One issue with the current “everything is a live service now” model in the gaming industry is that there quickly become too many games to keep up with. One of my fears has always been my brain breaking as I try to juggle two main games now, Destiny 2 and Diablo 4, both live services, in addition to big standalone releases from this year, Jedi Survivor, Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy XVI, Starfield, etc. I’ve already had to quit other ongoing games and leave many titles unfinished in my attempt to make this work.
Fortunately, it feels like Diablo is a rare game that is going to make its seasonal grind…not that bad, actually. From speaking with developers and everything they’ve said publicly, this feels like a seasonal model you can take at whatever pace you want, and still finish comfortably by the time it expires.
Speaking with director Joe Shely this past week, he emphasized the point to me that finishing the 100 rank battle pass would not come anywhere close to forcing players to reach level 100 on a seasonal character, something that can easily take over 100 hours of gameplay by itself. The live team’s goal, he said, was that if people want to go nuts grinding, they can, but they also wanted to design a system where if someone can only play a few hours a week due to their schedule, they can still comfortably finish the battle pass by the time the three month season ends.
In season 1, the base storyline is supposed to be rather short. While Diablo has said future seasons will get a little more expansive, for Season of the Malignant at least, the initial storyline is mostly to provide context to the central mechanic of farming Malignant Hearts and socketing them into gear for bonus powers. But the actual story is not timegated, you do not need to return each week to play or grind specific things to unlock new story beats.
The point of a season is really just to have fun leveling a new character while using a unique seasonal mechanic that doesn’t exist in the base game. I know some people will be disappointed that they cannot use their existing characters (I’ve been over this a lot before), but fundamentally the goal is to have everyone start at the same playing field, and then you can experiment with a class or build you haven’t tried.
A big benefit to Diablo 4’s seasons is that you are not losing your seasonal character you’ve been grinding at the end. So if you’ve finished the battle pass and had enough of the central mechanic you can just…stop. If you want to return to that character down the road, or keep leveling them after the season ends, you can do that in the eternal realm. Your time invested still leaves you with a permanent result.
All of this feeds into the idea that the Diablo 4 team does not especially care about never-ending engagement like other live games. In a recent dev livestream, Diablo’s Joe Piepiora gave a widely circulated quote about how it’s okay to stop, to take a break from a game and come back later on when there’s new stuff you want to play.
“When you’ve reached all the goals and done the things you think are really important, and you want to go take a break to play something else for a little while, that’s fine. We do the same thing.” Piepiroa said. “When a season rolls and there are new things for you to come out, that’s a great time to come back, particularly if you had a good time playing before. That’s exactly when you should come back and check out Diablo 4 fresh.”
It’s…refreshing, having come off a never-ending treadmill where you constantly feel behind in other live games. Yes, I’m talking about Destiny, but also Genshin Impact, The Division, loads of different games that were organized similarly. I’m looking forward to seeing how Diablo 4 does it differently.
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