Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Be prepared to sink a whole lot of time into exploring Sanctuary when Diablo 4 launches.
Diablo 4’s beta period is sadly over after two consecutive weekends of hellish fun, players have a lot more content to look forward to when the full game launches. A recently-released image has revealed that the beta’s map is really just a small slice of Sanctuary in its entirety.
The two beta weekends let players run through Act 1’s story quests within the confines of Fractured Peaks, which is one of the five zones that we’ll get to see in the full game. As it turns out, Fractured Peaks is actually one of the smaller zones that make up Sanctuary - and it becomes particularly tiny when viewed in the full in-game map.
Here’s what Fractured Peaks looks like in the actual map:
All in all, we really have only seen a fifth of the full game at best. Seeing as Act 1 took around 10 to 12 hours for completionists like us to clean out the map, one can only imagine how much time it’s going to take to experience everything Diablo 4 has to offer when it launches in June. Blizzard has yet to reveal the full game’s runtime, but given the fact that it’s likely to include a robust endgame, we can expect it to be around five or six times as long as the beta at minimum. That’s just based on the size of the full map above.
Diablo 4’s zones look pretty interesting, and players arguably haven’t seen the best ones yet. The four other zones we’ll see in the full game are Kehjistan, Hawezar, the Dry Steppes and Scosglen. In Scosglen, you’ll find emerald forests and wetlands inspired by Scotland, if Scotland also had a severe werewolf problem. Kehjistan is a more sandy desert region inspired by the Middle East, and Hawezar takes swamps and marshes inspired by southern United States, and throws in lava, snakes, and more murderous beasties. The Dry Steppes are meant to be a bone-dry mountainous desert region, which seems similar to Kehjistan - but time will tell how the zones differ.
These zones also have areas in between them that act as connective tissue, blending each environment together so that you don’t just pop over from dry deserts to muddy swamps in the matter of seconds. As we saw in the beta, Fractured Peaks consisted of icy mountains and barren forests, which was fun enough - but I think I’m more looking forward to Kehjistan now than anything else.
Have a look at what we thought of Diablo 4's open beta weekends here.
