the new update is a disaster and the players are getting angry

What happens to Diablo IV ? The new opus of the franchise signed Blizzard touched the hearts of gamers when it launched last June but it only took a month and a half for the ship to capsize. With this fourth installment, the cult hack ‘n slash embarks on the slippery slope of service games. This model widely popularized by Fortnite invites players to return regularly to experience new content and gameplay adjustments.

If it is above all a formula to captivate communities for years, it is not without risk. The management of the economic model and updates can quickly damage a title hitherto appreciated by all. Worse, it sometimes even prevents games from finding their audience (yes Marvel’s Avengers, we are talking about you). Luckily, Diablo IV avoided this curse when he left, but here comes the trouble. The arrival of the Season of Malevolence, the first major update to the title, is obviously not to everyone’s taste.

After listening to and implementing player feedback in the first weeks of play, it seems that Blizzard is now taking advice against the grain to make the game experience much more tedious.

All it takes is an update to change everything

Yes, Diablo IV is a popular game for its high level difficulty. Overcoming the dungeons in the highest levels requires optimizing your character to the maximum. Only, now that the pleasure is reduced to nothing by strange decisions on the part of the developers. By decreasing the rate of experience points obtained, it is now more difficult to reach the maximum level, an already tedious task from the outset.

It is not a question of an increased difficulty, but of a slowing down of the game in every way, including spells. Indeed, the cooldown reduction for skills is now reduced by 30%. Even the animation for exiting dungeons has been lengthened from 3 to 5 seconds. And this is of course without mentioning the significant loss of power of the Sorcerer class which was nevertheless one of the weakest to date.

Inevitably, loyal players are affected by these size changes and have not failed to express their dissatisfaction. “I have never seen an entire community so dissatisfied” exclaims a Reddit user. The reactions are virulent, with some going so far as to call for quitting the game until things get back to normal. Worse still, the game has already been reviewed-bomb to finally land at the sad score of 2.7 on Metacritic. Some users prefer to take the situation as a joke and make memes of the most beautiful effect.

But more than anything, this situation is indicative of the risks incurred by service games. Balancing a game is no small feat, and in the case of a game like Diablo, a single false step is enough to break the fun of the players. Fortunately, the regular monitoring of this kind of titles also makes it possible to rectify the situation. Blizzard is certainly working hard to fix these massive errors. It remains to hope that this fiasco serves as a lesson and that this disaster will not happen again. In the meantime, the first season will start at 7 p.m. (French time) with all the worries listed in the long patch note.