This weekend was all about Diablo 4, and finally getting to experience everything that the early access beta had to offer. Until this point, all players had to go off of was some carefully constructed gameplay released by Blizzard themselves or a bad-quality leak.
However, thanks to this weekend, players finally got the chance to experience the game for themselves, and they’ve come back with one major request for Blizzard: Please fix the dungeons before launch.
At its core, Diablo is a dungeon crawler so when players across the globe started to note that Blizzard’s dungeon design is too simple and could make repeated playthroughs tedious, warning flags were instantly raised. Blizzard had previously said that the game would feature over 150 handcrafted and procedurally generated dungeons, which on paper sounds great but players who have now experienced the game for themselves don’t seem to be buying it.
Procedurally-generated dungeons are a staple for the Diablo franchise; however, when Diablo 3 first came onto the scene, the game was heavily criticised for its simplified dungeon layouts that didn’t have the complexities of Diablo and Diablo 2. Instead, it was streamlined to make for fast completion. Many players, including myself, were hoping Blizard would address this in the upcoming Diablo title. Sadly that isn’t what happened.
Diablo 4 is currently receiving hundreds upon hundreds of posts across various subreddits of players complaining that the dungeons are too simple and don’t feature enough randomisation, with players noting that there is no sense of explorations or discovery and less than 48 hours after starting to play they were already bored of playing through dungeons with the same layout again and again.
It’s worth noting that players’ complaints didn’t stop at just repeated dungeon layouts. Players have also raised issues with repetitive puzzle elements and noted that there just isn’t enough diversity which made the dungeons even more repetitive as a result.
What do you think about all of this? Will you still be picking up Diablo 4 on launch or will you be waiting to see if some much-needed diversity and randomisation ever arrive?