Devil 4 Next season is all about the addition of new bosses to the game, but it’s the first time Blizzard has intentionally tried to enhance the difficulty of an RPG. Blizzard wants to slow things down and make them a little more difficult due to a glittering booty drop in season 8 after a year of players burn the game faster and faster.
“It’s a tricky balance because you have to overcome the challenges to feel rewarded for something,” live game designer Colinfinor said in a recent group interview with passthecontroller. “And without enough challenges, it feels like you’re getting free candy and you don’t feel like you’re really happy to overcome your boss.”
These new hard bosses were just one of the changes players tested on a finite-time public test area (PTR) server last month. The 1-60 leveling journey has also become difficult to work hard to make early game progress more meaningful. In a stream about the March season, Blizzard said that too many players have reached the endgame dungeons of the game.
“I’ve heard a lot of feedback from season 7, but I was able to get everything for free with AFK alone, and that wasn’t something I felt was loyal to Diablo,” Finther said.
In PTR, Finer said the team has a “double or half-approach when it comes to balancing” and is deliberately treating it as an “extreme” test field. To prepare for the release of Season 8 next week, the team addressed feedback from PTR players that the boss is killing them with one hit, and that the best difficulty levels are punishing too much.
“We haven’t pulled back all the time,” Finther said. “It’s a little more difficult than Season 7. I think it really helps to help the whole game feel much more rewarding because we’re overcoming real challenges.”
As for the difficulty of genres, it’s a subtle line about how your character grows with strength until he becomes a god. To get it right, he said, “Not only is it challenging enough to feel rewarding, but not so challenging, so it’s not so challenging enough to make the game slower and slower.”
Diablo 4 Season 8 drop on April 29th.
