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Diablo 4 May Require More Substantial Changes Than a Live-Service Model Can Offer
As fans cast their hopeful gaze to the impending release of Season of Blood, the mood has increasingly shifted to the belief that there are more fundamental issues in Diablo 4's design than can be addressed via a seasonal live-service game model. One glaringly undercooked aspect of the game is its open world, which, as players delve into the endgame, becomes more and more of a missed opportunity.
In its current state, as the grind for loot and Paragon Levels is honed to a finely-optimized point, the engagement with the open world aspects of the game are largely superfluous. Despite several passes at tuning the endgame, it remains suboptimal to do anything besides steamrolling Nightmare Dungeons.
There are some notable design choices Blizzard implemented in order to get people to interact with Diablo 4's open world, but the execution is left wanting. The PvP zones, Helltide events, and world bosses/world events all seek to get players out of their routines and traversing otherwise underutilized sections of the map, but their unrewarding and time-gated nature makes those features little more than a distraction after being experienced once or twice.
The Altars of Lilith and the addition of mounted traversal has done an alright job at incentivizing exploration, but both were initially hampered by design decisions. At Diablo 4's launch, the plan was for Altar rewards to reset at the onset of a new season, and roads were littered with destructible barriers that impeded movement on mounts, resulting in a break of game flow.
The good news is that Blizzard compromised on the Altar reward decision and implemented the ability of mounts to charge through those barriers, spelling hope for the game's open world future. Still, unavoidable is the bottom line that exploration lacks a sense of discovery or any meaningful secrets to unearth.
On October 17, Season of the Blood will be unleashed, with its vampire-focused quest line and powers, along with quality-of-life features and a stimulus of new world bosses for players to conquer. While its release will surely provide a boost to player engagement and reception, nothing that has been revealed so far strikes at the heart of Diablo 4's open world woes.
