Diablo IVHardcore mode is not for the faint of heart. Anything that kills your character will leave them permanently dead, no matter what level they were, how much time you invested or what equipment they had. So, understandably, Twitch streamer Quin69 was overcome with confusion and anger when his level 91 druid with 172 hours of grinding suddenly and shockingly died during a loading screen of all things.
Quin69 was traveling back to town after completing a keystone dungeon when his game seemed to freeze (via PCGamesN). After being redirected to the main menu and logging back in, he was immediately greeted by a message telling him that his druid had ascended to the Hall of Fallen Heroes and had never returned.
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“That’s dog shit, man,” he captioned his stream in disbelief. “I finished the damn capstone, upgraded my glyph, went to town, and now on the loading screen where I’m going to town, my character died.” He had 172 hours and 50 minutes of playtime with the Character accumulated 71,087,522 gold when an apparent bug killed him. “Fix your game,” he said tweeted
So what exactly happened? Players can only speculate, but the main theory is that Quin69 was killed by lightning during a storm. Normally he would have been safe in the protective bubble that appears when teleporting, but it’s possible that the bubble disappeared when the loading screen appeared while the flash didn’t, killing his druid before the teleport was complete. The game claims that Quin69 was killed by the environment, which seems to confirm this interpretation of events.
This isn’t the first time a player has died in the worst possible way in hardcore mode. Souaïb “cArn” Hanaf was Diablo IV‘S First player to reach level 100 in permadeath mode only to see his barbarian eventually wiped out by a rogue server. Luckily for him, he at least managed to win Blizzard’s Hardcore mode races before he was fooled by in-game hijinks. It is not yet clear if Quin69 will start his ascent again. However, if he eventually reaches level 100 with a new character, the victory could be all the more beautiful.
