Just two days after claiming the Diablo 4 Hardcore crown as the first player to reach level 100 in the game's unforgiving permadeath mode, streamer Souaïb "cArn" Hanaf's in-game avatar has died in the most ignominious way possible—felled not in a glorious showdown with a powerful enemy, but by a random server disconnection.
cArn was simply roaming the overworld map and beating up trash mobs when it all went wrong. "Hello?" he said in early but obvious alarm as the screen suddenly froze. "I'm fucking... are you kidding me?" A second later, the screen went black.
This is one of the big risks in playing Diablo 4's Hardcore mode, especially during the early days of the game's release, when glitches and server instability are relatively common: A disconnection, for any reason, is essentially a guaranteed death. This isn't really a big deal in normal mode, where death is a very brief and minor inconvenience, but there's no coming back from it in Hardcore: Your stuff is gone, the character is wiped, and you're starting over from scratch. Multiple attempts at claiming the hardcore crown prior to cArn_'s victory were derailed by glitches and bugs.
Sure enough, when cArn_ logged back into the game, he discovered to his great dismay that his character was dead—brought down by a lowly vampire bat.
"Yeah, sure, a vampire bat's gonna kill me," he said. "Doesn't make sense."
cArn_ is understandably upset about his death, but as noted by PCGamesN, it's not the loss of the characters that bothers him so much as the gear he'd accumulated during his run. "Stop saying it's fine, you can get level boosted," he said in response to viewers who suggested he could boost a new character straight to level 100. "I don't care about the levels."
It's a sad end to one of Diablo 4's great early heroes, and while death eventually comes for us all, this was an especially ugly way to go. One of cArn_'s viewers invoked a famous bad-death scene from the world of movies to sum up the moment:
