Blizzard to explain reasons behind Diablo 4's "game-ending" pre-season patch this Friday

Compared to most live service games these days, the Diablo 4 launch has been fairly smooth. Apart from service disruptions that happened as a result of attacks, servers have been stable, and disconnects/crashes have been rare.

But, it seems Diablo 4's problems weren't in its technical state, but more of its design issues. More specifically, the game showed a lack of depth in its endgame, and players have been voicing their concerns about that in various ways after many of them finished the campaign and started the grind.

Everyone - from casual players looking for new content, to the hardcore with hundreds of hours each under their belts - has been looking forward to Season of the Malignant, or more accurately, the big patch that would arrive ahead of the season's official kick-off.

Patch 1.1.0a did indeed release less than 24 hours ago. It's Diablo 4's largest so far, with a staggering number of bug fixes, a few key changes to mechanics, sweeping nerfs to all classes, and an unusual slowing down of the grind.

Needless to say, Diablo 4's most dedicated players were hoping for things to go the opposite way, and they've been making that veery clear over the past several hours. The Diablo 4 subreddit has been ablaze with overly dramatic doom and gloom, general criticism of the volume of new content, dismay about how wide-ranging (and seemingly unnecessary) the nerfs are, to the ever-amusing memes.

The negative response is so widespread that players have to specifically mark threads where they try to discuss some of the positive changes, only for them to also end up with drive-bys. It's honestly a little shocking to see such vitriol, even from voices outside the streamer bubble.

Clearly, Blizzard needs to outline just what its intents were with many of those changes, and the developer is doing just that. Diablo's global community director, Adam Fletcher, confirmed that the team is preparing a Campfire Chat to go through this feedback.

Campfire Chats are less formal livestreams Blizzard has been hosting since the release of Diablo 4. This one is set to go live on Friday, with specific times to be shared later today/tomorrow.

If you're looking forward to the new season yourself, there's still time to do as many of the items on this list as you can. Not matter what, however, do not start a new seasonal character without doing this one thing.