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Managing Expectations is Key to Improving Diablo 4 - Rod Fergusson Interview with GamesRadar
Diablo IV
Pubblicato
24/08/2023 alle 16:38
da
Archimtiros
In an
interview with GamesRadar
, General Manager Rod Fergusson owned up to negative sentiments surrounding Diablo 4's first Season, acknowledging the team moved too fast and failed to manage expectations, despite feeling like they were doing the right things.
Rod Fergusson Interview with GamesRadar
GamesRadar+
Fergusson states that "one of the things we recognised early on was that we had made some sort of mistake in managing expectations. It was hard because we felt like what we were doing for the game were the right things to do."
"But there were other parts that needed to go along with it," the Diablo franchise lead continues. "We were trying to move a little fast, we were trying to be very responsive and agile. So we were like 'hey, we have two-thirds of a solution. So let's give them the two thirds, and we'll do the other third later.' And that didn't work out in our favour."
While the team is now attempting to correct this failure with more frequent live streams and earlier patch notes, the exact changes made to accomplish this remain to be seen. The developers continue to state their intent to create a more level playing field between various builds, though overwhelmingly negative response to any kind of nerf to the already-emerged meta builds may prove this course to be as disastrous as the first ill-fated attempt to enforce balance. Blizzard previously made it clear that there
would not be another patch nerfing classes as hard ever again
after the Season 1 changes, though the
recently announced Season 2 update
plans to address many of the same offenders - including Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable - without any apparent plans to address more overarching issues such as lackluster itemization and an overabundance of repetitive damage modifiers.
GamesRadar+
Fergusson also adds that "the previous couple of updates were very buff-oriented, and so the notion of getting out in front and saying 'hey, we need to have all builds be viable, we want a level playing field so everybody can be successful with all kinds of builds' - we didn't get out in front of that enough."
"And so because we realised it was an expectation management problem, we had to just own that and recognise we have to do better to get patch notes out before that. We were doing patch notes at the moment the patch dropped, we weren't doing live streams ahead of time to talk about it," the Diablo lead says. It's true that Blizzard was delivering patch notes with rapid cadence in the weeks after Diablo 4 first launched in June, constantly trying to keep its player base informed as to what to expect.
While Season 2 also comes with
several positive quality of life updates
, the general manager insists that
managing expectations
is the key to improving Diablo 4, which makes it sound like they're looking long term rather than expecting one big patch to fix everything. We can expect this to manifest as more developer liveblogs and more extensive patch notes in the two months before Season of Blood launches on October 17th, hopefully alongside answers the community wants to hear.
GamesRadar+
Going forward, at least, Fergusson acknowledges that the "biggest thing for us was just really like 'hey, we have to manage expectations correctly.' And we're going to do better, and we're just going to keep making a better game."
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