What you need to know
- Diablo General Manager Rod Fergusson has explained how campaign co-op progress and party scaling work in Diablo 4.
- The host of the party owns the world state, including active quests and story progress. Players who haven't progressed as far as the host won't make progress, but if everyone is "aligned," everyone in the party will make progress.
- If you're part of a group that doesn't always play together, Fergusson advises letting the player with the least amount of progress be the host so they can make progress, get quest experience, and catch up.
- Fergusson also confirmed that party scaling scales the health and damage of enemies for each individual party member, allowing players at different levels to play together and still have a good time.
While Diablo 4 is designed to be a blast to play all on your own, the chaotic action RPG is arguably even more fun when you play it with your friends. However, something fans have been confused about for a while now is how campaign progress works when playing in co-op. To clear things up, Diablo General Manager Rod Fergusson has shared a full clarification on Twitter.
"The host of the party owns the state of the world. If you're aligned (aka at the same point in the quest line) then you all progress," Fergusson explained. "If there is a misalignment (like you invited someone new half way through) then they won't get the story quest progress/xp until they catch up."
This means that if you're part of a Diablo 4 co-op group that doesn't always play together, you should let the player with the least progress be the host of the session. That way, they'll be able to make progress on quests and earn experience from them, allowing them to catch up to everyone else. Once everyone in the party has reached the same point, everyone will get progress regardless of who's hosting.
So if you're playing with a group that's not committed to playing together, it's always best to have the player with the least amount of progress to be the host.May 15, 2023
Fergusson also discussed party scaling in Diablo 4, which is a system that makes it easier for players at different levels to team up. While each party member will see the same enemies, their health and damage will scale individually for everyone. This not only ensures that low-level players won't suddenly start facing extremely powerful monsters when a more experienced friend joins them, but it also guarantees that high-level players won't completely curbstomp every foe in sight if they're helping a buddy make progress, too.
"And one of my favorite features is the fact that the game scales individually for players so questline progress aside, you can have a level 1 and a level 30 playing together and having fun because the game scales for them and the new player doesn't have to hide in the corner," Fergusson said.
The Diablo 4 Server Slam beta was held last weekend, giving fans one more chance to try out Blizzard's upcoming dungeon crawler ahead of its scheduled June 6 release. While it was active, players could play through the Prologue and Act 1 of Diablo 4's campaign, and also challenge the mighty Ashava the Pestilent world boss.
Diablo 4 is slated to fully launch on June 6, 2023 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One consoles, Windows PC, PS5, and PS4. It has the potential to be one of the best Xbox games for fans of dungeon crawlers and hack-and-slash combat, and we can't wait to jump in when it arrives.
