Diablo 4 is currently in an interesting spot. When it launched, it quickly became one of the best-selling games of the year, breaking sales records for Blizzard games. However, since the release of Season 1, the developer has been met with a playerbase that is increasingly annoyed at several of the changes added via patches. Because of the community’s frustration, Blizzard announced that it will be changing how Diablo 4 handles patch notes. Instead of dropping them on patch day, the team will be announcing them early moving forward, which brings us to the upcoming release of Patch 1.1.1. Today, Blizzard announced it would be revealing the latest patch on July 28 via a new Campfire Chat.
We don’t yet know exactly what the Diablo 4 developers will include with Patch 1.1.1, but they have provided some hints. As expected given how annoyed players were with changes to classes like the Sorcerer, the next patch is said to include several class balance changes to bring Sorcerers back in line with everyone alongside a host of quality-of-life changes including lower respec cost. Other than that, we don’t know much else about what’s going to be announced later this week.
Season of the Malignant is live NOW ?
Will you defend Sanctuary from the corruption? pic.twitter.com/LAX5c9ilH8
— Diablo (@Diablo) July 20, 2023
What we do know is who will be on the panel. Game director Joe Shely will be joined by associate game director Joseph Piepiora, lead class designer Adam Jackson, and associate director of community Adam Fletcher. Those names unfortunately don’t give us a much better idea of what’s coming, though Piepiora has been actively engaging with players on Twitter in the last few weeks, so he might speak to some of the topics he addressed there, including bag storage.
Either way, it’ll be interesting to see exactly what direction Blizzard takes with this next patch. It’s far from a make-or-break patch for Diablo 4, but with all the backlash we’ve seen over the past few weeks, it certainly feels like something the developers have to get right. Hopefully, they’re able to do so and Diablo 4 gets back to delivering the quality content players expect from a developer with Blizzard’s pedigree.