Interview: Diablo 4 Developers Talk About Class Changes, Dungeons, and More Ahead of Final Beta Test

ign.com:

Though Diablo IV recently went gold after a lengthy development, that hasn't stopped the team at Blizzard from iterating and planning for the future of their upcoming live-service action RPG -- a fact that will be on full display during it's recently announced beta weekend scheduled for May 12th. Hot on the heels of their first two beta weekends, which featured the full first act of Diablo 4's campaign, the developers have moved quickly to implement a whole host of changes based on player feedback, which includes everything from character class balances to dungeon reworks, and even changes to the fonts used.

Among those developers are game director Joe Shely and associate game director Joseph Piepiora, who I had a chance to sit down with to discuss their beta learnings and the surprise "server slam" weekend -- a final beta test that will give players one last opportunity to jump into Diablo 4's first act early.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback from the previous beta weekends was that dungeons required a lot of backtracking and repeated objectives that took too time to complete, and Blizzard has already moved to address some of this with changes that will be implemented in time for the server slam.

"We took a look at all of the different dungeon objectives to make sure they were as fun as possible," Shelley explains. "In terms of backtracking specifically, we looked at where [objectives] were spawning in terms of the layout of the dungeon. We also adjusted the way that the dungeons are laid out... so that the layout itself requires less backtracking."

Piepiora added, "We also made a couple of adjustments to some of our objectives. There's a few dungeons where players are asked to kill all the monsters inside the dungeon.