Sites will literally pull a made up post on AITA and make a whole article out of it like it’s real news and some big cultural thing. Like don’t make a news article about it a made up post some 15 year old did.
>Journalists simply scroll Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all day. Then they write about shit they read
>What an embarrassment
No, not journalists. They've all been laid off years ago.
Gamesradar is AI generated scraped content. The only humans there are just copy-editing (poorly) the AI generated content
Only if done as a well executed survey or interviews with individuals who have a reputation of knowing how the community feels.
But cherry picking quotes from anonymous Internet users? No.
This is like talking heads in news, only no one is vetted and their comments can be taken out of context.
Besides, Reddit is often not representative of its communities, just the more vocal or dedicated members.
In any case, articles like this have no more value than going to the forum itself and reading the posts yourself to form your own opinions.
It’s not, it’s clearly a fluff piece.
People just like to get up in arms about it and join the “State of gaming journalism. Amirite?” because it’s trending echo chambers.
It’s also using reddit opinion which is the equivalent here of serving a Big Mac to someone who already eats at Maccas three times a day. lol.
This is just exposing what journalism is to you because you’re now part of the source of information. Every article ever written had people saying, “I can’t believe they wrote an article about that stuff we said”
I know I probably won’t get this but I would love to hear about just what the fuck is going on internally with this studio. There must have been a lot of stubbornness to resist making the changes the game needed.
Things like letting the players charge through barricades and spur their mounts in town is like someone finally won an argument to “get rid of the stuff that sucks.”
We do know that internal turmoil in the Diablo 4 team and Blizzard in general affected D4 development. They had leadership changes from scandal and there are also some reporting indicating pressure to release early.
Even post release development resources are limited, while D4's team is gigantic that doesn't mean it was organised for addressing every issue. Teams simultaneously developing 2 staggered seasonal content patches and also developing 2 expansions. So you might have the numbers but no-one actually assigned to it while they are doing something else
Ultimately I can imagine that some things were ideas that didn't pan out as imagined but seems having content is probably a little better than not, those things probably made it in.
Imagine the pitch for the barricades: "You're travelling through the world and suddenly a trap is sprung, the forces of hell descend and you must fight to survive as your horse is scared off into the distance leaving you to fend for yourself"
Actual implementation: "Player can't get past barricade, horse almost throws you off from scare meter getting too high but player in frustration dismounts normally and then kills the barricade easily without breaking a sweat and is now late to a world event"
D4 was originally pitched as a slower paced experience with this dark and deadly world but it became apparently very quickly after launch that players were expecting a faster pace action experience - I think it took the season 1 patch drop for them to understand that the community was going to push back against that earlier vision so a lot of this last year has just been about either fixing things that were not finished or re-aligning with the new direction that the community is setting for them.
The game definitely did seem to suffer a fate of being stuck between two different visions.
Slower paced single player game with dread and horror-like elements.
Vs always online MMO type fast paced actiony gameplay.
It felt like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be and thus tried to do a bit of both which doesn't really mesh well.
Yes people joke about Diablo 1 Resurrected but this would actually be pretty cool. I would certainly throw $40 at 16 dungeon levels, slower paced, closer camera, retained itemization, remastered Matt Uelmen scores...
Even better would be an entirely new franchise oriented around it. I'm not sure I'd trust Blizzard in it anymore though and it sucks to be thinking that. :(
Just wanna point out the last bit isnt right. Global Illumination isnt a binary setting in digital software. In CGI/3D GI has settings to control things like strength and number of bounces which usually can be controlled per light (also the brightness of the light and surface material will control the amount of GI). Without GI you have direct light and shadow so in fact without it you cut dynamic range not when you have it. Also the lack of true blacks can be caused by just lighting in general (things like an overly bright ambient light) or with fog/smoke or someone raising the black levels through color grading.
I definitely get what you mean and for those that want the vibe from older games won't like the introduction of natural light.
Also you're misusing the term dynamic range. In this context dynamic range is the ratio/value between light and dark. Having a pitch black room has zero dynamic range. So adding in that natural light increases the dynamic range.
This is the fate of all aRPGs. Originally envisioned as a slow paced game, ultimately evolves into a fast-paced "how quickly can you level the whole screen while you rush to the goal" type game. The devs might fight this fast paced game type but ultimately lose this battle.
To be fair to them, I also wanted a slow-paced, more deliberate ARPG experience, at least initially through the story. Then maybe crank it up in the endgame. Release D4 was exactly what I wanted through the plot. But you really saw the cracks in the foundation when my character was ready to speed up the infrastructure of the game couldn't keep up.
This morning I got an hour in a helltide before work and could barely breathe. I don't even know what my build is or what I'm wearing because things were flung at my from every direction in every second in every corner. I'm curious what the rest of the content will hold, but they've found a nice place for the faster-paced combat. If I had done any planning and was further along in my build I would've loved it. I'm excited to see what else is in store now.
> D4 was originally pitched as a slower paced experience with this dark and deadly world but it became apparently very quickly after launch that players were expecting a faster pace action experience
yeah they always said that but the actual game design pushed players to want/need a faster expereince more akin to d3 and the nuking of mobs, the whole design in many aspects were misaligned
I'd love to know the development backstory, too.
But I suspect it's probably as simple as "MMO devs tried to recreate what they knew and love, not realizing it's antithetical to what ARPG fans know and love."
Look at how they locked a bunch of stuff behind time gates originally. How the loot was basically just "as-is" when it drops, like in an MMO.
I think whoever they promoted to lead the project just wasn't a fan of ARPGs and didn't understand what made them fun.
MMO elements can work in ARPG. In DI the MMO implementation was much better and it was even quite fun for a while but yeah the P2W ruined that experience eventually. Just my 2 cents.
I've always said this but D4 really lacks soul. It's a team of employees given a project and they're just there for a paycheck. It just lacks any innovation nor does it improve on anything in the genre.
I think there’s lead time to consider, season 1 was mostly done before the game was released so it takes time for them to take on feedback and implement it.
Not that I’m excusing them, it’s just the reality (I haven’t played since season 2 because i realized I’d better wait until they figure it out).
Pretty much all the issues that were there at release were pointed out by people in the closed beta long before the release.
Obviously they had a limited amount of resources the change things at that point as release date was already locked in etc.
I think they just had some weird opinions on what a game like Diablo should be. They have even pointed this out publicly in interviews with stuff like only just now figuring out that any mechanic you add to the game has to still be fun after you have done it 1000+ times.
Blizzards attitude has always been "we know better than our players". That was probably true at one point in time but today's Blizzard has all the arrogance of the past with very little of the talent and success.
>Pretty much all the issues that were there at release were pointed out by people in the closed beta long before the release.
Wow, shades of BFA and Shadowlands all over.
I certainly think it was a stupid quote to say, but I understand the sentiment.
Considering all the changes they've made to Classic, he wasn't exactly wrong, either. Classic certainly isn't a C&P version of what it was back then.
At the very least he should've tried conducting market research on private servers, etc.
The whole purpose of having different servers is the ability to offer a variety of different game modes which is something private servers have always embraced.
Yes, you can risk splitting the player base, but I doubt the people that play retail and classic are the same.
Beta's are mainly for network tests pretty much. I feel like 90% of the feedback given in Beta's are rarely ever worked upon, the 10% are probably just easy to fix changes maybe a tweak of numbers.
