Diablo 4 game director admits it's "really hard for players to keep up" with the ever-changing ARPG, especially if you aren't "at the cutting edge of everything all the time"

It seems like Diablo 4 morphs into a completely different game every year, with Blizzard consistently dropping updates containing foundational changes to its core systems. If you find it hard it keep up with everything happening, Blizzard hears you.

Right from launch in 2023, Blizzard has been tweaking Diablo 4 with big changes to everything from loot to combat to endgame and, most controversially, its approach to balance. The ARPG implemented sweeping balance updates in 2023, a huge "loot reborn" update in 2024, another big loot and combat overhaul in 2025, and coming up on the horizon, an endgame revamp that takes cues from Diablo 2.

Talking to PC Gamer, Diablo 4 game director Zaven Haroutunian chalks it all up to ARPG problems, saying it's "normal" for these kinds of games to go through "transitions."

"I call them transitions because the people who play an action RPG from the start, they change as they play that action RPG more and they start requiring different things," he says. "Friction points that we could never imagine—that players might never even imagine—suddenly rear their head over the course of 10,000 hours."

That definitely makes sense in a live-service game with so many interwoven systems, but the near-constant evolutions can be tricky to keep up with unless you're playing all the time.

"We know that it's also really hard for players to keep up with [Diablo 4], particularly those who aren't playing at the cutting edge of everything all the time," Haroutunian admits. It doesn't sound like that acknowledgment will have any bearing on how Blizzard approaches Diablo 4 updates, but it's validating to hear as someone whose job requires me to stay up-to-date on this dang game.

"I said this before, I believe in it: If a part of the game isn't working, we have to give it some attention," Haroutunian says. "I don't think anyone's too thrilled about having an obsolete part of the game just sort of linger and not do its job and not contribute."

Ex-Diablo 2 lead character artist says "there's no way you could ever" give the iconic ARPG a new act: "Would it be in a location that Diablo 3 or Diablo 4 has already fleshed out?"