Blizzard recently hosted a “Diablo IV Campfire Chat” where members of the dev team gathered around to discuss the state of the game now that it’s been out in the wild for a few weeks. While Blizzard has rolled out numerous patches and hotfixes for the game, the Diablo 4 first “real patch” is on the way, and it’s a massive one clocking it at over 13 pages long and counting.
Update (June 27): The patch Blizzard was referring to is now live! Check out the complete patch notes here.
This detail and more was revealed by the Diablo 4 dev team. The chat was hosted by Franchise General Manager Rod Fergusson, Associate Production Director Tiffany Wat, Game Director Joe Shely, and Community Lead Adam Fletcher.
In the livestream, Fergusson announced a “big ‘real patch'” coming soon, with the scale of the patch possibly causing maintenance for the game when it comes out. Fletcher also revealed a physical document containing the patch notes on stream, though it won’t be made public until it’s set to go live.
Fergusson: We already have a big “real patch” coming, and so that’s something that’s gone through certification. It’s out there. It’s going to address a lot of things, including performance issues. And it’s so big, we’re actually talking about there’s the potential we may actually choose to have a maintenance window and say, “Y’know, we’re going to bring the whole game down, we’re gonna apply this big patch, and then we’re going to bring it all back up.”
Fletcher: In fact, we have been working on a pretty large client patch. It’s very chonky… that addresses a lot of things, and this right here (shows document) is actually, it’s 13 pages but it’s not even done yet. But it is just an early preview of kind of what we’re putting together. And I have it here, we probably won’t go into detail of it all, but we will have it posted obviously when the patch does actually hit.
One major issue among Hardcore players is the chance of their hero dying randomly through various circumstances. While it’s still unclear as to why this happens, Shely confirmed that Blizzard is looking into it and that they will be fixing the issue should the root cause be discovered.
Shely: So there are a few cases here. We’ve seen cases where a Hardcore hero died during teleport, which is a bug, we’ve seen potentially some bugs with situations where you should be immune, but you might have died, we’re investigating both of those cases. And once we have identified the root cause, we’ll tackle fixes for that.
Shely also revealed that the Scroll of Escape, a Hardcore-only consumable which teleports players to a safe zone, will also be made to teleport players in the event that they disconnect from the game.
Shely: So basically the way that this will work is if you get disconnected, and this is essentially for any reason… now I want to clarify that the disconnect case is a very complex situation in terms of determining what’s happening. So it’s not [a] perfect situation. But what should happen is that when we detect that you’ve disconnect[ed], if you have one of these Scrolls of Escape in your inventory, it will trigger, even though you weren’t there to trigger it. It will consume the scroll, so they can’t just do this as much as you want, and it will teleport you to safety. So when you log back in after the lightning has subsided, you should be in town.
On the topic of Nightmare Dungeons, Shely stated that players will be able to teleport to them via Sigils in the future, allowing you to chain multiple Nightmare Dungeon runs in a row without having to travel between them.
Shely: Nightmare Dungeons are explicitly set up to be highly replayable, through the sigil affixes, through the variety of Nightmare Dungeons that are available, to the changes to monsters that occur inside them, and so we want them to be a great place to farm, including if you want to farm dungeons over and over. If you want to loop dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons are set up to be good at doing that. So what we’re going to do there is we’re going to increase the amount of XP that you get from Nightmare Dungeons, and our goal with this is to make Nightmare Dungeons more efficient to do than side dungeons, ’cause they’re designed to be more replayable.
Fergusson: And does that take into account, like, Nightmare Dungeons have essentially a travel time to get to them?
Shely: Right, so this is a great point. When you think about efficiency, when you think about XP per hour or XP per minute, and we actually have telemetry on it so we can see what it looks like, you can’t just look at the XP that you’re getting from the Nightmare Dungeon, because you have to spend some of the time traveling to that Nightmare Dungeon. In fact, Nightmare Dungeons are a variety of distances away from the nearest waypoint or teleport, so it actually varies depending on which Nightmare Dungeon you’re going to. And so that can also have the effect if you’re thinking about the efficiency aspect of it, of XP per hour or loot per hour, of sort of making it hard to justify choosing a Nightmare Dungeon that’s far from a teleport point. So the second thing that we’re going to do here is we’re going to modify the way that Sigils work so that they teleport you to Nightmare Dungeons on use.
Fergusson: So [do] they teleport you or do they create a place to a waypoint to the dungeon?
Shely: They will create a waypoint that allows you to teleport. But yes, you’ll be able to teleport to, that’s an important distinction, but the effect is that you’ll be able to teleport to your Nightmare Dungeons, and you’ll be able to loop from the end of a Nightmare Dungeon into your next Nightmare Dungeon, if you want to loop them again, you may have to leave the Nightmare Dungeon using an interface, but you’ll be able to go from Nightmare Dungeon to Nightmare Dungeon without traveling between them. And that allows us to calculate the XP buff to make sure that those are the most efficient to do because we’re removing the travel time aspect of it.
If you’re interested, you can watch the full livestream VOD on YouTube here.
Diablo 4 has been out for a week and a half at this point, with many players still going through the game’s campaign. You can read our review of Diablo 4 here.
I just completed the campaign for Diablo 4 yesterday, glad the dev’s continue updating the game.