As the open world sub-genre continues to expand, a greater range of design philosophies form. From the world teaming with collectibles and icons such as Assassin’s Creed and Horizon Forbidden West, to others that place exploration and subtlety at the centre of the experience such as The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, and then there’s the scope and nature of the open worlds themselves. The scale of these worlds have varied drastically, from the enormity of a world such as the one seen in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, despite its semi-open world nature, to the open world hub nature of games such as Rise Of The Tomb Raider, or The Last Of Us Part II, and the result is a lack of uniformity that keeps players consistently engaged in different kinds of open world experiences.
Diablo IV is on the way, and players are asking which of these open-world parallels will be drawn with the upcoming Blizzard title. IGN managed to get an interview with some key Diablo IV figures, Game Director Joe Shely and Diablo General Manager Rod Fergusson, to get some insight into this specific line of thinking. To the question Fergusson said,
One of the concerns about putting ‘open world’ in a big neon sign and flashing that sign is that people have that notion of the Breath of the Wild kind of, ‘Oh, it’s completely organic and I can go anywhere and do anything and eventually I can figure it out for myself’. That’s not really our story. Our story allows for non-linearity, but there is a story. We wanted to have a beginning, middle, and end. We wanted to start a certain place, we wanted to end at a certain place.
Shely followed up by discussing the impacts of mounts and the nature of the terrain that players want to explore with or without a mount.
We actually had so much stuff that getting through it on a mount was challenging, and so we had to say, okay, let’s make sure that the roads actually are connected to good places, are a good way to travel through this area so that you can get through, get to places that you’re going expediently, and also have the opportunity to go off the path and see interesting things.
In closing Fergusson shared the biggest complicating factor for any open-world designer, that you’ve got multiple camps looking for vastly different things, saying
[Players] say they want open worlds and free choice. But they also want to be told where to go.
It looks like we just don’t know what we want, but we’ll have answers soon, with Diablo IV rumoured to be on track for an April release date.
