Diablo 4’s repetitive dungeon design under fire after early access beta
Diablo 4 will release on June 6, 2023, but Blizzard has been running a beta test for anyone who pre-ordered the game over the last weekend with an open beta to follow in a few days. While a majority of the accessible content was lauded by players, such as the combat, skill trees, and eerily dark atmosphere, the design of the action RPG’s dungeons has been criticized for being repetitive.
When it comes to the small cellars found on the map, which often house sidequests, it’s easy to spot the literal copy-paste job that had been done, but even the main signature dungeons, which are randomly generated, showed signs of repetitiveness.
Players claimed that they were confronted with the exact same dungeon layout several times when entering certain areas. This is obviously a major weakness in the game, since you’ll visit the same places dozens of times on farming runs and playthroughs, and exploration has been taunted as one of the core aspects of Diablo 4’s revamped open-world gameplay.
There seem to be lots of similarities between different dungeons in terms of the layout as well, which adds to that déjá vu feeling: Players always seem to start out at the bottom, bosses are found in the center, and keys are placed at the same positions as well.
These issues blemish an otherwise very promising first beta weekend, which was encouraging for many older Blizzard fans, who had been skeptical about the studio's ability to deliver a solid game after years of disappointment.
It’s a good thing that these problems were discovered during beta testing and not at release, as the developers will have a few months to finetune their dungeon generation system alongside all the other work of polishing the game, fixing bugs, and making sure it’s launch-ready. Players can only hope that Blizzard will recognize this feedback and actually investigate the matter.
The upcoming open beta weekend will surely provide more feedback regarding this and other topics, as Blizzard will finally allow players to access all the classes on this occasion.
