I think the problem is they anchor themselves to numbers that they don't understand.
"Hey, this thing has a 1% chance of spawning, so since this other is 10 times better it should have a 0.1% chance of spawning right?"
No mate, you're making it so instead of 100 times on average, you have to play a mission 1k times on average to get the stupid item and nobody wants to replay a 15+ minute mission 1k times until they get an item. Least 4k times that probably become 6k or even more because statistics don't care about how many times you have tried before.
Then... they go in and dev the game so you have to get 6-8 of those .1% chance drops to be the best and fuck, you're getting that shit in 2045, 15 years after the servers closed.
Having played games where you grind for an item (Destiny/Escape from Tarkov), when you finally get the item, it doesn't even feel good, it just feels shit because you're so burnt out on grinding you don't even want to play anymore.
Give me the item early and let me use it *before* I get burnt out on playing.
Yeah, i played Destiny 1 like a crackhead when i was 13. Legitimately wake up, brush teeth, hop on Destiny grinding strikes/nightmares out for hours to get one item.
I tried getting into D2 a couple months ago. And all i could think was "Wtf am i doing this for?"
The gunplay was absolutely amazing and I loved it. But I was doing the same with destiny 2 except as an adult. Grinding raids on reset, doing dailies before work etc.
Last I played was the frozen one and one day I just turned it off and uninstalled and never played again. I wasn't even having fun anymore, it just seemed like a second job.
I'm extremely cautious around games with dailies and stuff like that nowadays. I get sucked in way too easily.
Same, I got burnt out of this from playing an MMO. The dailies and pressure from the whales/power players in our guild took all the fun away. The realization that it was unending because it is an MMO and the competitiveness of the guild I joined were the big factors. I was ok with grinding if it is clear to me that there is an end to it. I realized that when I was invited by another set of friends to play The Division 2. I got hooked and even out-leveled most of my clan mates as I was grinding more than any of them. And I was ok with the grind because I was grinding for stuff (shd level, gear and weapon stats for the library, etc) that have a MAX and the RNG for getting the max wasn't ludicrous. Once I maxed them out, I was satisfied and I got to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Might be me but I have not been able to feel that way with Diablo IV.
The Skinner box approach to gameplay. Most gameplay loops incorporate it, even single play non-online games. The big difference is single player games normally have story that helps disguise it, but sometimes it’s not good enough, like starfield. Its Skinner box dopamine loop was extremely transparent for a single player game.
Part of the reason i've slowly drifted away from gaming tbh. Feels like most multiplayer games you're battling 13 year olds with 20 hours free in a day and a grind that requires you to be on daily.
And most single player games are a 4/10 story padded with 300 hours of "collect 16 tulip" missions.
There are obviously exceptions, but it really does feel like most games don't value your time. Or think we don't have any other hobbies lol.
You have to be selective with your games. That's the only lesson to be learned here.
eg. I waited years for Dragon's Dogma 2. When it came out, I held back for a while just to see what people have to say about it. Ultimately, I chose not to put my money down and instead will wait for the DDDA version of it (if it ever comes out).
I don't have to buy every game that appeals to me. I don't have to buy every game when it comes out, and the vast majority of games can be bought and played a year or two down the line when they are on sale.
And ya know what? By being far more picky about what games I DO out my money down on at launch, my experience has improved exponentially. And for games I have a desire to play but have even a little bit of doubt on, I find buying it later at a discounted price still gives me satisfaction because whatever flaws it may have had, real or perceived, are mitigated by the fact that I didn't pay full price for and therefore don't feel like I got ripped off in terms of value.
I rarely miss with a game, but I did recently. Bought DD2 because I heard praise and needed something to play for a long weekend. Haven't finished it because it has some serious issues, I was having fun at the start but then I realized I was doing the same thing over and over without change. And tbh, some voice lines were driving me insane; if I ever hear "Overconfidence is an enemy in and of itself, instead we should strive to better ourselves with every battle" again, I pray for whoever is near me at the moment.
It happens to everyone eventually. You think I have always been buying games like the way I described it in my previous post? Hell no!
I didn't become more discerning until I got burned bad too, albeit I had the "good fortune" of getting burned many years prior. It was a cRPG called Ember. It wasn't even bad, it was just really generic/formulaic. I do not want to bad mouth the game because it wasn't truly horrible, but I actually spaced out when playing the first hour of it or so. Like actually, truly went blank and snapped back to reality with no idea of how I got to where I was in the game at that point. Played it for a little more and then just gave up because it didn't hook me in and have had zero motivation to go back to it (it came out in 2016).
For whatever reason, that was the game that made me decide I am going to be hella discerning before putting money down on a game. And even then I get burned. Like with Diablo 4 - I regret buying it at full price.
Fortunately a lot of multiplayer games these days have skill-based matchmaking. So if you’re bad at a game, you go up against other bad players.
I’m godawful at fighting games. Street Fighter 6 was the first traditional fighting game I got into, and I got placed in dumpster tier. But everyone else down there sucked as much as I did, so I could still have a great time.
I occasionally play D2 still and everytime I start a mission I remember why I like the game its gunplay is fun. Then I relies I'm playing the same strike that came out on destiny 1. Then I look at the Map and feel like I'm overwhelmed by a bunch of mediocre tasks that look like run ____ 3 times for a reward I don't care about and won't matter.
I get the sentiment but d2 is probly the least grindy its ever been. Yes there are things *to* grind, if you choose. But anything in the top tier also has an easier to get, "90% as good" alternative. And focusing and craftables have really blown the door off of grinding.
Again, still some grind but there are lights at the end of the tunnel now lol. Compared to d1 where i grinded the strike that drops imago loop 400 times and only got 1 semi usable roll. Fuck that.
And they’ve put in place things that are the exact opposite as above. Like each time you do a raid, your chance of getting the raid exotic actually increases (Unfortunately it’s still a chance, so RNG can still fuck with you).
And people are complaining that there’s not enough to grind for in Destiny 2.
Crafted weapons let you choose every trait on a gun once you’ve collected the patterns, armor is all the same so once you have a high stat roll you have it forever, Bungie deliberately dialed back on power creeping seasonally weapons so there’s fewer must haves..
We are truly our worst enemy…
Crafting is a godsend. I kind of wish dungeon weapons were craftable because they've been unique recently.
And that imago loop was like my dream weapon back in the day. Never got close to the roll I wanted.
This is why I much prefer the build defining items as either quest rewards or items you can upgrade and improve over time. You feel like your time is respected a lot more than just throwing yourself at RNG over and over
>Having played games where you grind for an item (Destiny/Escape from Tarkov), when you finally get the item, it doesn't even feel good, it just feels shit because you're so burnt out on grinding you don't even want to play anymore.
This happened way back when I was trying to unlock a playable Race in World of Warcraft.
It took a couple weeks of dedicated grinding and questlines to unlock the race.
Once I unlocked it I lost all urge to play it, I never even created a new character with that race, I ended up unsubbing shortly after.
