Diablo 4‘s Lord of Hatred expansion goes live in April, and one of its big draws is that players will finally get a chance to explore a location that has only been hinted at for decades. The Skovos Isles were teased in ancient texts–better known as the Diablo 2 game manual–and it’s that very same pocket-sized manuscript that inspired Blizzard to create a region that has been left relatively unscathed by the doom and gloom that has befallen Sanctuary over the centuries.
“I’ve been playing Diablo games since the very beginning, so I had that exact same feeling of like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Skovos. I get to go there. I’m going to meet the Amazons.’ I want to do all this stuff–meet the Oracles and so on,” associate game director Zaven Haroutunian said to GameSpot. “It’s someplace we’ve never really gone in this series. No game has gone deeper than a scratch into what this place is. So it was a good opportunity to kind of sit back and take stock of the series’ entire history.”
“When we were building Skovos–not just the story part, but the culture there and the characters and the history–we were going through the Diablo 2 manual trying to rediscover what we’ve said about this place,” Haroutunian continued. “We wrote everything down like, ‘Oh, we didn’t name all the islands. Let’s name islands. Let’s try to draw these things from the book.’
