The hype for Diablo IV is real, and the numbers from the early access beta show it. For those who pre-ordered Diablo IV, they had the opportunity to play the early access beta that ran from March 17-19. As that has now ended, Diablo announced on their Twitter that over 1 million players reached level 20 or more, rewarding them with a cute wolf puppy backpack that’ll carry over into the title’s launch in June. That being said, Diablo publisher Blizzard only announced the specific data of 1 million players reaching the level 20 mark, so it’s unclear the full total of early access players. Even still, 1 million people logging on to play the early access is a massive amount.

It’s not too late to rescue a puppy of your own. Reach level 20 during the #DiabloIV Open Beta and earn the Beta Wolf Pack at launch. pic.twitter.com/egVLr9VKNU

— Diablo (@Diablo) March 20, 2023

While the early access has ended, there’s still the open beta which will launch Friday, March 24th at 9am PT. As well for those who played the open beta and weren’t able to net that coveted wolf puppy backpack, players will still have the opportunity to carry over their character and save and continue with it through the open beta. The open beta will only be for the weekend, from March 24th- 26th.

Of course with over 1 million people playing the early access beta this past weekend, there were server issues at times with long waiting periods to get into the game. This eventually cleared up but it’s caused concern that the open beta servers might just overwhelm the system entirely. Speaking to Eurogamer, Diablo general manger Rod Fergusson stated “the ideal is that there are no queues.” He followed up by saying, “Sometimes you’ll put a queue in place just so that if there’s one particular service – like writing to the database – that you’re trying to not overwhelm, you’ll add to the queue to say, “Hey let’s just slow down a little bit while we fix this or look at it.” So it’s not always just availability of space. Sometimes something’s being investigated, or you’re trying to manage pressure on one particular thing until you can reinforce it.”

Diablo IV has been a long time coming for fans of the celebrated franchise, it was announced way back in November 2019 at Blizzcon. Last year in June, Diablo Immortal released for those with a smartphone and has been popular albeit the problematic in-game shop.