Diablo 4 expansion's game director refuses to back down on the dungeon you can't enter unless you do it multiplayer: 'I absolutely am sticking to my guns'

Diablo 4 Dark Citadel — (Image credit: Blizzard)

Every new Diablo feels more like a multiplayer game than the last, with co-op as the intended experience and solo play as a vestigial limb. There's a reason the last two Diablo games have been always-online. Yet there are still a significant number of players who enjoy them as entirely singleplayer experiences, and some of them aren't happy about the fact the Vessel of Hatred expansion includes a dungeon, the Dark Citadel, that can only be entered in groups of two or more.

Speaking to Polygon, Vessel of Hatred game director Brent Gibson was adamant that the Dark Citadel wasn't going to be changed, saying, "I absolutely am sticking to my guns".

He went on to explain this multiplayer dungeon isn't something players have to do, especially since the rewards are cosmetic. "We've designed it in a way where, to be the most efficient in the game, it's not required to have to go through that multiplayer content. I love the fact that we have this huge, rich game that has a bunch of different activities that give you alternate paths in the same loop."

The Dark Citadel is similar to the kind of raid dungeon you get in World of Warcraft, where players have to learn specific mechanics to survive encounters—standing on pressure plates for instance—either by dying and retrying, or just looking them up on YouTube. While an essential part of the endgame of something like Destiny 2 or Lost Ark, it's not something Diablo has dabbled in before.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.