Diablo 5 director wants you to feel powerful, not fight endless scaling

Blizzard revealed Diablo 5 at BlizzCon earlier this month, with a release window of 2029. Game director Joe Shely has been talking openly about one of the biggest design shifts: rethinking how power progression actually feels to the player.

Shely's core argument is that automatic enemy scaling — the system Diablo 4 launched with — undercuts the whole point of leveling up. "You've filled the experience bar, you get stronger, you should feel awesome now, a wave of light pulses out from you, a bunch of monsters die," he told PC Gamer. "And sometimes automatic scaling can get in the way of that feeling, which is so core to it." Blizzard is promising a "somewhat different approach" in Diablo 5, though the specifics haven't been detailed yet. The studio is also targeting combat that feels more like Diablo 2 — where building the right character matters more than raw action — and set items are returning to reinforce the power fantasy.

Diablo 4's launch scaling was widely criticized by players: enemies leveled with you so aggressively that optimizing your build or gear rarely translated into a noticeable power spike. Paragon points gave diminishing returns, gear upgrades felt incremental, and there was no safe farming zone where you could grind up before tackling harder content. Blizzard eventually walked back the most aggressive parts of that system through post-launch patches, but the damage to early impressions was done. Shely's comments suggest the team has internalized that criticism and is treating the power-fantasy feel as a foundational design goal rather than a tuning problem to fix later.

More details on how Diablo 5 handles progression are expected to roll out through 2025. The 2029 window gives Blizzard time to iterate, but with the game already announced, the studio will be under pressure to show that the lessons from Diablo 4's rocky launch have actually shaped the new design.