Diablo 4 interview: Devs break down quest design process, building new zones, more

We spoke to Diablo 4 developers Naz Hartoonian and Harrison Pink about the upcoming sequel’s many new questlines, zone designs, and more.

Creating a game is no easy feat. This is especially true when creating a new entry in one of the most beloved game franchises of all time. Diablo, originally released back in 1996 has been a staple of Blizzard’s repertoire ever since, with fans adoring the ARPG since its inception.

With a new entry on the horizon, we spoke to senior quest designer Harrison Pink and game producer Naz Hartoonian about the upcoming Diablo 4, diving into their design process while working on the highly-anticipated game.

Both Hartoonian and Pink worked on the quest design team for Diablo 4, producing and creating the many stories that players will experience in the new release.

Stories both old and new

When it came to the main story of Diablo 4, the devs were aware of the many concepts that the franchise had previously built upon, with many characters and names likely unknown to newly arriving players.

“When we worked on Diablo IV, we knew it was the fourth game in a long-running franchise and there’s a lot of high concepts on characters, places, and names. And what we didn’t want to do was upturn the bucket of proper nouns on top of the player in the first five minutes of the game.” Pink stated.

Therefore they tried to roll out these existing terms and concepts to players slowly, introducing them to the various facets of Diablo over time.

“We tried to roll out the concepts slowly enough that you can get your grounding if you don’t know anything about the Eternal Conflict or Sanctuary or Angels or Demons or any of that stuff, we try to onboard a lot of players. We are aware this will be a lot of players first Diablo game, a significant amount of players will be coming from Diablo III, and a significant amount of players will be coming from Diablo II and Diablo I, but we know a lot of players will never have played any Diablo game before.”

Designing side quests in Diablo 4

Juxtaposing the main campaign of Diablo 4 are the multiple side quests on offer to players who wish to explore Sanctuary a little more. As far as the design team saw it, side quests in Diablo had two different purposes.

“Side quests in Diablo IV basically do two things. Well, they do a lot of things but the main things we want them to do are help flesh out a certain town, a certain region of the world… The second thing is taking you to different places in the world that you might not otherwise go to” Pink explained.

Hartoonian further echoed Pink’s sentiment and spoke about how side quests can often offshoot off of the main campaign, bringing light to characters previously unknown.

“We have ones that build off of what was brought up in the campaign, we have some characters that are really mysterious in the campaign and you want to know more about them. So we want to build off of those types of characters, lean on their backstories, learn a bit about themselves as a character.”

Diablo 4’s new open-world design

Another new addition to the Diablo formula is Diablo 4’s more open-world approach. According to the devs, this allowed for Sanctuary to come alive as its own character within the game.

“We never had a chance to let Sanctuary be its own character. This was the game where we felt this was the time to do it, we have the technology, we have the right people, and we want to do a story about the creators of Sanctuary. Inarius and Lilith were the big forces of the story from the very beginning and it felt like a perfect match to make Sanctuary the world that they created as a place you can naturally roam.”

Pink wanted to bring about an entirely new experience into Diablo, one that even veterans of the franchise would experience for the first time.

“Diablo I, II, and III, you never really got the ability to do that without going through loading screens, the maps were a little bit smaller, and you were sort of constrained to a specific route that you could take. You never really got to see the breadth of the entire place, so we wanted to give players the opportunity to live in Sanctuary in terms of what’s the new thing Diablo can bring to the franchise.”

This open-world design also lent itself to the gameplay of Diablo 4, as it gave players more options to play the way they wanted.

“We wanted to offer a bunch of different things that the player is able to do in the open world, just to provide that sense of ‘Oh my god, there’s so much content that I could play’ and that sense of excitement and that thrill that comes with entering dungeons or pursuing different sidequests or whatever you’d like to do,” Hartoonian explained.

The various zones of Diablo 4

The most important aspect of this world design however was differentiating the various locations within Sanctuary. The zone design team ensured that no zone would be too similar to one another, as well as implemented visual clues to help transition players from zone to zone.

“In terms of biomes, we wanted to make sure that each zone didn’t feel like one thing. For example, Hawezar isn’t just swamp in all directions, there are rocky high lands, there’s the shore with all the broken shipwrecks, there are absolutely swamps but there are also flatlands like watershed plains and rivers. We wanted to make sure that we really make the place feel geologically real, and that it’s not a theme park.”

“By that I mean it’s very easy to say we’re going from Fractured Peaks into the Dry Steppes so you just go one screen over and now it’s just arid grassland where you were just in the snowy peaks. But if you travel the route you can see you’re actually coming downhill, the snow starts to peter out, the snow drifts stop, it starts to get replaced with water as you can see it melting and turning into waterfalls. And you kind of hop across the stones and see tufts of grass that’s kind of green coming out, and the further you go into the Dry Steppes it starts to dry out and become brown.

“So the transition to those spaces really feels as geologically true as you can fit within the bounds of a video game obviously.”

Diablo 4’s “wow” factor

With all these new changes in the works, it’s clear that Diablo 4 will be a big step forward for the franchise. Dexerto asked the developers what they thought would be the “wow” factor behind this new entry in particular. As a fan of the open world, Pink was keen for players to be able to explore all that Sanctuary has to offer.

“For me, it’s being able to walk across Sanctuary. I’ve been working on this game for a number of years now and I still get excited to get on a horse and ride from Scosglen all the way down through Dry Steppes into Kehjistan with no loading screens and just watching the weather change, watching the biomes change, watching the monsters change, like all the architecture changes.

“I’m the kind of discovery player who likes to explore environments and see what’s behind the waterfalls and find all the treasure chests and stuff, so being able to explore a massive space that all fits within the Diablo universe is the most exciting thing for me, just as a player.”

Hartoonian, however, had a different take, explaining that they’ve enjoyed being able to ingrain their created character into the narrative.

“For me, it’s the fact that you get to play your way. I’m someone who really likes to customize my character and the fact that I have that opportunity in Diablo IV is something that I am really excited about. We have a very robust character creation system that our artists and UI designers worked really really hard on so I’m super excited to actually get that into the hands of the players cause I know there are a lot of people who are excited to see themselves, their characters in these cinematics that we have in Diablo IV.”

Even though their opinions differed on what they believed the wow factor was, the devs both agreed that many people have placed their heart and soul into Diablo 4, and are incredibly keen to get it into the hands of players.

“It’s going to sound very corny, but we had several hundreds of developers work on this title, and we all put our heart and soul into this and we seriously can’t wait to get this in front of players. I know that people will be really really excited to see everything that we’ve worked on.”

“You’ll never play Diablo IV for the first time ever again, you only get one chance to play it for the first time and experience everything. So, soak it all in, just enjoy it, really just look at all the incredible things that have been put into the game, it’s just been a labor of love and a labor of passion for a lot of really talented people who have really put their hearts and soul into making the best possible Diablo IV they can”

Diablo 4 launches on PC, Xbox X|S, and PlayStation 5 consoles on June 6, 2023.