Diablo 4 fans plead for arcade-style combat text to be switched off

With the imminent launch of Diablo 4 on the horizon and reviews in the wild (like our own), denizens of the internet are making known their impressions of the highly anticipated game, including the UI.

A thread on the Diablo subreddit has opened debate over the pop-up text that appears over enemies heads when they’re hit. The original post calls for Blizzard to “please let us turn off this arcade combat text” with the poster putting their case forward. “This is a stunning looking game, and some players just want to enjoy the atmosphere without seeing dozens of pop ups every second.” They’re not the only ones to feel this way either.

“This is by far the ugliest part of the game,” says Seltbadwy “I watched a Nightmare endgame dungeon runthrough, and you couldn’t even see the character or the enemies for all the language and inflating damage numbers showering off. It looks such an ungodly MESS.” While the text does serve a practical purpose, letting players know when they’ve struck a critical hit for example, many feel that it can be overkill with the number of enemies that appear on screen. “This is a bigger distraction than a map overlay,” says P0l4r21. “I thought they wanted us to be immersed and remove all distraction. What is the dumbass logic behind this ungodly sight?”

Some users have pointed out you can turn off the numbers in the UI – which helps – but not the statuses like “Vulnerable” – which are arguably bigger and more of an issue. “I’m kind of torn between wanting to disable them to have better immersion,” says TheDex4 “Vs having number go up for a good feeling of progression and having the debuff labels tell me what’s going on.”

There is of course, a potential compromise being brought up, with many conceding that while this text serves a purpose, they’d at least like to have the option to turn it off. “They should give us a choice,” says FirstCold2533. “(I’d like to) play game like d1/d2 was. Without tons of fonts on my screen. For me it looks just bad. I know that many peoples like it but we should get a option to turn off all this stuff if we want (to) play without it.”

Diablo 4 of course won’t be a static game, with plenty of updates in the weeks, months and almost certainly years following launch – we’ll have to wait and see if they decide to address this issue. For more on the game – check out our recommendations for the best graphics settings for Diablo 4 on PC and find out is Diablo 4 cross play and cross platform?

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