As we hurtle rapidly towards Diablo IV’s launch on June 6th, one aspect of it has been kept tightly under wraps: what the endgame experience will be like for players. That is until now. Last week they released a video that gave us our first public look at what we can expect from the endgame experience of Diablo IV. In addition, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora and Lead Producer Kayleigh Calder, where we discussed everything related to the endgame experience. So, let’s dive into all the juicy bits.
So, I’m max level; what do I do now?
I was specifically curious about what happens if a player hits max level before they finish the campaign and how that would work. As much as I love the story in the Diablo games, I tend to get distracted and over-level things quickly. Piepora explained that the campaign is designed to be played only in world tiers 1 and 2, and as players gain levels, the content in those tiers will get progressively more challenging. After finishing the campaign, if the player is level 50, they can complete an “endcap dungeon,” which will allow the player to move on to the higher world tiers. That sounds great and provides a bit of a testing ground to see if the player is ready to move on to more challenging content.
One of the new features in Diablo IV is an entirely new Paragon system, and as Calder explained, “the most it has in common with the one in Diablo III is the name.” It sounds like they are aiming for the paragon system to provide a lot of the customizations in playstyle; Calder continued with, “you can level two sorceresses, they could play and feel entirely differently depending on the choices you make, not just in your skills and the legendaries you get, but also the paragon board itself and the choices you make as you travel through that.” Piepora also chimed in to point out that it won’t be possible to get everything in the paragon board; progression will be capped. This is great because your choices on the board and how you path through things will matter a lot more.
One of the significant criticisms I saw after the open beta weekend was that the gameplay was shallow because the choices in building your character were pretty limited. However, they have reserved much of the complexity and player choice for the paragon levels. This is a brilliant way to do things because it doesn’t make things immediately overwhelming for new players. They can quickly get in and start learning about what they can do as they level. By the time they get to the paragon levels, they’ll have a lot more of an understanding of how everything works and can make better choices. More experienced players will likely be able to blast through the base leveling and get to the paragon levels quickly.
Another significant pillar of endgame content is nightmare dungeons, which are accessible through the use of nightmare sigils. Piepora described the process in this way, “nightmare sigils are earned by completing whispers of the dead, another feature available for the players once they’ve finished the campaign and they’ve gotten a little further in the story and a regular piece of content they’ll be dealing with as part of the seasonal content as well… Now, each one of these nightmare sigils is tied directly to a dungeon somewhere in Sanctuary… When you get one of these nightmare sigils, it’s gonna have a number of different modifiers which we call afflictions baked into the sigil itself.
They might increase the monster’s attack speed, they might increase the monster’s damage they deal when making poison attacks, and it might make them all have barriers every time you initially fight one in combat. There’s also some positive affixes and modifiers as well, such as increases experience generated, increased gold drops, and things like that.” Calder also pointed out that higher world tier difficulty will result in more challenging nightmare dungeons, so players have some control over how difficult a challenge they seek out.
This will add a lot of variety to dungeons as you work through your paragon levels. Additionally, he mentioned that there are over 120 dungeons in Diablo IV, but each season there will be about 30 of these, which will be part of the seasonal content and change up when a new season starts. He also mentioned that there is a chance for these sigils to drop while clearing a nightmare dungeon, so we won’t be solely reliant on whispers of the dead activities to gain access to nightmare dungeons. Lastly, if you get a bunch of sigils for a dungeon you don’t want to do, you can take them back to town and get them ground down into dust. Then you can take that dust and craft them into new sigils of a randomized dungeon but targeting a particular difficulty tier.
Seasonal Story Content
As someone who tends to enjoy the story of Diablo games, seasonal content as it has been described for Diablo IV had me a bit concerned because I may not be able to play in every season, but if each season adds more story, I would hate to miss out on it. I’ve quit a few games in the past because when I came back to play, I was unable to play through the story I had missed, and I’d hate for that to be the case with Diablo IV.
