Diablo 4 general manager says “we want world bosses to be challenging”, but the focus is on “making the game fun”

The devs can’t focus on “outliers”, he said

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The general manager for theDiabloseries, Rod Fergusson, has admitted that setting the difficulty of world bosses inDiablo 4is “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 Fergussonif mini pets will ever be added toDiablo 4, to which he replied, “We’re a ‘never say never’ team.”

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Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.

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