Shattered Sanctuary is upon us, and in this latest update to Diablo Immortal, none other than Diablo himself makes his much-awaited return to wreak havoc on Sanctuary.

In an interview with Senior Narrative Designer Ryan Quinn and Senior Game Designer Nan Jiang, we delved deep into the inspirations behind the return of the titular character to Diablo Immortal in the Shattered Sanctuary update, what players can look out for when the event drops, and why this event should be one you shouldn’t miss out on.

*This interview was edited for clarity

Diablo Immortal Shattered Sanctuary Interview

Q: It’s interesting that Diablo has finally been brought back. Is it possible that we’ll see other bosses from other games return such as Malthael or Lilith?

Quinn: For those of you who’ve played a lot, you can see we’ve brought back Albrecht, we’ve brought back Leoric, we’ve brought back the Countess. For us, it’s kind of like a 50-50 balance between nostalgia and bringing out the old hits and characters that people know and trying to make something new. That’s been one of our guiding lights since the early development of Diablo Immortal. I think we’ll continue on that path. There are some classic bosses that I can definitely see an easy path to bring back that we’d love to bring back.

Q: Will there be a chance in the future that we’ll see more collaboration events with other games, like the recent Diablo Immortal and World of Warcraft Collaboration event?

Quinn: We had an awesome time doing it. We’re huge fans of WoW on the team, some of us have been working on and playing WoW for a very, very long time. So we’re really excited to see the positive response. Nothing to share about new collaborative events or anything like that, but we’re jazzed to see the people are enjoying it.

Q: Shattered Sanctuary wraps up the age of unmaking and kicks off a new chapter for the main story. How did you approach making this transition feel exciting for players while still leaving room for future adventures in the Diablo Immortal universe?

Quinn: From our perspective on the narrative team, if we spend a long time building up to something like back in Realm of Damnation, at the release of Diablo Immortal originally is when we started talking about Diablo’s return. So that’s been a little bit. And so we’re really obligated to resolve it in a substantial way. So not just fighting Diablo, but seeing new exercises of his power, seeing how he directs his minions, seeing his influence creeping across the land.

And then, you know, when we complete a story arc, we also want to spend a little time in the aftermath. We want to give you and everybody who plays the game an opportunity to take a breath and experience catharsis and see the resolution of what’s going on. So we’ve got a lot of big emotional moments and a lot of brutal fights in World’s Crown, but we are also pretty serious about setting up in this story arc where we might go next and especially what kind of challenges we might face in the future.

If we are able to defeat Diablo, and, no spoilers, but should that happen, there’s going to be a pretty big power vacuum here on Sanctuary, and there’s going to be a pretty big power vacuum in Hell.

Q: Did you sneak in any hidden lore or Easter eggs or nods to previous storylines that players should keep an eye out for?

Quinn: Yes. Most of the stories and big characters have hidden lore and backgrounds in spades. It’ll be really hard for you to miss when you play through. We’ve even got a comic that’s coming out that focuses on one critical character in the story and their relationship to Diablo. So yeah, there are lots of hidden gems if you dig.

Q: Challenger Dungeons with random modifiers sound super fun. What were your main goals when designing this feature, and how do you see it evolving to keep both new and veteran players hooked on the endgame?

Jiang: Looking at the data, our players really love dungeons. You can imagine how long players spend in dungeons. We hoped to build something more dynamic, more challenging, and more rewarding opportunity for players because they keep playing the same content, so we want to add something refreshing to that experience.

Quinn: We see the challenge dungeons as an opportunity to reward people who are pushing their builds and pushing their technical skills by learning monster patterns and mastering their layout. As a player, that’s always super fun for me. It feels like learning a new martial art or learning a foreign language. You can really dive into it, and there’s no limit to how much you can spend fine-tuning. But as we put out this kind of initial set of modifiers, we will keep an eye on it, see what people like, see what people don’t like, and we’ll factor that into any sort of future development we might do on challenge dungeons themselves.

Q: World’s Crown features iconic enemies from earlier Diablo titles. How did you decide which fan favorites to bring back, and what design adjustments were made to modernize them for Diablo Immortal?

