The story of Diablo 4 for the last three years is one of constant reworks and reinventions of its basic systems. Loot was "reborn" in its second season, then changed yet again last year. Even the max level you could reach was knocked down from 100 to 60 when the first expansion came out.
For anyone not logging into every season, it probably looks like Blizzard can't figure out what it wants Diablo 4 to be. And while I think there might've been some merit to that early on given the reports about its rocky development, it seems like things have settled now that we're three years out from when it was released.
But that doesn't mean major overhauls won't happen again, game director Zaven Haroutunian told PC Gamer in a recent interview. "It's almost like a meme at this point about action RPGs in general [that] go through this transformative arc, and, well, we can't escape it any more than any other action RPG can for the same reasons," he said.
Haroutunian believes it's "normal" for action RPGs to go through what he calls "transitions." "I call them transitions because the people who play an action RPG from the start, they change as they play that action RPG more and they start requiring different things," he explained. "Friction points that we could never imagine—that players might never even imagine—suddenly rear their head over the course of 10,000 hours."
He has a point: This is a genre made for people to spend thousands of hours killing monsters and collecting loot, and doing it over and over again every season. Regular seasonal updates shake up the balance and players adapt to the new normal. Diablo 3 famously had its "Loot 2.0" update and Path of Exile has spent the last 13 years shifting things around as players run into things they don't like. Path of Exile 2 has only been available for a little over a year and its next update is set to replace its entire endgame loop.
"We know that it's also really hard for players to keep up with [Diablo 4], particularly those who aren't playing at the cutting edge of everything all the time," Haroutunian said. The team has to constantly evaluate how much change should happen at once and whether or not it's worth risking players being too overwhelmed to come back.
"I said this before, I believe in it: If a part of the game isn't working, we have to give it some attention," Haroutunian said. "I don't think anyone's too thrilled about having an obsolete part of the game just sort of linger and not do its job and not contribute."
As someone who's played every season of Diablo 4, I know there are things that didn't bother me in the first year that I see as glaring problems now. Every time I look at the grid of little forgettable stat buffs to use my 200 paragon points on, I wish there was something far more interesting to pick in their place—Haroutunian specifically called paragon points a "really good example" of a system "that's starting to feel like why am I doing this?"
The paragon system won't be changing in next month's Lord of Hatred expansion, but it sounds like it's on the list of things that Blizzard would like to fix. I'm glad that I can feel confident knowing the most annoying things probably won't last forever. I just hope Blizzard can uphold that balance of recognizing when too much change is a bad thing and to be OK with leaving some things as they are—even if they don't satisfy every type of player.
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