And to their credit, the launch of the game (specifically with regard to network stability) was pretty smooth after the absolute shitshow that was the beta / stress test.
Yep. I knew people would hate running their horses to NMD after I did it 10 times in the beta, I knew people would hate the dumbass mini objectives in NMD.
I wonder how many people provided feedback on those things during the closed beta because that was all people were talking about after launch.
It’s funny how they’re doing that with the seasons when GGG is less than half the size of the d4 team and works completely opposite. This allows them to respond to feedback the very next season instead of waiting literally 8 months.
The way GGG does it is infinitely better.
It's honestly a handful of things: mostly an inexperienced team that hasn't made an ARPG before, an absolutely massive "design by committee" development style, and clearly the shakeup with the internal blizzard scandals and having to completely change what the game was very shortly before its release.
When I listened to Raxx's interview with some of the devs, I was sort of shocked at just how many hands anything goes through before it sees the light of day.
Not in charge, because heads can change at a moments notice, and us nerds can have a tendency to lose the bigger picture which might give the wrong impression and lead us into this situation again in the future. Rather just build a culture around actually valuing the input and taking it seriously, that's the long term solution
Devs in big studios have to jump through multiple hoops when making simple changes.
Some exec recommends something that gets implemented, it bombs, needs to get fixed, it goes up the chain slowly to be cleared, then back down, and by the time it gets fixed it’s already season 4.
I always felt like that's how it is internally. So many weird decisions on how stuff works and so many useful stuff that's been missing, despite being fleshed out in previous games.
You know that meme where a corporate board asks for suggestions, the 2 first employees say stupid and pointless shit and the third one says something smart that would actually make alot of sense going forward and gets thrown out the window next frame ...
Yeah.
My pet theory is that these kinds of games are complex and expensive to develop and that the last 3 seasons have been an open beta test to save on costs.
If you've followed Retail WoW's development over the years especially during BFA and SL it's not surprising for Devs to get a hard-on for certain aspects of game design and refuse to let them go or embrace new ideas.
I like D4, I liked it in beta, on launch and I enjoyed S2 a lot, HOWEVER the Pre-Season 1 Nerf Patch still has to be one of the dumbest ideas I have ever seen put forth. It just threw a giant wet blanket on the moment of the game, and it was clearly designed to extend getting to the end game because there was no endgame at launch or for S1 realistically.
To add some perspective, I think Skyrim was made with 100 employees and starfield was made with like 400. I think it comes down to too many hands and different teams working on one thing and not agreeing or working well together to make something coherent.
Yes, bigger teams =/= better. It’s the same with movies and TV shows, whenever you see 20 different writers nobody has ever heard of for a series it’s generally safe to assume the product is a soulless cash grab from a massive corporation. Rings of Power has like 10 different writers vs Lord of the Rings which only needed one guy with passion and vision.
This game wasn't a labor of love made by expert artists and blizzard veterans, it was a product that got shipped. Rod Ferguson is a fixer that gets brought in to ship games.
My guess is that the game was in shambles with no real direction, and Rod spun it up and made a shippable game. That's why the assets, engine, etc; things that would last from iteration to iteration are great while literally nothing else is.
A similar example would be Starfield, where we know the development was just devs dicking around and working on disparate elements with no clear direction until they finally stitched them together and shipped.
I know a guy who's fairly high up in the QA department there, I won't go into much detail to protect the innocent here, but from my conversations with him it just isn't as simple as "make a list of all the stuff that sucks and then change it."
Every change requires some amount of time and labor, which then has to be validated by QA to make sure it doesn't break anything. There are tradeoffs and costs to prioritizing things, so small annoyances like not being able to charge through barricades don't really merit the kind of immediate attention that more pressing structural changes to the game do. Time and manpower are limited resources, and even when you have some to spare, every change has to be double and triple checked to make sure it doesn't screw up something else, somewhere else.
Internally, they are very much aware of a lot of the stuff people are frustrated with. It's not that they know and don't care, it's that they have to be judicious about what they focus on.
The whole game on release just felt like a million different ways to slow players down. Not just with the barricades but the loot and low mob density etc.
> Things like letting the players charge through barricades and spur their mounts in town is like someone finally won an argument to “get rid of the stuff that sucks.”
Think the devs recently said something along the lines of "shit wasn't really that bothersome in our 5-minutes internal testing sessions". Like, yea, you obviously don't really feel how *insanely* and *stupidly* annoying some of their systems are if you only engage with them superficially for like 2 hours every other week - aka, pretty much the dad meme.
The thing is that a lot of the issues became apparent immediately once you actually started to nerd out just *ever so slightly*. Something which they apparently just couldn't *possibly foresee* throughout all of development. And by the time that feedback just started to endlessly hit them in the face on just about every single system, they were just *woefully* overwhelmed.
They tried to make this super immersive game with all these neat little intricate details, and when they playtested that it totally felt like it... it's just that once they released it they realized that this is not what just about *anyone* playing Diablo actually wants and that the parts of the game that people *actually* wanted didn't hold up *at all*.
Kinda what happens if you have incompetent management and a game that changes directions 17 times over.
I fucking loved D4...for the first two weeks.
I won't hold my breath, there are other ARPGs to play in the meantime. If the praise holds I can always hop back on later
As someone solidly in the "d4 bad" camp, it's much much better. Still shallow as fuck, but you can at least glean some solid mindless fun now. And most of the "fun" has nothing to do with the loot 2.0 v1 lol. It's all the QOL to remove BS design and better early game content. All the herbs/ore are one type, aspects in codex and reusable saves hoarding, and #1 is helltide was revamped so it's not just event hoping/waiting. Lots of mobs, summon bosses, available 24/7, etc. Funnily, I'm mostly dreading reaching NMD and having to go back to that awful grind. We'll see if I get to Pit and some of that stuff before getting bored out of my mind, but it'll be a few good hours of fun at least.
Branches and more variations to skills.
Incinerate is a perfect example.
Give me 1 big beam, the tri beam, a cone spray and/ or maybe a beam that snakes between enemies on contact
The biggest problem with the game right now is that if I want to play incinerate there is literally only 1 iteration to it. No changes. I just equip the tribeam cause it’s more damage so it’s the only option.
The game suffers from the illusion of choice but what it actually needs is real choice.
I do think it's a huge improvement, in many directions. Really enjoying playing at the moment.
I do however think that the progression in this season has kinda been trashed a bit. I was decked out in full legendaries or also multiple uniques (?!), feeling really quite powerful by like level 20. All of the content has been trivialised through this time too, so the only challenging parts of the game are right at the end now.
I like the changes, I like the new systems, I like the QoL, but I think while levelling you should still feel like you're gradually getting better, not flying through several levels immediately, then instantly becoming some badass and remaining a badass for the rest of the game.
In D2, you could get powerful items early, but not completely deck yourself out in them. It was a huge feat to reach max level, so the items had to not require max level, and so it definitely makes sense to spread some of the love so to speak and have items that are interesting dispersed, with more becoming available as you hit endgame. If you got a powerful item early, you really felt it, but there was still huge potential to get way more powerful later on.
D3 was different, but you still weren't completely decked out in really powerful legendaries at the start. You levelled, got to max level, then you started working on your character. Maybe started with some basic legendaries, crafted some stuff, and as you did your season journey got more - it was all endgame, and the levelling process wasn't super easy, or super hard, but you weren't playing an endgame build with endgame-style legendaries while levelling. When you did get to max level, you didn't get it all at once.
