The latest Diablo 4 update rolled out right on schedule, on July 15, across all platforms. Unfortunately, it appears the update had skipped a couple of QA steps along the way, because it became immediately clear that it’s breaking the game for most players.
Patch 2.3.1 is the game’s second this month, and it’s actually full of buffs to various classes and abilities. These weren’t necessarily expected, but players got excited after reading the patch notes, only to download it on the day and realise something has gone horribly wrong.
Broken patches are rare for Diablo 4, but they have happened in the past. Typically, once the patch is released, one or several major bugs are quickly discovered, which Blizzard either rolls out a hotfix for within 24 hours, or is forced to rollback to the previous version.
In this case, patch 2.3.1 arrived on July 15 as planned, but it didn’t take long for players to post on Reddit and elsewhere about the myriad of issues they began experiencing as soon as they started playing after installing it.
Most of the complaints were from console players, many of whom described an unbearably laggy gameplay experience, with teleporting characters and enemies that stack damage. But the issues extended to good ol’ crashing and game freezes, and sometimes even missing expansion content.
“I can get maybe a 10-minute gameplay in before everything freezes, it will not let me leave properly, to hopefully try to keep any progress or loot I may have acquired,” wrote Reddit user That1Guy710_DD4Z.
“Currently trying to load up the game and have been stuck in a loading screen for about 10 minutes, gonna just let it do it’s thing,” they added.
Blizzard actually rolled Diablo 4 back to version 2.3.0 on PC for a few hours while the developer worked on fixing 2.3.1. The latest update was later reissued across all platforms, and it appears most of the major problems have been resolved, at least.
This is all particularly amusing, because just as the patch was rolling out, Blizzard launched a surprise in-game event. Gift of the Tree is a limited-time event that’s available now until Tuesday, July 22, and it simply rewards players with a Gift of the Tree Cache each time they turn in Whispers.
Obviously, nobody would say no to extra loot every time Grim Favours are completed, but the patch’s launch disaster completely overshadowed whatever excitement the event could’ve generated.
Indeed, given the mostly negative reaction to Diablo 4’s Season 9 so far, which itself follows the disappointing Season 8, Diablo 4 is clearly back to making players upset more frequently than it does bring them joy.
The game’s next major patch is likely the mid-season update, though it’s not clear at this stage what we can expect from it just yet. Hard to imagine it’s capable of turning sentiments around much, however.