You would have thought that a game called Diablo 4 would star, or at least prominently feature…Diablo. But the Lord of Terror himself isn’t currently in the game at all outside of mentions and allusions, and won’t be, outside of his presence as a seasonal boss in the upcoming Season of Hell’s Legacy.
However, he is the star of Diablo 5, a fact we learned at BlizzCon this past weekend alongside the reveal of the new game. In Diablo 5, Diablo himself has taken over. He’s won. And the world is a wreck as a result, leaving us to build a resistance within that literal hellscape.
But why did Diablo (largely) skip Diablo 4? Why not add him in as DLC instead of making a whole new game? I asked senior production director on Diablo 5 Tiffany Watt and senior art director John Mueller in an interview at BlizzCon, and Mueller’s answer was rather straightforward: “Diablo’s very demanding,” he told me.
The team’s original story for the base game of Diablo 4 is about Lilith, not Diablo, which is fine and good. But once they had set off on that path, Mueller says, it would have been challenging to just tack him on as extra content.
“We do have a luxury [at] Blizzard in that Blizzard supports us in what we want to build, and I think there was no container on our vision or anything. It was like, just build the greatest Diablo game that you have a vision for. That could be an expansion, that could be a sequel, it could be anything you want. And I think that we really, when Diablo is the character, he’s going to be the center. You can’t tell a small story, and then when you decide that you’re making a sequel, and all of a sudden you have to be bold, you have to be ambitious, you have to innovate, and it kind of unlocked a lot of things for us. I think there’s a core audience that we have that really is yearning for innovation.”
Mueller also talks to me about how Diablo 4 evolved from being a somewhat impersonal story to one that was personal to the player character, who has a relationship with Lilith and Mephisto in the Lord of Hatred expansion and a personal stake in what happens. He’s proud of what the team did in Lord of Hatred, but wanted that sort of more personal, character-driven narrative to span a full game in a way it hadn’t in Diablo 4.
“You should feel like the stories matter, the characters matter, this should feel like the cast of your favorite show, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve,” he continued. “So those are the things that doing a sequel really opens up for us, because we have the talent, we have the tech, we have the skills, but the framework of the game has to change.”