2. Diablo V Story
Johanna Faires: So much to unpack. Westmarch is definitely burning, and it seems like something’s gone terribly wrong. So what story are you trying to tell here?
Joe Shely: We’re a long way from the campfire. From its comfort and hope, these are the fires of Diablo, Sanctuary has been destroyed. And Diablo has won.
Johanna Faires: And Matt, I’m curious, when building the next era, what has guided you and the team on this?
Matt Zitterman: Yea, so when we started talking about what’s the next era of Diablo need to look like and what do we want to do with it, we really started the conversation thinking about players. The whole reason we’re here is to make games that our players want to play. And for Diablo, after 30 years, we’ve accumulated a very large playerbase with lots of different wants and needs from a Diablo game.
And it’s important then when we think about what we want to build and the ambitions we have for the game, that we’re making a Diablo game that is for every type of Diablo player, whether that’s somebody who is here for the story and the vibes and the dark fantasy, or somebody who is here to grind bosses and find loot and min-max their build and kind of perfect their character and that kind of everybody who falls in between. And so when we started talking about breaking ground on the next Diablo experience, we really started there.
We were looking for themes across our player groups, how players cluster together into different groups so that when we’re talking about the features and the content and the ideas for what we want to build we can always kinda anchor it back on. Which type of Diablo player is this part of the game most for? So after we started getting through that phase of breaking down and understanding our players, we spent a lot of time looking at Diablo IV and thinking about what worked really well about that game, how it’s grown over the years in response to player feedback, and where we had ambitions to try something new and bring fresh ideas to the world of Diablo.
And it was that conversation that led us to start thinking about, do we do this as an expansion to Diablo IV or do we do this as a sequel? Sequels allow us to do something really special to the game, especially a longstanding game like Diablo where we can get in and really change the fundamentals of what the game is. And that’s really hard to do when you’re building on top of a game that’s been around for several years, has had several expansions and seasons.
Making those types of fundamental changes to what the game is and how it is structured that we felt were really necessary to chase the ambition that we had for the next phase of Diablo. We really needed to build a new game. And of course, we want to bring Diablo back. We’ve all been hungry for seeing him represented in a Diablo game for the first time in a long time. And we need to do him justice, right? Like, Mephisto and Lilith are these epic characters with great stories and lots of depth to who they are and how they operate in the world of Sanctuary, and Diablo deserves that and more.
Jennifer Brandes Hepler: Tell the truth, Matt. None of us wanted to tell Diablo that his brothers get his own game and he doesn’t.
Matt Zitterman: Okay, fine. You got me. We really didn’t want to tell Diablo no. So it became clear to us pretty early on that to really do justice for what players want out of a Diablo game to give Diablo a game that he deserves to really tell the story of Diablo, we needed to do a sequel. So once we started wrapping our heads around the sequel, everything kinda flowed from there.
Johanna Faires: And Jennifer, I’m curious, how did the narrative team approach crafting the story worthy of this Lord of Terror?
Jennifer Brandes Hepler: So like Matt was saying, once we decided that this game was going to bring Diablo back, we knew we had to do it right. He couldn’t just be a final boss. He needs to be the force that’s shaping this game from its opening moments. And that’s how we decided that this time, you’re not scrambling to protect Sanctuary before Diablo can rise and take it over, because let’s be honest, everybody in this room is been doing that for the past 30 years, right?
So this time, other heroes rose up to try to stop Diablo, and they failed. And you’re living in the aftermath of what they failed to prevent. You’re living the world that all of the other Diablo games were trying to prevent from happening.
| BLIZZCON 2026 DIABLO V: FORGING A NEW ERA PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Story | 3. Art | 4. The World | 5. Classes |
| 6. Itemization | 7. Characters | 8. Environment | ||
