I remember playing games when I was a kid and when you died, you had to start all over again, no saved progress and nothing carried over. That would be true hardcore if that happened in D3.
Can you imagine that happening? Lose all items in your stash. Lose all paragon levels. Lose the ability to go straight into Adventure Mode. Have to do Story Mode all over again to unlock Adventure Mode. Players (well the vast majority of them) now-a-days couldn’t handle that at all.
Of course, in D3, you could bypass that by making mules so that you wont lose any items. Also, you could level those mules so that they can access Adventure Mode right away. However, they are mules. If you wanted any one of them to be a main character, then you have to make another mule.
Since that new mule would have to go through Story Mode to access Adventure Mode, you might as well do that with your new main character and keep the mule as a mule. Even then, do you think the vast majority of players would be able to handle that?
Of course hardcore can’t be too hardcore, then there wouldn’t be a hardcore option. Everyone would play softcore. I, for one, like the fact that they implemented a hardcore option. Yes… I. Will. Die. A Death! Many many times.
True, but those games were much, much shorter and simpler, and didn’t have features such as achievements that can be completed once per year and dynamically created items with dozens of parameters and millions of possible combinations. Losing the progress was a matter of hours lost, not months.
The stash, Paragon levels and access to Adventure Mode are (game mode)-wide (SC/HC * season/non-season), not separate for each character.
Thy proposal would require regressing to D2 system, with separate stash for each character and no safe way of transferring items between them. Not nice in such fast-paced game, where players often switch between characters.
Also, campaign progress reset in D2 didn’t work as well - players just got rushed though all acts and difficulties and then powerleveled.
Gating multiplayer behind completing the campaign could work, but in practice, but I’m afraid that in practice the majority of players would quickly get bored with such repetition and just abandon HC after main character death.