With Diablo 4 set to release June 6, old and new fans are eagerly awaiting their opportunity to hack-n-slash their way across the world of Sanctuary once again. This is the first major mainline entry in over 11 years, with Diablo 3 originally releasing in 2012. Diablo 3 has changed significantly during that time, and Blizzard has learned quite a few lessons on what players want in a Diablo game. With Diablo 4, developers knew they had to change the endgame, which meant changing one of the more controversial systems in Diablo 3: Rifts and Greater Rifts.
Introduced all the way back in patch 2.1, Greater Rifts were designed as an endgame play mode that was timed and would get progressively more difficult, but would also provide rewards to match. Since the introduction of rifts, Diablo 3 has run a total of 28 seasons, with the latest introducing The Altar of Rites, a new progression system that gave players a type of talent tree to pick and choose new account-wide character buffs. But from the earliest seasons to the most recent, Rifts have continued to be a contentious issue, as players had no way early on to pick their rewards and were forced to continually grind them in hopes that the one piece of gear they needed would drop this time.
During an interview with Game Rant, Associate Game Director Joe Piepiora and Dungeons Producer Ash Sweetring Vickey explained why Rifts and Greater Rifts were one of the biggest things they wanted to change going from Diablo 3 into Diablo 4. As Piepiora said,
"We wanted to focus more on the idea of capped progression and not this sense of never-ending power progression. We wanted to put more emphasis on the choices the player has made over the course of their character's progression and what they got for drops versus the amount of time they’ve invested purely in that character."
The focus away from a system that never really ends might sound counter-intuitive from a game development point of view, but both Piepiora and Vickey understood at the beginning of creating Diablo 4 that players felt tired of running continuously on the hamster wheel that was Diablo 3's Rifts and Greater Rifts. Almost immediately after the Rift system was introduced, players were already annoyed at the requirements needed to just access them. From Finding a Keystone of Trials dropped by a Nephalem Rift Guardian to fighting waves of enemies to determine the level of the Key they would use, the process was quickly viewed with a high level of annoyance by players.
It was later tweaked and partly changed in patch 2.3 with the Realm of Trials, but it didn't alleviate the boredom some players were feeling. As Vickey explained from the player input they had gotten,
"The rifts were one of the biggest things that I think we wanted to take away. We heard a lot of feedback from players that it seemed pretty tedious after a while, so we wanted to introduce the objective of Nightmare Dungeons which is actually the ability to be able to increase your personal player power and cater more towards your personal play style."
Of course, this doesn't mean there isn't an endgame progression system in place, as Nightmare Dungeons and the new Paragon Board will offer much more in the way of players' choices in how they build their characters out in Diablo 4. But Vickey also noted how instead of using Rifts to continually chase better equipment with better stats, improving individual gear could be seen as a quality-of-life improvement. "...that was one of the big things that we were able to take away is how we can improve an everyday quality of life item that people still enjoyed, but something that we could make better for the long run for players," Vickey said.
The switch to improving singular items in this new way is a definite switch from previous Diablo loot progression systems. Before Diablo 4, every previous title has been focused on finding a specific item that also needed to have the best stats, but the grind for it was the cause of many players to become burnt out looking for that one piece that just never seemed to drop. That same new philosophy on improving singular gear pieces instead of continually looking for replacements was echoed by Piepiora, as he noted,
That was another really big change that we made in that we wanted to provide a lot of extra choices once players got to that point and customization options. We didn’t want it to be never-ending, and we wanted there to be a finite point where gear doesn’t get more powerful numerically from here. Now it's really about finding the right affixes on the items you’re looking for, the exact legendary powers you need, or the unique items that you’re hunting for. That was really more of the focus for us.
The decision to move away from constant gear hunting will more than likely be seen in a positive light by those who have spent the last decade grinding high-level Rifts and Greater Rifts in search of that elusive gear piece to complete a build, especially without the power to choose which gear piece drops. That grind more than likely fueled the increase in ultra-meta Rift builds as well, as speed and ease of clearing content grew to clearly outweighed any fun or silly builds for players. Blizzard's developers appear to have listened to the community in doing away with the Rift grind, but only time will tell if their replacement in Diablo 4 will be the quality-of-life improvement they hope it will be.
Diablo 4 releases on June 6 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.