Forest of Immolation is a unique area that we had in our draft concept that we were talking about last year. It hasn’t been brought up because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There is a lot of art and animation around it, but, somehow the storyboarding doesn’t line up.
So, somehow, “we” have the idea that Diablo somehow originated from this forest. This is a problem with the canon, because the forest isn’t really evil, and doesn’t support the story. We got stuck arguing about what Diablo is, both as a character and as the game and the franchise and so on, and we haven’t been able to put it to rest.
We like to think of Diablo as the divine manifest of Prime evil. Not a forest troll.
The Forest of Immolation is actually a pretty good area. It is a forest of trees, and the trees have leaves that burn. So, the wind effects look really good, because all this fire is flying around, and there are stumps that are molten, and other unique features. It looks interesting, but it isn’t as major a location as the implied surrounding effort wants to make it out to be.
This is exactly what I imagined would happen in such a thread: meta-discussion from who is Diablo the entity, to what is Diablo the franchise, and what the hell is going on?
I’d like to know what the original reference was here, what thread were you in that you saw this forest thing?
We have been using a system that bases the title differently.
The basis goes like this: for example, with Diablo, the principle gets broken down by dividing the titles in this order
- Prime Evil -> Hell Lord -> Lord of Terror
Being the Prime Evil being the most important, and Lord of Terror the least. This makes the aspect surrounding “fear” less prominent. This incidentally empowers Diablo differently than we have seen before, and makes Diablo a lot more of a melee rumble, with charge, knockback and stun effects, rather than being understood as a ranged caster. Diablo, for example, waits to use Lightning Breath until bone prison is successful, not just at will. Everyone is much more determined.
This similar kind of breakdown can be applied to all the Hell Lords. We have also been unable to find “Hell” as a game mode again.
So far, we have all been able to agree about what this system means. However, as soon as we have to come back to the origins of Diablo, we get stuck with our “trees” argument again. Every time we break down the argument, the type of tree keeps “changing” and somehow we always see different trees.