Good Morning Friends! Yesterday the Diablo IV PR team dropped a video previewing the “endgame” activities that you will participate in after you hit the level cap. I had heard that it was getting more downvotes than likes, and as a result, I thought I might talk about my own feelings regarding what I saw in the video. I feel like it is important to cover some ground before I do so. I am a huge fan of ARPGs and if you sift through the last decade and a half of this blog you will see evidence of this scattered throughout its pages. Second I’ve played both very limited closed and open testing periods for Diablo IV but can only really reflect my thoughts on the open testing. It isn’t like the closed testing really gave me information that I did not gain through the open weekends, however. I’ve also already largely decided that Diablo IV is not a game being designed for me and the types of gameplay that I enjoy in ARPGs. You can read some of my comments on my experiences here, but I wanted to get this out of the way to explain that I am going to try and be balanced but I have my specific biases as does everyone talking about this game.
Let’s talk about what was outlined in the video while staring at my Beefcake Murder Hobo Barbarian from Open Beta. Essentially the video outlines a number of activities that will exist and will at least make up the early “endgame”. It also indicates that releases will be made on a semi-regular basis that will add additional “content” but we are uncertain exactly what any of that release schedule will entail. Diablo Immortal “launched” on July 7th of 2022 and has released a total of 11 “seasons” worth of content some with major changes and some with minor tweaks for an update roughly every 24 days. Diablo III has had a rather anemic release schedule going for long periods of time with no updates other than the rolling new season every 3-4 months… most of which only entail the release of a new cosmetic chase item. I expect that Diablo IV is going to land somewhere between these two with not nearly the frenetic schedule of a mobile game, but at least something dropping each quarter. How significant each drop is going to have not been explained yet. I also expect expansions that add the missing classes to the game like Crusader and potentially Witch Doctor.
I am going to start by Cataloging the Endgame Activities outlined in the video:
- Four World Tiers
- Open World
- Events
- World Bosses
- Dungeons and Strongholds
- Nightmare Dungeons
- Requires consumable “Sigil” to unlock
- Helltide Rifts (this one I am uncertain about)
- Bounty Board in the form of an Angry Tree
- PVP Areas
World Tiers
The video introduces the concept of World Tiers, and in the Open Beta, we immediately had access to two of these… Adventurer and Veteran. After completing the campaign moving to Nightmare sounds like it is gated by what they referred to as a “Capstone Dungeon”. Upon beating that dungeon you can set your world to the next difficulty which I would assume involves some grinding again and unlocking the next capstone dungeon and progressing forward. There is no clear indicator if you will need to progress through the story again at Nightmare difficulty, or if this just opens up the next Capstone Dungeon immediately. In Diablo III, the initial endgame was effectively just repeating the story over and over at different difficulties so I would hope that they do not make this critical mistake again.
It kinda feels bad that the different difficulties don’t just open up on their own. For example, in Diablo III the difficult tiers are level gated, and if you are absolutely Feeling your Wheaties you can run the entire initial campaign on Torment 1 if you so choose. This was absolutely a key mechanic before helping your friends catch up quickly to the endgame levels but zooming them through content and catchup experience is likely not going to be a thing in Diablo IV based on the limited testing I did with friends during the beta. Essentially higher world tiers feel like more of the same… same open-world areas, same events that reoccur on a schedule, and same world bosses.
It is really the World Bosses that concern me the most when it comes to Higher World Tiers. Essentially this template of keeping moving forward in World Tier is something that we experienced with Diablo Immortal. There if you fell behind the average level of your server, you simply did not have groups to do anything with. I simply could not get groups for the bosses at lower World Tiers, after taking a break from the game and seeing the majority of the server zoom ahead of me. This is probably going to be something that is rapidly a problem with this type of world design for Diablo IV unless all of the world tiers are blended together at the same time.
Nightmare Dungeons
So based on the video, there are apparently “over” 120 dungeons in the game. Now I have talked about them before and how similar they felt… with it feeling a bit like the World of Warcraft cave problem of every single cave in the game having the same layout. That aside… there is apparently the chance of having a “sigil” drop that allows you to turn a dungeon into a “Nightmare Dungeon”. Doing so adds “affixes” to the dungeon that modifies the experience. If you have played World of Warcraft since the Legion expansion, you will know this system as Mythic Dungeons. Now it does not necessarily sound like keys upgrade in this system, but using a key to unlock a game mode that adds challenging modifiers to the dungeon… is basically the same thing as Mythic. This does nothing to disprove my hypothesis that Diablo IV is an MMORPG, but whatever people generally enjoy Mythic as a game mode.
