Hardcore

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Hardcore characters are exactly the same as regular characters, except that they are mortal. When they die, they stay dead. Forever. No restarting in town; no restarting anywhere.

Dead hardcore characters in Diablo 2 are able to log back onto the Battle.net chat channels, but they can not join or create games. It's not known how this aspect of things will be handled in Diablo III.


D3 Hardcore Confirmed

After months of "probably" type comments, Hardcore was confirmed as a Diablo 3 feature in August, 2010. Here's a brief timeline of official statements on the subject.


D3 Hardcore Characters Will Look Special

How HC chars will differ isn't yet known, but the D3 Team has repeatedly said they'll be set apart from regular characters in some obvious fashion. [1]

Will hardcore characters be more powerful than normal? --Spectrusv
No intent, no. But they’ll definitely have more prestige and flashy things to show off for being so awesome. --Diablo


June 2008

From the Diablo 3 Design Fundamentals panel, at the 2008 WWI event:

Q: Will there be Hardcore mode?
A: We haven't decided yet, but I don't see why we wouldn't. It’s not a decision we need to make yet. We probably will, though.

April 2009

Bashiok in a forum post.[2]

Question: Has anymore thought been put into Hardcore? Are any features decided-upon?
Bashiok: I think the last thing I heard from Jay on it in public was something along the lines of “Ok fine we’ll just commit to a hardcore mode here and now” outside of that no details have been released.

August 2010

In an interview with GameSpot AU, Jay Wilson confirmed that Hardcore is definitely returning to Diablo III.[3]

Hardcore is definitely returning to Diablo III, but we haven’t decided what sort of special Battle.net features we’ll enable with it. We want to make sure that if you see a HC char on B.net, you’ll know they’re HC. It’s a status symbol, and it’s only one if you know. We’re looking for ways to reward players, and we’re sure we’ll have a set of HC achievements also.

Paying to Resurrect Hardcore Characters?

This concept was initially floated in a forum post by Blizzard's Diablo 3 Community Manager Bashiok, in July 2009. [4]. Reaction from the Hardcore community was fairly outraged and almost entirely negative[5], and when the issue came up again in April 2010, Bashiok said it had been pretty much ruled out.[6]

Paying to bring back a fallen hardcore character was something I read someone here post once, and I simply repeated it to say I thought it was an interesting idea. I’m not a designer. Things I find interesting doesn’t mean they’re being implemented. I have though heard Jay (who is lead designer) say that paying to bring back hardcore is pretty much a horrible idea.

Arena PvP

The current plan, as of late 2010, is for Hardcore dueling to work just like a PvM hardcore game (and not like the normal Arena, where it's team-based, games last for 15 minutes, and the team with the most total round victories wins). In the Hardcore Arena, as initially planned, any death is the end of a character. There's no team play, and no best of 5 or 7, and no 15 minutes of play, as in the regular Arena. One death = no more character, whether that takes 10 seconds or 2 minutes.

Jay Wilson enthused about instant perma-death Hardcore dueling at Blizzcon 2010, and @Diablo repeated that in November 2010. [7]

If you PvP in hardcore and you die, you’re dead. Hardcore PvP leader board is going to be... hardcore! --Diablo
Yeah, it’ll be hardcore, but it undermines your Arena design. How can you have 3 rounds if you die forever in the first one? --NocturneGS
It doesn’t undermine anything. Although I would expect it to become most popular at specific skill tier unlocks.—Diablo


Hardcore Dueling Arguments

This has proven a very contentious subject, with strong opinions on both sides. Some threads with much debate about the issue:

The majority of supporters of instant-death dueling (seem to be non-HC players like Jay Wilson and @Diablo), simply say they think it would be cool and "hardcore." The argument isn't any deeper than that, or comments like, "Any form of resurrection cheapens Hardcore mode." Which is an emotional appeal, but not exactly an argument full of winning logic.

On the other side are Hardcore players who want a permanent death mode, but also want some sort of practice or non-lethal mode so HC players can enjoy the Arena and play it as much as they wish, just like Softcore characters. Having only a perma-death mode means that most characters will get about 20 seconds of Arena before they are dead, forever. And that's just not any fun. It's also contrary to the whole design concept of the Diablo III Arena, as Flux argued in one of the forum threads linked above: [8]

Arenas are a fundamentally different game type than PvM. They're even quite a bit different than dueling in D2. The D3 Arena game type exists only for dueling. You're locked in a small area with enemy players, there aren't shrines or monsters or huge levels you can run away in, or a town to duck into. Someone's going to die, and generally quite quickly. Which is the whole fun, since you get to start a new round right back up 5 seconds later and try a new approach.
Hardcore mode works perfectly with PvM, since PvM is about killing huge hordes of monsters with the goal of not dying at all. Dying in PvM, even once, is failure. D3's Arena isn't like that. It's about dying less often than the other team. It's about co-op team play, pairing up your talents with other player's and competing against the enemy team through a dozen+ rounds during the 15 minute battle.
Trying to play Arena w/o dying is like trying to learn to juggle w/o dropping any balls. Yes, not dropping any is the goal, but no one would ever learn to juggle if every time you dropped one you had to stop juggling for a week while you went off to make a new ball.

Another common argument against takes the form of an analogy:

Imagine if there were a softcore dueling mode, in which the loser could not play that character again for 2 weeks, and couldn't even transfer their equipment on other characters. How stupid would that be? How awful? How annoying? Would anyone ever use that mode? Probably not. Well that's HC dueling, except it's not 2 weeks, it's forever.


On the other side of the argument there's not much. People who advocate for the planned insta-death system seem to be almost entirely people who didn't play HC D2 (and presumably won't play HC D3). For them it's not something that will personally effect them, so they're going on a purely emotional/visceral level. These people say things like Jay Wilson did at Blizzcon 2010. "It will be so cool! So hardcore!" Which is true, if anyone does it.

The pragmatists, most of whom are long-time HC players from D2 (where high or even mid-level HC dueling has always been almost non-existent) agree that it would be cool. They just say that no one will do it, and that it's better to be realistic and make some allowances or exceptions to a cool game feature than see it not used at all.


Hardcore Dueling Game Mode Suggestions

There are numerous fan suggestions to make HC dueling something that players could regularly indulge in, rather than a special cool hardcore bonus prize that almost no one would actually indulge in.

  • An arena practice mode which would work just like SC dueling. Perma-death duels would remain an option if both players agreed.
  • A best-of format for HC duels, where the most kills in 5 or 10 or 15 minutes would rule out, and the other team would die. (How to stop disconnects before the time limit is an issue.)
    • Equipment wagering penalty. The characters in a duel put up all (or some) of their equipment as bond; if they leave the game before the conclusion, all of their gear goes to the other team/player. This would punish chicken-hack disconnecters, while hurting someone who got actually did lose connection, but at least leaving their character alive.
  • A team format, where all 3 players on a team would stay alive if that team won. This could go one single round, or best of 3/5/7 rounds, to make it more skill and less luck-based than a single fall match.

Additional HC Content

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