Is Diablo 4 Season 4 Really So Great It Should Be Considered Diablo 5? Blizzard Has Its Say
When Diablo 3 got its pre-Reaper of Souls expansion patch dubbed ‘loot 2.0’ in 2014, it was credited with turning Blizzard’s action role-playing game around. Critics and players called loot 2.0 a big improvement on Diablo 3, with changes that sparked renewed interest from a community that had dropped off following the base game’s 2012 release. Now, 10 years later, Blizzard is aiming to repeat the trick with Diablo 4 Season 4.
For the first time, Blizzard launched a Public Test Realm (PTR) that let players get stuck into the sweeping changes to itemisation Season 4 will bring when it launches on May 14. Hardcore Diablo 4 fans who have stuck with the game despite its many ups and downs since last summer have positive things to say about Season 4, now the PTR has ended. You’ll see comments like, ‘Diablo 4 is good now’, ‘Season 4 is what Diablo 4 should have been at launch’, and ‘the Diablo 4 beta is over, Season 4 is 1.0.’ For Blizzard, though, the hope is Season 4 reinvigorates Diablo 4, brings back lapsed players, and maybe even attracts new players who might have found the game intimidating up to this point.
All this comes after the launch of Diablo 4 on Game Pass — the first Blizzard game to do so following Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year. And it comes ahead of the hotly anticipated launch of Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, later in 2024. In short, these are busy times for Diablo 4 and for its development team. With all this in mind, IGN sat down with Diablo boss Rod Fergusson and art director John Mueller to find out more about Season 4, their thoughts on datamining and secrets, and how Game Pass has affected the player base.
Diablo 4 is approaching its first year after launch. How would you assess how it’s gone so far?
Rod Fergusson: It’s been going well. What I love about having a game that’s a live service is you’re able to iterate and learn. It’s not like one thing that just goes out and you’re living with that. I hope the players are seeing that with every season we’re working to make the game better, to make it more engaging, to offer more things to do.
What we’re doing now with the PTR we did for Season 4 is a representation of that listening to our players. It was an opportunity to get feedback before the season came out, as opposed to hearing the feedback during the season and adjusting later. That just ended yesterday to a lot of really great positive sentiment. It’s a pretty fundamental change. Season 4 represents a complete rework about how our loot works, and what we call itemisation. The notion around how loot actually functions in the game has fundamentally changed, starting with Season 4 on May 14. Being able to get it out in front of the players, having so many people show up to try it, and then be able to give us that early feedback so we can now go back and iterate and polish going into Season 4, is exciting. But that’s been the cycle of what it is to be a live service. You have that opportunity to listen, watch, and respond. And that’s what we’ve been doing season over season.
I assume your hope is that people who have dropped off Diablo 4 will be encouraged to come back to the game with Season 4 due to the positive feedback?
Rod Fergusson: Yeah. We’ve even seen that in the PTR itself. There were some people who hadn’t participated in seasons who have participated in the PTR. So we know there’s something really exciting about the way we’re changing up that system.
Part of the change is also to make it more approachable. When you got heavily into the itemisation or the loot of Diablo 4 it could be a little intimidating with all the different attributes and affixes. You speed up when running away from things that are chilled – there was a lot of conditional things that could get complicated. It was hard to know, is that thing that just fell on the ground, do I want to pick it up or not? That’s really what Season 4 is about addressing, making things much clearer, and that what you’re looking for on the ground, you know what you want right away, and then you go in and start crafting how you want to adjust it using the tempering system and the masterworking system. That idea you have ownership about how your loot progresses through the game really empowers the players.
It’s the same thing with the codex. People would have this notion of, oh I found this pair of boots that have this attribute that I want to save for later. So I’m going to fill my stash, or I’m going to extract it and save that. Now it just all goes into your book. You just extract it and it goes into your book. The best one you extract is the one that’s in the book and you can apply it whenever you want. So this idea of, I’ve always got to fill my stash with two backups because I’m going to want one in Tier 3 and I need one in Tier 4, that kind of thing is not a part of Season 4 and the game moving forward.
So there’s that kind of stuff where we’re freeing up your stash, simplifying how you think about your loot, and giving the player more ownership and accountability. Being able to go, I want a pair of gloves that does this, and I can go make it myself.
John Mueller: When you get an item you like, it’s the start of the journey.
Rod Fergusson: And you don’t have to look for three of them any more. The way you invest in your character, you can invest in your loot, which is nice.
