Summary
On its surface,Diablo 4is a well-crafted entry in the historic franchise with impressive critical reception and strong sales, but exploring its depths has disenchanted many of its initial proponents. In the series' first turn at an open world, it has become increasingly evident thatDiablo 4missed the mark on several fronts that are considered key in exceptional open world design.
Four months post-launch,firmly into its Season of the Malignant, it is hard not view the current state ofDiablo 4’s live-service journey as a game of wack-a-mole. Every balance tweak, content addition, and bolstered feature has taken aim at a sore spot of player feedback while another crops up in its reparative wake. It was crucial that Blizzard get off on the right foot withDiablo 4’s seasonal content, but that appears not to be the case. Stifling nerfs to nearly every class coupled with the convoluted Malignant Heart system have missed the mark on keeping its hooks in the player base. While this post-launch support is problematic, they can be fixed eventually, something that would not be as easy to do with the open world issues.
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Diablo 4 May Require More Substantial Changes Than a Live-Service Model Can Offer
As fans cast their hopeful gaze to theimpending release of Season of Blood, the mood has increasingly shifted to the belief that there are more fundamental issues inDiablo 4’s design than can be addressed via a seasonal live-service game model. One glaringly undercooked aspect of the game is its open world, which, as players delve into the endgame, becomes more and more of a missed opportunity. In its current state, as the grind for loot and Paragon Levels is honed to a finely-optimized point, the engagement with the open world aspects of the game are largely superfluous. Despite several passes at tuning the endgame, it remains suboptimal to do anything besides steamrolling Nightmare Dungeons.
There are some notable design choices Blizzard implemented to get people to interact withDiablo 4’s open world, but the execution is left wanting. The PvP zones, Helltide events, and world bosses/world events all seek to get players out of their routines and traversing otherwise underutilized sections of the map, but their unrewarding and time-gated nature makes those features little more than a distraction after being experienced once or twice. The Altars of Lilith and the addition of mounted traversal has done an alright job at incentivizing exploration, but both were initially hampered by design decisions.
AtDiablo 4’s launch, the plan was for Altar rewards to reset at the onset of a new season, and roads were littered with destructible barriers that impeded movement on mounts, resulting in a break of game flow. The good news is thatBlizzard compromised on the Altar reward decisionand implemented the ability of mounts to charge through those barriers, spelling hope for the game’s open world future. Still, unavoidable is the bottom line that exploration lacks a sense of discovery or any meaningful secrets to unearth.
On October 17,Season of the Blood will be unleashed, with its vampire-focused quest line and powers, along with quality-of-life features and a stimulus of new world bosses for players to conquer. While its release will surely provide a boost to player engagement and reception, nothing that has been revealed so far strikes at the heart ofDiablo 4’s open world woes. The campaign continuation could take players to several underrepresented zones, crafting memorable set pieces and encounters, but that really does not move the needle when it could be done just as well with instanced zones. Currently, there is little incentive to move about the open world in any way besides fast traveling to the nearest waypoint and bee-lining for the destination, and nothing inDiablo 4’s pipeline hints at that changing any time soon.
Diablo 4is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
