During a recent campfire stream, Blizzard’s developers working on Diablo 4 reflected on the most recent season, suggesting that things didn’t pan out as expected. They confirmed that the game has become far too easy and revealed that players are levelling up in ‘half the time’ compared to previous seasons, even on harder difficulty levels.
As someone new to Diablo, I can attest to that. I’m usually awful at challenging games, but even after cranking it up a few levels, I’m having no issues whatsoever with Diablo 4.
That’s set to change, though.
Prepare for Hell
When the next season rolls around in Diablo 4, players will find themselves levelling up slower and facing a tougher grind compared to the current season, which is focused on the Vessel of Hatred expansion.
In the recent campfire stream, Blizzard’s Colin Finer revealed that players are ‘chewing through some of the content’ much too quickly, hitting level 60 and securing their Paragon classification far too rapidly and with too few struggles.
In season 8, players will find that they’re levelling slower through the first 25 levels of a new character and that rarer loot – such as Legendary items – will be much harder to find.
Here’s the full campfire chat with Blizzard:
(Thanks to Polygon for the spot)
The team revealed that ‘too many’ players have found their way into the highest difficulty level of the game in record time, which represents a kind of imbalance in the player base.
Just from a philosophy standpoint, we really want whatever the hardest Torment tier is — in this case Torment 4 — to be aspirational, and to us that means around 10% (of players).
Presently, around 50% of the players in the Vessel of Hatred season have made it to the highest difficulty level. To battle back against that issue, Blizzard will be adding new, more challenging boss characters in the new season, and existing bosses will have their abilities cranked to the max.
It’ll be a while before all that arrives, though. The next season of Diablo 4 isn’t expected to drop until April 29.
Do you think Diablo 4 has gotten too easy? Let us know in the comments or on the Insider Gaming forum.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news about the latest Last of Us season two trailer
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