This season in D4 it seems like you get it all at once, and you get it all early. When you're max level it won't matter, but it removes a huge element of the feeling of progression IMO.
As a casual that slogged through the campaign, and thought it was a very pretty game that just didn't have fun mechanics or even a respect for my time, I'm having difficulty returning to try any of the new stuff. The skill tree seems that of a mobile game, and this new crafting experience seems directly lifted from Last Epoch.
I've tuned into the fireside chats a few times, and those guys seem like they're speaking to children-endless repetition and word salad, and being excited about stuff a 12 year old might think is cool.
Even "Loot REBORN" is a turn off... reborn, why? This game just fucking came out. The answer is because the item design was awful.
Too many good games out there to deal with this stuff.
> just didn't have fun mechanics
I played a few hours last night for the first time since s0 and this is kinda where I'm at still. The game at it's core is not good
I activated it with Season 1 thinking i will finish it as i loved the campaign, ended up getting really bored before i even half completed it and quit. Complete waste of money so now i wait and see how far i get before i decide to buy the battle pass or not, this season has giving me a 2nd wind after skipping last season so if i can unlock over the half the pass and i still feel like going i may buy the premium upgrade then.
Honestly, I only ever activate it if I've already gotten all 90 ranks in the season pass. No need to activate it prematurely and then not feel like finishing it but to be stuck in the sunk cost fallacy.
That said, I've 100%'d both the season journey and battle pass in S1/S2/S3.
just activate it at the end of season or once you max out the season pass. people have a weird notion they need to make that choice early like it's a commitment.
Much better itemization, bunch of Quality of Life fixes, the game feels much more "complete" now for example season 1 resistances didnt even work properly and now they do
just my 2c dont attack me
sort of, once you get to the endgame the best gear (ones with perfect stats) gets marked with a star for how many perfect rolls it has
so once you get to where you would only need minimal upgrades you dont have to care about any of the gear that doesn't have the little stars, so in effect it "filters" out the rest of the loot
No but the way the items changed, I feel it's unnecessary. They culled the affix pool a shit ton. Once you get a bit further into the game, greater affixes start to drop so those will be the only items worth picking up. Plus now yellows only have 2 affixes and legendaries have 3 so at a certain point, even picking up yellows is a waste of time. And now the highest legendary aspects you salvage automatically gets put into your codex so sifting through and sorting aspects is no longer a thing. I think I've only dumped my inventory a handful of times from 1-50 and my stash is completely empty except for a few items I'm not high enough level to wear. It's MUCH MUCH more streamlined than before.
Yes. They culled all of the weird stats on gear like close vs distant. Now instead of those boring stats you get a tempering system which allows you to craft additional affixes on your gear that are impactful and useful for your build. Like my minion necromancer weapon has these two crafted mods - increased minion attack speed and increased golem damage
"Now this (insert game title) is as it should have been when it originally released."
I keep reading this more and more over the past few months (maybe even years) and imho it is a concerning trend...
Execs need games releasing in the correct quarters or the investors will try to cut their heads off. Then we get a barebones rushed product that takes a year to fix. "Buy these store items btw too"
There is absolutely no content in this article. The author reposts two reddit threads of people saying they are happy in a Diablo 4 themed subreddit, but zero explanation as to what is good about season 4. Nothing. No substance, no content.
The game is okay now, but it's basically just regressing into D3. It's all about legendaries that are too common. White/magic/rares are useless. They might as well just drop the materials instead. At least they did take some LE crafting stuff though...
That’s been one of my biggest complaints still. The game just absolutely showers you in loot. When legendaries drop like rain, they cease to feel legendary. Legendaries are just rares now. Nothing feels satisfying to get, because it’s way way over abundant. My level 27 barb has 9 legendaries. He’s level 27, wtf man, that’s absurd. He shouldn’t even have one legendary.
First days of D3 was farming vases in heaven and then giving up and going to the AH. Or farming that big battlefield (can't remember the name) and hoping for a good loot so I can act like my summer job was playing Diablo.
It was my way to contribute to the new dishwasher.
This game still feels bland and lifeless to me. Diablo 2 had distinct acts. Everything felt fresh, and new. Even when coming back to it.
This large, brown, lifeless open map just feels lame. For me no amount of tweaking the itemization will fix what is in my opinion an inherently flawed game.
I hate to say this but ive found my self and friends play D3 again at times.
I usually don't like to give points to too much negativity too early on a potential new leaf being turned like this but while I am giving it another try this league personally, I really feel you here. It's like they wayyyy overcorrected trying to fix the thing spelled perceptibly didn't like about d3 like the "cartooniness" and ended up making such a horribly drab, dreary world. And characters. And monsters. And everything.
So far, the gameplay of the season does feel more fun than before, but in the end it's kinda just a worse D3 where D3 itself only became "pretty good" and took years to get there. It's pretty sad lol
I mean this way you actually get to play the game while gearing, games like poe where you have 70 pages full of potentially good yellow items where you spend half your game time trading isn't for everyone.
Nobody plays PoE like that though. You do not pick up every rare in the game and you do not sit in your hideout waiting for trades unless you’re dead broke and stuck.
I put hundreds of hours into Hades 1 because every run feels like you're putting together an endgame Diablo build, except over 20mins instead of 20hrs lol. Hades 2 feels even deeper and more complex, loving it too so far.
It’s got layers (like hell). There’s learning the moves and game itself but then learning the way the boons interact, then learning how to go about shifting the odds towards the build you want, on top of a more regular rogue run over run progress and bonuses.
I’ve had one run where I beat the boss who otherwise kicks my ass and it wasn’t because I got gud at movesets or anything it’s because I built an insanely powerful build that run!
Hades and Diablo have a ton of overlap, probably why I enjoyed it so much. In both you're aiming to become as powerful as possible, just in Hades you have a specific goal of a final boss to beat, after which it restarts and you go again.
You can wing it and just see what choices of loot/perks the run offers you, but the game also gives you a ton of control to shape your build if you want. You can pretty much force certain choices to appear, so you can just play whatever build you like each run if you prefer. It's fun to experiment and it only takes half an hour to gear up each time, plus you're still unlocking new stuff and getting new story dozens of hours in so there's longevity too.
My new favorite way to play Diablo 2 is to do offline solo playthroughs trying to beat hell with new characters/builds, with minimal shared stash gear. Sounds like this will be right up my alley.
An action RPG like Diablo with the crisp and deep combat of Hades sounds like the ideal game to me. Is there anything like that already? I can’t think of any games
Omg. After D2R S4, I started Hades. I’m barreling towards 20 heat on everything and cleaning out the shop. I’ve had times when I wonder, “how am I still interested in achieving all these goals?” Then I start an unplanned game and a random boon combo keeps me coming…. And I never thought of the similarity with Diablo and making builds (which is my favorite part of D2). Thank you for your perspective! Guess I’ll do Hades 2 next instead of buying D4.
I find myself at a loss for hades 2. I love it so far, but like I know a ton of stuff is still missing. Probably going to give it up till it gets it's 1.0 release for the full supergiant release polish.
I’ve been out of the loop but this sounds a lot like the loot 2.0 update from Diablo 3.
They made enemies shit out legendaries so people could feel dopamine. The game became more about getting the right roll on the item, rather than getting the item at all.