It does concern me a bit because this absolutely sounds like a “bring your own group” type experience. I am hoping that the game offers some form of matchmaking other than just spamming chat and looking for a group.
Helltide Rifts
So this one I am completely uncertain about as to if it is an actual game mode or not. During the section talking about dungeons, Joseph Piepiora specifically calls out one of his favorite modifiers called Helltide Rifts. So that would lead me to believe that this is just a subsection of Nightmare Dungeons. However on Reddit folks are specifically listing this as a game mode, and further on in the video, there is footage making it seem like this is taking place in Open World areas as well. So I am utterly confused by this, but it sounds like Rifts shown above open up, and harder mobs that don’t necessarily exist normally in an area spawn forth. So other than that I legitimately have no clue what is going on here.
It does not strike me as anything close to the usage of the word “Rifts” from Diablo III, where they were instanced content that you ran through either on a timer or until you collected a specific number of orbs. The Open World footage reminded me a bit of the raid rifts from the game Rifts, so again I am clear as mud on what this even is… or if it is just a subsection of Nightmare dungeons. Maybe the footage I think looks like Open World is just dungeons that have a more open layout. Diablo Immortal definitely had dungeon areas that looked more like just an Open World map, so maybe Diablo IV does as well.
Bounty Boards / Bounty Tree
Apparently, there is a tree that is angry with us, and it wants us to do bounties for it to make it less mad at us. I mean that is what I got from the words that were said in the video. Mechanically what I understood it as… is that there is a tree somewhere in the world that serves as the new bounty board. In Diablo Immortal conveniently located in the town was a board… and you could accept mini-quests to kill some stuff, collect some monster giblets… or do something similarly menial. Doing bounties looks like it allows folks to purchase gear. I mean I am fine with bounties as a concept, and honestly, I enjoy doing them. They were probably part of Diablo Immortal that I enjoyed the most. However, generally speaking, these are less an objective in themselves and more something that you do while you are doing other objectives. I can’t really get excited very much about this feature.
PVP Areas
We knew there would be PVP in the game, but I have to tell you right now… this is very much not a game mode for me. I will never participate in it, because I don’t really do PVP in general. I do not care about flopping my virtual schlong on the table and measuring it against other players. I am not terribly competitive in nature, and the main reason why I enjoy WvW in Guild Wars 2, is that traditionally… there is a lot of killing of NPCs and capturing of objectives and very little actual fighting. From the sounds of what was described in the video… it seems like Diablo IV pvp is something akin to the Dark Zone from The Division. This has more collectively become known as “extraction mode” where you go into a dangerous area and are trying to get back out with a resource of some sort. In this case, it is some sort f shard that you need to purify inside the danger zone, and while doing that you are flagged on the map to all players in the vicinity so they can come to kill you and take your stuff.
Again… this is not a game mode I am ever going to engage in. They specifically call out spending these shards to buy cosmetics. I kinda hate when cosmetic appearances are locked behind specific systems that I have no interest in engaging with… but I lived with that in WoW with the cool PVP armor and mounts and I guess I can live with it in the Diablo MMORPG as well.
More of the Same
I’ve already told you my biases, but there is part of me that had held out hope that the endgame was going to blow me away. The leveling game in Path of Exile for example feels NOTHING like the variety and fun of the endgame. However, what it sounds like, at least based on this PR video… is the Diablo IV endgame is more of the same type of content that you have already experienced to that point. Since I was not really feeling the experience of playing Diablo the MMORPG, then I don’t think it is going to drastically change when I hit the level cap. I’m a bit disappointed and maybe this is going to be another situation like Diablo III and we have to wait until the expansion comes through before the game actually gets good.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Diablo IV is going to sell extremely well, and there are going to be a lot of players that play through the campaign and then uninstall the game never to be seen again. I do not think they have designed a compelling endgame experience that is going to target the ARPG audience in the way that Diablo III, Path of Exile, or Last Epoch have. I think there will likely be some World of Warcraft players that eat this game up, because legitimately as I have said before it is the Diablo MMORPG. I just don’t know if there are going to be enough players sticking around after the credits roll to make the endgame feel like it is thriving.
I know that I will likely spend at least some time poking around in the game when it releases in June, but this video has done absolutely nothing to sell me on a vision for the type of gameplay experience I actually want. I didn’t even talk about the paragon board system in part because we really don’t know a ton about it. However, the footage from the video shows really boring options like what we consider “travel nodes” in Path of Exile that just reward flat stats. I still do not feel like this game is targeting me or the other players that regularly participate in seasons, ladders, and leagues. That said… I am still uncertain who the players are that are going to be sticking around and feeding Blizzard long-tailed transactional money to keep this game making money in the long term. I am glad that is not my problem to solve.