Diablo III Devs Agree On Open World Mode

Looks like the Blizzard devs want an open world mode in Diablo III too:

Blizzard tracker: June 25, 2013

'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.

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