I’ve seen some people say that now the PTR is over, they’re going to struggle to go back to the live game, that they’re going to wait for Season 4 to come out before playing again. That’s a compliment, really.
Rod Fergusson: It is for sure. In order to fully test things, we want things to get out of balance, and have things be overpowered to see where the limits are, to see where we’ve gone too far or not far enough. The hard work begins now for us, where we look at the results of the PTR and go, okay, how do we take what everybody’s finding really fun, but make it in a way that works in the game, that’s actually fun to be a part of?
We saw all those clips of the fire and Dust Devils, and they would fill the screen. For a crazy spectacle, it’s fun for a moment where you’re like, this is insane! But if you were in a party with that person or even as the player, and you can’t see the ground or the monsters because your screen’s entirely covered with fire and Dust Devils, that’s not actually going to be that fun day in and day out. So you have to find the right balance between, I want that spectacle and that idea I’ve found a way to break the game, but at the same time, you have to be responsible to the other players in the game and to yourself. You don’t want to ruin it for yourself.
Dust Devil Barb clearing the highest Tier 200 Pit with an insane amount of Twister in #DiabloIV. This Build is a ton of fun but it can be difficult to see your own character at times after min maxing it😁
Do you think we need higher Tiers going forward? How do you like the new… pic.twitter.com/TLf9QeoKTF
— Rob2628 (@Rob_2628) April 3, 2024
I’ve seen some say that the changes are so significant that they’re viewing Season 4 as a 1.0 launch for Diablo 4. Is that a fair way of putting it? Do you see where they’re coming from?
Rod Fergusson: I’ve seen that. I’ve seen other things some people have said, like this is Diablo 5 now, because it’s so fundamental. I think what they’re speaking to is the scope. It is a foundational change. Diablo is a game about getting loot. It is part of the core loop: kill monster, get loot, become more powerful, kill bigger monster, get better loot, become more powerful. It is an intrinsic part of our game loop.
So that idea that we change one of those elements so fundamentally, I can see why it feels very different. And we wanted it to. We came out of the gates when we first launched wanting a certain level of depth and complexity to the system, and realized we overshot the mark. We saw that in Diablo 3 as well, ‘loot 2.0.’
What was funny is I actually went back and read an article on when Reaper of Souls came out, and they were saying, Reaper of Souls is now Diablo 4. Like, literally the same headline! ‘Diablo 4 is now Diablo 5,’ they were saying, ‘Diablo 3 is now Diablo 4 because of loot 2.0.’
“I’ve seen other things some people have said, like this is Diablo 5 now, because it’s so fundamental. I think what they’re speaking to is the scope. It is a foundational change.
You have a goal you’re shooting for in terms of that depth and complexity and interest, and realize, oh, this is actually maybe too far, it’s too complicated, or it’s causing tensions around the amount of space in your stash. We get lots of like, ‘I need a loot filter!’ That’s a symptom, that’s not the problem. I could cure the symptom by giving you a loot filter. But we want to go after what the actual problem is, which is, loot is too complicated, and we want to make it cleaner for people to understand what’s good for them and what they can invest in and spend their time with.
Right now, loot in early stages is disposable. You’re like, okay, this will carry me through World Tier 2, but I’m going to need a Sacred in World Tier 3, and I’m going to need an Ancestral in 4. So I’ll take it, wield it for 10 levels, and throw it away. Now, this notion of, I can start to build and invest in my loot the same way I build and invest in my character. So now it’s not disposable any more. In fact, you’re working to go, I can make it really custom by putting double movement affixes and I can move even faster than I could before because I can choose how to customize it.
I guess it just took a bit of time for you to get to that point? The fact this is coming nearly a year after the game came out is a by-product of you reacting to feedback from previous seasons?
Rod Fergusson: Yeah. To use the old saying, ‘it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.’ It’s that kind of feeling. We wanted to make sure what we delivered out of the gate was phenomenal. Having a 90-rated Metacritic campaign was what we wanted to be able to tell, like the best story we’ve ever told in a Diablo game, and having that return to darkness. My friend, the BAFTA-nominated art director for our artistic vision, for actually being able to deliver on those things!
But having that notion of being a live service where you can see how people are playing, and seeing who’s showing up and how they want to show up, and what is interesting to them, that we can start to adapt as we go. I think you see that even with something as simple as Helltide. We did Helltide as an open-world event. As we started to lean into it with the vampire mode and it became the Blood Harvest, and people loved the density and they loved the ability to summon these huge waves of monsters. And then we leaned into it again with the arcane tremors we just did. And now you see in the PTR, with the worms coming up and spewing out stuff, and you build up threat. And even bringing Helltides to World Tier 1 and World Tier 2, so everybody can participate in that feature. That’s just Helltide becoming Helltide 1.0 and 2.0 and 3.0 and 4.0.
