Diablo 4 devs show us the “fun decisions” waiting in endgame

pcgamesn.com:

A Diablo 4 developer update livestream has given us another juicy deep dive into the upcoming Blizzard RPG game. Just a few weeks after the first two public test weekends, some of the team’s lead developers have dug into player feedback, along with revealing a few more details about what we can expect from the final game when the Diablo 4 release date arrives.

The livestream, which saw a “secret announcement” teased ahead of time by Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson, features a couch conversation between game director Joe Shely, associate director Joseph Piepiora, community manager Adam Fletcher, and Diablo YouTuber and Twitch streamer CJ ‘Rhykker’ Miozzi.

That announcement, as it turns out, is another chance to play Diablo 4 ahead of its full release date on June 6. The Diablo 4 server slam is a public test aimed at pushing the servers to their limits, and the team encourages as many people as possible to hop on – with the opportunity to earn any beta rewards you missed alongside some new ones.

First up, we get a look at the ‘capstone dungeons’ that players will need to best in order to move up to subsequent world tiers and push to increasingly challenging difficulty levels. Rhykker says his time testing these has immediately felt like a notable step up from the veteran difficulty level included in the public beta.

“I definitely felt it – the world seems more hostile and more aggressive,” Rhykker remarks, noting how the increased difficulty feels more dramatic than a simple ramping up of enemy health and damage numbers. You’ll want to push that difficulty level up, though, Piepiora notes, so you can earn more powerful Sacred and Ancestral tier items.

“Not every item in world tier three is Sacred by default,” he