There’s nothing like reaching a key cutscene and taking your hands off the keyboard to watch the story unfold, only for your character to suddenly be dead and the respawn window to appear on your screen.
That’s what happened to one unsuspecting player, who posted their experience to Reddit on June 23—to the astonishment of many who were also unaware dying in the background of a cutscene was even possible.
Unnecessarily dying in the background of a cutscene is something that has popped up from time to time in years gone past in many games, but no one expected Diablo 4 to suffer from the same issue
In the post, the player notified everyone their characters may die while a cutscene is happening if a party member skipped the cutscene and started fighting the boss. However, some players were quick to correct the author of the post, adding this can only happen during the Lilith boss cutscene.
The players clarified that, while the characters are in a cutscene, they are immune to add or boss damage, so even if an ally skips their cutscene and begins attacking the boss, anyone still watching is invulnerable.
However, during the Lilith boss fight, the floor falls away from you. If you do not move in time, your character falls to their death—which is what happened in this situation with the author’s character falling through the map while their teammate began the boss fight.
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It might be much better for the whole party to have a prompt on whether they’re going to skip the cutscene or not so that new players can still view the cutscenes and fight the boss from start to finish. A player pointed out this is quite similar to the system Final Fantasy 14 has in place where players can’t move from the spawn point until all of the players have watched or skipped the cutscene. This way, the gameplay is preserved and the story won’t be missed by new players.
Hopefully, the devs caught wind of this and are already making improvements regarding this issue. Two of Diablo 4’s hooks are the story and the boss fights. This issue disregards these hooks as the player is presented with two options: Either finish the cutscene and then join the boss fight mid-way, or skip the cutscene and play the boss fight from start to finish.
Alternatively, they can also have a co-op group that agrees to not skip the cutscene or if they do, wait for the player to finish the cutscene before attacking the boss.
Here’s hoping you’re not deep into a Hardcore run when something like this happens.