That’s the joy of seasons. Seasons become this testbed where we know for roughly three-ish moments, we’ll try something and if it works… like Blood Harvest worked so well in Season 2 that we were just like, there are lots of things we could do with Helltide down this path. That’s what you’re seeing showing up now in Season 4, all that experimentation with Helltide.
And it doesn’t come free. That’s the thing. It’s not like there’s some switch there where we’re just like, ‘no, more monsters!’ Click, and we’re done. Every time we improve the density of the monsters in the world to fight, to make it more action-packed, that’s a bunch of engineering and optimisation.
John Mueller: There’s performance optimisation that has to go on for all the platforms we ship on. I saw a thread recently saying how stable the game is on multiple platforms, that no matter what you throw at it, it seems like it runs at a good frame-rate. That’s a by-product of all the engineers and tech artists. So when we do a change like that, there’s a whole engine that has to kick up to make sure it’s shippable and it’s fun for people.
Rod Fergusson: Yeah, and that’s why it’s not like we’re just holding back density. Each time we increase the density there are a lot of people doing a lot of work to make sure the game can support that. When you look at our min spec for PC or you look at gen eight as a console that we support, we have to make those changes in a very structured way so we’re not destroying somebody trying to play on PS4 and not be able to play any more because, oh, we chose to turn up the density. So every time we do it there’s a whole team behind us making sure it still runs properly.
To follow up on that, do you see a situation where you will have to make a difficult decision about bringing a new feature to Diablo 4 that isn’t viable on what is very old hardware at this point? Or are you committed to having a consistent experience across all platforms Diablo 4 launched on?
Rod Fergusson: There’s always a time and a place for when maybe it’s time to no longer support a platform. I don’t think we’re at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, ‘hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it’s not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it’s not something we can do today.’ But we keep pushing the boundaries on that.
John Mueller: We’re pretty good at finding fallbacks. That’s how we think of it. We’ll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there’s something really awesome we want to do. I don’t think we’ve been gated by it. We’ve generally leaned into it, and it’s been a creative challenge to figure out, okay, how do we accomplish that on gen eight? So the two things will look slightly different depending on the platform. We just got ray-tracing in, that was a huge feature we added. It scales up and down depending on whatever you’re playing it on.
Rod Fergusson: It can be a good constraint. I’ve always found your min spec will make you do things that are better in the longer term, so that you can have that ability to turn stuff up. So, we’re looking at that. It’s part of the conversation, always. Like, we have this idea for a new feature, can we do it based on what we’re supporting today? Yes or no? And generally, as John was saying, we can. We find ways to do it.
John Mueller: That’s why the PTR is so great. The Dust Devil thing is so insane from an overdraw standpoint, if we get into the technical part of it. But it’s also an exciting challenge to think, ‘okay, how can we do it in a way we can support it on all our platforms.’
Rod Fergusson: When Rob made that clip, he was saying, ‘I’m crashing the game.’ And the game doesn’t crash! And you’re like, ‘okay, that’s good.’
Of course, by releasing a PTR for Season 4 you’re letting dataminers do their thing ahead of release. What can you tell me about the Iron Wolves?
Rod Fergusson: I can tell you nothing about Iron Wolves!
I had a feeling you’d say that!
Rod Fergusson: The hard part about it for me with PTRs is the idea we’re giving some of it away. As a game developer, we always want to surprise and delight, and one of the problems we run into is sometimes we have to give up the surprise in order to earn more of the delight. And so it’s one of the things we’ve been not doing in PTRs, part of the reason is… Well, one is technically it’s challenging, but two, the notion of, oh, they’re going to know about the malignant, or oh, they’re going to know about the vampires, or, oh, they’re going to… And there’s no, I showed up for the first day and I’m excited and surprised by whatever the season’s going to be.
And so we’ve always had this tug of war between surprise and getting feedback earlier. And so the notion of having the PTR go out and having dataminers find stuff or find old stuff or new stuff or whatever it may be, we have to live with that and go, you know what? The number of people who are going to read that Reddit thread is much smaller than the actual number of players who are going to show up for the season. So I’d rather get the feedback in some cases.
