Diablo 4 has live service elements but could be played just like a regular old action RPG, Blizzard says.

d4 items endgame might look nearly the same as an MMO(opens in new tab), however, it won't mirror the genre's endless climb for power, nor does it betray the series' history being an action RPG, Blizzard says.

The team continuously asked themselves if Diablo 4 was an MMO or perhaps an action RPG and where you can draw the road during its development.

"The response is that Diablo 4 is definitely an action RPG first," associate game director Joe Piepiora said in a group interview with PC Gamer. "It is really a dungeon crawling, monster slashing, monster killing, loot collecting game."

The open world and exactly how other players can be displayed alongside you to definitely help with world events and world bosses will be to make Sanctuary feel bigger, to not make it seem like group activities within an MMO.

"In Diablo, everybody's kind of a damage dealer," he explained. "The fantasy of playing a Diablo game, oftentimes, is making really overpowered builds and merely blowing up screens filled with monsters sooner or later and having that sort of experience. We want to ensure that those elements are preserved where we do not have to worry about attempting to create a curated group of balances between multiple players inside a party that have to work inside a very particular way together."

After you've completed Diablo 4's story, you will be presented with a lot of reasons to go back to old dungeons and areas of the map for better gear. There are nightmare dungeons with unique challenges, bounties to accomplish, and PvP zones on the view world.

As you're employed your way toward the game's level 100 cap, you'll earn paragon points and spend them on various stat increases on the giant board. Compared to Diablo 3's nearly endless paragon point system, Diablo 4 may have a limit on how many you can generate.

All of the sounds nearly the same as an MMO, also it doesn't appear to be Blizzard would argue it's not borrowing in the genre, but Diablo 4 pulls back from becoming an endless grind.

"One thing I do need to make sure it is clear is we're not attempting to create a situation where players believe they must play forever," Piepiora said. "We want players who play Diablo 4 to experience and enjoy the experience when they are playing the sport."

"We want you to definitely get to a particular point, once you have reached level 100, where you have 220 of those paragon points you're having fun with, you've all of your skill points that you have already allotted to your character, and you have your legendary and unique items, and today it's about configuring the board precisely the way that you would like," Piepiora said.

You can rotate the paragon board around, choose nodes that suit your build, and add glyphs—which you can find on view world—to power up nodes around them. The idea is you will move your points around while you take on progressively difficult challenges, and, presumably, because of the meta changes.

Diablo 4 may have seasons such as the previous game(opens in a new tab), meaning you'll begin a new seasonal character and level them from 1 to 100 every time. Participating in those activities laid out within the endgame video and dealing with objectives within the "seasonal journey" will enable you to get progress around the battle and go through "favor." The battle pass may have a free track with such things as XP boosts for those players, along with a premium track with strictly cosmetic rewards.

"Right now, the battle pass, when you are figuring in completing the growing season journey alongside doing other content in the sport, you are looking at roughly 80 hours price of time invested to accomplish the entirety from the battle pass. To level a character to level 100 could take longer than that based on how you play," Piepiora said.

He said it's likely that you simply finish the battle pass before you reach the max level each season, which follows a broader philosophy of letting players get what they need out of the sport and move ahead if they'd like.

Story-focused players who aren't interested in the endgame can skip it and are available back when a tale update happens or anything else interests them, Piepiora said. "But we're not attempting to say the only way to experience Diablo 4 would be to engage using the endgame and go all the way to level 100 with every character you ever make."

d4 items will launch on June 6. But if you're impatient, you can begin planning out your build now(opens in a new tab) by using this tool based on the sport's recent beta.