LogInMore than a million players experienced the RPG over the weekend.
Last weekend, Diablo 4 opened the doors to its beta for those who pre-ordered it. While the developers received valuable feedback, fans of the franchise had a chance to enjoy a new installment of their favorite game.
In an interview with Eurogamer, general manager Rod Fergusson and game director Joe Shely discussed the beta's numbers, queues, surprising enemies, and more.
In a way, the first beta test was meant to prepare the creators for the next one this week so that the final release on June 6 is as smooth as possible. Fergusson once again confirmed that Blizzard aimed to make sure the game was ready for everyone to play.
"Beta" has been a twisted word that has become "marketing beta", which means demo, and for us this was a true beta because we wanted to be able to test that load and what does it mean to get a lot of players in?"
And a lot of players there were: apparently, over a million users joined the first wave, so the numbers for the open beta this weekend must be even higher. But can the servers handle so many people, or the players will have to wait in long queues?
While on Friday you had to wait for your turn, on Saturday queues were not a problem, and the developers want them to stay this way. However, Fergusson explained that they are sometimes necessary to protect the services.
"Sometimes you'll put a queue in place just so that if there's one particular service - like writing to the database - that you're trying to not overwhelm, you'll add to the queue to say, "Hey let's just slow down a little bit while we fix this or look at it." So it's not always just availability of space. Sometimes something's being investigated, or you're trying to manage pressure on one particular thing until you can reinforce it."
So that's why the queues disappeared when the studio understood how slow it has to go to not fall over. Blizzard made a lot of progress, so let's hope this won't be an issue at launch.
A pleasant surprise for older fans was the Butcher, an enemy originally from Diablo 1, who now ambushes adventurers in dungeons. He was introduced recently to make players change their gameplay priorities.
"And the Butcher does that by ambushing you and creating a situation where you're likely to run and potentially run into other danger or navigate under pressure. So broadly speaking, in Diablo 4, we're looking for other ways to add that kind of gameplay that changes the player's experience on the fly."
The Butcher also adds an element of nostalgia for those who have fought it before. Shely hinted that there might be more enemies like that in the future.
The developers also talked about players' skills and some other features of the game, which you can find in this article. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform, our Reddit page, and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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