https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/o8Rq5fwe
And there’s been all kinds of speculation going on the past few days about whether or not Diablo IV will be an MMO because of the small little snippet mentioning massive multiplayer game development experience being a plus.
Diablo III is an online massive multiplayer game albeit it being concurrent instanced sessions with limited multiplayer co-op within those instances. I do believe that higher level executives at Blizzard already came to the conclusion during Diablo III’s early development that the franchise is not one that will fit well with being a completely persistent open world design (the classic MMO). The Blizzard North version of D3 was intended to be an MMO in the World of Warcraft sense in terms of sprawling areas as well as lore (the objective per David Brevik was to do away with load screens between zones).
The Diablo III team took a ton of flack for how non-randomized the instanced game world felt like prior to adventure mode/rifts in Reaper of Souls since they went with a design where the peripheries were static while the middle tiles were randomized. A persistent world like in most MMO’s is not going to be something that is welcomed by many ARPG players let alone D4 since that open world cannot be randomized nor does having a fog of war make sense. MU Legend gave their dungeon instances (interdimensional rifts) fog of war in order to give them more of that ARPG feel but the rest of the persistent open world is obviously static and does not have an initial fog of war.
Path of Exile allowed their town hubs to be filled with the characters of other players to make those areas feel more alive. Former Diablo II lead designer David Brevik noted they had to scrap plans (they ran out of time trying to implement it) for something they called Battle.net Town where instead of the chat lobby, players entered the world (sort of like Path of Exile’s town hubs) where they could do things and also see other random players, trade with them, etc.
I think this kind of design where the smaller hubs are populated with players in a channel makes sense for this genre as opposed to having larger open world areas where you encounter smaller dungeon instances (as is the case with many MMORPG’s). So that is where I expect changes to be made for D4. I would be very surprise to see them backtrack on turning the franchise into an actual MMOARPG though like Albion Online, Lost Ark, Lineage Eternal, or MU Legend though.
With that said, the personnel that fill several senior level positions (especially the content designer position) will determine how the designs in D4 will end up proceeding. D4 needs completely new blood there including those with actual ARPG design experience (not the on rails action arcade design of Diablo III).
