Blizzard recognises sparse end-game content, new patches to increase durability in pipeline

Recognising the lack of end-game content and its inability to keep Diablo III sustainable in the longer run, Blizzard has revealed that it is focused on a number of fixes that will help to add durability to the game.

The community manager of the latest game in the popular action role-playing game (RPG) franchise Micah “Bashiok” Whiple admitted the undeniable shortcoming of the game in respect to end-game content, especially in the game’s final act, Act IV, on inferno difficulty.

Any notion that the America-based developer would sit idle and watch one of their most successful titles die down after the players are done with the seemingly endless hunt for powerful loot was removed after Whiple’s recent post on the game’s official forum.

He conceded that the strategy that was successfully applied to their most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft could not be applied to Diablo III.

“Diablo III is not World of Warcraft,” he stated. “We aren’t going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every few months. There needs to be something else keeping people engaged, and we know it’s not there right now.”

Whiple revealed that work had already started on a couple of new patches that will bring new features to the game instead of additional content.

The first of these patches, patch 1.0.4, will introduce a number of fixes and changes to the game to increase its appeal. The complete details of this patch will be released by Blizzard in a few days’ time.

The Diablo III community manager also promoted the yet unreleased patch 1.1, which will offer a different experience by introducing player-versus-player arenas.

Whiple is hopeful that the new patches will be met with a positive response. The intended motivation behind the two new patches is to give players something more and something exciting to do in Diablo III after they have gotten done with all four acts of the game.

He pointed out that patch 1.0.4 and 1.1 are in no way a real solution to the sparse end-game content, though they are thinking about taking care of that issue as well in the future.

“We have some ideas for progression systems, but honestly, it’s a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1, which itself is still a ways out,” he said.

After years of wait, the fans of the Diablo franchise finally got their hands on the third instalment in the series. It received generally good reviews from critics and players, something that hardly came off as surprising considering the amount of time Blizzard had taken to develop it. Despite being extremely popular with its servers literally overloaded, the game faced one crisis or challenge after another. However, the game still enjoys a strong fan base and while the overloaded servers qualify as a bane, they still serve to demonstrate the immense popularity of the game.