A Gift of the Tree event came to Diablo IV with extra bonus Whisper Caches. Instead of joy, the update brought in a wave of anger, crashes, and simply horrendous gameplay. The Tree might be talking, but the players are screaming back.
The event went live rather recently and was supposed to be a nice seasonal addition-extras, loot, new objectives-the usual live-service stuff. But almost immediately after the patch was dropped, players went onto social media to report severe game-breaking issues. PS5 players got the worst of it-crashing, endless loading screens, and even login queues longer than Nightmare Dungeons. Foreropa took to Twitter to lament: “Updated Diablo 4 and now takes several minutes to enter a game!!” Other players shared their horror stories, including RyanSeaBBN, who was unable to log on for three hours.
This shouldn’t be news only to PlayStation. Xbox players reported being locked out by “Code 75” errors while PC users dealt with lag spikes so horrendous that they were an insult to dial-up. The star selling point of Diablo IV — crossplay — seemed broken following the update.
The event itself was lambasted as underwhelming. JemuzuKICK said, “Same event last month. Was boring and unrewarding then, is boring and unrewarding now.” Others say, including Ron1nn_, Blizzard should be looking at solving the much deeper issues in a manner instead of patching the surface of these events: “It’s a band-aid for the players like myself who are bored with the game, add end game and start lowering the prices of cosmetics and battle pass.”
Gameplay, of course. Foreropa (again, unlucky guy having a bad day) whined about Belial one-shotting him mid-fight, calling the sudden difficulty spike “SO annoying.” A name to remember: Valthrudnyr, complaining of lost time and data; compensation because of too many failed update attempts.
Blizzard hasn’t made any statement regarding the backlash, yet with so-many literal-and-figurative hundreds of thousands crashing against walls now, they would better do so soon. If the fixes do come, will they come in time to save this event’s reputation? At this moment, the one thing picking up speed faster than Whisper Caches is the frustration.
For the few brave souls still able to log on, Gift of the Tree is now time-limited. But a word of advice would be to just wait until Blizzard patches the patch. Or go touch some grass for a little while. The Tree can wait.
