Just had an idea of a cool spinoff game that could bring characters down to earth a bit, make the gameplay more methodical, gritty, and increase stakes.
It may sound silly at first, but I’m feeling it could have some cool potential - what if you took a role of a caravan merchant (maybe someone similar to or Gheed himself) trying to build trade routes throughout sanctuary during those 20 years between D3 and D4?
Through your journeys, you are hiring mercenaries to fulfill difficult tasks. Mercenaries include: Barbarians, Sorcerers, Necromancers, Paladins, Druids, Rogues/Amazons, Assassins and etc. All mercenaries come with different limited skillsets, but you can adjust them by improving your caravan and same mercenaries can contribute by looking after food storage, alcohol, medical stations, entertainment and etc.
Each town or settlement may have different needs of defending, fending starvation or settling inside corruption.
You plan your next steps and missions by the caravan bonfire resembling d2 character selection and you choose a character that goes out to either collect something, scout area or defeat a certain obstacle/enemy.
In the mission, you control the ragtag group (similar to what we saw in D4 cinematic) of selected Two mercenaries (both can be controlled in local co-op) you may have a second mercenary controlled by UI and switch between them tactically. There is also a chance to meet others online - may be similar to something they are working out for D4.
If your mercenaries die on a mission, they are actually dead. Nevertheless, your progress with them is not completely lost, because you can still send others to retrieve items they lost back to the hellhole where the previous character went, but then you have to defeat possessed corpse of the comrade you may have spent quite a bit of time together.
There may be a mechanic that also lets you execute exorcism, but the retrieved character may be damaged for a while. Getting it back to where he was may consume a lot of resources, so you have to weight if it is worth keeping it or just send him to a madhouse or something.
You are always a few steps behind evil and struggling to get through each day. The difficulty of the game rewards smart plays and custom scenarios build personal relationships and stories about the characters.
I hope you like the idea. I don’t expect to see anything like that in the future, but I felt it was really capturing the essence of D2 and worth just writing it down.