Eine offene Welt in Diablo 3? Klingt nach World of Warcraft, kann aber auch nach einer Menge Realismus und Spieltiefe klingen. Die Nephalem in den Diablo-Romanen ackern schließlich auch nicht immer dieselbe Story durch, sondern befinden sich irgendwann in einem Sanktarium, welches einfach existiert und in dem man sich frei bewegen kann.

Immer wieder wurde in der Vergangenheit die Idee laut, man könne Diablo 3 so eine offene Welt verpassen. Grimiku nahm dazu nun abermals Stellung in den Battle.net-Foren und verlinkte einen Post von Wyatt Cheng, in dem dieser die Idee nicht als völlig abwegig bezeichnete und mit dem Gedanken verknüpfte, man könnte eventuell die Monsterverteilung anpassen, wenn man eine offene Welt kreieren würde, um mehr Abwechslung in die Sache zu bringen.

Konkrete Zeitpläne gibt es natürlich noch nicht, da sich hier die CMs bislang noch sehr bedeckt halten. Es dürfte jedoch eine positive Nachricht darstellen, dass die Entwickler von der Idee einer offenen Welt teils überzeugt sind.

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I’ll quote Wyatt Cheng in this post so you guys don’t have to follow the link I posted earlier.

We’ve talked about open world, where you can skip story and cinematics. I shouldn’t use the word, talked about. That can be ambiguous, where it can mean oh it was mentioned as opposed to, no, we actually sat down and assessed the production cost, and time, and weighed it against other opportunities. We can’t chase everything at once, so we have to look at the 100 things we could do, and pick the ones that we want to do. If we do for example, a no-quest open world mode, then we might not be able to do an alternate monster distribution for an area. That’s not an accurate comparison, but we definitely look at all the things that we’d like to do. For alternate distribution, I’ll mention that: I would love if I came by an area, and it wasn’t always the same monsters. Diablo 2 did some of that, where you came through an area and the distribution was different. It still made sense artistically for the area, but there was a little more variety.

I know a lot of you would like more concrete details on dates, or even a time frame estimate, but I don’t have any to share right now. We’d still prefer to talk about things we’re working on as early as possible rather than remaining silent (caveat: I know there are some of you who may disagree with this approach). That said, I think what Wyatt is talking about sounds pretty awesome, and we’ve seen a bunch of posts from the community on this topic. A lot of you mentioned it would be cool if there was a mode where there was an open world mode with no story, and I think it’s good for you to know that there are senior developers on the same page.