What features would you like to see added to Diablo 4?

Diablo 4 has gone Gold, which means that it is feature locked and ready for release. It’s a callback to days when most people purchased games as physical copies and the ‘golden master’ was the copy sent to the manufacturing plant for duplication.

At this point in the game development, no new major features are likely to be added as, the game should be playable without any changes from this point. Of course, online distribution of gaming has meant that games can now be tweaked right up until the last minute and beyond with hotfixes and patching. But even with real-time distribution it’s fairly uncommon for major features to be added or significantly altered between major content releases.

Modern software design is largely built around the concept of a ‘minimal viable product’ (MVP) that can be added to over time as resources allow and as new features are identified as important to the user base. This is done for several reasons. What the userbase considers important can change over time, and for large development projects, even ones with a budget as large as Diablo, getting a product out the door and shipped is important.

Blizzard announced a few days ago that despite loud requests from these base to provide an overlay map mode similar to Diablo 2, there are no plans to add one to Diablo 4 at this time. Unlike WoW, which had a large addon community that lets you customise your user interface to a significant degree using community developed modifications, games in the Diablo universe do not support community developed mods. Everybody sees the game into same way with only limited in game configuration options such as key bindings.

Feature requests I’ve seen on the forums so far include the previously mentioned overlay map, a Paladin class at launch, the ability to join a raid group for the world boss, being able to customize the body type at character creation, a dance emote, restricting loot drops to only those bootable by the class being played, loot being tradable between players, and many more. I would add that even on the Blizzard forums, players can’t agree between themselves which features they think are important or game breaking (either if included or if not included).

What features you would you like to see added to Diablo 4? Are there any features you’ve seen in other games that you think would be a great addition to the Diablo user interface?