Diablo 4’s lead live game designer says difficulty is ‘a tricky balance,’ but Season 8 should pack more of a punch: ‘If there isn’t enough challenge, then it just feels like you’re getting candy for free’

We’re in a golden age of ARPGs if you haven’t been paying attention, but that doesn’t make them any easier to balance. Since its launch, Diablo 4 has been criticized for its awfully gentle take on the Burning Hells; and though smacking loot pinatas until they stop moving doesn’t have to be all that hard to be fun, lead live game designer Colin Finer is ready to kick things up a notch.

“We had heard a bunch of feedback from Season 7 that you could just AFK and just get everything for free, and that wasn’t something that we felt like was true Diablo,” he said in an interview with PC Gamer.

“It’s a tricky balance, right? Because to feel rewarded for something, you have to overcome a challenge. And if there isn’t enough challenge, then it just feels like you’re getting candy for free, and you don’t really feel that satisfaction of overcoming a boss.”

The PTR has yielded a lot of feedback about the game’s current difficulty level that Finer said the team is aware of, but noted that nothing on the test server is final and that the live version of Season 8 should feel “a little bit more difficult than Season 7.”

“We definitely have a sort of double or half it approach when it comes to balancing these things, especially on the PTR. So we doubled a lot of the numbers … since then, we’ve heard a ton of feedback, we’ve played it ourselves, we’ve gotten a lot of data, and we’re actually dialing back quite a bit, and we think we found a pretty happy middle ground.”

Finer said the team has been careful not to ante up the difficulty too quickly to avoid making the game “a slog” that’s “just slowing the players down,” adding that “we think that that little tick of difficulty is really going to help the overall game feel much more rewarding.” While there were a bunch of bosses getting one-shot in the PTR, Finer said they’ve addressed a “a lot of one-shots” for the live version of the patch.

I don’t doubt that it’s difficult to tune a game with as many builds and legendary items as Diablo 4 has, and it’ll probably remain a moving target long after Season 8 comes out. Here’s hoping the team’s ambitions for Season 8 please those looking for a deadlier dungeon crawl.

Diablo 4 is on sale for $27.49 through April 28 on Steam.