Blizzard is making some pretty big changes to how it approaches balancing in Diablo 4, with the devs adopting a more "fine-tuned" philosophy starting with the upcoming season 8.
In a roundtable interview attended by GamesRadar+, Diablo 4 lead live game designer Colin Finer spoke at some length about the ever-evolving topic of balance, which, I think it's safe to say, has given Blizzard a lot of headaches since the game's launch in 2023.
Blizzard has gone back and forth on the issue, notably letting broken Spiritborn builds run hogwild until a massive nerf brought them back to Earth in the season 7 PTR. Season 7 itself then spawned the overpowered Blood Wave Necromancer build, which is exactly what Blizzard intends to avoid next season.
"We absolutely want powerful builds, but I think it's finding that sweet spot. We think the Blood Wave fell into a category that was too powerful," Finer said. "There wasn't enough of a journey to actually get to a point where you're just demolishing bosses and enemies. We think that's totally OK and cool for builds to get to that place eventually, but we don't think it should be as easy as, you walk into Torment 1, and you equip one Unique item, and now the game is trivial … in season 8, we're changing our philosophy on balance a little bit."
With how time flies these days, it feels like it was yesterday that I was writing about Blizzard essentially deciding it was more important to let players have fun with their broken builds for a while, but alas, it's been months since they said that, and in that time they've decided that approach "was a really big disrespect to players' time," as Finer put it. "Like, if you had built up Blood Wave Necro, you'd done all this work to scale it, and then in the midseason patch we just destroy it, that felt like we sort of broke your character. We didn't like that.
"Now, our approach going forward, is in the first week or so, early into the season, if we start to see things that are just wildly overpowered, just completely breaking the game, there's no journey to getting to a godlike state, we're gonna act on it quickly so that you aren't necessarily wasting a bunch of time investment," he continued. "We're nipping it in the bud before you spend weeks and weeks building this character … Our approach is trying to be more fine-tuned to make that progression journey more gratifying and that power fantasy, once you realize it, much more satisfying."
I respect Blizzard's adaptability, but I do wonder if they're setting themselves up for another vicious cycle of nerfs followed by backlash followed by damage control and future changes to balance philosophy. The action RPG holding pattern, that is. As long as bugs and exploits slip through the cracks and into updates, it seems like there will always be this problem and no easy, universally agreed upon solution. Or maybe I'm just jaded and everyone will be happy with this new approach. But that also sounds wildly unrealistic.
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