Diablo Immortal‘s upcoming 3.2 update is shaping up to be its biggest one yet, with an all-new zone filled with quest content, new Helliquary bosses and Inferno tiers, more legendary gems, and of course, the long-awaited showdown with Diablo himself. Among many additions, Diablo Immortal is also introducing Challenge Dungeons, a fresh take on classic dungeon runs that should mix things up for veteran players seeking more variety in familiar content. Beginning at Inferno 1, Challenge Dungeons can be run without limit and yield increased rewards for players up to the task.
Game Rant recently sat down with Diablo Immortal lead content designer Scott Burgess in a group interview to discuss the team’s approach to Challenge Dungeons in the forthcoming Diablo Immortal update. Burgess weighed in on the overall difficulty level the team was striving for, the combinatorics of the dungeon modifiers, and the team’s plans for future Challenge Dungeon content.
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Diablo Immortal’s Challenge Dungeons Enhance Replayability
Essentially, Challenge Dungeons are the same Diablo Immortal dungeons players have come to know, but with a set of randomized modifiers that can substantially alter each run. Burgess says that, in its initial implementation, the team didn’t wish to overload players with overly complicated modifiers or ones that would introduce a punishing difficulty spike. That said, Burgess pointed out that each modifier should be a net negative for players in their run. For example, although the Big Problem modifier increases players’ damage by 15%, it also increases their size by 30%, making them easier targets for area attacks and potentially compounding the difficulty posed by other modifiers. As Burgess explained,
What we’re doing is we’re starting very much with the first floor of modifiers. We didn’t want our modifiers to be too crazy. We didn’t want, “This modifier opens a brown door that has spikes come out, and those spikes are covered in lava” or some obscure thing like that. We wanted to make sure that we started with just “there’s lava attacking you.” I don’t want to get into specifics because there are elements that we are still thinking about. “Do we want to keep this one?” But basically the idea behind the modifiers is that we want them all to be negative. We want to make the run a little more challenging.
Along with a substantial boost to enemy health and damage, the difficulty of Challenge Dungeons can vary somewhat depending on the combination of modifiers players are faced with. It’s not intended to be the most difficult content in Diablo Immortal, but iconic Diablo bosses like the Skeleton King in Mad King’s Breach can feel surprisingly different when backed up by a few tricky modifiers.
Diablo Immortal’s Challenge Dungeons Have Future Potential
Challenge Dungeons in Diablo Immortal will usually introduce no more than two modifiers and the team’s goal was to ensure that each modifier pairs interestingly with another. For example, the Conjurer modifier can cause bosses and enemies to summon doppelgangers of themselves, which might make for a devious pairing with the Laser modifier that causes enemies to periodically fire laser beams. Even with these difficult synergies, Burgess emphasizes that the system is intended to make the content more replayable rather than punish players. As Burgess explained
We want them all to be good when combined with each other. Very often we’ll have two modifiers happening at once, so we wanted to make sure that they complement each other, depending on what the combination set is. The goal behind the whole system is not necessarily to make this a punishing system. It’s more to make this a value-added system where, if you want to get a little more rewards and you want to have a little more variety in each run of your dungeon, you can just opt into the system and play through it. We’ll see how players respond to the system and we have a lot of modifiers that we want to add in the future, so we’ll continue to support it as we go forward.
Burgess and the Diablo Immortal team will be watching for fan reception to the system, and the plan is to introduce additional modifiers in the future. It’s easy to see how this system could be built upon further, with extra-challenging Challenge Dungeons that stack up even more modifiers or perhaps pull from a pool of more difficult ones. In any case, players can look forward to fresh dungeon content in Diablo Immortal beyond the 3.2 update.
Diablo Immortal‘s 3.2 update launches on December 12 for Europe, Asia, and Oceania and on December 13 for the Americas.
