Diablo 4's annoying Season 3 traps are driving players up the wall: "I don't understand their obsession with trying to waste our time"

24.01.2024 - 18:53 / gamesradar.com / Dustin Bailey

Diablo 4 Season of the Construct is upon us, and the response to the new content has not been especially positive so far. One of the most common points of criticism so far is the addition of traps, which many players are finding downright annoying.

Vaults are a headline addition for this Diablo 4 season, adding a new dungeon type to conquer with bonus rewards. They also have traps. There are big spinning flame wheels, spots of fire on the floor - if you've seen a video game dungeon before, you know the drill. It's possible to mitigate the damage these traps do, but there's also a mechanic where you get bonus loot for keeping a particular ward on your character, but you lose that ward as you get hit by traps. So for maximum rewards, you need to practice good movement at a level that Diablo 4 hasn't really demanded up until this point.

"Is anyone sick to death of the trap BS already?" as one player on Reddit asks. "Sorry, but they're just a gigantic hindrance in clearing areas causing it to be slow and annoying. I watched the stream where they said they were adding more traps to dungeons but this is wildly ridiculous and I'm already about to quit."

"I don't understand their obsession with trying to waste our time," another agrees. "Like man, these empty trap rooms aren't hard, they're just annoying and I have to waste time running through them when it could have just been a normal room full of monsters to kill, which is the fun part of the game."

That's been the common line through a lot of these comments - Diablo is about destroying monsters with nearly mindless efficiency, so anything that slows down that process can be frustrating. There are a few players out there quietly professing that they enjoy the traps as a different sort of challenge, but those voices are very much being drowned out by the sea of complaints.

These traps have been drawing a lot of unfavorable comparisons to the Labyrinth in Path of Exile, which added similar traps years ago that the community quickly pushed back on. As another player writes, "I can't believe the team at Blizzard thought adding trap rooms was a good idea. It doesn't belong in a Diablo game. There's a reason PoE made all the changes they did to Labyrinth because people don't like doing that sort of thing."

"It's bizarre," yet another agrees. "The Labyrinth/traps was something PoE did 10 years ago - a decade ago - then realized it was more frustrating than fun and didn't return to the concept. Blizzard, a AAA studio, is rehashing that same decade-old mistake made by an indie developer. I genuinely don't understand Blizzard's mindset with Diablo 4." 

Diablo 4's new Season 3 companion would have to be "horribly overpowered" for Blizzard to do anything.