Blizzard responds to Diablo 4 beta feedback, says dungeons work as intended

Variety supposedly comes in after reaching different regions

Overall, players were quite delighted with the early access beta for Diablo 4 last weekend, but the game’s dungeon design, which many testers found to be repetitive, caught a lot of negative attention. Speaking to Eurogamer, Diablo 4’s General Manager, Rod Ferguosson, and Game Director, Joe Shely, responded to some of that feedback provided by the community.

They emphasized that this early access beta wasn’t a “marketing beta” like so many other beta tests nowadays, but was actually supposed to help them identify issues, test server loads, and so on. “And Friday was a little bumpy because of that, but the way that we looked at it is the issues we find now are issues that will be a lot smoother at launch. And so this weekend was to prepare for next weekend, and next weekend prepares for launch,” Fergusson said.

Over the first weekend alone Blizzard was able to fix “dozens of issues” as over a million players entered the open world of Sanctuary.

Addressing the issues raised by the community regarding the dungeon design, Shely stated that players were “only seeing the dungeons that exist in the Fractured Peaks” and that dungeons in that region intentionally shared certain properties, tying them to a specific region on the map. “So that when you go into a dungeon, it's not just drawing out of a raffle all of the elements, there are some things that are consistent,” he explained.

That means every one of the open-world map’s big regions will feature dungeons with different shared characteristics, giving them an identity. Shely maintains that endgame content like the Nightmare Dungeon system, which allows players to modify dungeons with positive and negative conditions, would dramatically shake things up. Fergusson added: “And it's going to feel like a much different experience.”

However, players claiming to have been part of previous closed beta tests focusing on endgame content claim that this isn’t really true. They said that the dungeon layouts won’t significantly change in the additional regions, maintaining the very “samey” feeling of those early areas. Much of the criticism uses comparisons to Diablo 2’s dungeon design, which managed to create dungeon layouts with very distinct identities.

They responded to some balancing concerns as well, confirming that they monitored the debate and are looking at things like buffing the Barbarian’s Hammer of the Ancients and nerfing a Frost Sorcerer build.

Diablo 4 launches on June 6, 2023, an open beta on all platforms is coming up this weekend.