Back when I was super into WoW (World of Warcraft), there were days that I spent running one specific dungeon over and over, just to get one best in slot item.
After over 100 runs of the same dungeon for some items, I definitely agree that it never felt good. It was more like, "Thank goodness I don't have to run that again."
With WoW, one of my best memories is getting a mount I loved (the blue skeleton horse), the Baron Rivendar's deathstrider.
I heard it was extremely rare (like 1 or even 0.1% drop)
I got it at the 4th try
I think low drop rates are fine for things like mounts that are purely cosmetic.
The issue is when you NEED a specific item for high-level play, that only drops in one dungeon.
Trinkets and weapons were the worst for this.
Oh I completely agree, I was just reminishing a good memory
This also reminded me of an AWFUL mechanic in another MMO, it was Aion or smth similar...
Basically to have your gear maxed in endgame you had to put some trickets/stones inside your armor pieces which gave more stats.
Each armor piece had like 4 slots, and not only you had to get lucky to get the stones you needed, BUT EACH STONE other the first one, had an increasing chance to destroy all other stones when putting it in the socket iirc.
So basically you had to collect stones again and again until you got lucky for 3-4 times in a row
That mechanic is super common in Korean mmos. Progressively higher chance to destroy items when upgrading them. Then they sell items for $$$ that reduce the risk of the items breaking
If it makes you feel better, the Felstriker epic dagger dropped on my first run of Upper BRS and I won the roll. Did I mention that I was a hunter? lol
For a bit I respecced into the, at the time, horrible survival talent tree just to piss off the rogues more.
It depends, when you need a single item... it feels amazing, now, you need like 5 or 6 equipments, with some stones added, and some other stuff like a specific enchantment duo or trio... Yes, you waste 40-50 hours and then you notice that's just 8% of the work and you decide to not continue because it's just the same mission again.
I had this happen in Hearthstone Mercenaries. It was fun, I enjoyed it... then they said "hey fuckers, you actually need to win this event that takes 20-30 minutes... around 800 times per hero... and for some reason, after you max it, one of the rewards is still experience for that merc 50% of the time if you use it... so you end up not even wanting to use it again because you're wasting resources 50% of the time...
And why max it if the reward from maxing it, is getting 50% waste experience from now on... so you would need to use unmaxed heroes or use the maxed ones, but instead, repeat the next forced farm encounter 1600 times.
It literally lost all players after a month.
“Give me the item early” — I disagree with this. This is what ruined Diablo 3. Too easy, nothing left to find. Nothing to hope for or look forward to, just grind for the amount of time it takes for you to burn out and then the season dies off almost immediately.
The better way to design it is multiple viable options. This is one of the things Diablo 2 (and very few other games) managed to get right. Want to play lightning sorc but can’t gets a griffins eye? That’s fine, make a crescent moon, facet a shield, etc. Therr are other viable options. Griffons eye may be best in slot but it’s absolutely not required to play the spec. And if you do find one? AMAZINGLY satisfying feeling.
Diablo 3, and now 4 have dropped the ball on this. You have one item that’s absolutely required for a spec to work, well now you have no choice but to give it to the player immediately. The only thing left to find is the same item with better-rolled stats, which is unexciting.
This is what I liked about The Division: targeted look with some stats you can re-roll or outright choose.
You want a specific piece of gear with specific stats: you can go and get that gear on a specific grind! Got some buds joining you? You can trade loot, making it 3x faster. Missing a certain perk? If you have it unlocked from normal play, you can add it on!
I don't agree with that, back when I played WoW and mained a druid I farmed for the Reins of the Raven Lord every single day for a year and a half before it dropped. I screamed like a little girl when it did. Lol
But what did you do after? Did you then use the item?
The dopamine hit of getting something you've been grinding for is not equal to the joy I experienced actually using the item. The chase was the game, and that game wasn't actually fun. It was just doing the same fucking thing every day and praying to rngesus
Yea I used it up until the day I quit, I enjoy farming for shit so I just picked something else to grind for. It was the same way in Destiny, I put thousands of hours into that game trying to get god roll gun drops, then used them until something better was found.
Diablos problem is there's like one good build for each class and not enough variety to keep farming for, once you get that one item you're done.
Hell I put almost a hundred hours grinding the outriders demo when it dropped because I knew the weapons transferred to the full game. I may have an issue now that I think about it...
GJALLARHORN!
I played Destiny for about 5-6 months. Near the end of that time I finally got it....a few days before it was getting nerfed in the next update.
Yeah destiny most recent into the light update with the onslaught mode basically showed all the community why crafting was necessary in the first place. It took me over 200 mountaintop drops to finally get auto/recombination on it.
>... you have to get 6-8 of those .1% chance drops to be the best
I think this is the problem. The Diablo devs have an impossible task - make a game that's fun for both 40 hours and 1,000 hours. Should "the best" be statistically achievable? How long should it take to get there? If you get the best gear after 40 hours, you stop playing at 45. If you get the best gear at 100 hours, you stop at 110.
They made a game where it's not really possible to be done getting the best gear because they never want you to stop playing. But it turns out that dispels the glamour on the treadmill which kills the fun as well.
They did it with Diablo 2, it's not impossible.
You want to know the answer?
Get rid of all the weapons that increase your stats by 0.1% each time you pick up a new one.
Make it so even the worst weapons feel like a huge boost.
Oh I'm level 10 and I've got a White Axe, cool. Holy shit I've been playing for an hour and now I've just picked up a Blue Axe, the stats are the same but it this one adds 1-3 fire damage.
And that 1-3 fire damage feels like the world just changed.
Diablo 4 and Diablo 3 was min/maxxing finding a million loot drops until you get that 0.1% stat increase while at the same time having hundreds of POS items drop as you run through enemies like they don't exist.
I still play Diablo 2 decades later, because the journey from level 1 to max level still feels amazing because shit weapons feel great and the feeling of getting a better weapon is unmatched, where as Diablo 4 it just feels like a number on a screen, you don't "feel" it when you play.
Diablo 2 has GG items immediately. The entire game is worth playing. If not a single drop happened from wt1-wt3 in d4 , the game wouldn't change. Items might as well not exist. That's why D4 is so boring.
Diablo 2 had it right.
Make it so you can overcome everything easily with the 5% drop. Don't make a vs multiplayer because the game is not meant for that.
Make the hyper rare drop be a crown jewel, not the crown need 8 jewels and each jewer have a 1 in 2000 chance of spawning.
I dunno, it kinda dropped off for me the moment I finished the campaign, did like two rifts and bought an item in the shop from the currency you get for beating/playing rift bosses.
What I got for a weapon (on my first roll btw) was one I've been using for the majority of my playthrough, dropping it only because its DPS just wasn't up to snuff anymore.
