What could Blizzard do with the Diablo franchise?

Since we’ve heard nothing about a new Diablo 3 expansion (and the Necromancer is clearly not tied to any new expansion) I’ve found myself musing a lot about what I’d do next if I was in charge of Diablo as a property. Of course, no one’s surprised that I want a sandbox RPG out of Blizzard, and Diablo has been the flagship title for Action RPG’s for decades now, so it’s possible we could see something like that in the future and I’d be down. But what else could we get?

Overwatch does the FPS multiplayer experience about as well as could possibly be done. We just wrapped up StarCraft 2 and I’m not sure if we’ll get any more RTS out of Blizzard, and if they were going to go in a 4x direction, I’d expect it from the StarCraft setting first. Heroes does the MOBA and has Diablo characters in it, Hearthstone covers the TCG market and World of Warcraft is the MMO property Blizzard’s got rolling. Is Diablo just going to soldier on as a dungeon crawling action RPG? If so, that’s hardly a bad thing, but could it be more, and more importantly, should it be more?

I won’t lie, I’d love a Diablo 4 that was basically more of the same D3, which has become an amazingly fun loot grabbing dungeon crawler. I honestly think it’s better than Torchlight and I freaking love that game. But I’d also love to see a game that could really dig into some serious story, and story has been one of the ways the Diablo games tease more than they deliver. So I’m torn on this one.

What about you, gentle reader?