This week’s controversial Diablo 4 patch has sparked a new wave of review-bombing from disgruntled players but the launch of Season 1 still caused long queue times.
Diablo 4’s long-awaited pre-Season 1 patch, 1.1.0, led to vociferous complaints from the game’s community, who accused Blizzard of turning the action role-playing game into a “slog” with a slew of heavy-handed nerfs to all classes, experience point gain, endgame progression, and more.
Blizzard said it will address the furore in a livestream on July 21 but that didn’t stop angry fans hitting out at the changes across social media, the game’s forums, subreddits and, crucially, its Metacritic page.
Diablo 4’s user score plummeted to 2.4, with the vast majority of recent reviews complaining about changes made to the game with the patch.
Despite the dissatisfaction expressed online and claims from some players that they’d stop playing entirely, July 20’s launch of Season 1 seemingly still brought in plenty of players as indicated by long queue times, with a launcher message displaying a warning to those logging in.
We’re seeing some unusually long queue times for #DiabloIV. We are working on this, and we appreciate your patience as we work to get everyone into Sanctuary.
— Blizzard CS EU (@BlizzardCSEU_EN) July 20, 2023
Some players also reported increased lag while playing the always-online game.
Run Forest, run… pic.twitter.com/26MbVbjrSl
— Tylko DELEGALIZACJA PiS!=skuteczne rozliczenie (@Darek_Michniak) July 20, 2023
Many Diablo 4 players now hope Blizzard rolls back the changes in response to the backlash. Game director Joe Shely, associate game director Joseph Piepiora, and associate director of community Adam Fletcher host the Campfire Chat livestream on July 21 at 11am Pacific.
Meanwhile, Blizzard moved quickly to revert one unannounced Diablo 4 patch change ahead of the launch of Season 1. The undocumented tweak added level requirements for World Tier 3 and 4. Post-patch, players discovered they needed to be level 40 to unlock World Tier 3, and level 60 to unlock World Tier 4.
This change increased the difficulty of progressing through Diablo 4’s various difficulty tiers, and further fuelled the furore around the patch’s heavy-handed nerfs that some said turned the game into a “slog”.
In response, a new patch, which brings Diablo 4 up to version 1.1.0b, was released yesterday that removes this requirement entirely.
Despite various issues, Diablo 4 enjoyed an enormous launch that saw over 10 million people play in June. Diablo 4 is Blizzard’s fastest-selling game of all time, and has fuelled record revenue and profits for the company. If you’re still playing, check out our interactive Diablo 4 map to start tracking your progress as you play.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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