Quinn: A lot of us are big fans of Diablo I. We find its tone and its claustrophobic atmosphere really, really inspiring. We ran really, really fast to the chance to bring back the Viper, which was a monster that a lot of people felt was really memorable in D1. Back in Tristram Cathedral, we brought back the Butcher. We like that sort of old-school gothic dungeon delve tone.

For World’s Crown, the zone’s experience is not that. The zone is a big, horrifying, demonic battlefield, and so we felt like we had to level up the Viper a little bit; give it this sort of massive, horrifying form that shows that, with the World Stone in his hand, Diablo can just tinker with the flesh and the power level of everybody in his army, transform them, add spikes, add horns, and go a little bit crazy.

We also think quite a lot about how our monster design needs to challenge players and what the needs of a particular zone spawn are. It’s as big a factor as what we think is cool or what the needs of the story are when it comes to bringing back classics or rolling out new monsters.

Q: Aside from challenger dungeons, how does this patch introduce other systems or mechanics to keep players coming back for more?

Jiang: We have so much exciting content coming to players. We have the new Helliquary bosses; three bosses are coming up, and they are very challenging, very powerful, full of evil, and have very new mechanics to challenge players. The biggest adjustments made here were the teamwork mechanics, but that is super hard because we have to balance it and optimize it even when you play solo.

Another one will be the Diablo challenge. Players are excited about these fights, but those were story-only bosses, so players ask if they can repeat it. The answer is a big yes. You will have a replayable Diablo dungeon that you can play yourselves or with teammates.

We’re also introducing the very first AFK feature in Diablo Immortal. You’re able to send your familiar out and let them complete some missions and daily quests for you.

Q: Can you elaborate on the narrative significance of Diablo’s return in the Shattered Sanctuary update? How does this tie into the overarching story of Diablo Mortal and the Age of Unmaking?

Quinn: So, Shattered Sanctuary as a storyline, it’s all about what Diablo can do with the power of the Worldstone Shard. If he’s able to unmake Sanctuary and fuse the remains with the Realm of Terror, his home plane of the Burning Hells, he will have an endless diet of fear from everybody who survives. All of those lesser evils in the Hells that have always been pesky annoyances to him and his brothers will have to bow down and obey him. No more casting him out of Hell and sealing him on the mortal plane. So really what this patch is about, narratively, is Diablo’s use of near-unlimited power.

In terms of the overarching story ties, those of you who’ve played know that Diablo always has plans within plans within plans. There’s always a backup for the Lord of Terror. So we see this arc as kind of the climax of the story that we started in Realm of Damnation and the end of the Age of Unmaking storyline, but it is absolutely not the end of Diablo Immortal’s story. I talked about the power vacuum that will be left in the wake of this conflict, and that is going to affect demons, that is going to affect mortals, and that is going to affect the land of sanctuary itself.

Q: The battle with Diablo will be the biggest boss fight to date. New skills, effects, pressure, and monster density. Can you provide more details on what players can expect from this encounter and how it differs from previous boss battles?

Jiang: When you compare to previous bosses, we bring that to the narrative team and the content team, so they can give us a framework. After that, our systems team will try to come out with core mechanics that is based on the background story and the nature of the boss. We will only have one core mechanic but filled up with many other small mechanics. The timeline usually will be three to six months.

With the Diablo fight this time, we actually spent over one year… I think it could be even longer because we promised our Diablo fight from the launch of Diablo Immortal. I think the Diablo fight will have more than three core mechanics, so it’s super huge, super big, and super amazing.

Q: The new zone, World’s Crown is described as a vast landmass with unique and twisted horrors. What inspired the design of this zone, and what challenges and experiences can players look forward to when exploring it?

Quinn: So we started off knowing that we wanted to go somewhere in utmost north in Sanctuary. We took a lot of environmental inspiration from Antarctica, but also from Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, sort of like cooling lava flows. We had in mind this idea that like Diablo’s power with the Worldstone would banish all life from this region, and so there would be no flies on corpses, there would be no decay. Things would just sort of die and then sit there, and that sort of corpse blanket, blood lake, these sorts of frozen in desolate time sub zones, that’s like, that was one of the things that was most inspiring to us.

