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From Hell’s Heart: The Future of Diablo

by - 8 years ago

It’s been an exciting week for Diablo 3 with the release of it’s biggest patch to date and the start of Season 5. As we’ve come to expect this patch brought with it a host of new features and build possibilities, which continues the excellent post release support for the game. But do these big seasonal patches indicate something about the future of Diablo 3 or the franchise? Over the course of the seasonal patches, some big features have been brought to the table, most notably Kanai’s Cube and new zones like the Ruins of Sescheron or Greyhollow Island. Normally these are the kinds of things that you would expect as a selling point for a new expansion, which has some people raising their eyebrows.

Some may think that these aren’t enough features to build an expansion around but, in my opinion it only looks that way when you look at the updates individually. Lets have a little fun and see how how these features look as if they were announced to be coming with an expansion.

Diablo III: Lord of Terror

New Artisan

  • Extract the powers of Legendary items for passive use with the powerful new Kanai’s Cube!

New Zones: Ruins of Sescheron and Greyhollow Island

  • Visit Sescheron, the ancient lands that were desecrated by Baal and his minions.
  • Set sail to Greyhollow Island and encounter new enemies while uncovering a mysterious new story.

New Areas: The Royal Quarters and The Eternal Woods

  • Explore the Royal Quarters of Leoric’s Manor or step foot into the dark Eternal Woods of Sescheron!

New Features

  • Set Dungeons: Think you’re a master of your class? Then the new Set Dungeons will be sure to test your mastery over your classes armor sets. Each set gets a unique dungeon with unique challenges to reap exclusive rewards!
  • Empowered Rifts: Empower your rifts with gold to give you an extra roll on your Legendary Gem upgrades.
  • Ancient Legendaries: Only the most dedicated Nephalem will find these as they are more powerful and more rare than normal Legendaries!
  • New Bounties, Treasure Goblins, Class Sets, Legendaries…and more

Besides there being no new class or Act, that’s actually a pretty respectable amount of features that could come with an expansion. So that raises the question, did Blizzard cancel a second expansion only to release it’s features through content patches? If you want my honest opinion, I say no and there’s a couple of reasons why I say that. One of the reasons being it doesn’t make sense from a story standpoint, why would the next expansion consist of new zones and areas that exist in places that are already in the game? Why would we be going back to Leoric’s Manor, Act III, and Act V?

Usually a new act comes with new Diablo expansions so I’m not too on board with the idea that these new zones are from a cancelled second x-pack. I mean, I guess that they could have been adding these areas on top of a sixth act to make bounties more fresh? Who knows.

Another reason is because back in 2008, Jay Wilson said in an interview with MTV Multiplayer that Diablo 3 will wrap up the current story.

“We’re not saying this is the end of the Diablo universe, but we are trying to bring this storyline to a close. It’s not just Diablo III — we’ve got plans beyond.”

Now those plans could have changed since that was almost eight years ago but, the story for D3 doesn’t seem to have come to a close yet with the ending of Reaper of Souls being pretty ominous and open. Jay Wilson’s quote could also make a case for the possibility of another Diablo sequel since he mentions there being plans beyond the scope of Diablo 3. Which brings me to my next topic, the infamous Art Director job posting (this job posting no longer exists) for an “Unannounced Diablo Project”. Our very own Eldorian wrote a nice article about this around six months ago where he gave his opinion on the job posting. He brings up some good points like how Diablo 3 has done too financially well for Blizzard to not advance the franchise in some way.

Also shortly after Reaper of Souls released, Blizzard sent out surveys regarding how interested people would be in a second expansion. You’d have to think that those survey results were pretty positive since RoS was immediately well received and gained a lot of praise for the changes that it made to the game. Despite the fact that the vanilla game was so poorly received, RoS still sold pretty well so why would Blizzard not put out another expansion when there’s a demand for it? I honestly don’t think they need to develop a Diablo 4 when they’ve been adding so much content to RoS. Which is definitely more content than what they would be able to ship a new game with, so it makes sense for them to continue to build upon what they’ve got even further. While a D4 is possible, I just don’t see it coming any time soon.

Survey

I recently saw a conversation between Neinball and Crow with the question being “Could they even top Diablo 3 and innovate the franchise enough to warrant a sequel?”which brings up an interesting point. I don’t think that they need to try and innovate on the tried and true formula that makes Diablo III so addictive. It’s not even like the dungeon crawler action rpg market is all that competitive. Torchlight 2 didn’t really live up to expectations while Diablo and Path of Exile both have a strangle hold on the genre. Their both different enough games to the point where they don’t even really compete with each other that much.

So why would Blizzard even need to develop a new Diablo that tries to innovate and push the franchise even further? I think they would rather just play it safe and keep expanding on D3 because in my opinion, they have already innovated enough and changed it completely. It’s nowhere near the same game as it was in 2012 and it continues to sell four years after it’s release and also continues to gain a lot of praise from the community.

As a side note, there was the supposed leak of Blizzard’s product release schedule back in 2010 that showed plans for two expansions.

Release Schedule

Now some of this is accurate but take it with a grain of salt since this was never proven to be a hoax or not. But if a second D3 expansion was slated for a Q4 2014 release, then it’s possible that it got pushed back with the release of RoS being in early 2014. If I had to guess, this would also be because of all the fixing they had to do for the game in order to regain the trust of the community. Also keep in mind that games rarely hit their projected release schedules since game development can be extremely unpredictable.

All in all I still have reason to believe that a second expansion is in the works with it’s announcement coming at this year’s Blizzcon (or maybe at Gamescom again?). It’s absence from Blizzcon 2015 could be for multiple reasons but Blizzard had a lot of game announcements to cover with Overwatch bursting into the scene, new Hearthstone content, Legacy of the Void announcements, and WoW’s new expansion. 2015 was just simply not the year for Diablo to be in the spotlight, but I have a feeling that 2016 will be a strong year for it starting with the recent patch 2.4.0.

So what do you guys think? Did a second x-pack get cancelled and released piece by piece with content patches? Do you think we will see a Diablo 4 or a second x-pack? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

 

 


hotstreak

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0 responses to “From Hell’s Heart: The Future of Diablo”

  1. I always appreciate good articles about Diablo future.

  2. Breens Nick says:

    Today I stumbled upon this website, and I must say. Your articles are a joy to read.
    No typical Blizzfanboy bullshit. Solid, unbiased, love it. Keep it up !

  3. MuMzGoDz99 . says:

    To answer the fact that Diablo didn’t have anything major going on at Blizzcon 2015, they pulled out a nicely done 2.4. Then this year it’s nothing but the Warcraft movie and release of Overwatch. So I feel like D3 could get some love by Blizzard making an announcement in March/April that an expansion comes out at the same time but next year.

  4. DoflamingoGT says:

    The only thing that will save diablo is releasing a hentai movie with Imperius and Tyrael gangbanging Female Diablo from both sides