Blizzard unveils Diablo 4's Hardcore Lilith statue and it's metal as hell (but also quietly dignified)

Blizzard announced in May that the first 1,000 Diablo 4 players to reach level 100 in the brutal Hardcore mode, and to make the claim appropriately, would have their names carved into a statue of Lilith, the game's demonic villain. Now we've got our first proper look at this massive monument to gameplay grind, and I have to admit that as giant videogame statues go, this one is pretty sweet.

The photo of the Lilith statue, spotted by GamesRadar, was shared on Twitter by Diablo global community development director Adam Fletcher. It's big!

This isn't the first massive sculpture to appear on the Blizzard campus—that honor goes to the famous orc statue that was erected in 2007.

It's awfully impressive too:

It also appears that the Hardcore heroes goal has already been reached. Blizzard said in a blog post that it is currently verifying all the players who made the claim, and will update—and presumably share the list—once the job is done.

It's a time-consuming process because of the various steps involved: Alongside the usual eligibility requirements (basically that you don't live in a country currently having beef with the US), players must send a public tweet to the official Diablo account with the #Diablo4Hardcore hashtag, their full Battle.net tag, and picture or video proof of the accomplishment.

You can understand why Blizzard would want to be sure it's got the winners right: One, this is the sort of thing that some people might get mad about if they're incorrectly excluded. Two, unlike Cyberpunk 2077's credits, for instance, you can't just add or remove names from a statue without some serious effort.

Diablo 4's Hardcore mode is notoriously unforgiving, mainly because if you die (and let's be honest, it's when you die), your character and all the gear they've earned are gone forever. And it's doubly challenging right now because that permadeath is also applied to disconnections and deaths due to bugs, which have brought more than a few quests for Hardcore 100 to an ugly end.

Blizzard recently said it's working on a way to (mostly) eradicate those unfortunate, untimely deaths, but that won't be implemented for a good while yet: Game director Joe Shely said last week that disconnection protection won't be rolled out until Diablo 4 season 2, which is expected to begin in mid to late October.