Every new Diablo feels more like a multiplayer game than the last, with co-op as the intended experience and solo play as a vestigial limb. There's a reason the last two Diablo games have been always-online. Yet there are still a significant number of players who enjoy them as entirely singleplayer experiences, and some of them aren't happy about the fact the Vessel of Hatred expansion includes a dungeon, the Dark Citadel, that can only be entered in groups of two or more.
Speaking to Polygon, Vessel of Hatred game director Brent Gibson was adamant that the Dark Citadel wasn't going to be changed, saying, "I absolutely am sticking to my guns".
He went on to explain this multiplayer dungeon isn't something players have to do, especially since the rewards are cosmetic. "We've designed it in a way where, to be the most efficient in the game, it's not required to have to go through that multiplayer content. I love the fact that we have this huge, rich game that has a bunch of different activities that give you alternate paths in the same loop."
The Dark Citadel is similar to the kind of raid dungeon you get in World of Warcraft, where players have to learn specific mechanics to survive encounters—standing on pressure plates for instance—either by dying and retrying, or just looking them up on YouTube. While an essential part of the endgame of something like Destiny 2 or Lost Ark, it's not something Diablo has dabbled in before.
So why add something to Diablo 4 that players could be getting elsewhere? As Gibson explained, "even though we have a lot of players who play games solo, the community in the gaming industry that doesn't know playing games any other way than with their friends or online with other people, it's growing over time".
Diablo 4 may not be on the list of games you play with your Discord friends just yet, but Blizzard sure would like it to be. And if it's going to compete with Path of Exile 2, it'll have to do something.
