Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson talked to gamesradar+ at gamescom. He addressed the negative feedback Diablo 4 has been getting recently and as far back as the dreaded patch 1.1. The two core issues Fergusson pointed to are pushing partial solutions/changes and not managing player expectations well.
Two Thirds of a Solution
The first part seems to be very much aimed at patch 1.1, as it was only two thirds of their solution to build diversity, difficulty and XP progression. The final being the recently deployed patch 1.1.1.
“We were trying to move a little fast, we were trying to be very responsive and agile. So we were like ‘hey, we have two-thirds of a solution. So let’s give them the two thirds, and we’ll do the other third later.’ And that didn’t work out in our favour.”
Managing Player Expectations
The second issue was managing player expectations, or rather not communicating the intention for the patches well or early enough. The following is again related to patch 1.1.
“The previous couple of updates were very buff-oriented, and so the notion of getting out in front and saying ‘hey, we need to have all builds be viable, we want a level playing field so everybody can be successful with all kinds of builds’ – we didn’t get out in front of that enough. And so because we realised it was an expectation management problem, we had to just own that and recognise we have to do better to get patch notes out before that. We were doing patch notes at the moment the patch dropped, we weren’t doing live streams ahead of time to talk about it.
The biggest thing for us was just really like ‘hey, we have to manage expectations correctly.’ And we’re going to do better, and we’re just going to keep making a better game.”
We have already seen the change to the patch notes specifically come into effect. We now receive them ahead of time, so players can react to them before they go live. Hopefully this will continue as Blizzard keep improving the game and their communication with the players.
Make sure to check out the full interview over at gamesradar+.