Diablo 4 head says Blizzard will "embrace," not insta-nerf, busted stuff like Ball Lighting Sorcerers: "Just let 'em have fun, we'll deal with it later"
The general reception surrounding Diablo 4 has had many ups and downs in its first six months since release. Currently, Diablo 4 is in a far better state than it was earlier this year. Evidently, the developers learned some valuable insights on carefully tuning this massive action RPG to meet community expectations.
In an interview with the Electronic Playground Network, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson took some time to reflect on the first six months of Diablo 4. He also talked about the rough patches -- both the actual patches and the resulting community backlash -- and stated that upcoming updates would instead go for more thoughtful changes. According to Fergusson, a big lesson that Blizzard learned is that sometimes it's OK for things to "feel" broken to keep the fun.
"[As developers] sometimes you focus on balance, and not fun," said the Diablo general manager while explaining the thought process for patching games. "Like, you can be like 'everything has to be on the same level' and that you're really striving for fairness, but the thing about a Diablo game is that those overpowered moments that when you feel like you're cheating or that you feel like you fooled the development team by taking advantage of some exploit, it can feel really, really fun. So that's what we've tried to embrace, and now in Season 2, the Ball-lighting Sorc' [build] is ridiculous, but we're just like "let them have their fun, we'll deal with it later.'"
These comments are a surprising and refreshing turnaround from the early months of Diablo 4, given how quick Blizzard was to make tweaks and remove popular quirks with the game.
Fergusson's also comments hit at one of the most defining aspects of the Diablo community: they love to
