It’s rough out there for Hardcore Players in Diablo IV. All it takes is one inopportune disconnect to have hours of progress wiped out via permadeath. It’s a frustrating situation driven in part by Diablo IV’s focus on online connectivity, but Blizzard may have a solution.
Speaking with IGN on the occasion of San Diego Comic-Con, producer Joe Piepiora suggested that the Scroll of Escape could be a solution for Hardcore Players suffering an untimely disconnect. The Scroll of Escape is an existing item in the core game that is used to teleport a player to safety, but Blizzard wants to expand its utility in future seasons.
“In Season 3, the Scroll of Escape is going to work in such a way where once the player has been disconnected, if they have a scroll escape in their inventory, they can basically immediately use it so they can get themselves removed from a dungeon space in case they're in a perilous situation,” Piepiora explains.
“We see players in these situations, we're trying to deal with connectivity issues as we find them, and trying to make this a better experience for those players,” he continues. “That's a really big atomic solution that we're going to be bringing online. It just requires a lot of work to do the way that we need it to work. So it's coming out. Right now we're planning on it for Season 3.”
For those who don’t want to wait until Season 3, Piepiora says that Blizzard is making a number of performance adjustments in Season 1 in an attempt to improve connectivity. This is on top of a number of new mechanics, a new boss, and other features.
The return of Rebirth
Elsewhere, Blizzard talked about plans for other new features, including a party finder and the return of the Rebirth system.
On the subject of the party finder Piepiora said that Diablo IV’s social tools “have a lot of room to be improved upon.” He chalked it up to the size and scope of Diablo IV’s gameplay, which he describes as a “really vast game.”
“We find these opportunities as players begin to play with the tools that we gave them to realize like, ‘Oh, there's actually a lot of places where we can make improvements here.’ And I think that adding additional player finder-style functionality – whether it is opting into a group, participating in a certain kind of content, or joining a queue for something – there's definitely an opportunity space here for us to pursue. It is something that we're actively talking about internally,” Piepiora says.
As for the Rebirth system, which allows players to import existing characters for seasonal play, Piepiora says that the “wheels are in motion.”
“The Rebirth System is actually something the team has been talking about internally for a while now. It's something we definitely do want to deliver in the future. I don't have a timeline for it yet, but it's something that is being actively discussed. Even this week we're talking about Rebirth more. So the wheels are definitely in motion and I can commit that it's going to be coming to Diablo IV in the future.”
Right now the Diablo team is focused on Season 1, titled Season of the Malignant, which is going live now. A patch with several Uniques and other updates dropped earlier this week, and fans weren’t very happy about some of the changes. The new season introduces several new features while rolling out the battle pass system.
For more, check out our Altar of Lillith guide as well as the complete map of Sanctuary, as well as Blizzard’s response to the mysterious cow level.
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
