The general manager for the Diablo series, Rod Fergusson, has admitted that setting the difficulty of world bosses in Diablo 4 is “a tricky thing to balance” as the developers have to consider all of their players, not just “outliers”.
In an interview at BlizzCon 2023, TRG asked Fergusson if the difficulty of world bosses (enormous multiplayer boss fights against the likes of Ashava and Wandering Death) is something that the team is looking to change, to which he said that there’s an “evolving thinking” around the matter, since they don’t want to stop the more casual players from having fun.
“One of the things you're gonna have to be careful of is that if you have outliers, and you do everything based on your outliers, and the people who are just trying to play the game are kind of punished for that. [...] And they're like, ‘But I'm just trying to play every night, you know, I get an hour a night when my kids are asleep.’ It's a tricky thing to balance,” he explained.
He added that “we want world bosses to be challenging”, acknowledging that some “hardcore streamers” are able to kill them very quickly. However, he added that some people finding them easy is something that the developers have to allow for the sake of the wider playerbase.
“Because we want our focus to be on making the game fun, more than making the game balanced, it means that we have to allow for those types of moments to happen,” he continued. “We get this sort of situation where we go like, ‘Oh, do we nerf Ball Lightning to make world bosses be the thing we have in our head? Or do we let people have fun with the [Sorcerer]?’ And right now, the decision is [to] let people have fun with the [Sorcerer].”
Elsewhere in the interview, we also asked Fergusson if mini pets will ever be added to Diablo 4, to which he replied, “We’re a ‘never say never’ team.”
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