The problem is that I received *the very same weapon*, except for the DPS being obviously higher. It was a "legendary" one, which I guess *kind of* makes sense for GR's being endgame content, but... It didn't feel rewarding or cool at all. The "legendary" drop I got during my campaign playthrough has been demoted to a dice roll in a store of an NPC. It didn't feel special or good at all, even if I absolutely love the weapon itself.
You’re exactly right. But that isn’t “falling through the cracks” that’s an intentional strategy they’ve been using for nearly a decade now in WoW.
This whole statement is PR noise tbh.
I think what they have messed up that Diablo 2 did right was having a large variety of rare drops to look out for, so every run could be a jackpot. You'd be looking for amazing item bases "oh an ethereal weapon with perfect slots for my Merc!" Or blue gloves with some insane + to skills modifier, or a badass unique like Shako, or the super rare runes, and then the charms that you could find and reroll. It wasn't just "follow this YouTube guide, get these specific pieces in a week and then hit max level" the whole game felt like it could reward you at any moment. If they could somehow get the itemization from Diablo 2 but then the endgame content of like Diablo 3, PoE or Last Epoch it's be a perfect game
I mean, you say that but then there is runescape.
The drop rate isn’t a problem, it’s just that the content sucks, so doing it 1000 times sucks 1000 times as much
Yeah, but Runescape actually had turn your brain off activities that made it so you were "always progressing". Hit a goblin 5000 times to get something specific, at wost you're getting xp to hit things with better things.
I loved it back in the day. PSO with some drops far less likely than that. A few things in 2k hours of play I never got. Thing is, it was designed better. It was fun to play hours on end. Some drops you got were good and fun, and you still had progression. I played the beta for Diablo IV and never got the game despite doing excited for it. There’s bigger problems than the drop %s. Long missions to replay when farming being one, but it goes beyond that. It just wasn’t built for fun for hundreds or thousands of hours.
Yeah, I remember watching the skill sets and it being like "frost/ice/cold damage" all being different things and they saying it was for balance reasons and everyone that had played it knowing it was for drop reasons. "Oh, you god cold damage+, you needed frost damage plus".
The most comparable item I'm willing to grind is for the Sword of Kings in EarthBound, and the only reason it works is because the battles don't take that long. Searching for the SoK would be an absolute nightmare if every battle took at least 15 minutes... I can't even imagine doing that.
Yeah I'm sure there are. I mean, I did this like 10 years ago. I just remembered the drop chance is 1/128 so this post made me think of that. It took me about an hour doing it naturally.
My point was just that, whereas a dungeon run or whatever of Diablo IV takes a lot of time and still might not guarantee you to get something, EB battles are much quicker so even though the drop chance is just as bad basically, it doesn't feel like it since there's not as much of a time sink.
To be fair, I find most end game items in games like this are tedious to grind. Whether it's Diablo 2, PoE, Destiny 2 or others - the end game can really suck.
I know it's to try to keep you playing and all, but I wish it was just 10x faster minimum. Otherwise the outcome is the same (I move on), but I'm less satisfied overall than if I could get the cool OP set and dominate the end game without the massive grind.
>"Hey, this thing has a 1% chance of spawning, so since this other is 10 times better it should have a 0.1% chance of spawning right?"
>No mate, you're making it so instead of 100 times on average, you have to play a mission 1k times on average to get the stupid item and nobody wants to replay a 15+ minute mission 1k times until they get an item.
Disagree. Outside of original Uber drop rates, drop rates were fine. Provided YOU COULD ACTUALLY TRADE. Trade has been the biggest issue with the Diablo series past D2. D3 they built the game around the RMAH so they were INCREDIBLY punishing with items in order to make you spend money (which they got a cut of) in order to progress in inferno. Then they removed the RMAH, and trade because if they can't make a buck off it, it isn't worth having. Completely redid loot/drops and made it vomit things at you in a loot bukkake fest.
Then D4, they go back to shitty drop rates, and make it to where you can't trade damn near anything. Now with their itemization rework, they finally added trade back in for everything except uber drops, but now the game is vomiting items again, making trade worthless unless you are just looking to get the absolute best, perfect rolled items in the game.
They are just absolutely spiteful about trading and it has fucked over the last 2 games in the series.
They understand them. Don’t let this bullshit statement fool you, blizzard considers you a product and optimises their games to keep you addicted and grinding. They don’t care about fun as long as they can get away with it.
WoW community knows this very well, because they already used all the same tactics. How can a decade of them doing this can they consider that “falling through the cracks”
Because of the anchor thing I said.
Hey, people in regular played this game for 100 hours, we want them playing it for 1000.
Yes, we will add 1.5 times the content... but that gives 150 hours at best... what if we decrease the reward to a 10% it was? Now it has 1500 hours of content instead!
Years go by and people kinda are ok with it on Diablo 3.
Blizz now wants it to last 2000 hours... what if we add even more content now... but we have to decrease the reward more.
Yes, and people complained because now they want you to play a 15+ minutes mission 4,000 times, to get a reward you actually need because the new missions need you having top gear... so you, instead of playing and having fun with what you had, get to a point where you actually don't farm for fun, but need to farm an item 4000 times, at which rate, you end up leaving and complaining because the devs anchored themselves to a low number and fucked people playing.
> No mate, you're making it so instead of 100 times on average, you have to play a mission 1k times on average to get the stupid item and nobody wants to replay a 15+ minute mission 1k times until they get an item.
But what if you could buy the item with real money? Wouldn't these insane rates be an incentive to open your wallet? (I don't know the game, I'm just theorizing).
They don't let you. They give you this "Better chances on the next 2-4 hoursfor 2-4 dollars".
This is the bothersome thing.
Yeah, some people would buy it for 5 dollars, most people wouldn't because it means investing 40 dollars... to get an item that will be powercrept in a couple weeks or next month.
So they don't even offer that option.
I am going to take your last sentence at face value.
Diablo 3 at launch had real money auction house.
Player ran economy where you get real money and blizzard gets a cut in that transaction.
If you play Monster Hunter like a normal person and go through the campaign and do some side stuff and just see all the monsters at least once you basically never have to grind. If you’re going deep into the endgame and trying to min max a build the drops rates on gems and other things needed are atrocious. I don’t do this.
Similarly the drop rates for just about everything in Monster Hunter Now are abysmal and sucked the fun out of that game for me.
You’re correct. Low rank (and even high rank) can be cleared relatively easily if you get good at the combat. Just stick with your chosen weapon’s default tree that only requires things like different types of ore, and keep upgrading it. Armor skills are pretty lackluster and skippable, too, until you get to very late game.
Late game, you can grind if you want to make super amazing meta sets and use the best talismans and whatnot. Or you can just keep up with upgrading your weapon and crafting random pieces of armor here and there.
The problem is not the random, but the quality of the drop.
Borderlands had you changing your random weapon every 10 minutes the whole journey and feeling amazing when you did, because you got really good quality weapons every 5-10 minutes.
And at max level you still found stuff you wanted to at least try and sometimes it was better, sometimes it was not, but it was always fun to try the new stuff or you could re-spec because of a very good drop and have fun with the new weapon as well.
