With the new Act 5 & 6’s the games story campaign is pretty long now; it was an awesome journey through from start to finish but I’d be hesitant to go through it all over again with another character on multiple difficulties in the same linear path.
It’d be nice to see an open world mode that changes level scaling throughout the world, opens up all the town rifts from the get go and relies on faction quests, bounties, random events, boss hunting, and challenges throughout the world that can get be tackled in a non-linear fashion…
The idea is Diablo 3 is pretty cool but unfortunately the game is entirely rift-centric and doesn’t really take advantage of world map content beyond bounties.
It would be a great alternative progression and fun for multiplayer outside of the story campaign and crucible.
I considered doing a mod but I feel there is going to be a lot of headaches trying to strip the main quest out of the campaign and open it up due to all the blockades / barriers tied to the main quest.
I’ve inquired about this in the past and it sounds like it’s a bit too ambitious for the modding community due to complications around the main quest locking off B until you complete A unless you could flag the entire main quest as complete with all roadblocks removed… but the main quest includes faction alliance choices that impact large areas of the world.
Re-scaling the zones and having each Act’s town hub as open from start would be fairly easy though… I just feel as the game grows bigger and longer, forcing each character to play through the same linear quest path multiple times per difficulty becomes pretty tedious. Opening up the world fully in non-linear fashion with an emphasis on bounties, random events, challenges and non-linear questing would be a huge boon for replay ability with new characters. I would certainly love to creates mods for such a world, but to create the foundation is no small feat.
What about a mod that basically just unlocks all or certain waypoints. You can kinda do this in GD stash already to skip to where you want even if you haven’t gotten there in campaign mode yet. Maybe just make it so certain NPCs wont talk to you about quest stuff yet.
But how would that impact enemies you encounter in the later areas? As an alliance you choose with a particular faction before progressing to a certain point in the story determines hostile spawns in the following zones.