Unfortunately, some of this info is spread across streams that were done from BlizzCon (and not yet published in articles). D4 will initially have a max level of 40 (as a way to allow growth for future DLC’s and expansions that will likely increase that cap; according to this interview with D4 executive producer and Blizzard Entertainment co-founder Allen Adham, there is a desire to release new content (via expansions) at a higher cadence (this is actually a higher level corporate mandate that has been given to the entirety of Blizzard).
IMHO, remaining with the D3 style of character leveling progression (modeled after traditional MMO progression), is something they should seriously re-think. It’s a serious design challenge to try something that goes beyond this (witness Torchlight Frontiers with trying to evolve from the usual vertical progression by trying to utilize horizontal progression). The design has been iterated to having a summation of your horizontal progress across frontiers, as a traditional character level (to make it easier for players to gauge their overall progression). The point is this total summation of frontier progression is not what is important; what is more important is the horizontal progression of each frontier.
Contrast this to the system that D3 went with; the objective is to get your character to max level, to get max level gear, and tackle max level content. For an MMO (which has the usual linear gating system based on something like item level, gear score, etc) which allows access into dungeons/raids where you then get better gear that allows you to repeat this cycle, this system is fine. But for an ARPG where part of the objective is not just gear, but also the actual progression of that character, it’s less than satisfying. In D3, everything scaled off of weapon damage. Unequip that weapon, and your character barely does damage. In D2 (and other traditional RPG’s), your character sans equipment, gains power from points dumped into attributes as well as skills. So you can still do damage without a weapon.
You are less concerned with the level range of items. Like in Torchlight Frontiers, I’m still using a couple of legendary items that I found early on. In D3, lower level legendaries don’t scale well as your character level increases (and once you hit max level, any lower level legendary is pretty much useless compared to max level items). With D4’s current core foundation, this aspect won’t change. Which leads into the actual itemization.
D4’s items (as it stands now), has been designed to be simplified (to attack and defense with additional affixes as the quality level increases). I thought D3’s core itemization was terrible (weapon damage, main stat, random affixes). What I see in D4 is worse. I know they won’t admit that console is playing some factor in how they are designing some of the core systems (as soon as I saw the same primary/secondary mouse skills + 4 keyboard skills setup that D3 has, I knew there was some influence).
It’s unfortunate because this really would be a great opportunity for the D4 team to evolve these systems. I also shook my head when Adham mentioned in the Game Informer interview, that Paragons were a hallmark of Diablo; Paragon levels are a hallmark of D3; D1 and D2 had finite levels (50 in D1 and 99 in D2). Paragon is an extended progression system that was originally added to the level 60 cap in vanilla D3; it was originally capped at 100 (and character based). All things went to pot when they decided to change it to “no cap” and account wide (separated for softcore and hardcore modes). The biggest problem is that past Paragon 800 (where you can max out every bonus category), all points go into main stat and health. This in conjunction with multiplicative gains from Greater Rifts, has meant a constant trivializing of the base difficulty (with ridiculous amounts of Torment difficulty settings added).
I have no issues with an extended progression system so long as there are a lot of choices of where to spend your points and isn’t “infinite” like Paragon 2.0 in D3. I guess this will be another test for this D4 team when it comes to evolving systems (or actually coming up with something more revolutionary or innovative).
With regards to difficulty; a hallmark of the franchise has been Normal/Nightmare/Hell difficulties with Inferno added in vanilla D3 for end game (each difficulty needed to be completed to unlock the next one). That entire system was replaced with an entirely new system; Normal, Hard, Expert, Master, Torment (where Torment had additional settings) which eliminated the need to play through the game several times to unlock the next higher difficulty.
I haven’t yet come across how this aspect will be handled in D4 (like will it utilize a system similar to Guild Wars 2 where a characters power is scaled down to the monsters level or will monsters scale with the characters level as it is in D3). Since the game will now have this open world element, will players even have the ability to granularly modify the difficulty (Torchlight Frontiers recently added this ability).
UPDATE (to the above): This PCGamer article provides more details about the shared world: no game-wide difficulty, monster level scales to the player (like in D3), dungeons will offer “granular” difficulty control.
As the team kept saying, they are early in development and are looking forward to feedback from the community. Myself, I learned a lesson with D3; that a lot of constructive feedback was summarily ignored by that development team (and early on before the closed beta, dealt with in a condescending manner by a few of the designers/developers where some of the response was “trust us, it’s going to be epic”). This new D4 team needs to prove they are actually open to feedback (and there is going to be a lot of it). Myself, I’m not going to bother to get involved with that again (posting on their forums or sending feedback via other means). My interest in the franchise fell into a chasm back in 2015; I’m writing my honest impressions to see if it can re-ignite even a small spark; the passion that I once had for this franchise and even the ARPG genre, just isn’t there as of this time.
