Diablo 4‘s big Loot Reborn update was apparently in the very final stages of development when Blizzard came up with the idea for Greater Affixes, the game’s most powerful item modifiers.
Greater Affixes were added to the game in Diablo 4’s big Loot Reborn update from last April. They’re essentially just better versions of normal affixes that guarantee the maximum roll of an item and multiply all stats by 1.5 times their regular value. The addition of Greater Affixes really shook up Diablo 4’s endgame itemization, but they never would’ve happened if Blizzard wasn’t building the game around code that could be easily tweaked without causing any major problems.
Speaking at this year’s Game Developers Conference, Blizzard Entertainment lead software engineer Patrick Ferland gave a talk about the technical side of Diablo 4 and the Loot Reborn update, attended by GamesRadar+, and while I won’t be going over that in the same painstaking detail, I did want to highlight an interesting note he made about Greater Affixes being conjured up at the very last minute.
“Our idea of Greater Affixes itself was a very late-breaking idea,” Ferland said. “Literally, we had two weeks left in the development schedule when someone even proposed it. But because we had hardened our data reconstruction to changes, we were able to proceed with a big change like that with much higher confidence that we weren’t going to destabilize the build and cause problems.”
Along with a myriad of balance updates, Diablo 4’s itemization revamp is one of the core changes attributed to Blizzard’s largely successful course correction following widespread criticism of the first few seasons.
That’s not to say there aren’t still plenty of valid and less-valid complaints about the state of Diablo 4 today, but balance and itemization were two of the game’s biggest issues, and Blizzard has been dropping updates for years specifically to improve those elements of the game.
Looking ahead, Diablo 4 season 8 is revamping the boss ladder system with new mechanics and bosses, including one of the best from Diablo 3.
An earlier version of this article referred to Greater Affixes having been late in the development of Diablo 4 in general rather than Loot Reborn. This has since been corrected.
