Diablo 4’s Lord of Hatred expansion goes live in April, and one of its big draws is that players will finally get a chance to explore a location that has only been hinted at for decades. The Skovos Isles were teased in ancient texts–better known as the Diablo 2 game manual–and it’s that very same pocket-sized manuscript that inspired Blizzard to create a region that has been left relatively unscathed by the doom and gloom that has befallen Sanctuary over the centuries.
“I’ve been playing Diablo games since the very beginning, so I had that exact same feeling of like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Skovos. I get to go there. I’m going to meet the Amazons.’ I want to do all this stuff–meet the Oracles and so on,” associate game director Zaven Haroutunian said to GameSpot. “It’s someplace we’ve never really gone in this series. No game has gone deeper than a scratch into what this place is. So it was a good opportunity to kind of sit back and take stock of the series’ entire history.”
“When we were building Skovos–not just the story part, but the culture there and the characters and the history–we were going through the Diablo 2 manual trying to rediscover what we’ve said about this place,” Haroutunian continued. “We wrote everything down like, ‘Oh, we didn’t name all the islands. Let’s name islands. Let’s try to draw these things from the book.’
Haroutunian added that Blizzard had to “clean up some of the lore” as it focused on the Skovos Isles, but the developer found it exciting to bring this location to life. “One of the islands we’ve got is named Celestia, which comes right from the Diablo 2 manual as the name of a character. We had to clean up some of the lore because not everything was perfect, but yeah, it’s been fun and exciting. And honestly, that’s just the narrative and thematic parts of it. The visual side has been really cool, because we get to realize the first time we ever get to see this place in our beautiful Diablo IV engine.”
Unlike other regions in Sanctuary that are still reeling from the effects of Malthael’s cataclysmic Reaping, the Skovos Isles have prospered. The Amazons have become the protectors of the land, and the Oracles have helped to prevent unseen disasters from plaguing the people. For a closer look at how the Lord of Hatred expansion is shaping up before it goes live on April 28, you can check out our in-depth Diablo 4 interview, read up on the new Warlock class, and explore the big endgame changes in the works.