But it’s an ongoing conversation. The success of the PTR for Season 4 does point in the direction of something we’d want to continue to do. But no-one should take that as gospel that we’re going to be doing PTRs for every season. Because there are times when we’re still going to want to have the surprise be more meaningful than the feedback in that moment.
And so every season we’re going to have that conversation of, do we want to PTR this or not? And what we felt like, Season 4 being so fundamentally different and so foundational in its changes, like we’re changing how the game literally plays, that we better get feedback early, and so that’s why we had the PTR.
People who played on the PTR did notice a change to the map. This isn’t datamining, just a slight change, and of course, players discovered it: an abandoned camp by The Lost City of Ureh.
Rod Fergusson: Oh!
It’s pointing towards maybe something happening there. Again, not datamining, this is just a change in the map that players have noticed.
John Mueller: I’m sure it’s a Lost City though!
Rod Fergusson: It’s so lost that we don’t know what it is! Yeah, it’s another thing that is going back to the surprise and delight. That’s part of being in a testrun, is that we’re taking a snapshot of where we were at a certain point in time. And so there’s things that may or may not be there when Season 4 launches. It’s hard to say…
John Mueller: It’s always fun to watch those things. It’s like, what does that mean? Sometimes it’s nothing, and sometimes there’s something, and that’s what’s fun about people getting to… Just the excitement around the game.
So you launched on Game Pass, which was a huge deal, obviously. How has that gone for you? How’s it gone for the game?
Rod Fergusson: It’s gone really well. We’re really excited to see lots of new players coming into the game and getting to experience Diablo 4 that hadn’t experienced it before. So yeah, we’ve been really happy with how that’s gone.
Our executive producer, Gavin, likes to say that every launch should be boring from an operational perspective. From an operational perspective, there should be no tension, no drama, no late nights, whatever. You want the game to be exciting, but you want the launch, the actual operational side of it or logistics to be boring. And that’s what happened with Game Pass.
Game Pass was this great coming together of Microsoft and Blizzard, and Battle.net and Game Pass to come together to make this all work for PC and console on Game Pass. And it went really, really smoothly. And so we’ve been really excited about how smoothly the rollout happened. And then watching all these players come in and watching how they are playing the game. And it’s just been great to have that, see that audience show up.
Sarah Bond recently said that after the Game Pass launch Xbox was the number one platform for Diablo 4 players, which surprised me because I associate Diablo with PC, and I assumed most people were on PC, even after the Game Pass launch. But with Sarah saying that Game Pass means more people are playing Diablo 4 on Xbox than any other platform, I thought that was really impressive. It must’ve meant that Game Pass launch really did have a significant impact.
Rod Fergusson: The clarification there I think is we were talking from a daily active user perspective. In terms of total players across all the platforms, that’s different than who shows up on that particular day. On those Game Pass launch days, Sarah’s completely right, the Xbox group was the largest audience that were playing the game on that day. But you look at total players across all platforms, that Xbox isn’t the number one across all of all time. But during that launch it definitely was.
“On those Game Pass launch days, Sarah’s completely right, the Xbox group was the largest audience that were playing the game on that day.
PC Game Pass still requires Battle.net to play and there are no Xbox achievements. It’s not a huge number of hoops to jump through, but do you plan to reduce the friction on PC Game Pass moving forward? Will it always require Battle.net? Do you feel the dream of a PC Game Pass player wanting to play Diablo and just pushing a button and they’re in, do you think that’s something that’s feasible? How do you view it?
Rod Fergusson: That’s a tough one because it’s a little bit about the future. And so the notion of always or never or the absolutes is hard to speak to. I know that we are really focused on trying to get people in quickly, and the quickest way to do that was to have this Battle.net step, which is what basically everybody else who wants to play the game has to have. To allow for cross progression and cross save we need a Battle.net account to tie it back to, to be the source of truth for all that. So that’s why that was there.
But I agree, I understand other services too when you go in and you have to create an account on the other one. But we were happy with how quickly people were able to go through that. And the thing is that if they fired up on console too, a bunch of those achievements will ding for you, that if you’ve gotten them on PC, but it hasn’t shown up, just because there wasn’t code in the PC code base that understood Xbox achievements at the time. And so that’s one of the things we have. If you fire up the game, some of those achievements will be granted to you from that.
Obviously in an ideal world you want that to be the smoothest thing possible. Even when you played as a console player – forget about Game Pass – when you wanted to play on Xbox or on PlayStation, you had to go create a Battle.net account again to be the source of truth for the game. And so while we want to be able to do crossplay and cross-progression and having one source of truth for your character, you’re going to need a Battle.net account.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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