Diablo 5 Wants You To Feel Your Power, Not Just See A Bigger Number

Diablo 5 won't be out until 2029, but Blizzard is already sharing plenty of details on the game following its reveal at BlizzCon earlier this month. The power fantasy of being a demon-slaying warrior is one aspect of the Diablo experience that Blizzard wants to overhaul. Compared to Diablo 4, the developer wants you to feel the might of your newly earned power on the battlefield.

Speaking to PC Gamer, game director Joe Shely explained how players should feel and look more powerful as they level up. "Diablo is a game that, in many ways, is about your character getting stronger and when the monsters get stronger at the same time, especially outside of your control," game director Joe Shely said. "You've filled the experience bar, you get stronger, you should feel awesome now, a wave of light pulses out from you, a bunch of monsters die."

"That's wonderful, but then you're going to go hit some more monsters, and you should feel powerful. And sometimes automatic scaling can get in the way of that feeling, which is so core to it, and that's why this is a really important question. And so, we're going to take a somewhat different approach to that in Diablo 5."

In Diablo 4, the game was criticized for having an aggressive layer of level-scaling for enemies. Even if you'd optimized your loadout and equipped optimal skills, there was always that friction between the player and the world, with players pointing out that the diminishing returns on Paragon points and fewer gear upgrades resulted in a frustrating bottleneck for them.

Because of the open-world scaling at launch, there was effectively no area where you could safely farm better gear to help you survive in tougher zones. Blizzard would eventually adjust the system to make Diablo 4 feel less like an uphill treadmill.

How Blizzard plans to properly implement these systems remains to be seen, but you can expect more updates about Diablo 5 to start rolling out next year. Combat is also under the Blizzard microscope as it aims to make it feel better than ever, and the return of set items should also help feed into the game's power fantasy.