Diablo III’s Excellent World Design Still Ensnares My Brain

Being big by being small

Diablo III’s varied world is held together by its bright aesthetic. Screenshot taken by the author.

Diablo III’s game world is objectively much smaller than the one found in its recent sequel, yet a shrewd combination of design, pacing, and dungeon depth makes it feel so much larger.

I was initially excited to hear that Diablo IV would take place in a stereotypical modern “vast open world,” though the game didn’t quite turn out how I hoped it would. While the overworld area is indeed one large series of interconnected seamless zones, it’s also lacking any kind of organic transition between them. They’re just shoved up next to each other, and their colors and biomes change almost at a hard borderline when you run between them.

The world complexity of Diablo IV is further hampered by the simplicity of its dungeons. Rather than the large sprawling multi-level nightmares you might expect from the history of the franchise, they are instead often contained to one small flat plane. They have some random quest elements, but otherwise lack variety, and they feature little in the way of intentional design. Dungeons pull their objectives from a random pool of possibilities, rather than presenting bespoke challenges built around their specific art and geometry. There are a ton of them, sure, but they all quickly blur together into a samey pool of mush.