Blizzard posted more details about the first season in Diablo IV which is being called “Season of the Malignant”. Season 1 will launch on July 20th (though the patch with the balance changes will go live on the 18th; so players will know at least what has been buffed/nerfed prior to launch).
The above linked posting details the core seasonal mechanic (Malignant Hearts) as well as information about how much renown will carry over. The campaign needs to be completed (on the Eternal Realm) before the seasonal game mode becomes available and players should login to their main characters (after the patch on the 18th) that have renown progress on them in order to have that info propagated across their account (according to the dev stream, this wasn’t how seasons were originally planned so their engineers had to design this setup for the first season; in plain english, they didn’t have time to have this process completely automated).
A lot of people were assuming that the current state of D4 was because Blizzard was holding a lot of things back from the pre-season release. It’s becoming abundantly clear though that large parts of the game (especially end game) weren’t fully ready for release yet (this speaks to the multiple years of delays, direction changes, massive personnel/leadership changes due to Blizzards internal scandals, and two years of pandemic related issues added to this mix). This is really not the way you want to do things though especially with a live service game (because now, you are constantly in the hole trying to resolve things that should’ve been resolved before a live production release, and now trying to also implement new features).
Season 1 isn’t even including additional stash tabs (something I was sure they would implement following the gating mechanic used in D3’s seasonal journey). This wasn’t even an unknown (same issue D3 had plus feedback during the NDA betas AND the betas back in May). While they are/do have plans to alleviate some of the storage constraints (like moving gems to the materials tab or increasing the stack limits of some material items themselves), they also seem resistant to just simply adding more slots and tabs. It’s not like I don’t understand the long held belief in RPG designs that having such inventory constraints, forces the player to make these decisions on what to keep/salvage/sell. However, this is a 2023 game with the loot hunt (across multiple classes) being a key objective. I personally have 5 alts serving only as mules for just one class (and it’s not like I haven’t already salvaged/vendored a lot of items already). Seasons is just going to add to the cascade of complaints with limited stash.
It would be nice to have a more creative way to solve this, but when the game systems are designed as such (where you can extract legendary properties from items, and where rare items are in fact are meant to be the best-in-slot gear you find that you imprint to turn into a legendary), this necessitates hanging onto to a large number of items. So the simplest solution is just provide players more stash space.
Digressing, there will be a seasonal campaign story line that takes place in Kyovashad (this at least gives players who are more interested in story/lore versus the usual seasonal ladder play, a reason to at least take part in some seasonal play). I don’t expect this campaign to be anything lengthy; it’s probably just to provide some back story to the seasonal mechanic that the game world will be undergoing.
I also found it interesting (in the video) that they kind of laughed about broken builds being an outcome of the malignant heart system because the first thing that came to mind was “then they’ll simply take the nerf bat to anything that is way too OP”. Given that this seasonal mechanic will disappear after the season ends, I see no reason for taking the nerf bat to fun/OP builds (extreme outliers that break the game completely, I can see) since it is not like that excess power creep will filter back into the main game. And if they believe the mechanic would be a nice permanent addition to the eternal realm, then they can go and fine tune/balance it (since they will have all of the data from that season to address it). However, I expect RNG on top of RNG will become a sticking point for many to achieve these broken builds given the inability to re-roll a sockets color (since the colors of the malignant heart need to match the socket color).
For whatever reason, frustrating designs seems to be a core outcome of many of Blizzard’s designers. I sort of thought some of this would disappear given that many of the senior designers who worked on D3, weren’t in those senior level positions for D4. But this pattern now seems to point to this being a result of the process they go through with any of their games (so it is what it is). While I’m not someone who enjoys seasonal restarts, I am going to give this initial one a whirl (I’ll probably roll necromancer unless the item/aspect for sorc is interesting).
Outside of this seasonal news, the 1.0.4 patch released today also allows uniques to drop from Helltide chests. This partially addresses the 175 cinder mystery chests as being the primary target since players now can target farm for specific chests (to try and get a unique for a specific slot). Unfortunately, the entire live service aspect of deploying updates without sufficient internal testing is showing cracks since players (if they were appropriate level) were suddenly getting a lot of the super rare uniques (one example was Harlequin Crests dropping in quantity). Blizzard has since disabled these super unique drops until a hotfix can be deployed. Some are calling for a rollback but I highly doubt that will be happening because of the cascading effect this has elsewhere (a larger amount of players will lose levels, drops, re-roll enchants, etc). Blizzard could remove the ones dropped from the Helltide chests, but I’m not sure if they will even do that.
What Blizzard needs to do pronto though is #1, better testing, and #2, seriously re-thinking the ultra rarity (in terms of the current drop rate chance) for these “uber uniques”. Given the crazy amount of hours of end game farming that has taken place where less than 5 Shako’s have dropped globally (prior to this bugged chest drop), they might as well not exist in the game to begin with since the chances they will drop for most players is virtual nill.
