Why Diablo 4's loot filter isn't ready yet: 'Every perceivably simple decision has some kind of crazy cause and effect'
Diablo 4 has a big, small problem: inventory space. There's just not enough of it.
Among all the other cool things coming next year in Vessel of Hatred, Diablo 4's first expansion, are a number of fixes designed to help players with the endless bag-space management task that is, perhaps, inevitable in Blizzard's loot-explosion action RPG.
However, it turns out implementing a key player-requested feature—a loot filter—is harder than it might sound. Developers are working on it, Blizzard told us at a BlizzCon interview, but it may not appear soon.
«We don't have a date to announce on the filter, and the reason for that is—let me back up just a little bit here,» Diablo 4 game director Joe Shely said. «When you think about the changes we made to experience in Season Two, when we talk about that, we say 40% faster leveling, which is correct. We have data that shows people are leveling faster and so forth. But we didn't just go in and change the number and say, 'Oh times 1.4x.'»
Instead, says Shely, developers made changes to a number of things—the Smoldering Ashes currency that bought Seasonal Blessings in Season One, for example, and making some things multiplicative, like elixirs, instead of additive, when they affected experience points.
«A bunch of things had to come together so that would result in a coherent experience leveling up,» Shely said. «The same thing is true for itemization.»
In a deep-dive panel at BlizzCon, Shely went over some of the changes the Diablo team plans to make to items: making it easier to compare them, expanding the crafting system and ways to modify your items, and making other tweaks that aim to ensure that item decisions result in meaningful differences in power.
«And so, when we think about
Read more on pcgamer.com
