So in case you missed it, Season of Blood was a success. Some people still hate the game, some people feel like it's redeemed itself. But no matter how you look at it, Diablo 4 is a better game after Season 2 than it was before. Players are now consistently getting to level 100 and there are more endgame builds than ever due to the new uniques. Happy days in the gruesome world of Sanctuary (well happy days for us, citizens of Sanctuary are still massively fucked). But no good deed goes unpunished. The Season of Blood has, by comparison, made one of the formerly best aspects of the game well… terrible, let's say it how it is.

Blood Harvest Made Helltides Boring by Comparison

With the second season came the Blood Harvest. The concept is simple: kill monsters, gather resources, open chests, profit. Sounds familiar? Yup, that’s helltide (and a little something tells me that's due to conveniently recycling code, but you know, if it ain't broken...). But here's the thing, Blood Harvest is a far better system design than Helltides. To understand why, we need to look at three fundamental game design principles: player agency, objectives, and purpose.

Player Agency

Player agency is probably one of the most important design elements of a game. It is about making the player in control of what happens, rather than have them suffer the game. Without agency, your game is just an overpriced CGI movie really. Agency can be given to players through branching storytelling (ask Larian Studio, they know a thing or two about this), through character builds, where the player controls not what happens in the game but how they play it, or through content variety, where the player choses what they'd like to do next.

So how does Blood Harvest offer more agency than Helltides? By having a 100% uptime, quite simply. If you need to farm Echo of Varshan for those juicy new Malignant Rings, you teleport to the current Blood Harvest, engage in joyous vampire genocide and collect your materials. If you need to farm Grigoire the Electric Bonebag (TM) you … wait for a Helltide to spawn. See the issue here? And worst of all, you need to kill Grigore twice to be allowed to fight Duriel, King of Maggots (I wish this was my pet name for him but sadly that’s just his actual name. Blizzard killing my vibe here). So that enforced farming pace gets in the way of two bosses, bosses which are the only way to target farm uniques.

And yes the game offers plenty of content to engage with while you wait. But you might not need to do any of the other content, and more importantly, the rest of the content isn't what you want to do. I need a X'Fal Corroded Signet for my build and the only thing getting in the way of it is the Helltide timer god dammit. THAT is lack of player agency.

Objectives

Now Helltide has another minor issue: it’s boring as hell (pun intended, deal with it). Don’t get me wrong, your first Helltides are thrilling. Monsters everywhere, fire and destruction, random bosses, that’s awesome… for like a week. But once you kill clusters of demons in a single click and you are at your hundredth Helltide, you spend a lot more time horsing around (two puns in one paragraph, I'm on fire!) looking for things to kill than actually killing things. Trust me, at one point even mass murder gets tedious. The smartest way to do it is run from one World Event to another, but these event spawn on a timer. Remember that thing about agency before? So yeah, maybe more timer isn't the solution here.

Blood Harvest on the other hand, always spawns with three Tree of Whispers missions, is filled with points of interest surrounded by tons of monsters, all easily identifiable on your map. So while it may seem like you’re still running around looking for things to kill, you aren’t "running really fast towards nowhere". You are running from one small objective to another. It may seem like such a small thing, but when your game is built around loot farming, the less tedious the farming, the better the game. And on top of all this, your Blood Harvest progression achieves many things at once, which leads us to: purpose.

Purpose

Our third pillar of game design, purpose, is particularly important for games as a service. If your partner says “let’s go for a walk” and drags you along the neighborhood for an hour, you might not care where you’re going. It's all about the journey. But if they expect you to walk for a week, they're gonna have to give you a reason to do it before you tell them to kick rocks. The same concept applies here. Many games can rely on their core gameplay loop to satisfy you. “Look, this is cool! Let’s do this for a few hours”. But games as a service aren't satisfied with a few hours, and 4 months down the road, the core gameplay loop won’t be enough to keep you engaged . A greater purpose, or even better multiple ones, are going to be needed to make you do the things you've already done a hundred times.

Once gain comparing Helltides and Blood Harvest, we have two wildly different activities. Helltides can fulfill two possible purpose: acquire Living Steel to fight Grigore or open Tortured Gifts of Mysteries to get some loot. Could be both, given a clean Helltide run, but most likely won't be. And because we are this late in the season, we probably don't really need these Mystery chest anyway. So really, you get one or two tickets to a boss fight and a little bit of loot.

In comparison, Blood Harvest allows you to farm Blood Lures, complete Whispers, find materials to summon Varshan -in additions to the guaranteed material granted by the Tree of Whispers-, progress towards your next Hunter’s Acclaim reward and farm Potent Blood to improve your Vampiric Powers. So you get a truck load of loot (a unit of measurement invented in 1987 by a canadian trucker named Joe who later died of boredom in a village in Ontario), one or two tickets to a boss fight, character progression and seasonal achievement progression, all at once.

A true game designer mindset

And there you have it. Helltides and Blood Harvest is a great example of the difference between an apprentice game designer product and the result of an accomplished game designer’s mindset. Now I know nothing of the people who designed these systems (could very well be the same people actually), and this is in no way a commentary on their skill set. But the outcome remains the same. Helltide is a self contained, traditional, decent game mechanic. Blood Harvest is an expertly crafted game experience, not by its gameplay, but by how it weaves itself within and leverage every aspect of the game.