Season 1 of Diablo IV, launched on July 20, was marked by queues and in-game bugs. Something to irritate players, who were already angry with Blizzard after patch 1.1.
It’s a well-known adage among players: “patch day, no play”. For anyone who isn’t a gamer, this means that on the days a patch is deployed, the game that benefits from it is generally unplayable, to varying degrees. This is sometimes true, sometimes not. But for Diablo IVthe evening of July 20th was akin to a “patch day, no play”.
The difficulties that have arisen on Blizzard’s hack’n’slash are not far to seek: the date of July 20 marks the start of season 1 of Diablo IV, which will last until October 17. Who says new season, says new content and, therefore, players who come back at the same time to discover what changes – challenges, quests, bosses, dungeons, etc.
As a result, a bottleneck formed fairly quickly at the start of the evening. Access times to Sanctuary, the game world, were abnormally long, with queues of a few tens of minutes. It had been a while since those queues had formed: even when Diablo IV launched, it had gone pretty well.
Various in-game bugs
Even in game, we could only see that the Diablo IV servers were suffering. Anyone who wanted to enter a dungeon was stuck on an abnormally long loading screen. After a few minutes, he was finally refused entry and his character reappeared at the entrance to the instance. Insisting gave nothing, except growing annoyance.
In the open world, it was no better: if you could play in certain areas, the passage from one region to another could be blocked. Result, one had the impression that the character ran against an invisible wall, without managing to cross it, or made strange movements back and forth. Videos illustrate the phenomenon well.
Elsewhere, other Internet users have reported problems with camera tracking (it did not move while the character was going off-screen), the disappearance of certain in-game elements (such as NPCs), game crashes, or even animation and collision issues – such as this barbarian doing an attack that made him cross a large area of the map.
It should nevertheless be noted that the situation improved later in the evening – beyond 10 p.m. in particular. ” We are seeing abnormally long wait times for Diablo IV. We are working on this issue and appreciate your patience as we work to get everyone in », had written Blizzard on Twitter.
The difficulties encountered on the first day of season one obviously say nothing about the real experience that the players will encounter: one can think that over the three months that it will last, Diablo IV will not have any major operational problems. However, the July 20 bugs come against a difficult backdrop for Blizzard.
The game’s latest patch, numbered 1.1, has caused the ire of much of the community. This update is unanimously rejected, because it is accused of making the game harder, longer and more unpleasant. The title has also suffered a “review bombing” on MetaCritic, with a score falling to 2.4 out of 10, for more than 4,700 negative opinions against 1,000 positive.
The situation led Blizzard to schedule a live broadcast on YouTube and Twitch this Friday, July 21. The development team is expected at the turn.
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