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Before I gave up on Diablo 3 for good some years ago, I tried playing a hardcore character to see if it would reinvigorating my love for the game - and it totally worked. Playing a hardcore character practically turns Diablo into a different game. The world is so much more dangerous when you only have one life to live, so the way you approach it changes a lot. Defensive stats and abilities become a lot more important than offensive ones, you have to slow down and find safer routes through areas that you would have sprinted through before, and eventually you form a real bond with your character. I don’t remember the names of any of the dozens of Diablo toons I’ve made over the years, but I’ll never forget my level 56 Wizard Teegan, who died doing what she loved: blasting Zoltun Kulle with lightning from her fingertips. RIP Teegan, I miss you.Hardcore Diablo can be incredibly rewarding, and I never felt like I had wasted my time even when a character I’d spent 40 hours with kicked the bucket. Those were memorable experiences that I enjoyed, and they wouldn’t have been as meaningful if they didn’t end in such a fateful way. Not to get too existential, but there’s beauty in a hero’s death. It can feel good to say goodbye, even if it hurts.That said, I’ve also been push🦹ed to my breaking point by hardcore. A hardcore character’s life may be fleeting, but as a player I still have an expectation that the game is going to play fair. I need to know that if my character dies, it’s because I did something wrong, not because something happened that was outside of my control. No one wants to feel robbed or cheated because they lost their character due to a bug or a server issue, which is exactly why I’m never going to play a hardcore character in Diablo 4.
I’ve had some pretty serious lag the entire time I’ve played Diablo 4. I usually hit a snag anytime I zone out of one area into another one, but I’ll also stutter occasionally in dungeons. Not everyone has this problem, and it will probably get better for me over time, but tha🐲t alone is enough to discourage me from playing hardcore at the moment. If the game froze for two seconds and resulted in my character dying, it would ruin Diablo 4 for me.
That hasn’t stopped a lot of people, especially streamers, from playing hardcore characters though. Even those who aren’t experiencing lag have lost their characters due 🧸to other server-related issues, and some of these problems have me convinced that it’s never going to be safe to play hardcore. The first person to reach level 100 in the hardcore race, cArn_, lost his character after 82 hours when his game briefly disconnected from the servers. Diablo 4 treats disconnects as death in order to stop people from DCing when they know they’re about to die, so if you have a service interruption for any reason, even for a split second, say goodbye to your character. As someone living under the tyranny of Spectrum ISP, there’s no way I’m trusting my shaky internet to hold up while I play hardcore.
That one might be an issue on the player’👍s side, but there have definitely been deaths caused by instability on Blizzard’s servers. that he’d been playing for 173 hours when trying to leave a dungeon. In the video you can see him finish the dungeon and spawn the bubble where your character should be safe from harm. He then tries to town portal, but for whatever reason, he gets stuck in a loading screen. The prevailing theory is that he was killed by the dungeon’s lightning storm affix while in the loading screen, which caused the game to crash. At the end of the video another streamer named Kripp recommends never running a dungeon with that affix while playing Hardcore, which is sound advice, but no one should have to play around unfair conditions like that for fear🌱 that their character will be unceremoniously deleted while exiting a dungeon they successfully completed.
I’m willing to accept the risks inherent to playing hardcore, but I need assurances that the game is going to be fair, and Diablo 4 ꦗjust can’t provide that. These deaths are the equivalent of your character having a brain aneurysm and keeling over in town. You can’t predict it, there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it, and if it happened to me I would be consumed with rage. 🉐You’d have to be a real pain fetishist to play a hardcore character in Diablo 4 right now, and given the always-online nature of the game, I’m not convinced that’s ever going to change.