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

“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.