Blizzard wants Diablo 4 to be challenging again, but not by making it ‘a slog’

Diablo 4’s next season is all about the new bosses being added to the game, but it also marks the first time Blizzard is deliberately trying to ramp the action RPG’s difficulty up. After a year of players blazing through the game at faster and faster speeds, Blizzard wants to slow things down and make them work a little harder for those sparkly loot drops in season 8.

“It’s a tricky balance because to feel rewarded for something, you have to overcome a challenge,” lead live game designer Colin Finer said in a recent group interview with Polygon. “And if there isn’t enough challenge, then it just sort of feels like you’re getting candy for free and you don’t really feel that satisfaction of overcoming a boss.”

Those new harder bosses were just one of the changes Blizzard let players test out on its limited-time public test realm (PTR) server last month. The leveling journey from 1 to 60 also got harder in an effort to make early-game progression more meaningful. Blizzard said during a stream about the season in March that way too many players were reaching the game’s endgame dungeons too quickly.

“We had heard a bunch of feedback from season 7 that you could just AFK and just get everything for free, and that wasn’t something that we felt was true to Diablo,” Finer said.

On the PTR, Finer said the team has a “double or half it approach when it comes to balancing,” and intentionally treats it as an “extreme” testing ground. To prepare for the launch of season 8 next week, the team has addressed feedback from PTR players that bosses were killing them in one hit and that the highest difficulty tiers were too punishing.

“We haven’t pulled back all the way,” Finer said. “It’s still a little bit more difficult than season 7. We think that that little tick of difficulty is really going to help the overall game feel much more rewarding because you’re overcoming actual challenges.”

It’s a fine line when it comes to difficulty in a genre all about your character growing in power until they’ve become a god. To get it just right, Finer said, it needs to be “just challenging enough to feel rewarding, but not so challenging that it feels like we’re just slowing the game down and making it a slog.”

Diablo 4 season 8 drops on April 29.