mounts, even including the Whisper turn in during one season. With regards to the open world portion, the meme of the “green Helltide” zones ended up becoming the method for Blizzard to salvage dead regions and get players to return to older zones for a short period. I think once players started prodding Blizzard with this negative stigma, the alternate colored seasonal zone died down as key features, which also meant those zones died down again.

Some people on reddit in that linked comment section mentioned how more of the focus ended up going towards instanced content like Dungeons, the Pit, Boss Lairs, Inferno Hordes, etc. In turn, there wasn’t as much focus on the open world part it felt, although things like Helltides would incorporate seasonal mechanics such as Duriel’s bugs, Chaos Portals, etc. Yet the other zones that weren’t normally affected by Helltides almost served no purpose.

Another sharp observation made was how an open world concept is better served when there’s an interactive environment. I think there were threads of an idea in place such as mining and herbs but over time those too became moot especially as crafting materials changed. Or you had the ill fated dedicated PVP zones, which now are ghost zones except for people who want easy whispers. Legion events are almost empty while Strongholds have become distant artifacts that are more of a nuisance each season as opposed to having a real purpose.

Beyond that, I think the open world for me has generally made the game unstable. Transitioning from one zone to another especially on horseback would cause these weird delays or rubberbanding. Part of optimizing your game was effectively killing off cross play because having additional players in a region would generate a lot of lag from network issues. Heck, even opening your Stash in town still causes problems with slowdown that makes no sense to me. It makes this concept of a true open world almost moot because of technical flaws that still exist.

But there are a few key causes here where I think we can see how this open world idea has failed over time. First, I think promoting seasons as a first class feature has effectively made the open world less appealing because of the conflicts in design. The original Diablo 4 leveling and progression experience were far slower. At the same time, you only had the Eternal Realm (which honestly wasn’t even a thing at that point). But not having to re-create your characters every few months encouraged this design where you could step back and enjoy checking out every nook and cranny in this giant world. It’s kinda like how World of Warcraft felt incredible the first time through but passe each time you created an alt.

With seasons though, you’re rebooting your character every few months. So the loftier goals that the older team(s) may have had in mind would be eliminated as the emphasis was on short term goals both as a monetization effort (BattlePasses!) Having this short lifespan for a character meant less attachment and trying to get through as much as possible quicker. Redoing just the Altars of Lilith or blue quests every single season just weren’t going to be feasible for most players much less enjoyable especially when the value proposition just isn’t there.

The other major issue is more an internal one from my perspective where you have a kind of team rot. This is a far larger problem because of how scandals and just the revolving door situation have made the game less about someone or a key group really having a core vision of what the game ought to be and more about KPIs as I’ve accused Blizzard/M$ of pushing in terms of what we’ve seen. But the clear outcome at this stage seems completely dictated by KPIs based on the game’s current direction.

For instance, I think when Season 2 was highly praised as a major success for the game, it may have given the team/Blizzard the wrong signals about where to place the emphasis on the game. I don’t have actual internal evidence but you can see where the game would make detours such as not pushing the old seasonal powers as much after some backlash from the players. I think in the case of seasonal powers Blizzard really shot themselves in the foot with subsequent seasons because they only used seasons to test out future features rather than determining how to reincorporate them back into the core game once the current season was done. Now, there is a clear difference to me when it comes to this idea because I view it as similar to how GGG would figure out how to pull a League back into the core of the game. I feel that many players expected and/or wanted this but Blizzard never has been able to find a sweet spot in terms of figuring out balance (and I argue that they never should have needed it which would eventually go into my standard rant against the esports culture inside of Blizzard, which for an ARPG doesn’t make a lot of sense to me).

Beyond that, the other problem is that a lot of the open world features pretty much were left to rot or that there were constant revamps to existing systems that seemed to eat away at better fleshing out the game. Now, some of those systems did need an improvement especially itemization and crafting. Yet what I’m talking about are things like Dungeons 2.0 or Infernal Hordes 2.0. Some of these revamps didn’t feel like much either to be honest. Like the Dungeon revamp with Escalating Nightmare Dungeons was honestly lame and Inferno Hordes was just boring content staying the same outside of a few updates like Soulspires or Aether Masses because neither were all that great in the first place. And even after those updates, a few like Soulspires remain soul draining (to real people).

While those things have been the focus of most of their core updates (especially now that there’s attention on War Plans to highlight the key activities in the game), the older parts have suffered especially in the open world have suffered. I’ve done my own blogs on offering advice to fixing them (and hopefully this weekend we can see Blizzard addressing these issues). But at least for now, these things aren’t high on the priority list and pretty much have been shoveled under the carpet.

When I think back about the open world problems, I think some of it is the result of having an extraneously long campaign/story mode. Most of the actual exploration occurs during the campaign (this includes the expansions). But once you’re done with the campaign, there’s not a lot of reason to return unless there’s a seasonal element. Also, depending on the season, you may get a reasonable story line to accompany that season such as 2, 3 and 7, which may require you to trek around the world. But I think trying to shoehorn more back stories into those older zones isn’t necessarily the best way to really get the most bang for your buck.

Really though the key point is the lack of interaction in the open world that probably is the number one issue where the concept has fallen short. At this stage, the open world is more of a hindrance than something that feels appealing. The only times I really see much value at this point are World Bosses and summoned bosses in Helltides. The only novel interaction I’ve had is when I used one of those Corrupted Roots in my backpack to kill some person just standing around waiting for a world boss to spawn. Otherwise, I really can’t see why the open world was conceived as a great idea.

Maybe part of it was an older idea inherent in Blizzard where they valued the early success of World of Warcraft. I think that early success was more serendipitous because of the scale and freshness of the game as opposed to the actual mechanics. Then you had the rise of social networks that coincided in timing with World of Warcraft. Those ideas may have influenced one another. However, as with my recent post on the decline in dating apps, I would argue that many of these social integrations are beginning to wear thin on people’s patience.

If we look at the utter failure of the Dark Citadel/Raid feature from Vessel of Hatred, we can see a futile/feeble attempt at Blizzard trying to recapture their early glory days from World of Warcraft’s raiding system. But I think most ARPG genre fans simply don’t want to be forced into grouping. I’ve made this argument in the past and luckily, we haven’t seen any more of this nonsense being updated (and hopefully it stays that way). But that was another case where social/group content was made into a huge feature but just withered away.

I think this idea of the open world and MMORPGs/social aspects are tied together and why neither really work well in an ARPG setting. I’m not arguing against including friends in playing a game like this but it should be more organic in how that type of environment occurs. Like Diablo 3 to me is a far better social game than Diablo 4 because it was done in a pretty straightforward manner. The only change was increasing the damage and life for enemies along with rewards to scale against the player’s team.

The other thing is that the speed in which ARPG players want in these games don’t really fit the exploratory/artistic nature that I think Blizzard had initially envisioned for this game. In turn, that vision and style simply have caused this major clash in what we have today in Diablo 4. I really hope that the team over at Blizzard understand why this game has so many problems though. The open world definitely is one of them at this stage, although I don’t think there’s much they can really do to fix the problems outside of routine maintenance to ensure older content doesn’t become completely deprecated.