Diablo 4’s highly-anticipated first season begins on July 20, bringing new mechanics, Malignant Dungeons, and aspects to experiment with. While the player base has beenworking out optimal grind routesfor the new season andwrapping up the campaign to access seasonal content immediately, there’s still much we don’t know about how the seasonal mechanics will work. We spoke to Diablo 4’s associate game director Joseph Piepiora, dungeon designer Michelle Piña, and quest designer Madeleine James about what we can expect from Season of The Malignant.
First off, everybody has questions about Malignant Hearts. The season revolves around this new resource, which is socketed into equipment much like gems are now. However, they’re very different from gems in that they give you bonuses akin to “legendary powers”, in James’ words. “One of my favourites is when five enemies get close to you, it will automatically stun them for every X amount of seconds,” she explains. That’s very different from the bonuses that gems and skulls give us, which might add small bonuses to the amount of armour or life your character has.
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You come across hearts all over the map, with varying types of Malignant Creatures differentiated through design and colours. They might be any kind of enemy, like a Quillrat, for example. Killing them for the first time gives you the opportunity to capture their Malignant Heart with a Cage of Binding, which will launch you into a second battle with a more powerful version of that creature, with special abilities depending on what kind of Malignant it is. Killing that more powerful creature will secure the Malignant heart.
You can also find them in Malignant Tunnels, which are specific dungeons made for the Season of the Malignant meant specifically for farming Malignant Hearts. In response to concerns aboutplayers finding dungeons repetitive, Piña says, “They’re shorter dungeons, so hopefully people don’t feel like they’re slogging at all. We also implemented some changes that we made to dungeons based on beta feedback.” These changes are largely centered around making objectives easier to find in tunnels by putting them in the player’s path as opposed to having them pushed to the end of maps, which helps to mitigate backtracking.
You will, inevitably, begin collecting more and more powerful Malignant Hearts. At this point, you may salvage Malignant Hearts into a resource called Ichor, which will be used in crafting throughout the season. “[Ichor] allows you to roll for certain Malignant Heart types when you go and you interact with Corman’s workbench,” Piepriora explains. You can also use them to craft Invokers, which can be used to summon Malignant Monsters of specific types in Malignant Tunnels, allowing you to farm for what you need more effectively.
We also touched on Diablo 4’s plans for future seasons and why they’ve chosen to give players a clean slate each time new content rolls around. While creating a new character for each season is fairly common in ARPGs like Diablo 4, many new players have expressed confusion and dismay at having to start fresh to experience seasonal content. Some are also upset that characters will lose Malignant Powers once the season is done.
“The reason why we like this is that it allows us with every new season to ensure the mechanic we’re introducing in this season actually can change the way that you want to play this season,” Piepriora explains. If players don’t start each season with a clean slate, “we would end up very, very quickly in a situation where the content becomes too dense and so complicated to engage with that every new thing that we add would need to be extremely small in terms of the impact it has overall, and the way that players would actually interact with that mechanic in general.” Starting each season fresh gives developers room for creativity and experimentation with interesting new mechanics, instead of having to minimise player power for the sake of balance.
Each Season being self-contained and not necessarily part of the overarching lore of the game also gives developers room to play around. Diablo 4 might be marketed as a ‘forever game’, but that doesn’t mean you have to be up to date at all times. “There’s kind of no FOMO,” James says. “I find itintimidating jumping into a game that’s been on live-service for X amount of years, because you’re like, I have to know this story and this story and this meta, and I have to watch a three hour video about the lore. And this is like you’re able to jump in at any time because it’s self-contained stories, and a self-contained meta, and I can join at any point and not feel like I’m really missing out.” Seasons are meant to expand on the stories of the people living in Sanctuary, and highlight that not everything is about Lilith and Inarius – the little guys matter too.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll never see the Malignant Hearts mechanic again. “If players find Malignant Hearts just the greatest system ever added to any game of all time, then we can probably assume that at some point we will have Malignant Hearts return in some format. Whether it means that we might take an updated version that we introduce into the evergreen experience longer-term, and make the necessary concessions to allow that to happen in a meaningful way, or we have them return in different seasons alongside big upgrades to the system and big updates and things, it gives us an opportunity to think about that stuff,” Piepriora says, before clarifying, “Right now we’re thinking about, what are the brand new things we can add with every new season to continue to build upon the experience?” It sounds like there’s plenty of exciting things in the works for Diablo 4, and a very interesting new season about to land in players’ hands.
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