It’s tough to understand why Diablo III recycled the settings of its predecessors when there are dozens of new alternatives, unless we frame Diablo III as an installment in a series that now has its own genre conventions. It’s the rough equivalent of a Metroid game having a lava area and an ice area—it’s just the way things are done.
The question of setting choices came to my mind last night as I finished up Act I and headed to Act II, only to find myself taking a caravan from Tristram to the desert just as I did in Diablo II. We’ll see if I end up searching for tombs again.
Out in the desert
Not that the repeat of settings is a bad thing, just like naming a street “Market Street” or some running water “Deer Creek” are not bad things. But with a whole world of possibilities, you might wonder why the team didn’t seek to inject something new in the scenery.
My hope is that this was the knee-jerk reaction of a new team taking over somebody else’s legacy and wanting to maintain the association with the previous versions. Maybe we will see new places when the first expansion comes along.
Of course, that brings up the whole topic of Blizzard and expansions. Will this be in the old Blizzard model, where we’ll get just one expansion, but it will show up in a year? Or will we see a few expansions, but have no idea when they will show up?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Perhaps a bit of a different perspective on it, Tristram essentially looks like the middle of nowhere on the map in the far west. To get to any actual civilization, you have to go east where the cities are. Makes a bit of sense that way. Though, if act 3 puts me in a swamp, I think I’ll start agreeing with your idea, since act 3 in D2 you went down a river rather than traveling east.
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@Antivyris – The article mentions where the third act goes, and it is another location from D2. Again, not bad. I just hope they’ll feel less constrained with any expansion.
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I thought the same thing, it’s like when they remade Psycho shot for shot. “OK, so in D2 we had an ancient horadrim mage with hidden secrets in desert tombs. Lets do that again.”
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I found this extremely lazy. They had so long to do it and we follow the same path as D2 again?
D3 is an excellent game but the story and setting team really let down the franchise here. The cheesy super predictable story was a waste of a ton of potential.
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