One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in modern Diablo is the addition of level scaling. Back in the Diablo 2 days, you had to go through a progression of difficulties to make the monsters tougher, but that’s much easier in Diablo 4. Nowadays, the enemies level along with you, ensuring that the game will always be challenging no matter what region you’re exploring. For most players, this is a welcome change because they don’t have to keep redoing the same area over and over again. However, some side quests and challenges can be a bit annoying when you can’t just out-level the enemies. Fortunately, associate game director Joe Piepiora has good news.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Piepiora confirmed that players can keep the game on World Tier 1 or 2 if they want to get ahead of their enemies. On those two Tiers, enemies will stop scaling at level 50, so you can power past them and give yourself some wiggle room. This will give you the option to run through content and knock off side quests with a lot less pressure. The one case where this seemingly won’t work will be in Strongholds which are always set to be a few levels above your own. It’s unclear if they will stop scaling once you get past that level 50 mark, but these definitely seem like the place Blizzard will be implementing an early challenge.
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Piepiora also mentioned in the interview that if you skip the campaign with a second character, “the world is all going to scale to you entirely.” Again, this is largely because the team wants to give you the option to play in whatever region you like. Gone are the days of doing infinite Ba’al runs in your quest to hit the level cap. If you want to stick to the first area for the entirety of your leveling experience once you’ve finished the campaign once, you can do that.
This increased level of choice extends to just about every area of the game. Diablo 4 is all about letting you play your way and the early returns in the beta have mostly been positive outside of some hangups with the Ashava boss fight. Even in saying that, Blizzard has been quick to implement needed fixes, which is hopefully a good sign for the full release.
