Diablo 4 Is Already Off To A Horrible Start
Diablo 4's early-access beta test has been a disaster, kicking people offline, heavily restricting how many can be online, being unable to connect friends, and even erasing parties.
Diablo 4, one of the most anticipated games with its release date fast approaching, is already off to a bad start—the game’s open beta just launched, and anyone who pre-ordered the game was greeted with long queue times and error codes which prevented them from logging into the game. Blizzard has acknowledged the issue and is actively working to remedy the issue. It would seem that the company has learned a lesson from the botched Overwatch 2 launch.
According to VGC, anyone who jumped into Diablo 4 this weekend had a bad experience. The wait queue times are incredibly long, the game displays various error codes, and in some cases, it outright crashes. Those who had managed to log in can’t connect to their friends and invite them to their gaming sessions. Luckily, Diablo 4’s community manager Adam Fletcher has acknowledged the issue, stating that the dev team is currently working on some issues preventing players from entering the game.
Apparently, those who work behind the scenes on Diablo 4 are actively managing the rate at which players enter the game until they have developed a fix for the ongoing disconnection issues. Once those issues are resolved, the team will increase the influx of players, and the queue times will be reduced to a reasonable and more manageable amount. Fletcher also shared a full list of issues that are currently plaguing one of Blizzard’s most iconic games, and those aren’t related to long queue times alone.
Besides long queue times, which Blizzard causes to manage the player influx while working on a solution, Diablo 4 players can also not join a party with other players while in-game. This problem happens occasionally, but it’s pretty widespread across the board. Players are also being dropped from games, followed by an error that their party doesn’t exist, and some systems have exhibited high RAM and CPU usage on select hardware.
To be entirely honest, none of these issues are that bad; we are discussing an open beta release, which still implies that the game is in its testing phase. Still, it would be nice for Blizzard to compensate pre-order players for the inconvenience because that’s what this situation really is—an inconvenience. It would be a real issue if we were discussing a fill-blown game release, at which point the only acceptable thing is long queue times, which are associated with nearly all new live-service releases—World of Warcraft Dragonflight also suffered the same issues at launch.
As for the Diablo franchise, Diablo 3 is still enjoyed by millions worldwide since the game has a very active community. Diablo Immortal, on the other hand, is at a loss because Blizzard put heavy paywall implementations in place, and the game costs over $100,000 to play correctly. Luckily, the upcoming Diablo 4 won’t feature the controversial loot boxes, focusing on a fan-favorite reward system instead.
