After «diligently monitoring your feedback», Blizzard has posted the notes for its upcoming 1.1.3 Diablo 4 patch, which is set to roll out on all platforms next week.
D&D’s next iteration needs to keep things simple, too
09.08.2023 - 16:11 / polygon.com
0One of the main reasons that players stick with Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition is because publisher Wizards of the Coast is always trying new things — new locations and new kinds of adventures, to be sure, but also new character classes, spells, and magical items. Along with that evolution comes a natural growth in the game’s complexity. Characters of the Artificer class, for instance, released in 2019, can craft their own magic items pretty much overnight. In addition to being able to hold their own in combat, they can also cast spells, make magical hand grenades, and design small mechanical creatures to do their bidding. That makes the Artificer a lot more challenging to run than the stock Fighter in the original Player’s Handbook (2014).
As the wildly popular tabletop role-playing game eases into its 50th anniversary next year, game design architect Jeremy Crawford and his team are neck-deep in a revised version of the 5th edition rules. Part of the challenge, he told Polygon, is knowing when to lean into that complexity. But it’s equally important to know when to hold back.
“I love intricate character options when I’m playing,” said Crawford in an interview with Polygon at this year’s Gen Con in Indianapolis. “But sometimes when I play, I’m like, You know what, I just want to swing a sword today. One of the beauties of D&D — going all the way back to the 1970s — is that it provides not only different narrative options through its various character classes, but different gameplay options.”
That mixture of simple and complex options is important to maintain, Crawford said, especially when creating Player’s Handbook (2024), which will become the single most widely read entry point into the wider world of D&D for its next generation of devoted fans. And to get that fuel-air mixture just right to maintain the game’s explosive growth, Crawford is using the best tool at his disposal: hard data.
The 5th edition of D&D was unique when it launched in 2014 because of how it was created — through a yearslong set of user playtests called D&D Next that the company ran with its most devoted fans. Some 120,000 of them returned surveys back to Wizards, and their feedback was instrumental, Crawford said, in making D&D what it is today. Now he’s doubling down on the model, and he says the results are astonishing.
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Wizards has published a series of robust playtest packets called Unearthed Arcana. Crawford uses these UA publications to demo things like new and revised character classes, special abilities, and changes to combat. To date, his team has received more than 500,000 surveys from players based on their time spent with the UA, and employees at Wizards have been poring over every single word.
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