Blizzard announced in May that the first 1,000 Diablo 4 players to reach level 100 in the brutal hardcore mode will have their names engraved on a statue of Lilith, the game's demonic villain. This was my first proper look at this giant monument to gameplay, and I have to admit that for a giant statue of a video game, this is pretty awesome.

The photo of the Lilith statue, spotted by GamesRadar, was shared on Twitter by Adam Fletcher, Director of Global Community Development for Diablo. Huge!

This is not the first time a giant sculpture has appeared on Blizzard's campus.

It's also very impressive:

Also, it appears that the Hardcore Hero goal has already been met; Blizzard said in a blog post that they are currently verifying all players who have claimed and will update and possibly share a list as soon as the work is done.

This process will take time due to the various stages: in addition to the usual eligibility requirements (basically, not living in a country that is currently in a dispute with the US), players will need to provide the official Diablo account with the #Diablo4Hardcore hashtag, Battle.net all tags, and a public tweet with an image or video proving the achievement.

You can understand why Blizzard would want to make sure the winner is correct: one, some people might be offended if they are wrongly excluded. Two, unlike the credits of, say, Cyberpunk 2077, one cannot add or remove a name from a statue without serious effort.

Diablo 4's hardcore mode is notorious for being unforgiving, mainly because if you die (let's face it, if you die), your character and all the gear you have acquired are gone forever. Moreover, this permadeath also applies to deaths caused by disconnections and bugs, so it is not uncommon for hardcore 100 quests to have ugly endings.

Blizzard recently said it is working on a way to (almost) eradicate these unfortunate unintentional deaths, but it won't be implemented for a while yet: game director Joe Shelley said last week that amputation protection is expected to begin in mid to late October, Diablo 4 He said it will not be rolled out until Season 2, which is expected to begin in mid- to late-October.