A Diablo 4 player flew into a rage after his 172-hour, level 91 Hardcore character died during a loading screen.
New Zealand-based streamer Quin69 uploaded a video to YouTube of the moment he saw the dreaded Hall of Fallen Heroes on-screen message after Diablo 4 appeared to crash while teleporting his character to the town of Kyovashad following the completion of a keystone dungeon. The only option open to Quin69 is to click “acknowledge.”
“I finished the f**king keystone and portaled to town,” Quin69 said as realisation set in. “In the loading screen of me porting to town my character has died.”
What appears to have happened is Quin69’s character, which was standing inside a protection bubble during the portal to town, somehow died to an innocuous attack from a nearby floating device. This shouldn’t happen, of course. As Diablo 4 streamer Octavian ‘Kripparrian’ Morosan suggests in the video, the port to town loading may have made Quin69’s vulnerable to the attack while stuck in limbo.
Diablo 4 itself recorded the death as: “Slain by ‘Environment’.” Whatever the reason, Quin69 has now lost a character he put over a week’s worth of hours into. It’s a brutal end, but Quin69 is not the only Diablo 4 player to have lost a Hardcore character through no fault of their own.
Souaïb ‘carn’ Hanaf was livestreaming Diablo 4 when the game disconnected. After logging back in, carn discovered his max level Hardcore Barbarian was gone, leaving him no option but to create another character and start all over again.
Diablo 4’s Hardcore mode features permadeath, which means if a character dies it’s gone for good. Character deaths such as these are a stark reminder of the perils of always-online video games, and are sure to fuel complaints about Blizzard’s decision to make Diablo 4 unplayable offline.
-172h 💀💀
died to a loading screen porting to town while in an invulnerability zone. Fix your game @diablo pic.twitter.com/VnqNEpccKf— Quin (@quinrex) June 14, 2023
Friends of Quin69, horrified by what they had seen happen to the streamer, can be heard saying they won’t bother with Hardcore mode. “You’re eventually going to die from a DC or a crash or whatever the f**k this is,” one said. “That’s terrible,” said another.
Despite issues such as these, Diablo 4 has been a critical and commercial success. In IGN’s 9/10 review we described Diablo 4 as “a stunning sequel with near perfect endgame and progression design that makes it absolutely excruciating to put down”. Be sure to check out our Diablo 4 guide for tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your journey through hell, and to use our interactive map to keep track of your progress as you play.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.