Diablo IV is so big that even its creators are suffering from it. There are problems that take 200 hours to find…
Blizzard is sometimes criticized for the changes it has made since the release of Diablo IV. In fact, it is a great ARPG that has received good reviews and sold a lot since its release. However, this also requires that the title be maintained in the long term: expanded with content, updates, and patches to balance the game. Even Blizzard itself is struggling with this.
After all, Diablo IV is such a big game that even the developers have to spend many, many hours with it to achieve the ideal experience, and even then, players are often dissatisfied with the result…
This was said by Adam Jackson, Diablo IV’s lead class designer, in an interview with streamer Raxxanterax. It turns out that Blizzard has a hard time with the game when it comes to collecting player feedback. Whether it’s fine-tuning the title or weeding out the bugs, Jackson calls it “the cursed problem.” This is because it is “more hours than what you would normally expect someone to work at a job” (via PC Gamer).
Blizzard works by building a team that collects constructive criticism from players through Reddit comments, content creators’ forums, and forums. “We have the ability to see data all over the game of how many people are equipping different legendary aspects, how many people are engaging with certain types of content,” Jackson says. “We can see what’s working, what’s not working, what people are actually doing versus what they say.” However, “where things get a lot more difficult” is anything that players can’t test.
Blizzard is still hard at work on Diablo IV
Ultimately, Blizzard’s “problem” with Diablo IV is that we’re talking about a massive ARPG that’s “tied together.” “Diablo is a freakin’ huge game that takes forever to play and really truly understand because our systems are so interconnected. So there is no substitute for actually going through that 80-hour experience and playing everything,” he explained. “The part that makes that really hard, and where I think the community gives us a hard time sometimes … is that to really test our game you need to spend your life playing our game.”
Despite this, Blizzard remains ambitious about Diablo IV and promises to continue developing the game after Season 4.
The QA team and game testers also contribute to this. But it’s still tricky: “I would love to play season 5 200 hours before it comes out [but] I only get it for 50 hours. We have to use our guts and existing ideas and telemetry to figure out if the decisions we make are right.”
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