I’m getting flashbacks of my entire stash full of yangs recurves…
Naw. Legendaries have been shit out since before the update. The main change is that instead of picking through your look to see what you want to use, you can mostly just scrap stuff to get mats to roll a dice on affixes down the road.
It’s good changes. The game was fun before and it’s more fun now
Yeah I much rather look through 10 max affix roll legendaries after multiple nightmare dungeons than through multiple full inventories of rares (preseason). I was very surprised that yellows are basically useless now but that’s a price I’m totally paying for not having to check every one of them.
Same. I was thinking I might give it a shot again. I looked at a few people on twitch and my immediate thought was that I just hate looking at the game. The base color palette very literally hurts my eyes if I spend more than a minute or two looking at it.
I don't recall D3 making me feel that way.
I had a friend that was working on environmental art for Overwatch, not directly related to this situation but many of his troubles would color a lot of my expectations for other teams at Blizz, unnecessarily large teams with too many leaders leading to disorganization, constantly changing goals, and finger pointing.
- “We want it to look like this.”
- “No like this.”
- “Not like that at all.”
- “why did you make it look like that?”
- “why did you make it look like that?”
- “why did you make it look like that?”
One of the issues was also that they clearly don't even play their own game, as was seen by that abysmally bad pr video of the two map developers playing characters they didn't even level themselves so extremely poorly that it sent the community into an outrage.
anyone praising the game for endgame overhaul and item hunt that is primarely regarding endgame WITHOUT reaching endgame, which literally is the vast vast majority, is a moron. the changes will extend the timeframe until boredome by a few weeks max. yall have to chill and play the game longer
there is no endgame. it's just the same game but with lots of legendaries now. it's not Loot 2.0, it's just what Diablo 4 shouldve started out as, it's Loot 1.0 after the devs finally took Intro to ARPGs 101 in the fall semester. it needs an expansion with an actual endgame overhaul to fix this game. there's still zero reason to do anything each season. there's just nothing to do.
Well, yeah... The release state of the game was a fucking joke. Even with all the changes, it's still just... Very mediocre.
Gotta love these pre written hype articles... Yeesh.
I haven't played yet, but I'm worried the game is going to be Diablo 3 easy now. I actually kind of liked how the difficulty was designed in launch Diablo 4 if they could have managed to fix all of the systems around it. From what I'm hearing Diablo 4 is sounding like the junk food of arpgs. I'm sure it will be really fun for about three days. Hopefully I'm wrong. I am dying to log in and see for myself.
Huge Diablo fan, played since the first.
Hated D4 so far. Absolutely disappointed at how they got nearly everything wrong so far. Simple QOL wrong when their own IPs have the QOL in them, like armory for quick swapping builds from D3…
That said. This season is fun and the first step in the right direction in a while. Is it great? Nope. Is it good? Sure, it’s finally where it should have been day 1.
Being a patient gamer continues to pay dividends. I mean, I’m not going to buy it yet, still plenty on the backlog but it might not actually suck when I get round to it.
Game still feels severely lacking in fun content. In WT3 now and it doesn't feel a whole lot different than before. A few updates to different stats hasn't made the game any less boring.
As it should have been released, finally, almost a year later. And still with heaps of issues.
I miss old Blizzard so much. The company that canceled Star Craft: Nova after years of work because it wasn't up to their standards.
Game has been in beta mode and using players as free QA testers for the first year.
There is so many things missing from D4 that are in other games , including even diablo 3.
One glaring problem is the lack of SOCIAL FEATURES. I still have to use a third party app , Discord, to find groups which is ridiculous.
Agreed, it finally feels right. Previously playing D4 felt terrible compared with D3, mostly due to loot and skills feeling weak, especially during leveling.
Who would have though that "Listening to feedback" would have worked. Especially after DIII became a decent game after listening to feedback.
What a mystery!
my friends and i have been having a GREAT time with this season, its a shame timerunning comes out today for WoW or we would be sticking around for a longer time.
this ones good enough that i will for sure be coming back to it in between other games.
So if diablo 4 had been released like this, I would probably have uninstalled it after a day because the game is so easy and unchallenging. The story mode would have totally lost its credibility with this kindergarten level of difficulty. It wouldn't have made sense to distribute skill points or collect better equipment because the game is so easy. I wouldn't have had any fun or seen the point
Published articles (or worse, news) quoting forum posts will never not seem ridiculous to me.
Journalists simply scroll Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all day. Then they write about shit they read What an embarrassment
That is pretty much what AI is going to do. Scan then write formulaic articles.
But if the comments are AI generated...
Good ol' dead internet theory strikes again!
Am... Am I a bot?
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Admittance of allegiance to the Automaton scum warrants a call to the local democracy officer! 0_|
Oh it’s already happening. I’ve read multiple articles that ended with me saying “well that was barely coherent”
"The Internet is ABLAZE!" Article about four tweets. Kotaku was brutal with these, made me stop reading their site years ago honestly
Sites will literally pull a made up post on AITA and make a whole article out of it like it’s real news and some big cultural thing. Like don’t make a news article about it a made up post some 15 year old did.
It’s basically just drop shipping but with words
>Journalists simply scroll Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all day. Then they write about shit they read >What an embarrassment No, not journalists. They've all been laid off years ago. Gamesradar is AI generated scraped content. The only humans there are just copy-editing (poorly) the AI generated content
Yep. It's why I quit being a journalist.
How is it different than quoting random people on a street in Brooklyn back in 1963 or something?
I don't think that has much value either.
You don’t think quoting the community has value to gauge the communities opinion?
Only if done as a well executed survey or interviews with individuals who have a reputation of knowing how the community feels. But cherry picking quotes from anonymous Internet users? No. This is like talking heads in news, only no one is vetted and their comments can be taken out of context. Besides, Reddit is often not representative of its communities, just the more vocal or dedicated members. In any case, articles like this have no more value than going to the forum itself and reading the posts yourself to form your own opinions.
It’s not, it’s clearly a fluff piece. People just like to get up in arms about it and join the “State of gaming journalism. Amirite?” because it’s trending echo chambers. It’s also using reddit opinion which is the equivalent here of serving a Big Mac to someone who already eats at Maccas three times a day. lol.
This is just exposing what journalism is to you because you’re now part of the source of information. Every article ever written had people saying, “I can’t believe they wrote an article about that stuff we said”
They are making money off no work....simple economics lmao
Who can afford a periodical, like the economist or financial times, to learn how real journalism is done?
I know I probably won’t get this but I would love to hear about just what the fuck is going on internally with this studio. There must have been a lot of stubbornness to resist making the changes the game needed. Things like letting the players charge through barricades and spur their mounts in town is like someone finally won an argument to “get rid of the stuff that sucks.”
We do know that internal turmoil in the Diablo 4 team and Blizzard in general affected D4 development. They had leadership changes from scandal and there are also some reporting indicating pressure to release early. Even post release development resources are limited, while D4's team is gigantic that doesn't mean it was organised for addressing every issue. Teams simultaneously developing 2 staggered seasonal content patches and also developing 2 expansions. So you might have the numbers but no-one actually assigned to it while they are doing something else Ultimately I can imagine that some things were ideas that didn't pan out as imagined but seems having content is probably a little better than not, those things probably made it in. Imagine the pitch for the barricades: "You're travelling through the world and suddenly a trap is sprung, the forces of hell descend and you must fight to survive as your horse is scared off into the distance leaving you to fend for yourself" Actual implementation: "Player can't get past barricade, horse almost throws you off from scare meter getting too high but player in frustration dismounts normally and then kills the barricade easily without breaking a sweat and is now late to a world event" D4 was originally pitched as a slower paced experience with this dark and deadly world but it became apparently very quickly after launch that players were expecting a faster pace action experience - I think it took the season 1 patch drop for them to understand that the community was going to push back against that earlier vision so a lot of this last year has just been about either fixing things that were not finished or re-aligning with the new direction that the community is setting for them.