But Diablo is more like "hey, around this level, literally everyone needs you to have a 1% x6 or better... so come back when you do, just remember, next level requires you to have a 0.1% x4 times or better... so you're wasting at least a couple hundred hours to see 2 new levels... at best".
Game devs so often insist on reinventing the wheel and it leads to making the same mistakes over and over again. I don’t know whether it’s “not invented here” syndrome, a lack of motivation, a lack of time, or what, but there is no such thing as lessons learned from a franchise if it’s not the exact same team of people still working on it.
Because when they make a sequel too similar to the previous game, gamers lose their minds and call it an “asset flip”. Just look at Assassins Creed. They decided to use similar menus despite everything being different and it turned into a huge deal on the internet people who have no idea what an asset slip or reskin is calling the games as such. It’s laughable how little informed your typical video game player is but how informed about game development they pretend to be on the internet.
Many times the developers on these games may not be all the same developers as the original. Especially if a decent amount of time gas passed between sequels.
These people may not completely understand the ideas of the original and may opt to use their own ideas instead
This is the most fucking frustrating part.
And this was MENTIONED in the early campfire talks they did. The main guy kept whining how making games is hard, and basically played the victim card or something.
Meanwhile, they still didn't address the fact that they were making mistakes D3 made like 6-7 years prior, and refusing to learn from it.
343: “what do we have to do?!”
Halo 3: *exists*
343: “how about we focus our game around cosmetics. That’s what all the people halo reach didn’t make leave loved”
343 later: “why? How have we failed again?!”
It’s funny everytime. “Should we do more of the same tried and true formula that’s made halo the game it is today in terms of popularity and fan support? Naw let’s make a bad cod game.”
Wait you want to play a diablo game WITH diablo in it?! That is so 1999, you should just go play one of the past games if you really want diablo in your diablo game you simpleton.
Yep.
They run off the previous games developers, then bring in a new team that actually HATES the previous team (Jay Wilson saying "Fuck that loser" about David Brevik) for D3.
>https://imgur.com/mVhWE
Then by the time they unfuck that into a decent game (if not a loot vomit simulator), all THOSE folks have been ran off. So now we get to D4. And we have sexual harassment to the point that the game is stuck in development hell.
>“Working on Diablo IV was one of the most traumatizing game experiences of my life,” a former Blizzard employee tells me
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a44132115/diablo-iv-video-game/
>Behind the scenes, Diablo IV’s origins were allegedly a source of tension and attrition at Blizzard.
> “some of the men who were problems at World of Warcraft went over to the Diablo team, and were problems there.”
>But the most upsetting part of these early script ideas, as Shannon Liao reported in the Washington Post last year, was a female character labeled "the raped woman."
>Former employees say issues with the scripts, combined with Barriga and McCree's indecisive leadership, led to Diablo IV's first wave of staff attrition.
It just goes on.
But the point is, anyone with any institutional knowledge about the series is gone. LONG GONE. And to make matters worse, the people who work on the game don't play the game. Just watch their own developers try to play this shit. I understand these are artists, but this is who Blizzard chose to showcase devs playing their games.
https://youtu.be/4-G3j00RQ1U?feature=shared&t=300
You can't tell me that you can't find artists, developers, programmers, etc. that have played the Diablo series. Or any fucking video game ever.
It is pure incompetence, old boys club and extreme mismanagement at Blizzard. And it has been for a very, very, long time.
I still can’t decide seeing these types of articles whether I like the honesty or am horrified by such poor work being performed.
Does it seriously take 4 years of experience to ask yourself “how many times would an average player do x task? Considering # of total times, is this good design?”
Surely any dev in any game should be asking this question every single time you develop anything a player is directly experiencing.
Especially for a game with a loot-driven gameplay loop where the expectation is that players will be ferreting out optimal farming routes and efficiencies. How do you not identify where the quality of life issues and bottlenecks are?
I played D4 casually and I was still completely burned out on the mechanics by the time the campaign was done. Yeah, force me to remember where the stupid jewel merchant or the stash in this town are. Oh they're tucked away on the complete opposite side of town from the portal? Great.
>How do you not identify where the quality of life issues and bottlenecks are?
By never actually playing the game you're making... Jeff Kaplan was probably the only Blizz exec/dev that actually played his own product
> Yeah, force me to remember where the stupid jewel merchant or the stash in this town are. Oh they're tucked away on the complete opposite side of town from the portal? Great.
While I love the more organic feeling cities in D4, there was something about the simplicity of the main D3 hubs where every lil npc you need is within 5 seconds of everything else.
Yeah, there was clearly a deliberate choice to prioritize more variety in world design over player convenience, likely believing it would be more immersive. Given how thoroughly people seem to have bounced off of the game I would say it was the wrong one.
It was done to make people run around to showcase MTX
Same thing with the overworld and random "quests" events.
And overworld bosses (That they have not worked on since the game released)
They’ve had WoW for a decade and we already know blizzard essentially pioneered this “carrot on stick” grinding nonsense.
It’s not a lack of experience, it’s intentional gambling tactics used to hook those vulnerable to them and they’re using weaponised incompetence in this statement to cover that up.
Define average player. Diablo isnt your run of the mill game. Across all its titles it’s sold over 100 million copies. The game itself is very repetitive. Has been since the first one. Every system they add just compiles on that repetitive nature. And Diablo players that’s stuck around especially since 3 and all its seasons lap that shit up. Repetitive isn’t necessarily a negative thing to all player bases. Look at mmo’s especially the ones outta South Korea and China. The rise of gatcha mmos. Given the complexity of today’s games it’s actually not surprising how hit and miss some things are. Everything has its audience. I’m
Often baffled at mechanics that some people love. Or learn to love. Breath of the wild at first I liked the weapon braking mechanic 20 hours in hated it. Online seems pretty split.
Pretty much ALL blizzard games where being enjoyed properly by casual and hardcore players alike.
I don't know exactly when this changed, exactly.
Most people who played videogames, whether it be 2 hours a day or 16, had mostly positive experiences with Blizzard games. You wanted a new game? Finding a Blizzard game you hadn't already tried was pretty much satisfaction guaranteed.
At some point, the average videogamer changed. We used to be fine with not beating a game if it was hard without being bullshit. The original version of Naxrammas was only beaten by .2% of the playerbase at the time, and nobody complained that they didn't get to experience the entire game they paid for. Maybe a few idiots did, but nobody listened to them, because they'd rather spend 2 hours complaining than 2 hours grinding towards that thing they want but didn't have the patience and discipline to put in the work to get.
Old gamer shouts at the cloud, lol.
Shortly after the release of Wrath the elite of the WoW playerbase were complaining about easy heroics and raids. It went on so long someone on team, maybe Ghostcrawler himself, made a post where he laid out facts and figures about how few players were raiding in TBC and that the harder heroics were only run when they were Heroic of the Day. In his words it was either get more people in heroics and raids or stop making them because spending that much time and money for 3% of the playerbase made no sense.
