Diablo 4 developers have seemingly doubled-back on the poorly-received player nerfs that took effect after patch version 1.1.0.
In the Campfire Chat live stream event that took place last Friday, associate director Joe Piepiora, game director Joe Shely, and community chief Adam Fletcher reflected upon changes made for patch 1.1.0, acknowledging complaints based on community feedback. In fact, Fletcher even promised that “we don’t plan on doing a patch like this ever again.”
“We know it is bad. We know it is not fun… We also want to talk about what we were trying to achieve specifically with this patch and with the changes that players ended up seeing,” said Fletcher, much to the agreement of the other two hosts. From Piepiora’s perspective, the goal was to slow down builds that were quote “blasting through content,” and prevent it from reducing the effectiveness of all the other underused abilities and classes.
Reiterating on that point and driving it home, game director Joe Shely rounded up the cause and concerns. “Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is make the game more fun for players,” further adding “The players are at the heart of everything we’re doing, and if players can’t believe that… as the game evolves, the game will get more fun, we’re not accomplishing our goals.”
Furthermore, Piepiora highlighted that the team felt the Endgame content, specifically nightmare dungeons, are a tad too difficult, even more so for tier 100 dungeons, making it a pain for most classes to complete, resulting in players pursuing very specific builds. As such, with immediate effect, nightmare dungeon difficulty has been reduced by 30 per cent, ensuring the game is just a little easier to deal with before patch 1.1.1 arrives to balance things out properly.
Closing up the thread, Fletcher promised improved communication and transparency between the developers and the community, including advanced patch notes for major updates and more balanced changes starting with patch 1.1.1. In the interim, a follow-up Campfire Chat livestream will kick off on Friday, July 28, to pre-face the next patch. Watch this space.
