To an outside observer this might have seemed like an obvious method—most other games use difficulty modes this way—but for a Diablo game it was revolutionary. “Initially it seemed like this impossible mountain to climb,” Martens said. “You knew you needed to change this major thing, [but] you never thought about the game in that terms, in automatic difficulty before. We’d never considered it in that manner.” They’d never considered it because of Diablo II.