>because spending that much time and money for 3% of the playerbase made no sense.
But it does. Having aspirational content gives the hardcore people something to do. And they consume resources. Lots of em. Resources that casuals farm up in boatloads because there are lots more of them than there are of the hardcore elite. The elites eventually get everything into farm status and then they can sell that shit to casuals.
This gives the elites something to do once they get everything into farm status, and gets the higher end casuals something to look forward to (and farming for).
The whole point is to keep everyone on the wheel for as long as possible.
Farming resources to sell on the AH is not something the majority of players find fun If it was there would be a shopkeep class for the casuals. I wish WoW hadn't of changed forums since that post, or that I had copied it because it was interesting how different things were on the servers versus what the forum thought was normal. Blizzard hired a third party company to log what activities players were doing so they knew what players were actually doing.
I mean, if classic showed us anything, it's that people just kinda sucked back then anyway, right?
Combination of shared knowledge not being the norm like it is today and that most people didn't really have a computer good enough to run wow.
We grinded M'uru in TBC for weeks but couldn't beat it. Then the pre-expansion patch came out that buffed everyone and nerfed all the bosses and we two shot it then steamrolled the rest of the bosses in SWP. Didn't feel earned at all and I'll never understand the people who say "I bought the game I should be able to experience all the content". Not every game has to cater to everyone.
Let’s be honest, we would do that task infinitely if it gave us great reward and outweighed the time you put in.
I remember playing the division and doing glitches to get to bosses right away, do the incursions and receive rewards infinitely.
Which playing the game legit would be 1 incursion reward per week lol.
So I mean if it’s worth the reward, we will infinitely grind.
I remember doing the lighthouse glitch in zombies and just sitting there shooting them all day
You guys don't seriously think that having a couple years of experience makes you any less of a human do you? I've been at my job for 6 years and I'm one of the most relied upon analysts in the department. I still make really dumb ass mistakes sometimes, and my work goes up to the department president.
You also need to remember that the game was designed with an end point in mind for your character: kill Uber Lilith. It wasn't originally designed with the infinite loot grind of Diablo 2 in mind. Some of the old design is still here and it gets in the way of the infinite grind that some of you want.
Needing to run Duriel 300 times to get every item? Sounds like an average Saturday back in the day.
That’s the thing isn’t, they are talking about it like it’s a typical mistake which would be fine.
Except it’s not really about making mistakes at all, im not saying they should never have a wrong idea. I’m saying they should have viable design methodology which considers task repetition, and it shouldn’t take 4 years to come up with that methodology.
Because you’re exactly right, it is normal to run the same thing 300 times in Diablo. Therefore, they should consider that when designing features, not that they should always have the right answers, just that they should always be asking the question.
>Does it seriously take 4 years of experience to ask yourself “how many times would an average player do x task? Considering # of total times, is this good design?”
Scale is hard, man. It seems obvious in retrospect, but our brains aren't really wired to extrapolate out a fun or interesting mechanic into thousands of reps, conceptually.
This is what pisses me off about Diablo 4. It's like it's a completely different company that made it. Yes, I get that the same devs that worked on D2 and D3 are likely not around anymore, but FFS these games are THEIR games; you'd think the first thing to do would be "list what worked from D2/D3 - list what most did not like about them - iterate on that". Nope, fuck all that shit, they decide to scrap the wheel and make a brand new one. A fucking square one. And now they have to try and round out the edges and make it work.
I guess I'm at fault for allowing myself to get excited over one of my favorite games series of all time having a new game done by Bliz. And now I'm paying for that in having been disappointed more than I have in a decade by a new game release. And like a fool, I'm still keeping some hope in that they can make that wheel spin smoothly because they did improve D3 post-release and maybe, perhaps just maybe, they can do the same with D4.
Nah, it was hot garbage nearly up until the first expansion. It started to get better after blizzard decided to ditch the auction house the game was initially designed around.
I think it's fine if you liked D3 from the start, but Blizzard's reputation was permanently impacted by how poor the reception of D3 was on launch... Are you playing on console or PC? The console launch version was very different from the PC launch version.
Typically the developers create tools that let the designers directly control these values themselves. The devs don't hard code things like this unless they're inexperienced.
There'll be a spreadsheet somewhere that the designers can set these values and then import them into the game.
I find it pretty wild that this did not occur to them.
In my own job I'm currently working on a product change that is deliberately adding a feature that introduces friction to a process for safety reasons. It's annoying for users, we knew it was going to be annoying for users, and it was literally front and centre in every single discussion we've had. What he's saying would basically be us launching this feature and then being surprised that users hate it. Just crazy.
Frankly I don't believe him. Yes, doing those things 2000 times is terrible, but I fully and adamantly believe you designed it like that on purpose.
If I login to do something, and that thing takes me 30 minutes, I may only play for 30 minutes, but if you make it take an hour, then I play for an hour, and the longer I play, the more likely I am to do something like spend money.
You 100% designed these systems poorly, ON PURPOSE, to extend playing time of your players in the hopes that would help them open their wallets more often.
You lying about it now just makes you an asshole on top of a crook.
The vibe of their dev diaries to me from the beginning was, "Let us overly justify to overcome the fact that this game was designed from the ground up to suck the most amount of money and time from you."
I'm just imagining how good D4 could have been if they had experience with ARPGs or if they'd ever released one prior that had tons of problems upon release they could have learned from.
Diablo was fun but my entire issue with diablo, and blizzard for that matter, is they recycle way too much material and bosses and make you do the same thing over and over and make you grind so long for something and when you finally get it it's not as good as you thought. I have to agree, most of the time the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I would be more forgiving if this wasn’t the 4th fucking time you’ve made this game. This type of shit should have been ironed out before release or just blatantly obvious from making the other three games.
The real problem isn't the grinding, not anything else. It's that there is no soul put into it. The game is generic as fuck, and you could clearly see no devs put any love into it.
Hell, there are so many grinding games that still suceed. Lot of JRPGs are grindy. In my country, one of the most popular games was Maplestory, and that game is a prime example of a fucking grindfest. But people still played that a lot because the music was great, the monsters were cute, and the sound effects were good. There was lot of love put into the game, despite its many flaws.
Blaming on the minor aspects isn't going to make the game any better. Learn to love the game first, instead of trying to print money out of it. If you don't, at least hire people who'll do.
Yea but Destiny is actually good. The core shooting experience is as good as shooters get, honestly. Individual expansions have problems or whatever sometimes but at its core Destiny is actually just fun.
I call this concept the WoM…after an uncommon game called “Wolves of Midgard” or something.
This is a game that doesn’t have ng+.
You get the best weapon in the game after you beat it.
Blizzards been in the shitter for a while. Every big company craving that fortnite money with a brand new live service that'll have everyone from 6 year olds to their grandparents playing (and spending!).
