A Diablo 4 player saw over 40 hours of game time go to waste after his new Season 1 Hardcore character died after a disconnect.
Diablo 4 YouTuber and streamer Wudijo, widely considered one of the best Diablo players in the world, saw his level 93 Hardcore Rogue die after a disconnect seconds away from the completion of an event in a Nightmare Dungeon, and just seven levels away from reaching the 100 level cap. The entire event was captured in a Twitch livestream.
Hardcore mode adds permadeath to Diablo 4, which means if you die, your character is gone forever.
Diablo 4’s first two months of life have been punctuated by the death of Hardcore characters following disconnect, adding fuel to the fire of complaints about Blizzard’s controversial decision to make the action role-playing game always-online.
But this latest death is slightly different in that Wudijo suffered a brief power cut of some kind that sparked the disconnect — a situation outside of Blizzard’s control. However, that didn’t stop Wudijo’s chat from hitting out at the always-online nature of the game.
“It’s over. There is no appeal,” a clearly downcast Wudijo said on-stream. The Hall of Fallen Heroes screen, which lets players know how their Hardcore characters died, revealed Wudijo’s Rogue was killed by a Revenant.
Wudijo, like many other Diablo 4 players, had joined the race to hit Level 100 with a new Season 1 Hardcore character (you need to start a new character to engage with Season 1 content). That race ended on July 22 when two players hit level 100, Icy-Veins reported. Wudijo’s level 93 Rogue died after 48 hours of playtime, and just 53 hours after Season 1 launched.
Turns out leveling is pretty fast these days pic.twitter.com/c5ywljeGA6
— wudijo (@wudijo) July 23, 2023
What can be done to prevent such untimely deaths? Last week, Diablo 4 producer Joe Piepiora suggested the Scroll of Escape item as a solution. The Scroll of Escape is an existing item in the core game used to teleport a player to safety, but Blizzard wants to expand its utility in future seasons.
“In Season 3, the Scroll of Escape is going to work in such a way where once the player has been disconnected, if they have a scroll escape in their inventory, they can basically immediately use it so they can get themselves removed from a dungeon space in case they're in a perilous situation,” Piepiora said.
“We see players in these situations, we're trying to deal with connectivity issues as we find them, and trying to make this a better experience for those players. That's a really big atomic solution that we're going to be bringing online. It just requires a lot of work to do the way that we need it to work. So it's coming out. Right now we're planning on it for Season 3.”
Last week, Blizzard addressed the backlash to Diablo 4’s controversial nerf patch, promising a new patch to revert many of the changes it made.
Despite various issues, Diablo 4 enjoyed an enormous launch that saw over 10 million people play in June. Diablo 4 is Blizzard’s fastest-selling game of all time, and has fuelled record revenue and profits for the company. If you're still playing, check out our interactive Diablo 4 map to start tracking your progress as you play.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
