One of the biggest complaints from the Diablo IV community is how little storage the game gives us with a very limited number of stash tabs. As I mentioned in my Diablo IV review, it’s almost absurd that we seem to have regressed to the days of Diablo II where we had to create mules to hold our gear. While the team is adding an additional stash tab in the coming weeks as part of its response to the recent disastrous 1.1.0 patch, it hasn’t really explained why the game has so few stash tabs, until now.
Joseph Piepiora, the Associate Game Director of Diablo IV, responded to a Twitter user’s question about why the game is only getting one extra stash tab. His response? “When we say they are expensive what we mean is that they create a lot of memory overhead. When you see another player in game you load them and their entire stash filled with all their items. This is what teams are working diligently to improve so that we can have more asap.” Piepiora follows up that tweet with “Basically this isn’t a storage concern it’s a performance concern.”
It’s a bit perplexing as to why they chose this approach. If we had to guess, it was likely to incorporate another feature they intended to have in Diablo IV, but it got shelved in order to get the game released in June. Now, that idea is likely off the table, resulting in the team having to address and fix this issue so we can have more stash tabs. Unfortunately, Piepiora doesn’t elaborate on this particular design decision.
It’s quite strange that Blizzard seems to have been struggling with stash space across all Diablo games. Here’s a post explaining the issues it ran into with incorporating more stash space in Diablo III.
Meanwhile, I have more stash tabs than I know what to do with in Last Epoch.