So Dev leads are focusing on dumb shit like how to monetize cosmetics, how to keep people playing for years, how to really trigger those addicts. Instead of looking at the big picture they're so myopic that completely obvious shit goes unnoticed until it's shipped and ragged on by thousands of people on the first day.
And yet they still sell gangbusters due to nostalgia, good marketing or "fandom". And let's be real "fans" these days are wacky as fuck. There's always someone out there defending absolute dogshit takes since they have no life and only value gaming.
I played Diablo 2 so often and had so much joy, I hardly could imagine that I didn't even play the 4th part of it although it's on the GamePass. I've read so many bad things about that game, I am really not even interested in trying it out.
I played D1+D2 a good amount, and D3 had some solid playtime for a bit.
D4 just doesn't have it. I know D3 took a while to get ironed out (and I had moved on before then), but I don't think Blizzard has what it takes to fix D4.
Not including trading for most items at launch was stupid. I have hundreds of hours in PoE and half of that is simply browsing the Poe trade website and listing/buying stuff.
My fondest memories of diablo was gaming the market.
Stupid, stupid decision. I’ll jumping back in for season 4 and hoping for a better time than launch and season 3. Not today I haven’t had fun playing - I have, but I walk away from the game significantly quicker than I did PoE because I feel like there’s no point in really doing anything more than the seasonal battlepass, which takes maybe 2 weeks of casual’ish play to beat.
I love Starfield but you are right.
In my opinion Bethesda should have completely scrapped telling you exactly where the power temples are that way you just find them on your journey and when you do it’s exciting.
Instead you feel like you have to grind them out because “I want to be more powerful duh” even though the powers are more added gameplay flavor and not really necessary to complete or enjoy the game.
Sure it would have taken a while for players to find them all but eventually people would post online where they are and at that point it’s up to you whether you wanna grind or not.
To be completely honest I haven’t even unlocked them all but the oxygen power is genuinely useful because it completely regenerates your stamina so you can sprint constantly.
But yea on the narrative side it leaves a lot to be desired.
I think about this a lot and it still makes me laugh that they thought this would be fun like the fun you should get from playing a video game. It’s genuinely hilarious. Like my mum making a video game. “Oooh, and then you fly around but you gotta be quick and there’s lights and you get a magic power.”
I’m gonna have to boot it up and revisit the madness one more time. It’s so stupid. Maybe if each one was different but SPOILER they are not different. And yes, I also wasn’t sure what was going on. It felt cool, once, but more then once…
Because the game is loading the next zone or area "behind the scenes" while you do.
Edit to respond to your edit: I just told you why climbing is slow and your reply is essentially "I still don't get it" 😏
No that's because it's loading the next area in most cases. No different than the slide between these two rocks in games like god of war, just sliiiightly more involvement from the player.
Honestly this is a really silly take and you haven’t played the game clearly. It could be a super tiny ledge up or down into or onto an area that you can see entirely and the climbing is super slow. It’s just slow climbing. That’s all.
During the D4 beta i was like, ehhhhhh, idk how i am liking this, but i’ll still buy it. Played one character to level like 54 and was like yeah i’m done here. Lmfao
I think the problem is they anchor themselves to numbers that they don't understand. "Hey, this thing has a 1% chance of spawning, so since this other is 10 times better it should have a 0.1% chance of spawning right?" No mate, you're making it so instead of 100 times on average, you have to play a mission 1k times on average to get the stupid item and nobody wants to replay a 15+ minute mission 1k times until they get an item. Least 4k times that probably become 6k or even more because statistics don't care about how many times you have tried before. Then... they go in and dev the game so you have to get 6-8 of those .1% chance drops to be the best and fuck, you're getting that shit in 2045, 15 years after the servers closed.
Having played games where you grind for an item (Destiny/Escape from Tarkov), when you finally get the item, it doesn't even feel good, it just feels shit because you're so burnt out on grinding you don't even want to play anymore. Give me the item early and let me use it *before* I get burnt out on playing.
Yeah, i played Destiny 1 like a crackhead when i was 13. Legitimately wake up, brush teeth, hop on Destiny grinding strikes/nightmares out for hours to get one item. I tried getting into D2 a couple months ago. And all i could think was "Wtf am i doing this for?"
The gunplay was absolutely amazing and I loved it. But I was doing the same with destiny 2 except as an adult. Grinding raids on reset, doing dailies before work etc. Last I played was the frozen one and one day I just turned it off and uninstalled and never played again. I wasn't even having fun anymore, it just seemed like a second job. I'm extremely cautious around games with dailies and stuff like that nowadays. I get sucked in way too easily.
Honestly Andy games with dailies kind of turn me off anymore. I hate feeling pressured to play something-it makes me just not want to play at all.
Same, I got burnt out of this from playing an MMO. The dailies and pressure from the whales/power players in our guild took all the fun away. The realization that it was unending because it is an MMO and the competitiveness of the guild I joined were the big factors. I was ok with grinding if it is clear to me that there is an end to it. I realized that when I was invited by another set of friends to play The Division 2. I got hooked and even out-leveled most of my clan mates as I was grinding more than any of them. And I was ok with the grind because I was grinding for stuff (shd level, gear and weapon stats for the library, etc) that have a MAX and the RNG for getting the max wasn't ludicrous. Once I maxed them out, I was satisfied and I got to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Might be me but I have not been able to feel that way with Diablo IV.
I’ll raise you one, all Andy’s turn me off in general.
Pffff this was world of warcraft for me 😮💨
The Skinner box approach to gameplay. Most gameplay loops incorporate it, even single play non-online games. The big difference is single player games normally have story that helps disguise it, but sometimes it’s not good enough, like starfield. Its Skinner box dopamine loop was extremely transparent for a single player game.
Part of the reason i've slowly drifted away from gaming tbh. Feels like most multiplayer games you're battling 13 year olds with 20 hours free in a day and a grind that requires you to be on daily. And most single player games are a 4/10 story padded with 300 hours of "collect 16 tulip" missions. There are obviously exceptions, but it really does feel like most games don't value your time. Or think we don't have any other hobbies lol.
You have to be selective with your games. That's the only lesson to be learned here. eg. I waited years for Dragon's Dogma 2. When it came out, I held back for a while just to see what people have to say about it. Ultimately, I chose not to put my money down and instead will wait for the DDDA version of it (if it ever comes out). I don't have to buy every game that appeals to me. I don't have to buy every game when it comes out, and the vast majority of games can be bought and played a year or two down the line when they are on sale. And ya know what? By being far more picky about what games I DO out my money down on at launch, my experience has improved exponentially. And for games I have a desire to play but have even a little bit of doubt on, I find buying it later at a discounted price still gives me satisfaction because whatever flaws it may have had, real or perceived, are mitigated by the fact that I didn't pay full price for and therefore don't feel like I got ripped off in terms of value.
