Despite its surprise announcement at BlizzCon earlier this month, Diablo 5 is a whole three years away. Blizzard's brief teaser trailer had zero gameplay in it, which means the action RPG sequel is still mostly a mystery.

But director Joe Shely helped paint a picture of what the real thing might look like during a recent group interview with PC Gamer.

One of the somewhat controversial aspects of the last couple Diablo games is how they handle monster difficulty. In Diablo 2, each area has a level range that determines how tough enemies will be compared to your character. Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 ditched this approach for a system that has monsters scale in difficulty as your character levels up.

In a genre all about the power fantasy of slowly becoming a demon-slaying god, this didn't go over so well with the many players who want those moments where your character feels considerably more powerful than their foes. While this still happens in the newer games, the gap between the strength of your character and the monsters is much smaller until you're decked out in high-level gear.

Level scaling seems to solve a lot of problems with maintaining a certain degree of challenge in the newer Diablo games, but it does diminish the spikes in power you can get from finding a particularly strong item or leveling up.

We already know Diablo 5 will return to procedurally-generating areas so that every dungeon, or open world zone, will look different every time you visit them—a crucial part of Diablo 2 that suggests Blizzard is interested in bringing back core elements from the series' history.

Shely said level scaling in Diablo 5 isn't something the team has fully discussed yet, but acknowledged how important your character's power level is to the experience.

"Diablo is a game that, in many ways, is about your character getting stronger and when the monsters get stronger at the same time, especially outside of your control… You've filled the experience bar, you get stronger, you should feel awesome now, a wave of light pulses out from you, a bunch of monsters die," he explained. "That's wonderful, but then you're going to go hit some more monsters and you should feel powerful. And sometimes automatic scaling can get in the way of that feeling, which is so core to it, and that's why this is a really important question. And so, we're going to take a somewhat different approach to that in Diablo 5."

As someone who has never been a huge fan of level scaling in RPGs, it's nice to hear that Blizzard is willing to rethink a major component of the recent Diablo games. Newer action RPGs, like Path of Exile 2, are great examples of how friction, like running into monsters way too powerful for you, can make the grind for better and better loot more meaningful when there are actual risks.

Diablo 5 is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the demon lord has won. Finding a new sword that lets you crush the monsters who humiliated you a few levels earlier should emphasize the progress you've made on your journey to save Sanctuary from Hell's army. Blizzard says regular updates about the game's development will begin next year and that it will incorporate feedback along the way. I'll be curious to see exactly how level scaling—or the lack of it—will work and how far the dev team is willing to go to recreate the classic Diablo experience.

You can play the first several hours of World of Warcraft: Forever and miss a lot of the changes Blizzard slipped into the early leveling experience. There are new quests and NPCs, but they barely stand out if you don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the MMO.

Now that players have had enough time to hit the beta's level 20 cap, they're starting to find what makes WoW: Forever different from a 1:1 remake of the old game. Items that break rules, like an axe that lets you mine ore without the mining skill, tease what's in store when the full game is out on November 4.

That axe, for example, drops off of an enemy in the Deadmines dungeon. You can use it to mine materials 30 times before it presumably breaks. Loot multiple of them and you can circumvent the way professions are usually meant to work in WoW: Most people pick up a gathering profession and use the materials to make gear with a crafting profession. The new axe lets you run two crafting professions—a luxury almost nobody had in 2004.

Players have also found a new sword that enables a playstyle for mages that was only a dream before. The Coldflame Saber—found in the Shadowfang Keep dungeon—has a unique bonus that causes melee attacks to deal fire damage to frozen targets. Normally mages want to be as far away from enemies as they can, but this sword enables a 'battle mage' playstyle that would've gotten you kicked from a group if you tried it in the past.

The concept of adding items that turn the old MMO on its head isn't technically new. Blizzard ran a limited-time mode called Season of Discovery where breaking the game was the entire point. Mages could stand in the frontlines and tank dungeons like a warrior in it. I don't get the sense that WoW: Forever will be quite as absurd from the start, but some of the new items suggest Blizzard won't be holding back the weird stuff just for max-level players.

There's no doubt Season of Discovery was a major influence on WoW: Forever. A "Cozy Sleeping Bag" item from it was just recently found in WoW: Forever, in fact. Curling up for three minutes in it will give you a 3% XP buff that stacks with the 5% XP buff from cooking. WoW Classic purists would lose their minds at an 8% XP buff.

Blizzard intentionally hid many of WoW: Forever's new items from dataminers so players could discover them organically. Earlier today, people realized there are a bunch of hidden books that reward you with extremely powerful rare items to juice your leveling journey. Assuming secrets like this will be snuck into the entire world, the November launch is going to be full of surprises as people uncover it all.

Even though Blizzard is committed to keeping some of the foundational aspects of WoW intact, I like that there are areas where nothing is sacred and things that you might've imagined as a kid might actually become real. I'll be patiently waiting for an item that lets warlocks tame enemies as permanent minions like Path of Exile 2 just introduced in its recent update.