Dealing trillions of damage in Diablo 4 isn't a problem worth worrying about as long as 'there's something that makes it meaningful', game director says: 'I know a lot of it is from fear'

Big damage numbers and Diablo 4 are practically synonymous at this point. That's the nature of a game where the goal is to multiply your numbers up high enough that nothing can stop you.

Other action RPGs tend to keep things constrained to millions or billions of damage, oftentimes not even showing the damage you deal. Diablo 4, however, is known for players proudly filling their screen with numbers so big you can barely see the monsters.

Players have asked Blizzard to squish things back down to reasonable levels—and it sort of did so in its first expansion—but things tend to scale way back up after a few seasons. Every time someone wants to make fun of the game, the damage numbers are first on their list to bring up, because some people consider it too ridiculous to take seriously.

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Associate game director Zaven Haroutunian doesn't think it's a problem at all for Diablo 4, and that the real issue is what players think it implies about the game. "I know there's a lot of strong feelings around this one, and I actually know a lot of it is from fear," he told PC Gamer in a recent interview.

"I worked on Diablo 3 a long time ago. I didn't work on [balancing the game], but I was on a team and I was playing that game alongside everyone else and I kind of saw what the infinite scaling did to the game," he explained. "Not just in terms of what it did to tuning and balance and itemization and all that stuff, but also experientially what that felt like."

Diablo 3 is notorious for having numbers so big that they're effectively meaningless. I wouldn't say Diablo 4 is quite there yet, but it's certainly closer than it's ever been since it came out. But Haroutunian says this concept of "infinite scaling" isn't coming to Diablo 4.

Next month, the Lord of Hatred expansion will expand Diablo 4's current torment difficulty tier system, allowing you to scale all the monsters up across 12 levels. Some players are concerned that this is a sign of the game copying Diablo 3 and taking the leash off of the damage numbers entirely.

Haroutunian insists that this won't be the case: "We're not actually adding torment tiers to extend the scaling of the game. We're actually adding them to fill in the scaling that already exists."

Design director of systems Colin Finer told PC Gamer the same thing in late January. The goal with the new torment tiers is to give players more incremental steps to take through their endgame progression and to let that affect more than the dungeons that already scale.

Haroutunian said someone who enjoys fighting through waves of monsters in Infernal Hordes will be able to crank the difficulty up and continue to do that one activity for better rewards. Right now, Infernal Hordes become a cakewalk as soon as your character is equipped with high-level gear, consolidating all of the game's challenge to the few things that have their own tier system, like The Pit or The Tower.

"Really early on in Lord of Hatred's development there was this design pillar we used which is a series of summits," Haroutunian explained. As you level up, gear up, and take on harder and harder monsters, it's like climbing a mountain. "What we want in Diablo 4 is when I hit the summit of that mountain, I gaze upon a vast sea of other mountains I can climb and multiple paths I can take to each," he said.

Without those mountains, so to speak, I don't think Lord of Hatred's new War Plans system would really work. War Plans will give you a playlist of different activities to complete for bonus rewards. But nobody would use them if only certain activities posed a challenge. More torment tiers gives those big damage numbers a purpose that they really haven't had for years.

It will still be on Blizzard to balance the game so things don't get too out of hand and trivialize most of the torment tiers, but that seems like a problem that will be easier to solve once the new system is in place. We'll see how it goes when Lord of Hatred launches on April 28.