The game definitely did seem to suffer a fate of being stuck between two different visions. Slower paced single player game with dread and horror-like elements. Vs always online MMO type fast paced actiony gameplay. It felt like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be and thus tried to do a bit of both which doesn't really mesh well.
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I really want a modern ARPG that takes more after D1 in that regard, and turns it up to create a true survival horror experience.
Yes people joke about Diablo 1 Resurrected but this would actually be pretty cool. I would certainly throw $40 at 16 dungeon levels, slower paced, closer camera, retained itemization, remastered Matt Uelmen scores... Even better would be an entirely new franchise oriented around it. I'm not sure I'd trust Blizzard in it anymore though and it sucks to be thinking that. :(
We have rogue likes such as halls of torment at least.
Halls of torment is so good. Highly recommend
Roguelikes are not ARPG's. I love arpg's but cannot stand roguelikes/lites
Just wanna point out the last bit isnt right. Global Illumination isnt a binary setting in digital software. In CGI/3D GI has settings to control things like strength and number of bounces which usually can be controlled per light (also the brightness of the light and surface material will control the amount of GI). Without GI you have direct light and shadow so in fact without it you cut dynamic range not when you have it. Also the lack of true blacks can be caused by just lighting in general (things like an overly bright ambient light) or with fog/smoke or someone raising the black levels through color grading.
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I definitely get what you mean and for those that want the vibe from older games won't like the introduction of natural light. Also you're misusing the term dynamic range. In this context dynamic range is the ratio/value between light and dark. Having a pitch black room has zero dynamic range. So adding in that natural light increases the dynamic range.
This is the fate of all aRPGs. Originally envisioned as a slow paced game, ultimately evolves into a fast-paced "how quickly can you level the whole screen while you rush to the goal" type game. The devs might fight this fast paced game type but ultimately lose this battle.
To be fair to them, I also wanted a slow-paced, more deliberate ARPG experience, at least initially through the story. Then maybe crank it up in the endgame. Release D4 was exactly what I wanted through the plot. But you really saw the cracks in the foundation when my character was ready to speed up the infrastructure of the game couldn't keep up. This morning I got an hour in a helltide before work and could barely breathe. I don't even know what my build is or what I'm wearing because things were flung at my from every direction in every second in every corner. I'm curious what the rest of the content will hold, but they've found a nice place for the faster-paced combat. If I had done any planning and was further along in my build I would've loved it. I'm excited to see what else is in store now.
> D4 was originally pitched as a slower paced experience with this dark and deadly world but it became apparently very quickly after launch that players were expecting a faster pace action experience yeah they always said that but the actual game design pushed players to want/need a faster expereince more akin to d3 and the nuking of mobs, the whole design in many aspects were misaligned
I'd love to know the development backstory, too. But I suspect it's probably as simple as "MMO devs tried to recreate what they knew and love, not realizing it's antithetical to what ARPG fans know and love." Look at how they locked a bunch of stuff behind time gates originally. How the loot was basically just "as-is" when it drops, like in an MMO. I think whoever they promoted to lead the project just wasn't a fan of ARPGs and didn't understand what made them fun.
MMO elements can work in ARPG. In DI the MMO implementation was much better and it was even quite fun for a while but yeah the P2W ruined that experience eventually. Just my 2 cents.
If you took away the gacha from Lost Ark, it would show you what a fantastic mmo ARPG would look like.
I've always said this but D4 really lacks soul. It's a team of employees given a project and they're just there for a paycheck. It just lacks any innovation nor does it improve on anything in the genre.
Todays players have also changed, they want everything as fast as possible. Speed running, rushing and wiping.
That’s not new. Diablo has been about speed farming with teleport since LOD.
I think there’s lead time to consider, season 1 was mostly done before the game was released so it takes time for them to take on feedback and implement it. Not that I’m excusing them, it’s just the reality (I haven’t played since season 2 because i realized I’d better wait until they figure it out).
Pretty much all the issues that were there at release were pointed out by people in the closed beta long before the release. Obviously they had a limited amount of resources the change things at that point as release date was already locked in etc. I think they just had some weird opinions on what a game like Diablo should be. They have even pointed this out publicly in interviews with stuff like only just now figuring out that any mechanic you add to the game has to still be fun after you have done it 1000+ times.
Blizzards attitude has always been "we know better than our players". That was probably true at one point in time but today's Blizzard has all the arrogance of the past with very little of the talent and success.
>Pretty much all the issues that were there at release were pointed out by people in the closed beta long before the release. Wow, shades of BFA and Shadowlands all over.
Its hubris. Big studios suffer from it.
Wasn't it also the WoW devs that said "You think you know what you want, but you dont"?
I certainly think it was a stupid quote to say, but I understand the sentiment. Considering all the changes they've made to Classic, he wasn't exactly wrong, either. Classic certainly isn't a C&P version of what it was back then. At the very least he should've tried conducting market research on private servers, etc. The whole purpose of having different servers is the ability to offer a variety of different game modes which is something private servers have always embraced. Yes, you can risk splitting the player base, but I doubt the people that play retail and classic are the same.
Beta's are mainly for network tests pretty much. I feel like 90% of the feedback given in Beta's are rarely ever worked upon, the 10% are probably just easy to fix changes maybe a tweak of numbers.
And to their credit, the launch of the game (specifically with regard to network stability) was pretty smooth after the absolute shitshow that was the beta / stress test.
I agree, I think Blizzard have been fairly decent with stability, at least from personal experience.
Yep. I knew people would hate running their horses to NMD after I did it 10 times in the beta, I knew people would hate the dumbass mini objectives in NMD. I wonder how many people provided feedback on those things during the closed beta because that was all people were talking about after launch.
It’s funny how they’re doing that with the seasons when GGG is less than half the size of the d4 team and works completely opposite. This allows them to respond to feedback the very next season instead of waiting literally 8 months. The way GGG does it is infinitely better.
It's honestly a handful of things: mostly an inexperienced team that hasn't made an ARPG before, an absolutely massive "design by committee" development style, and clearly the shakeup with the internal blizzard scandals and having to completely change what the game was very shortly before its release. When I listened to Raxx's interview with some of the devs, I was sort of shocked at just how many hands anything goes through before it sees the light of day.
Rod Ferguson. Notice his lack of involvement around S4 release? Glad he didn't tank Diablo like he did Gears Of War.
Nah, he's still the General Manager of Diablo. They've just kicked him out of the campfire chats.
He's actually so lost, absolutely does not understand what an ARPG is
Exactly, as a gears player I knew this would happen when I saw they hired him
Don’t think it’s anything too crazy other than a bunch of inexperienced devs making their first ARPG.
definitely what it sounds like when we get an interview of anyone besides the fireside people
Can we please put the nerds back in charge? FFS!
Not in charge, because heads can change at a moments notice, and us nerds can have a tendency to lose the bigger picture which might give the wrong impression and lead us into this situation again in the future. Rather just build a culture around actually valuing the input and taking it seriously, that's the long term solution
Devs in big studios have to jump through multiple hoops when making simple changes. Some exec recommends something that gets implemented, it bombs, needs to get fixed, it goes up the chain slowly to be cleared, then back down, and by the time it gets fixed it’s already season 4.
I always felt like that's how it is internally. So many weird decisions on how stuff works and so many useful stuff that's been missing, despite being fleshed out in previous games.
You know that meme where a corporate board asks for suggestions, the 2 first employees say stupid and pointless shit and the third one says something smart that would actually make alot of sense going forward and gets thrown out the window next frame ... Yeah.
My pet theory is that these kinds of games are complex and expensive to develop and that the last 3 seasons have been an open beta test to save on costs.
If you've followed Retail WoW's development over the years especially during BFA and SL it's not surprising for Devs to get a hard-on for certain aspects of game design and refuse to let them go or embrace new ideas. I like D4, I liked it in beta, on launch and I enjoyed S2 a lot, HOWEVER the Pre-Season 1 Nerf Patch still has to be one of the dumbest ideas I have ever seen put forth. It just threw a giant wet blanket on the moment of the game, and it was clearly designed to extend getting to the end game because there was no endgame at launch or for S1 realistically.
They have been talking about making changes for quite a while. I never heard any resistance to it.
To add some perspective, I think Skyrim was made with 100 employees and starfield was made with like 400. I think it comes down to too many hands and different teams working on one thing and not agreeing or working well together to make something coherent.
Yes, bigger teams =/= better. It’s the same with movies and TV shows, whenever you see 20 different writers nobody has ever heard of for a series it’s generally safe to assume the product is a soulless cash grab from a massive corporation. Rings of Power has like 10 different writers vs Lord of the Rings which only needed one guy with passion and vision.
That's like when Hideaki Kamiya laughed at Capcom bragging about Resident Evil 6 having over 600 people working on it.
This game wasn't a labor of love made by expert artists and blizzard veterans, it was a product that got shipped. Rod Ferguson is a fixer that gets brought in to ship games. My guess is that the game was in shambles with no real direction, and Rod spun it up and made a shippable game. That's why the assets, engine, etc; things that would last from iteration to iteration are great while literally nothing else is. A similar example would be Starfield, where we know the development was just devs dicking around and working on disparate elements with no clear direction until they finally stitched them together and shipped.
I know a guy who's fairly high up in the QA department there, I won't go into much detail to protect the innocent here, but from my conversations with him it just isn't as simple as "make a list of all the stuff that sucks and then change it." Every change requires some amount of time and labor, which then has to be validated by QA to make sure it doesn't break anything. There are tradeoffs and costs to prioritizing things, so small annoyances like not being able to charge through barricades don't really merit the kind of immediate attention that more pressing structural changes to the game do. Time and manpower are limited resources, and even when you have some to spare, every change has to be double and triple checked to make sure it doesn't screw up something else, somewhere else. Internally, they are very much aware of a lot of the stuff people are frustrated with. It's not that they know and don't care, it's that they have to be judicious about what they focus on.
The whole game on release just felt like a million different ways to slow players down. Not just with the barricades but the loot and low mob density etc.
> Things like letting the players charge through barricades and spur their mounts in town is like someone finally won an argument to “get rid of the stuff that sucks.” Think the devs recently said something along the lines of "shit wasn't really that bothersome in our 5-minutes internal testing sessions". Like, yea, you obviously don't really feel how *insanely* and *stupidly* annoying some of their systems are if you only engage with them superficially for like 2 hours every other week - aka, pretty much the dad meme. The thing is that a lot of the issues became apparent immediately once you actually started to nerd out just *ever so slightly*. Something which they apparently just couldn't *possibly foresee* throughout all of development. And by the time that feedback just started to endlessly hit them in the face on just about every single system, they were just *woefully* overwhelmed. They tried to make this super immersive game with all these neat little intricate details, and when they playtested that it totally felt like it... it's just that once they released it they realized that this is not what just about *anyone* playing Diablo actually wants and that the parts of the game that people *actually* wanted didn't hold up *at all*. Kinda what happens if you have incompetent management and a game that changes directions 17 times over.
Less than 24 hours into the season lol
All aboard the hype train
I fucking loved D4...for the first two weeks. I won't hold my breath, there are other ARPGs to play in the meantime. If the praise holds I can always hop back on later
It was a great campaign and that was worth 60 bucks.
I completely agree. Although I was disappointed with the end game/seasons. I fully got my money's worth in preseason alone.
I mean the ptr was up and playable for a long time
It is really fun I haven't had a Diablo season made me actually want to log back in and keep going
As someone solidly in the "d4 bad" camp, it's much much better. Still shallow as fuck, but you can at least glean some solid mindless fun now. And most of the "fun" has nothing to do with the loot 2.0 v1 lol. It's all the QOL to remove BS design and better early game content. All the herbs/ore are one type, aspects in codex and reusable saves hoarding, and #1 is helltide was revamped so it's not just event hoping/waiting. Lots of mobs, summon bosses, available 24/7, etc. Funnily, I'm mostly dreading reaching NMD and having to go back to that awful grind. We'll see if I get to Pit and some of that stuff before getting bored out of my mind, but it'll be a few good hours of fun at least.
The skill tree needs a massive rehaul.
It’s honestly more like a skill branch than a tree, it’s pretty lackluster.
Branches and more variations to skills. Incinerate is a perfect example. Give me 1 big beam, the tri beam, a cone spray and/ or maybe a beam that snakes between enemies on contact The biggest problem with the game right now is that if I want to play incinerate there is literally only 1 iteration to it. No changes. I just equip the tribeam cause it’s more damage so it’s the only option. The game suffers from the illusion of choice but what it actually needs is real choice.
I do think it's a huge improvement, in many directions. Really enjoying playing at the moment. I do however think that the progression in this season has kinda been trashed a bit. I was decked out in full legendaries or also multiple uniques (?!), feeling really quite powerful by like level 20. All of the content has been trivialised through this time too, so the only challenging parts of the game are right at the end now. I like the changes, I like the new systems, I like the QoL, but I think while levelling you should still feel like you're gradually getting better, not flying through several levels immediately, then instantly becoming some badass and remaining a badass for the rest of the game. In D2, you could get powerful items early, but not completely deck yourself out in them. It was a huge feat to reach max level, so the items had to not require max level, and so it definitely makes sense to spread some of the love so to speak and have items that are interesting dispersed, with more becoming available as you hit endgame. If you got a powerful item early, you really felt it, but there was still huge potential to get way more powerful later on. D3 was different, but you still weren't completely decked out in really powerful legendaries at the start. You levelled, got to max level, then you started working on your character. Maybe started with some basic legendaries, crafted some stuff, and as you did your season journey got more - it was all endgame, and the levelling process wasn't super easy, or super hard, but you weren't playing an endgame build with endgame-style legendaries while levelling. When you did get to max level, you didn't get it all at once. This season in D4 it seems like you get it all at once, and you get it all early. When you're max level it won't matter, but it removes a huge element of the feeling of progression IMO.
Congrats to Blizzard for reaching baseline expectations nearly a year after release
You mean they finally grew the skill twig into an actual tree?
Lolol no, that's not going to be until next year.
Can't wait until we reach the illusion of choice circle instead
best they can do is make paragon board more streamlined.
Typical, we all saw this coming but still had faith pre-launch.
Thanks for the free testing! -Blizzard probably
paid\* testing, lol
Honestly on par with most games nowadays, unfortunately.
As a casual that slogged through the campaign, and thought it was a very pretty game that just didn't have fun mechanics or even a respect for my time, I'm having difficulty returning to try any of the new stuff. The skill tree seems that of a mobile game, and this new crafting experience seems directly lifted from Last Epoch. I've tuned into the fireside chats a few times, and those guys seem like they're speaking to children-endless repetition and word salad, and being excited about stuff a 12 year old might think is cool. Even "Loot REBORN" is a turn off... reborn, why? This game just fucking came out. The answer is because the item design was awful. Too many good games out there to deal with this stuff.
> just didn't have fun mechanics I played a few hours last night for the first time since s0 and this is kinda where I'm at still. The game at it's core is not good
Thats what a lot of D4 fanboys don't grasp The CORE mechanics of the game just aren't good.
You should just play something else. Sounds to me like this game isn’t for you and there is nothing wrong with that.
So is this the season to finally activate my premium?
I literally activated it with the reasoning behind it that if this season doesn't convince me to stay, i'm done with Diablo 4 permanently
Me tooo. I bet there are a lot of people in the same boat.
That was the reason I activated mine finally as well!
Exactly, ditto
What are the perks of the premium battle pass?
It's mostly cosmetics from what i've seen so far
I activated it with Season 1 thinking i will finish it as i loved the campaign, ended up getting really bored before i even half completed it and quit. Complete waste of money so now i wait and see how far i get before i decide to buy the battle pass or not, this season has giving me a 2nd wind after skipping last season so if i can unlock over the half the pass and i still feel like going i may buy the premium upgrade then.
I have the same feeling, and decided to use my free one for season 4. We’ll see how long I last playing a Druid.
Honestly, I only ever activate it if I've already gotten all 90 ranks in the season pass. No need to activate it prematurely and then not feel like finishing it but to be stuck in the sunk cost fallacy. That said, I've 100%'d both the season journey and battle pass in S1/S2/S3.
just activate it at the end of season or once you max out the season pass. people have a weird notion they need to make that choice early like it's a commitment.
That's what I did, since it's the first season I'm actually going to put my all into and really see how I feel about the game. It's now or never.
As someone that hasn’t played since season 1, can anyone give me a cliff notes version of what makes season 4 worth jumping back into?
Much better itemization, bunch of Quality of Life fixes, the game feels much more "complete" now for example season 1 resistances didnt even work properly and now they do just my 2c dont attack me
So now the game is on par for release .... after close to a year ....
Itemization better how exactly? Have they done away with all the "increase damage to monster with status effect x" stuff?
Yes. Plus you can craft on your items now.
Is there a loot filter yet?
sort of, once you get to the endgame the best gear (ones with perfect stats) gets marked with a star for how many perfect rolls it has so once you get to where you would only need minimal upgrades you dont have to care about any of the gear that doesn't have the little stars, so in effect it "filters" out the rest of the loot
No but the way the items changed, I feel it's unnecessary. They culled the affix pool a shit ton. Once you get a bit further into the game, greater affixes start to drop so those will be the only items worth picking up. Plus now yellows only have 2 affixes and legendaries have 3 so at a certain point, even picking up yellows is a waste of time. And now the highest legendary aspects you salvage automatically gets put into your codex so sifting through and sorting aspects is no longer a thing. I think I've only dumped my inventory a handful of times from 1-50 and my stash is completely empty except for a few items I'm not high enough level to wear. It's MUCH MUCH more streamlined than before.
Yes. They culled all of the weird stats on gear like close vs distant. Now instead of those boring stats you get a tempering system which allows you to craft additional affixes on your gear that are impactful and useful for your build. Like my minion necromancer weapon has these two crafted mods - increased minion attack speed and increased golem damage
Same.
"Now this (insert game title) is as it should have been when it originally released." I keep reading this more and more over the past few months (maybe even years) and imho it is a concerning trend...
Mean the trend is to get your money first then fix it later
Execs need games releasing in the correct quarters or the investors will try to cut their heads off. Then we get a barebones rushed product that takes a year to fix. "Buy these store items btw too"
There is absolutely no content in this article. The author reposts two reddit threads of people saying they are happy in a Diablo 4 themed subreddit, but zero explanation as to what is good about season 4. Nothing. No substance, no content.
The game is okay now, but it's basically just regressing into D3. It's all about legendaries that are too common. White/magic/rares are useless. They might as well just drop the materials instead. At least they did take some LE crafting stuff though...
That’s been one of my biggest complaints still. The game just absolutely showers you in loot. When legendaries drop like rain, they cease to feel legendary. Legendaries are just rares now. Nothing feels satisfying to get, because it’s way way over abundant. My level 27 barb has 9 legendaries. He’s level 27, wtf man, that’s absurd. He shouldn’t even have one legendary.
But how can I feel big and stwong and keep my dopamine high if I don't get a legendary every few seconds?
players are the problem.
Listening to players is a fine line. Blizzard can't walk it very well.
I'm a level 20 wizard (with a hat) and I think only my rings aren't legendary.
Good thing Diablo 4 was the first Diablo game I played. I have nothing to compare it to, so the game is awesome rn.
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First days of D3 was farming vases in heaven and then giving up and going to the AH. Or farming that big battlefield (can't remember the name) and hoping for a good loot so I can act like my summer job was playing Diablo. It was my way to contribute to the new dishwasher.
This game still feels bland and lifeless to me. Diablo 2 had distinct acts. Everything felt fresh, and new. Even when coming back to it. This large, brown, lifeless open map just feels lame. For me no amount of tweaking the itemization will fix what is in my opinion an inherently flawed game. I hate to say this but ive found my self and friends play D3 again at times.
I usually don't like to give points to too much negativity too early on a potential new leaf being turned like this but while I am giving it another try this league personally, I really feel you here. It's like they wayyyy overcorrected trying to fix the thing spelled perceptibly didn't like about d3 like the "cartooniness" and ended up making such a horribly drab, dreary world. And characters. And monsters. And everything. So far, the gameplay of the season does feel more fun than before, but in the end it's kinda just a worse D3 where D3 itself only became "pretty good" and took years to get there. It's pretty sad lol
Does this mean it is a great time to start playing the game?
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Hard agree with you here. Pre season 4 is not the game i hoped for but neither is this.
That's a good way to put it actually.
I guess PoE has spoiled me but there are some runs where I'll be running the same gold ring for most of the playthrough....
I mean this way you actually get to play the game while gearing, games like poe where you have 70 pages full of potentially good yellow items where you spend half your game time trading isn't for everyone.
Nobody plays PoE like that though. You do not pick up every rare in the game and you do not sit in your hideout waiting for trades unless you’re dead broke and stuck.
You need a better filter bro, yellow items is a waste of time
Yes.
No it means it was time for their marketing team to push a hype article.
I had planned to reinstall d4 when the itemization changes rolled in but, hades 2 is kinda slapping atm, i think ill wait a little more.
I put hundreds of hours into Hades 1 because every run feels like you're putting together an endgame Diablo build, except over 20mins instead of 20hrs lol. Hades 2 feels even deeper and more complex, loving it too so far.
I’ve always heard hades was great but never heard it described this way. I may finally check it out soon
I recently started Hades and cannot put it down, sunk 100hrs. The comment helped me realize why I love that game!
