After dabbling into live-service territory with the seasonal model in the previous entry, Diablo 4 charts brave new territory for the series as the first live-service game in the franchise's history. One of the components that Blizzard included to ensure that players would have plenty of reason to keep returning to Sanctuary is the largest map that any game in the series has featured to date. Diablo 4's Sanctuary is a massive and sprawling world bursting with activities for players to engage in as they attempt to thwart Lilith's evil plans, but the size of the game's map comes at a cost.
As a live-service title, the endgame will ultimately be the determining factor in what keeps players coming back along with Blizzard's plans to support Diablo 4 post-launch with new content. While its large map offers plenty of options for players to keep revisiting Sanctuary after beating the main story, the size and scope are offset by a lack of variety in dungeon layouts and enemy types.
How Diablo 4's Map Helps the Game
According to the game's developers, Diablo 4's main campaign takes somewhere in the window of 30 to 35 hours to complete. This estimate has since been corroborated by the first players to roll credits on the game's main narrative during review and early access periods, with the average player able to complete the game's campaign in about 30 hours.
Still, the campaign of Diablo 4 is only a fraction of its available content. The map of Sanctuary is massive and split up into five distinct regions, each with its own dungeons, enemy types, side quests, and strongholds (among other activities to complete). Simply put, players hoping to spend more than 30 hours in the world of Sanctuary have been granted an expansive space in which to continue returning to Diablo 4.
The fact that Blizzard has constructed such a massive world that is feature-rich and ready for countless hours of exploration at launch is a boon to players hoping to get the most out of Diablo 4. When one takes into consideration the canvas that Blizzard has provided for future content to be embedded in, the game's live-service future seems quite bright. Even though players are completing the game's campaign in an average of 30 hours, it's possible to spend nearly that much time on Act 1 alone thanks to the sheer scale of the opening area of Sanctuary's map, and there's only more to come.
How Diablo 4's Map's Size and Scale Limit Its Variety
However, the massive scale and scope of Sanctuary's map come at the cost of variety and uniqueness among its environs. Each of the five regions features distinct biomes for players to explore, but ultimately many will find themselves doing a lot of the same activities across the map, albeit in different locations. One area that seems to have somewhat suffered due to the sheer scale of Diablo 4's map is dungeon design, as many of the dungeons that players will be spending plenty of time in have the same basic layout or gameplay loop.
Of course, Nightmare Dungeons, Capstone Dungeons, and other activities do instill some variety in gameplay, but some players may not want variety at the cost of a drastic difficulty spike. Additionally, the enemies and encounter scenarios that players will engage in as part of Diablo 4's dynamic World Events are very similar across each of the map's five regions and lack any distinct flair or variety outside a seemingly limited pool of event types.
As a result, it's hard not to see some of Sanctuary buckling under its own weight as the largest map of any Diablo game to date. Blizzard's post-launch and live-service plans for the game will hopefully see the map get injected with more variation and utility given its size.
Diablo 4 is available now in early access with its full launch coming June 6 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