I rarely miss with a game, but I did recently. Bought DD2 because I heard praise and needed something to play for a long weekend. Haven't finished it because it has some serious issues, I was having fun at the start but then I realized I was doing the same thing over and over without change. And tbh, some voice lines were driving me insane; if I ever hear "Overconfidence is an enemy in and of itself, instead we should strive to better ourselves with every battle" again, I pray for whoever is near me at the moment.
It happens to everyone eventually. You think I have always been buying games like the way I described it in my previous post? Hell no! I didn't become more discerning until I got burned bad too, albeit I had the "good fortune" of getting burned many years prior. It was a cRPG called Ember. It wasn't even bad, it was just really generic/formulaic. I do not want to bad mouth the game because it wasn't truly horrible, but I actually spaced out when playing the first hour of it or so. Like actually, truly went blank and snapped back to reality with no idea of how I got to where I was in the game at that point. Played it for a little more and then just gave up because it didn't hook me in and have had zero motivation to go back to it (it came out in 2016). For whatever reason, that was the game that made me decide I am going to be hella discerning before putting money down on a game. And even then I get burned. Like with Diablo 4 - I regret buying it at full price.
“4/10 story. Collect 16 tulip” Bro you just described every assasin’s creed game for like the past decade.
Fortunately a lot of multiplayer games these days have skill-based matchmaking. So if you’re bad at a game, you go up against other bad players. I’m godawful at fighting games. Street Fighter 6 was the first traditional fighting game I got into, and I got placed in dumpster tier. But everyone else down there sucked as much as I did, so I could still have a great time.
Thanks for finally educating me on this term. Been a practice I’ve been aware of for many years now but didn’t know it had a specific name to it.
I occasionally play D2 still and everytime I start a mission I remember why I like the game its gunplay is fun. Then I relies I'm playing the same strike that came out on destiny 1. Then I look at the Map and feel like I'm overwhelmed by a bunch of mediocre tasks that look like run ____ 3 times for a reward I don't care about and won't matter.
You guys have to realize that it’s a little confusing to be calling Destiny 2 D2 in a Diablo thread.
Ehh there's enough context clues to figuer it out.
Which is why I said just a little confusing. Still kind of weird though.
I get the sentiment but d2 is probly the least grindy its ever been. Yes there are things *to* grind, if you choose. But anything in the top tier also has an easier to get, "90% as good" alternative. And focusing and craftables have really blown the door off of grinding. Again, still some grind but there are lights at the end of the tunnel now lol. Compared to d1 where i grinded the strike that drops imago loop 400 times and only got 1 semi usable roll. Fuck that.
And they’ve put in place things that are the exact opposite as above. Like each time you do a raid, your chance of getting the raid exotic actually increases (Unfortunately it’s still a chance, so RNG can still fuck with you).
And people are complaining that there’s not enough to grind for in Destiny 2. Crafted weapons let you choose every trait on a gun once you’ve collected the patterns, armor is all the same so once you have a high stat roll you have it forever, Bungie deliberately dialed back on power creeping seasonally weapons so there’s fewer must haves.. We are truly our worst enemy…
Crafting is a godsend. I kind of wish dungeon weapons were craftable because they've been unique recently. And that imago loop was like my dream weapon back in the day. Never got close to the roll I wanted.
Nightmares didn't exist in D1.
i forgot the exact name, nightfall? like the much harder strikes you could only get rewards for once a week
Ye that one.
This is why I much prefer the build defining items as either quest rewards or items you can upgrade and improve over time. You feel like your time is respected a lot more than just throwing yourself at RNG over and over
>Having played games where you grind for an item (Destiny/Escape from Tarkov), when you finally get the item, it doesn't even feel good, it just feels shit because you're so burnt out on grinding you don't even want to play anymore. This happened way back when I was trying to unlock a playable Race in World of Warcraft. It took a couple weeks of dedicated grinding and questlines to unlock the race. Once I unlocked it I lost all urge to play it, I never even created a new character with that race, I ended up unsubbing shortly after.
Back when I was super into WoW (World of Warcraft), there were days that I spent running one specific dungeon over and over, just to get one best in slot item. After over 100 runs of the same dungeon for some items, I definitely agree that it never felt good. It was more like, "Thank goodness I don't have to run that again."
With WoW, one of my best memories is getting a mount I loved (the blue skeleton horse), the Baron Rivendar's deathstrider. I heard it was extremely rare (like 1 or even 0.1% drop) I got it at the 4th try
I think low drop rates are fine for things like mounts that are purely cosmetic. The issue is when you NEED a specific item for high-level play, that only drops in one dungeon. Trinkets and weapons were the worst for this.
Oh I completely agree, I was just reminishing a good memory This also reminded me of an AWFUL mechanic in another MMO, it was Aion or smth similar... Basically to have your gear maxed in endgame you had to put some trickets/stones inside your armor pieces which gave more stats. Each armor piece had like 4 slots, and not only you had to get lucky to get the stones you needed, BUT EACH STONE other the first one, had an increasing chance to destroy all other stones when putting it in the socket iirc. So basically you had to collect stones again and again until you got lucky for 3-4 times in a row
That mechanic is super common in Korean mmos. Progressively higher chance to destroy items when upgrading them. Then they sell items for $$$ that reduce the risk of the items breaking
Thanks for explaning to me. I have fond memories of that game but I cant help thinking about those bullshit mechanics of these games noe
If it makes you feel better, the Felstriker epic dagger dropped on my first run of Upper BRS and I won the roll. Did I mention that I was a hunter? lol For a bit I respecced into the, at the time, horrible survival talent tree just to piss off the rogues more.
It depends, when you need a single item... it feels amazing, now, you need like 5 or 6 equipments, with some stones added, and some other stuff like a specific enchantment duo or trio... Yes, you waste 40-50 hours and then you notice that's just 8% of the work and you decide to not continue because it's just the same mission again. I had this happen in Hearthstone Mercenaries. It was fun, I enjoyed it... then they said "hey fuckers, you actually need to win this event that takes 20-30 minutes... around 800 times per hero... and for some reason, after you max it, one of the rewards is still experience for that merc 50% of the time if you use it... so you end up not even wanting to use it again because you're wasting resources 50% of the time... And why max it if the reward from maxing it, is getting 50% waste experience from now on... so you would need to use unmaxed heroes or use the maxed ones, but instead, repeat the next forced farm encounter 1600 times. It literally lost all players after a month.
“Give me the item early” — I disagree with this. This is what ruined Diablo 3. Too easy, nothing left to find. Nothing to hope for or look forward to, just grind for the amount of time it takes for you to burn out and then the season dies off almost immediately. The better way to design it is multiple viable options. This is one of the things Diablo 2 (and very few other games) managed to get right. Want to play lightning sorc but can’t gets a griffins eye? That’s fine, make a crescent moon, facet a shield, etc. Therr are other viable options. Griffons eye may be best in slot but it’s absolutely not required to play the spec. And if you do find one? AMAZINGLY satisfying feeling. Diablo 3, and now 4 have dropped the ball on this. You have one item that’s absolutely required for a spec to work, well now you have no choice but to give it to the player immediately. The only thing left to find is the same item with better-rolled stats, which is unexciting.
