The world of Diablo V

Sanctuary is not the world Diablo IV left behind. Diablo won, and what this section documents is the place that victory produced: Westmarch as a throne rather than a city, a continent used as the staging ground for an assault on the High Heavens, and a population whose souls are counted as materiel in it.

The part that changes how you play is the ground itself. Blizzard describes a Sanctuary that is procedurally altered between visits - terrain, points of interest, the enemies present, the rewards and the degree of demonic corruption can all differ the next time you cross the same area. The team's stated intent is that this reads as Diablo's rule advancing rather than as a dungeon generator being shuffled. We file that separately below, because an intention is not a mechanic.

What follows from it is the absence at the centre of the design: there are no permanently safe cities left to return to. A travelling caravan of survivors takes their place, and because that is a system rather than a place it is documented under gameplay systems.

Everything here is filed the way everything on HellCodex is filed. The table below is built from the codex records themselves, so each line carries the state it is actually in - published by Blizzard, said by a developer, or still open - and the source you can check it against. Where we read something into the material rather than quote it, the sentence doing the reading says so.