"One of the concerns about putting 'open world' in a big Diablo 4 Gold 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'," Fergusson said. "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."
Diablo 4 is "more of a branching story," he said, and players can choose the order in which they play its major parts—and then play them in a different order in a replay, to get a different sort of experience as a result. Naturally, there will also be plenty of opportunities to horse around with other things and ignore the main quest if you want.
"That's the nice thing about the open world, there's a lot of side quests, there's a lot of things in the world that you can go and do that aren't on the campaign golden path," Fergusson said. "And the fact that the golden path is a branching path that you can decide when you want to do those branches and what order."
Diablo 4(opens in new tab) will have an open world, but Blizzard hasn't been very clear about what exactly that means. In a new interview with IGN(opens in new tab), game director Joe Shely and Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson went a bit deeper on what players can expect when they return to the world of Sanctuary.
"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'," Fergusson said. "That's not really our buy Diablo IV Gold 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."
