Beware, Diablo IV adventurers, for dark whispers speak of a horrific beast of great power that can spawn ungodly numbers of clones and totally fuck you up. It’s not a lie! I’ve seen it happen to many folks, and not all have returned to tell the tale.
Diablo IV’s launch has been pretty damn uneventful and smooth, which in 2023 is actually impressive and newsworthy. But no game, especially not a game as fresh out of the oven and massive as Diablo IV, can launch in a perfect state. So of course there are some bugs and other issues in Blizzard’s latest action-RPG. And perhaps the funniest involves an enemy named Darcel who can—and seems to often—spawn dozens and dozens of himself.
In Diablo IV there’s a fairly simple, not-too-exciting side-quest called “Stolen Artifice” in the region of Scosglen. The short side-quest asks you to hunt down a big baddie, kill him, take his runic charm, and bring it back to someone. This is your bog-standard video game fetch quest, of the sort you’ve likely done variations of more times than you can remember at this point. However, there’s currently a bug with “Stolen Artifice” that leads to clones of the quest’s boss—Darcel—spawning almost endlessly, causing problems.
On Reddit and YouTube, players are sharing clips of Darcel spawning 20 or more versions of himself in seconds. These clones are all as powerful and deadly as the original, and can quickly—like a demonic swarm of locusts—overwhelm even the most powerful players.
“I went to kill Darcel and there was like 200 of him standing there, fix?” posted one user on Blizzard’s official Diablo forums. Another player jokingly posted a clip of the glitch on the Diablo subreddit, adding that they “did not expect Diablo IV [to be] this hard” and that it was “one too many Darcels for me.”
Kotaku has contacted Blizzard about the bug.
Some players are reporting that Darcel will just spawn forever, causing crashes or making it impossible to finish the quest. Some have had luck defeating Darcel, the neverending monster, by killing the original Darcel before he can spawn far too many copies of himself.
While this bug is pretty damn funny to watch, I can imagine someone playing a hardcore-mode character (which has only one chance at life, and is gone forever upon death) finding this bugged quest and screaming in terror as they realize, far too late, that they are about to get wrecked by a clone army of Darcels. RIP to those poor souls.