Players, to an extent could set their own difficulty, and the mode continues to evolve to this day. Shely says, however, that while the process may have given the QA team nightmares, Hardcore Mode became something almost like a living breathing part of the game. Given the fact that up to four players can take part in a co-op game in Diablo III – using characters with vastly different and varied abilities and attacks – Hardcore Mode was an immense challenge for the developers to balance.
“When we looked at things that fans enjoyed about Diablo II, we tried to translate that into Diablo III where it made sense.” How Blizzard went about balancing the mode “Hardcore Mode is a feature that has quite a significant legacy in the Diablo franchise,” says Senior Game Designer on Diablo III Joe Shely. But for the Diablo faithful, this is the way the game is meant to be played. Still, for those unfamiliar with Blizzard’s dungeon crawler, Hardcore Mode seems more than a little harsh.
Then again, this is balanced out by the fact that loot drops are significantly more valuable. As one would expect, the enemies – and in particular the game’s bosses – are far more dangerous and deadly than they appear in easier modes. The chances of this happening, incidentally, are pretty good. Players who attempt Diablo III on this difficulty setting do so in the knowledge that at some stage they may find themselves gazing in horror as demonic entities turn the character they’ve worked on for ages into paint, meaning it’s lost and gone forever. This isn’t the case with Diablo III’s Hardcore Mode, which features an aspect seldom seen anymore in modern gaming – perma-death. Players may see XP, weapons and a certain amount of progression go up in smoke, but the avatar they’ve become invested in returns in some shape or form. Games in which players are rewarded for their time with incentives – be it in the form of skills, in-game currency, equipment or new areas to investigate – usually allow them to keep their loot and progression even in the event of their character meeting a sticky end.Įven those games that make players pay a cost for failure usually don’t strip them of everything if you die you may pay a penalty, but your character doesn’t vanish altogether (see the Dark Souls games). I n the first of our new PS Blog series looking at the best examples of harder difficulties in PlayStation games – and to celebrate the title’s The Rise of the Necromancer expansion release tomorrow – we talk to Blizzard about its superb PS4 dungeon crawler Diablo III.
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