What has the Diablo 4 Beta taught us? Blizzard is back, but we need to be cautious

If you’re like most other gamers I have seen over the past few days, Diablo 4 is now high on your ‘most excited’ list for 2023. Move over The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, right? (Wrong). It’s been almost 11 years since the launch of Diablo 3, and since then the games industry has moved on. We’ve become more accustomed to ‘games as a service’, we’ve got better at implementing social elements into RPGs, and we’ve rethought lifecycle and monetisation – for better and worse – when it comes to triple-A projects.

Diablo 4 has been watching, like an ancient evil in the dark, learning from the mistakes of its peers. Countless Diablo-likes have come and gone in the decade since the dark lord last loomed huge over our consoles and PCs, and none have stood the test of time. Every newcomer that’s had its five minutes of fame before being unceremoniously killed off and cast aside has made Diablo stronger – anyone that so much as glanced at the past few weeks of beta tests could tell you that. The king is back, and it’s going to haunt the industry for a long time.

There are a few foibles I need to point out about the game itself, and they mostly stem from the technical side of things. The game suffers from disconnects, crashes, rubber-banding, and more than a couple of graphical aberrations (which I would care about more if the whole thing didn’t look so damn good). But all that is to be expected when you’re playing a game in its beta stage, really. The most insidious problem the game has is something Blizzard can’t wrangle out of the code in time for launch… because it’s Blizzard itself.

Let’s go back to the launch of Overwatch 2. It wasn’t a good look for Blizzard. The battle pass itself proved really unpopular at launch, and the actual launch of the game was one of the most disappointing examples of a game launch we’ve seen for a while. The controversial SMS Protect system kept long-time players from signing in, multiple characters had to be removed from the hero pool because of bugs and exploits, and Blizzard was forced to give away free in-game items by way of apology to many players that were left p**sed off and angry at a launch that – by all accounts – set the game on a pretty bad path.

Closer to home, in more recent Diablo territory, there was the bungled roll-out of Diablo Immortal. The game’s community was in uproar about the expensive in-game items that riddled the game, and Blizzard even got real defensive about the critisism, noting that the "vast majority" of players aren't spending money. It was a bad look, and an ugly statement that compounded the feelings of an already unhappy community.

Further to all that, there’s the whole foul employee harassment business that hangs over Blizzard like a bad cloud. In September 2021, the EEOC filed a complaint against Activision Blizzard, alleging the company was responsible for employees facing sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, and related retaliation. A settlement figure of $18 million was agreed at the end of that case, but there was a wealth of abuse and poor management unveiled during the process of the lawsuit that has tainted Blizzard’s name forever.

So. Diablo 4 plays great, but there’s a lot to consider before it launches on June 6. Blizzard has had issues with game launches for a long time now – it even took Diablo 3 until the Reaper of Souls expansion before it really found its feet, nearly two-years post-release.

It’s also worth considering that Blizzard simply doesn’t care what we think. Overwatch 2 attracted an eye-watering 25 million players within just 10 days of release, controversy be damned. Diablo Immortal, likewise, sucked up $100 million within two months. Despite public outcry and all the stories, forum posts and memes, the community seems to stick by Blizzard – even when its perceived as one of the scummiest developers out there.

Granted, the developer did reach out to the playerbase post-launch to see what could be done about its predatory monetisation practices, so maybe its learned a little bit about what the ‘safe’ limits of the Diablo community are, and won’t cross them (at least, at launch). But as exciting as Diablo 4 is, it’s worth approaching the launch period with caution – because we know how many times Blizzard has historically fumbled the ball, this close to the goal.