The story of Diablo 4 for the last three years is one of constant reworks and reinventions of its basic systems. Loot was “reborn” in its second season, then changed yet again last year. Even the max level you could reach was knocked down from 100 to 60 when the first expansion came out.
For anyone not logging into every season, it probably looks like Blizzard can’t figure out what it wants Diablo 4 to be. And while I think there might’ve been some merit to that early on given the reports about its rocky development, it seems like things have settled now that we’re three years out from when it was released.
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Haroutunian believes it’s “normal” for action RPGs to go through what he calls “transitions.” “I call them transitions because the people who play an action RPG from the start, they change as they play that action RPG more and they start requiring different things,” he explained. “Friction points that we could never imagine—that players might never even imagine—suddenly rear their head over the course of 10,000 hours.”
As someone who’s played every season of Diablo 4, I know there are things that didn’t bother me in the first year that I see as glaring problems now. Every time I look at the grid of little forgettable stat buffs to use my 200 paragon points on, I wish there was something far more interesting to pick in their place—Haroutunian specifically called paragon points a “really good example” of a system “that’s starting to feel like why am I doing this?“
The paragon system won’t be changing in next month’s Lord of Hatred expansion, but it sounds like it’s on the list of things that Blizzard would like to fix. I’m glad that I can feel confident knowing the most annoying things probably won’t last forever. I just hope Blizzard can uphold that balance of recognizing when too much change is a bad thing and to be OK with leaving some things as they are—even if they don’t satisfy every type of player.
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