Pieporia addressed this in two parts. The first part he explained is that every season will have a specific theme, and along with that theme, there will be story content that supports it. That slice of story content will be temporary and only playable during the season it’s related to. This was a little bit disappointing, but it makes complete sense. He then went on to say, “When it comes to expanding on the larger story of Diablo IV, if we were to have content that would thread from the conclusion of Diablo IV and lead into the expansion, or anything like that we might do in the future, in that sort of situation we’d want to continue to tell the story of Diablo IV, then we would make sure that content is persistent and available for all players at all times.” Which is perfect. As long as I’m able to bridge the gap between essential story bits, I’ll be happy. Also, at least one expansion seems to be on the table.
Battle pass, because of course, there is
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve reached a point where the mere mention of a battle pass causes me to shudder. From the exhaustion of every game trying to tell me it should be my only game to games like Diablo: Immortal, where actual power is obtained from premium lines, they can often feel terrible to participate in. Piepiora expanded a bit on what we can expect from the Diablo IV battle pass system:
“In terms of how does the battle pass link up with in game activities and how do we make players want to engage with it – so the way players will progress through the battle pass is by completing all manners of in game activities to earn what we call favor, which will be the fuel that drives the battle pass as players progress through them. They’ll earn favor from completing quests, by killing monsters, and doing all kinds of things. But they’ll also earn favor by completing objectives in our season journey which is going to be a set of different objectives available every season… If you’re familiar with the season journey from Diablo III, it’s not altogether wildly different from the format we had there that we liked so much.
So as players move through gameplay season to season, they’ll be completing these big objectives and earning big buckets of favor as they go to help progress along the battle pass track. That said, the battle pass when you are figuring in completing the season journey alongside doing other content in the game, you’re looking at roughly 80 hours worth of time invested to complete the entirety of the battle pass. To level a character to level 100 could take a little longer than that based on how you play.”
This sounds like the ideal type of battle pass where we’ll be able to do various things to progress and not have to go out of our way to do specific things we may not want to do. It can get quite frustrating to log onto a game and look forward to doing a particular type of content for that play session but feel like you need to do something else to progress the battle pass. That said, it does sound like the most significant chunks of progress will come from seasonal progress. Additionally, 80 hours could be a lot for some players, especially if each battle pass is only around for a month, as is typical. [UPDATE: Blizzard reached out to clarify that the seasonal story content is spread out across three months, so you won't need to grind 80 hours in a month as we previously believed.] He also mentioned the developer post they did last August, which gave more details on how the battle pass will work in Diablo IV.
MMO, ARPG, or Both?
Diablo IV continues to tread the line between MMO and ARPG, sometimes pushing hard on that boundary. For example, when I was playing during the early access beta, there were certain points where there were some many other people running around on a map with me that it felt very reminiscent of playing WoW. However, it was also nice to escape to a dungeon when I wanted to escape from everyone else for a bit. This is partly because, although I enjoy grouping up with friends in Diablo games occasionally, I generally approach these games desiring a single-player experience. When asked about treading this line, Piepiora had an interesting take on it:
“The answer is that Diablo IV is an ARPG first. It is a dungeon crawling, monster slashing, monster killing, loot collecting game. It has these persistent online elements where you can see and run into these other players in the interconnected overworld - we want these things to feel like they are married well together. So, one of the things we don’t have in the launch of Diablo IV, is we don’t have a lot of content designed explicitly for organized groups. We don’t have this notion of roles when you are playing the game, because in Diablo everybody is sort of a damage dealer. The fantasy of playing a Diablo game in many cases is making really overpowered builds and just blowing up screens full of monsters at some point, and having that kind of experience. We want to make sure those elements are preserved where we don’t have to worry about trying to create a curated set of balances between multiple players in a party that have to work in a very particular way together.”
Overall, the endgame for Diablo IV seems vast and varied, which is about all I could have asked for. They also talked a bit about after leveling your first character through the campaign, when you make subsequent characters, you’ll have the choice to play the campaign or not, which is a huge plus. There’s still a bit under two months until Diablo IV launches, and hopefully, in that time, we’ll learn even more about how everything will work for us in the endgame section of play and more about the seasons.
