Legendary Item Drop Rates, Dungeon Variety, Butcher Details and More: Diablo 4 Developer Comments

Diablo 4 Game Director Joe Shelly and General Franchise Manager Rod Ferguson talked to several outlets about the beta experience, and addressed some common concerns about the full game. First off we got an answer to one of the most commonly asked questions from the beta: are the item drop rates increased in these two test weekends:

They are tuned higher, yes to give a fuller experience and better test during Beta.

— Rod Fergusson (@RodFergusson) March 23, 2023

Then we have several topics covered in the big Eurogamer interview, with the Butcher and dungeon design being particularly interesting:

It’s a wonderful response to have. And just to clarify: is it like a reverse treasure goblin in how the Butcher appears at random? What are the conditions for him appearing – are there any?

Joe Shely: I think that there are some minimum level restrictions – there might be a few others. But it’s meant to be very random and very unexpected. He also will leave-

Rod Fergusson: [Chuckling to himself] pieces of you.

Joe Shely: Either after he killed you or after some amount of time. And this provides a couple of things: one, it gives you a moment to get revenge on him later, and two, he doesn’t kill you ten times in a row.

Rod Fergusson: What I love about the Butcher is that most of the stories around the Butcher are, “I didn’t know that existed, I was surprised, it killed me. What the hell?” And then, “I played a bunch more, I got stronger; when he showed up, I had my vengeance.” That overcoming, that showing of mastery, is a really cool kind of arc within an arc.

So are any other enemies getting a similar kind of treatment to the Butcher?

Joe Shely: Yeah, we’d like to add more enemies like that to the game. And because the game is a live service, we have a lot of opportunities to do that.

One other bit of feedback I saw, and this came from a few people, was their not being overly enamoured with dungeon design. The gist seemed to be that dungeons were too big and involved backtracking to grab keys and unlock doors and so on. Is this something you’ve seen and are you taking a look at it?

Joe Shely: We have seen it, yeah. There’s a few elements there. There’s some players who… We added the ability to teleport out of dungeons via the UI and some players don’t realise that exists. But certainly there are cases within the dungeon where you’re going to get a key and then you’re going somewhere else.

We don’t want players to be running through an empty dungeon. In cases where you’re going to get a key and you’re running back through an area, there should be enemies that are showing up to refresh that. It is a goal of ours that you’re not running through an empty dungeon, basically, ever. It can be okay for very short periods of time.

But when you think about dungeons overall, and there are well over a hundred dungeons in the game – and in the beta, of course, you’re only seeing the dungeons that exist in the Fractured Peaks [region], which is about twenty percent of the overworld – one of the design decisions we made is we wanted the dungeons, an individual dungeon, to have certain properties about it that were consistent and tied to that dungeon and that place in the world. So that when you go into a dungeon, it’s not just drawing out of a raffle all of the elements, there are some things that are consistent.

And the way that we want players to approach that as they’re levelling up, is to look at it as, “I want to do each of these different dungeons,” and that’s incentivised through things like the Codex of Power and the Renown system that give you a sort of checklist for all the dungeons you can do. And then when you get into the endgame, after you’ve completed the campaign and you get access to the Nightmare Dungeon system, we have the sigils that modify dungeons in really cool ways, with buffs and nerfs, and those dramatically modify the dungeon. But because the dungeons are designed with some properties to start with, you can get a sigil for a dungeon and have some context for what that means – it’s not just a random name that can be anything.

I see.

Rod Fergusson: People are seeing dungeons at the baseline level. It’ll be interesting the feedback once people get to experience what it means to go through sigils and get to see now there’s more monsters, now they have a different ability, now you’re being debuffed this way and they’re being buffed that way. And it’s going to feel like a much different experience.

And then there’s this similar comment on dungeons from an NME interview:

“The dungeon feedback is something that’s really interesting to us,” shared Shelly. “The beta is isolated to a single area of the world. There are five zones in the world, and you’re only playing through Fractured Peaks. We put well over 100 dungeons in the game — many of those are not in Fractured Peaks. We expect that as you’re levelling up your character, you’re going to be adventuring through many different dungeons rather than doing the same dungeon over and over.

“The game rewards you for that,” the director continued. “We have mechanics like the Codex Of Power, and we have different types of mechanics for different dungeons. Some dungeons are about killing all the monsters, some have different kinds of objectives. Some of them have bosses at the end, while others have events at the end. It’s really about – during the level-up period – experiencing all of the different dungeons that exist in the world, and of course, in the beta you’re only getting a fraction of that.”

However, Shelly added that the endgame experience in Diablo 4 will feature more variance, as the Nightmare Dungeon mechanic will allow players to use keys to modify existing locations with additional affixes.

Hopefully these answers put some players’ mind at ease, but the dungeon issue in particular is still a hot topic, as many are not convinced the Nightmare dungeon sigils will offer enough added variety to what we’ve seen so far or that later dungeons will be more complex or varied. 

The open part of the Diablo 4 Beta starts tomorrow and you can check out the specific region start times here, and you can also check out our guides for it here.