We wanted to make something that felt big and surreal and kind of like a metal album cover because we have done a lot of environments that we love, we think are awesome, but they are natural environments. We wanted to do an environment that showed that the Worldstone could transform just about anything.

In terms of the challenges, we had a bunch of new monster families. We have an updated all-new Shardborn monster family. We have a ton of new terror demons. You heard me talk about the Viper before we’ve reskinned a lot of the terror demons and terror cultists that you encountered in World’s Crown. We’ve got a bunch of new unique monsters. We’ve got bounties. It is going to feel like a very challenging zone.

Q: Diablo comes equipped with new abilities, courtesy of the reality-altering Worldstone Shard. Can you discuss how these new abilities were conceptualized and how they integrate into the lore and gameplay of Diablo Immortal?

Quinn: We always try to begin with what would be cool, what do we think would be awesome and inspiring for us to see, and then we sort of shift into the realm of how do we make this fun and how do we make this fit within the real fiction of the world of Sanctuary? You have to make it feel real. You have to make it feel credible. So in our story, the Worldstone Shard is an artifact of creation. It was used long, long ago by Lilith and Inarius to essentially forge Sanctuary, and so we wanted it to have creation-like abilities, summoning tons of monsters, warping reality, fusing realms together, and hurling the player into other dimensions. Those are the things that we feel are within the scope of what you would expect based on what you know of the Worldstone Shard.

But ultimately, we don’t want to limit ourselves to just that. Once we get into the stage of coming up with a boss design, that’s where it starts to synthesize. And that’s where we start coming up with cool new ideas. We start bending and twisting the fiction in little ways to make the boss fight experience more powerful.

Q: Could you maybe share a story during development that stood out to you that made you think and feel that this update is going to be something special, not just for the team, but for players as well?

Quinn: I think for me, seeing the initial environment art for World’s Crown. We have this lake of blood that spans an entire sub-zone. We have a pyramid made of corpses that towers over the horizon. We have this basalt crater that digs down into the earth, this underground cavern system with tar welling up like in a river. And these are all things that we talked about in the conception phase, but seeing them come to life and look radically changed… It’s like going to the moon. It’s just so radically different from anything else we’ve ever done, but it doesn’t feel wrong. When I see it, when I look at this horrifying environment of destruction, I’m like, oh, yeah, we did it. And when we’re going through playtests and our senior producer, Brad, is looking at these environments and the monsters that are crawling out of them and going, this is kind of making me feel sick. That’s how I know, like, okay, we did it. We got there.

Q: Any last words to players looking forward to the new update?

Quinn: I just want to say thanks. Thank you for playing and for caring about this game. For us on the team, we’re fans, players, and enthusiasts as well as game developers. I think most of us were fans, players, and enthusiasts first, and then we got into game development. So it’s just really humbling and I am just really honored to be entrusted with Diablo and Tyriel and Eldruin and being able to take these cool little army men and put them in a big climactic environment and put on a show with these icons that mean so much to us and mean so much to so many people.

This is the biggest zone we’ve ever done since I joined the team. We’ve been working on it for a long time. We’re very proud of World’s Crown. Finishing a story arc is always bittersweet, but we’ve been talking about Diablo since we launched the game, and we’ve been teasing his return since 2022, so I’m also really, really, really excited to get to the culmination of this arc and there’s more to come. Diablo Immortal’s story is far from over.

Jiang: I really want to say thank you to everyone. You guys are the best and we’d really love to hear from you. We hear a lot of complaints, and while it’s not always perfect, we appreciate that the players give feedback and tell us how to make the game better. 100%, we hear you and we’re going to optimize the game even better. We will keep making the game better.

Thank you to Ryan Quinn, Nan Jiang, and Activision Blizzard for this opportunity!

Are you looking forward to Diablo Immortal’s latest Shattered Sanctuary update?