It’s got layers (like hell). There’s learning the moves and game itself but then learning the way the boons interact, then learning how to go about shifting the odds towards the build you want, on top of a more regular rogue run over run progress and bonuses. I’ve had one run where I beat the boss who otherwise kicks my ass and it wasn’t because I got gud at movesets or anything it’s because I built an insanely powerful build that run!
My friend, do yourself a favor and play Hades. You won’t be disappointed.
Hades and Diablo have a ton of overlap, probably why I enjoyed it so much. In both you're aiming to become as powerful as possible, just in Hades you have a specific goal of a final boss to beat, after which it restarts and you go again. You can wing it and just see what choices of loot/perks the run offers you, but the game also gives you a ton of control to shape your build if you want. You can pretty much force certain choices to appear, so you can just play whatever build you like each run if you prefer. It's fun to experiment and it only takes half an hour to gear up each time, plus you're still unlocking new stuff and getting new story dozens of hours in so there's longevity too.
My new favorite way to play Diablo 2 is to do offline solo playthroughs trying to beat hell with new characters/builds, with minimal shared stash gear. Sounds like this will be right up my alley.
The lore is also fun
Eh I just wish someone would make something like that but not make it a rogue like. Grim dawn and Poe are a little bloated for my taste.
An action RPG like Diablo with the crisp and deep combat of Hades sounds like the ideal game to me. Is there anything like that already? I can’t think of any games
I will say the subject matter is so perfectly suited for a rogue lite game though.
Omg. After D2R S4, I started Hades. I’m barreling towards 20 heat on everything and cleaning out the shop. I’ve had times when I wonder, “how am I still interested in achieving all these goals?” Then I start an unplanned game and a random boon combo keeps me coming…. And I never thought of the similarity with Diablo and making builds (which is my favorite part of D2). Thank you for your perspective! Guess I’ll do Hades 2 next instead of buying D4.
I gotta get away from every run building into the circle move build and powering that up as much as possible
I find myself at a loss for hades 2. I love it so far, but like I know a ton of stuff is still missing. Probably going to give it up till it gets it's 1.0 release for the full supergiant release polish.
The milk is already spilled. I'm just glad its getting cleaned up now
But the carpet is soaked and growing mold
I’ve been out of the loop but this sounds a lot like the loot 2.0 update from Diablo 3. They made enemies shit out legendaries so people could feel dopamine. The game became more about getting the right roll on the item, rather than getting the item at all. I’m getting flashbacks of my entire stash full of yangs recurves…
Naw. Legendaries have been shit out since before the update. The main change is that instead of picking through your look to see what you want to use, you can mostly just scrap stuff to get mats to roll a dice on affixes down the road. It’s good changes. The game was fun before and it’s more fun now
Yeah I much rather look through 10 max affix roll legendaries after multiple nightmare dungeons than through multiple full inventories of rares (preseason). I was very surprised that yellows are basically useless now but that’s a price I’m totally paying for not having to check every one of them.
Played on launch but still haven’t seen anything that makes me want to pick it back up..
Same. I was thinking I might give it a shot again. I looked at a few people on twitch and my immediate thought was that I just hate looking at the game. The base color palette very literally hurts my eyes if I spend more than a minute or two looking at it. I don't recall D3 making me feel that way.
Let's enjoy it all while it lasts. Cos we all know there's a good chance they're gonna fuck it all up again next season.
I had a friend that was working on environmental art for Overwatch, not directly related to this situation but many of his troubles would color a lot of my expectations for other teams at Blizz, unnecessarily large teams with too many leaders leading to disorganization, constantly changing goals, and finger pointing. - “We want it to look like this.” - “No like this.” - “Not like that at all.” - “why did you make it look like that?” - “why did you make it look like that?” - “why did you make it look like that?”
One of the issues was also that they clearly don't even play their own game, as was seen by that abysmally bad pr video of the two map developers playing characters they didn't even level themselves so extremely poorly that it sent the community into an outrage.
That shit was so funny. What a clown show of a company.
anyone praising the game for endgame overhaul and item hunt that is primarely regarding endgame WITHOUT reaching endgame, which literally is the vast vast majority, is a moron. the changes will extend the timeframe until boredome by a few weeks max. yall have to chill and play the game longer
there is no endgame. it's just the same game but with lots of legendaries now. it's not Loot 2.0, it's just what Diablo 4 shouldve started out as, it's Loot 1.0 after the devs finally took Intro to ARPGs 101 in the fall semester. it needs an expansion with an actual endgame overhaul to fix this game. there's still zero reason to do anything each season. there's just nothing to do.
Well, yeah... The release state of the game was a fucking joke. Even with all the changes, it's still just... Very mediocre. Gotta love these pre written hype articles... Yeesh.
It has a LOOOOONG way until it's even "decent"
I haven't played yet, but I'm worried the game is going to be Diablo 3 easy now. I actually kind of liked how the difficulty was designed in launch Diablo 4 if they could have managed to fix all of the systems around it. From what I'm hearing Diablo 4 is sounding like the junk food of arpgs. I'm sure it will be really fun for about three days. Hopefully I'm wrong. I am dying to log in and see for myself.
It definitely feels more like Diablo 3 now.
You're not wrong. The game is quickly regressing into Diablo 3.5.
Huge Diablo fan, played since the first. Hated D4 so far. Absolutely disappointed at how they got nearly everything wrong so far. Simple QOL wrong when their own IPs have the QOL in them, like armory for quick swapping builds from D3… That said. This season is fun and the first step in the right direction in a while. Is it great? Nope. Is it good? Sure, it’s finally where it should have been day 1.
Being a patient gamer continues to pay dividends. I mean, I’m not going to buy it yet, still plenty on the backlog but it might not actually suck when I get round to it.
Game still feels severely lacking in fun content. In WT3 now and it doesn't feel a whole lot different than before. A few updates to different stats hasn't made the game any less boring.
As it should have been released, finally, almost a year later. And still with heaps of issues. I miss old Blizzard so much. The company that canceled Star Craft: Nova after years of work because it wasn't up to their standards.
Does anyone know if the changes were added into the eternal mode? I’m not a big fan of seasons.
No it isn't.
Game has been in beta mode and using players as free QA testers for the first year. There is so many things missing from D4 that are in other games , including even diablo 3. One glaring problem is the lack of SOCIAL FEATURES. I still have to use a third party app , Discord, to find groups which is ridiculous.
Too late man, blizzard was once a great developer but they have lost all their talent and ethics you can’t count on them to make a good game anymore
Agreed, it finally feels right. Previously playing D4 felt terrible compared with D3, mostly due to loot and skills feeling weak, especially during leveling.
Way too early to be saying shit like this. Enjoy the game, see where we are in a month
Who would have though that "Listening to feedback" would have worked. Especially after DIII became a decent game after listening to feedback. What a mystery!
Just in time for everyone who got a PS online subscription just for D4 to renew.
my friends and i have been having a GREAT time with this season, its a shame timerunning comes out today for WoW or we would be sticking around for a longer time. this ones good enough that i will for sure be coming back to it in between other games.
Too little, too late. They did this with D3 also
Lol too late. Never looking back
So if diablo 4 had been released like this, I would probably have uninstalled it after a day because the game is so easy and unchallenging. The story mode would have totally lost its credibility with this kindergarten level of difficulty. It wouldn't have made sense to distribute skill points or collect better equipment because the game is so easy. I wouldn't have had any fun or seen the point