Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo 4’s main campaign is just the beginning of your journey in Sanctuary, according to Blizzard.
Blizzard Entertainment’s new Diablo 4 featurette dives into the game’s meaty endgame progression system, which aims to keep players hooked for hundreds of hours beyond the story campaign. Once players reach the endgame, they’ll unlock a ton of brand-new activities that weren’t available before (as seen in the open beta), including Capstone Dungeons, the Paragon System, hidden Aspects, Nightmare Dungeons and more. Frankly, there's an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to do here.
Watch the developer insight video below:
Diablo 4’s endgame really starts to open up following the completion of the main campaign, when players can start completing Capstone Dungeons to unlock higher World Tier difficulties. These higher difficulties give you extra loot and XP in exchange for more challenging combat encounters. Fortunately, you’ll also have more opportunities to build up your characters to keep up with higher difficulties.
In the open beta, we noticed that the skill tree held an inaccessible tab called the ‘Paragon System’. This system only unlocks in the endgame, giving players even more paths beyond the initial skill tree with boons and glyphs to alter their playstyle. On the loot side of things, you can find hidden Aspects in dungeons to convert ordinary items into Legendary-tier items, and then take all this heightened power into the game’s more than 120 dungeons.
Here’s the thing: in the endgame, any one of these dungeons can now become a Nightmare Dungeon, featuring more difficult objectives and affixes to overcome. Affixes such as Hell Gates, for example, will open up in a dungeon to unleash hordes of monsters at any time. Nightmare Sigils are necessary to turn dungeons into Nightmare dungeons, but Blizzard hasn’t confirmed how players can pick those up yet. You’ll also find stronger monsters roaming Sanctuary once the campaign is over, and defeating these creatures in Helltide areas will give you shards to purchase rewards at caches.
Players can also head on over to the Tree of Whispers to collect Whispers of the Dead bounties, and then return to the tree once those bounties are ticked off to get big reward caches. The Fields of Hatred PvP area will also let players battle each other or complete tasks for shards, but if you’re just looking for shards, be aware that everyone else knows what you're up to and can still kill you. It's a PvP area. Don't count on the kindness of Sanctuary's inhabitants to keep you safe here of all places.
All that, and Diablo 4 will continue to get updates as a live service game too. If all goes well, players should have plenty of stuff to do even after the main campaign, once Diablo 4 launches on June 6.
