If you're in the loop with Diablo 4, you probably know about Blizzard's recent patch that made sweeping changes to the balance of the game. The changes didn't exactly go down well, with many fans feeling like too much was nerfed, so the team has come out and addressed this fan feedback.
In a 'Campfire Chat' livestream hosted by several Blizzard developers, the team began by addressing the player outrage that's cropped up in recent days, before going on to discuss the reasoning behind the patch 1.1.0 balance tweaks. Here's how Blizzard initially touched on the fan reaction, before going into full detail further into the video:
"We want to acknowledge everyone's feedback in regards to reducing player power. We know it is bad, we know it is not fun and it's something that we ourselves know - that it's not the greatest play experience for players out there."
"I know that we've talked on stream before about our intentions for Diablo 4 being about choice. Part of that is ensuring that the various class options feel like they've got a place in the meta experience - that kind of goes to some of the changes made in [patch] 1.1."
Buffs are planned for the the Sorcerer and Barbarian classes in a future patch, along with what we'd expect to be a laundry list of other changes. However, none of the big complaints were addressed in a recent hotfix, so fans could be waiting a while to see how Blizzard tackles the situation in the future.
What is clear is that Blizzard wants to avoid another situation like this. Adam Fletcher, who works in community management at Blizzard, simply mentioned that "we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again".
What do you make of this? Has patch 1.1 affected your Diablo 4 experience? Do let us know in the comments section.
[source youtu.be, via pushsquare.com]
Comments 9
Does Blizzard want to avoid a situation like this?
Between the similar handing of Diablo 3 and "Don't you guys have phones" from Diablo Immortal, this seems right up their alley.
Who'd have thought that changing the game to the point of making people completely relearn characters they're hundreds of hours in would be a bad idea?
They say they 'Know' its not fun and turns a 'great' experience into a tedious 'grind' yet still went ahead with making changes.
If something is particularly OP, I can understand bringing it 'down' a bit. However, it seems like 'balancing' is making things people enjoy using 'worse' than things they don't like using to make them 'use' those instead of 'buffing' the stuff people don't use to make it more 'competitive'.
To bring more variety of builds/classes, it makes sense to give the players more 'options' without taking away from the Experience. Nerfing guns in an FPS changes how it feels and plays. If one is dominant - it stops people using the other choices - so you need to decide is that Gun 'detrimental' to the experience, too OP, or is that delivering the Experience people want and therefore need to 'buff' the other weapons to add more options. If its annoying people, feels OP in context and forcing people to use it to 'compete' then its a case of 'nerfing', but I can't see how that matters in a more Single Player/Co-operative experience...
@BAMozzy co-op experiences still need balance, especially once they start doing leader boards and all that (a form of indirect PvP).
Even without leader boards, players always create their own meta-PvP, almost always some sort of speed runs or DPS metrics. If only a handful of builds can be extremely superior to all others, by 2x margins or more, players slowly are demanded to roll specific builds.
Sometimes you can just buff, but that's really not that much of an option when we are talking about 4 paths out of potential hundreds being superior by large orders of magnitude.
I am not playing D4 and don't know what their current balance situation is, but balancing multiplayer games, even PvP ones, is necessary to sustain a healthy and varied environment where build choices matter, else you might as well just offer 5 classes with no variations or customization and let it be there. This is why making RPGs is not easy.
Also, a huge aspect of Diablo-like games and the seasonal content is that you re-roll characters on every season, starting from scratch. Things change enough every season, be it due to buffs, nerfs, or simply new gear that entirely flips things on its heads, that things will always play differently on the new content. Expecting characters to play the same season after season is not a realistic expectation on any ongoing multiplayer RPG.
A really weird response... We know what we have done bloody sucks... so why the hell did you do it? 😆
Long time Diablo fan, and D4 is still a better game than D3 in all categories (except end game). That said it’s not without flaws, and I think my favorite thing about this patch is that they’ve previously admitted to the resistance system being completely broken, yet it wasn’t a priority to fix…. You’d think that a fundamental part of rpg systems would be on the first thing to-do list…..
And it baffles me as to why they couldn’t just completely copy and expand the D2 system….. instead opting to copy the D3 system and overlay D2 on top of it.
The main problem with D3 is a problem that continues in D4, itemization. And I think I finally figured out the problem - too frickin many stats on gear, especially stuff like crit/crit dmg/element dmg/etc and so on, on gloves.
D2 was great cause it was less stat filler crap, and that gave items more “weight” oddly enough. You didn’t have to keep rerolling and praying for trifecta gloves. Stuff like crit and dmg damage were in skills, not gear. And your gear was meant to boost and supplement skills. D4 makes head way here, but not quite enough. I think if they ditch stuff like crit/crit dmg from gear and vulnerability all together (didn’t anyone learn from BL2 Slag?!) and bring back stats like Life/Mana leach, that would go a long way towards better itemization.
Also, how many forms of Damage Reduction do we need? FFS there’s so many, and most are conditional dependent. DR, DR against Close Enemies, DR against Far Enemies, DR against poisoned enemies, DR against Crowd controlled enemies, DR against chilled enemies….. I’m sure I’m missing one or two,,.,
The other issue is d2 had a clear cap on monster difficulty / level. There wasn’t an endless difficulty, players 8 and hell mode TZ is the cap, we’re all fine with being able to steam roll that once we get our builds up. Our chase was items, not “can we beat the next GR/NM dungeon?”
/endrant
All that said, d4 does have good potential, and sadly, like all other Blizzard games, will require an expansion or two before it’s in a good place. At least that’s what history with Blizz has shown us. I doubt it’ll dethrone D2R for me, but I’d love to be proven wrong!
I would be more surprised if Blizzard did something people were happy about, even post-merger.
I think they just come off as douches to often. Even when they do something kinda right it's like look at us we didn't douche it up that time. I hope that Xbox puts some gamers back in charge and not glorified accoutaints.
Why future patches?
Why not now? Can they not revert back the patch rollouts?
I am telling you now, they are on purposely slowing down the updates so they dont fix the game right away. This developers dont want to fix a live service right away, if they did, they wouldn't have anything better thing to do. If you give the players everything right away they believe that the players will beat it and not comeback.
@FakeSunkist And that just proves how outta touch they are. D2 and D2R, not a live service, but has everything off the bat, no need to patch unless a glitch/exploit pops up. Millions of players are still playing it 20 years later. Smh.
PoE, PD2. D2R, etc all prove the model is sustainable with just optional seasonal content.
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