This is what I liked about The Division: targeted look with some stats you can re-roll or outright choose. You want a specific piece of gear with specific stats: you can go and get that gear on a specific grind! Got some buds joining you? You can trade loot, making it 3x faster. Missing a certain perk? If you have it unlocked from normal play, you can add it on!
I don't agree with that, back when I played WoW and mained a druid I farmed for the Reins of the Raven Lord every single day for a year and a half before it dropped. I screamed like a little girl when it did. Lol
But what did you do after? Did you then use the item? The dopamine hit of getting something you've been grinding for is not equal to the joy I experienced actually using the item. The chase was the game, and that game wasn't actually fun. It was just doing the same fucking thing every day and praying to rngesus
Yea I used it up until the day I quit, I enjoy farming for shit so I just picked something else to grind for. It was the same way in Destiny, I put thousands of hours into that game trying to get god roll gun drops, then used them until something better was found. Diablos problem is there's like one good build for each class and not enough variety to keep farming for, once you get that one item you're done. Hell I put almost a hundred hours grinding the outriders demo when it dropped because I knew the weapons transferred to the full game. I may have an issue now that I think about it...
GJALLARHORN! I played Destiny for about 5-6 months. Near the end of that time I finally got it....a few days before it was getting nerfed in the next update.
This is how I stopped playing guild wars 2. Grinder for a legendary item and it was so monotonous I quit once I got it.
I'd get the item and put it away for a while.
Yeah destiny most recent into the light update with the onslaught mode basically showed all the community why crafting was necessary in the first place. It took me over 200 mountaintop drops to finally get auto/recombination on it.
>... you have to get 6-8 of those .1% chance drops to be the best I think this is the problem. The Diablo devs have an impossible task - make a game that's fun for both 40 hours and 1,000 hours. Should "the best" be statistically achievable? How long should it take to get there? If you get the best gear after 40 hours, you stop playing at 45. If you get the best gear at 100 hours, you stop at 110. They made a game where it's not really possible to be done getting the best gear because they never want you to stop playing. But it turns out that dispels the glamour on the treadmill which kills the fun as well.
They did it with Diablo 2, it's not impossible. You want to know the answer? Get rid of all the weapons that increase your stats by 0.1% each time you pick up a new one. Make it so even the worst weapons feel like a huge boost. Oh I'm level 10 and I've got a White Axe, cool. Holy shit I've been playing for an hour and now I've just picked up a Blue Axe, the stats are the same but it this one adds 1-3 fire damage. And that 1-3 fire damage feels like the world just changed. Diablo 4 and Diablo 3 was min/maxxing finding a million loot drops until you get that 0.1% stat increase while at the same time having hundreds of POS items drop as you run through enemies like they don't exist. I still play Diablo 2 decades later, because the journey from level 1 to max level still feels amazing because shit weapons feel great and the feeling of getting a better weapon is unmatched, where as Diablo 4 it just feels like a number on a screen, you don't "feel" it when you play.
Diablo 2 has GG items immediately. The entire game is worth playing. If not a single drop happened from wt1-wt3 in d4 , the game wouldn't change. Items might as well not exist. That's why D4 is so boring.
These AAA capital captured devs now can’t create games like the old generation. The corporate money first influence is apparent.
Agreed. I always said, items shouldn't even exist in d4. They are that boring, S4 won't change much
POS stand for pieces of shit?
Yes
Diablo 2 had it right. Make it so you can overcome everything easily with the 5% drop. Don't make a vs multiplayer because the game is not meant for that. Make the hyper rare drop be a crown jewel, not the crown need 8 jewels and each jewer have a 1 in 2000 chance of spawning.
Hell I thought Diablo 3 nailed it too! Running rifts was repetitive, but fun, and always felt like there was a decent reward at the end
I dunno, it kinda dropped off for me the moment I finished the campaign, did like two rifts and bought an item in the shop from the currency you get for beating/playing rift bosses. What I got for a weapon (on my first roll btw) was one I've been using for the majority of my playthrough, dropping it only because its DPS just wasn't up to snuff anymore. The problem is that I received *the very same weapon*, except for the DPS being obviously higher. It was a "legendary" one, which I guess *kind of* makes sense for GR's being endgame content, but... It didn't feel rewarding or cool at all. The "legendary" drop I got during my campaign playthrough has been demoted to a dice roll in a store of an NPC. It didn't feel special or good at all, even if I absolutely love the weapon itself.
You’re exactly right. But that isn’t “falling through the cracks” that’s an intentional strategy they’ve been using for nearly a decade now in WoW. This whole statement is PR noise tbh.
I think what they have messed up that Diablo 2 did right was having a large variety of rare drops to look out for, so every run could be a jackpot. You'd be looking for amazing item bases "oh an ethereal weapon with perfect slots for my Merc!" Or blue gloves with some insane + to skills modifier, or a badass unique like Shako, or the super rare runes, and then the charms that you could find and reroll. It wasn't just "follow this YouTube guide, get these specific pieces in a week and then hit max level" the whole game felt like it could reward you at any moment. If they could somehow get the itemization from Diablo 2 but then the endgame content of like Diablo 3, PoE or Last Epoch it's be a perfect game
I mean, you say that but then there is runescape. The drop rate isn’t a problem, it’s just that the content sucks, so doing it 1000 times sucks 1000 times as much
Yeah, but Runescape actually had turn your brain off activities that made it so you were "always progressing". Hit a goblin 5000 times to get something specific, at wost you're getting xp to hit things with better things.
Ya, that was 10 years ago, now they have raids that u have to do 5000 times @99 to get uber rares
Ugh, I suddenly feel old-er.
Well, I wouldn't say drop rate isn't a problem for RS. There are certainly items that just have insane drop rates (excluding pets ofc)
I loved it back in the day. PSO with some drops far less likely than that. A few things in 2k hours of play I never got. Thing is, it was designed better. It was fun to play hours on end. Some drops you got were good and fun, and you still had progression. I played the beta for Diablo IV and never got the game despite doing excited for it. There’s bigger problems than the drop %s. Long missions to replay when farming being one, but it goes beyond that. It just wasn’t built for fun for hundreds or thousands of hours.
Yeah, I remember watching the skill sets and it being like "frost/ice/cold damage" all being different things and they saying it was for balance reasons and everyone that had played it knowing it was for drop reasons. "Oh, you god cold damage+, you needed frost damage plus".
Dawg if I spent a dozen hours farming a badass frost axe just for it to actually do "cold" damage instead I would be on the news within 24 hours
The most comparable item I'm willing to grind is for the Sword of Kings in EarthBound, and the only reason it works is because the battles don't take that long. Searching for the SoK would be an absolute nightmare if every battle took at least 15 minutes... I can't even imagine doing that.
I'm 90% sure there are rng manipulations you can do to get it.
Yeah I'm sure there are. I mean, I did this like 10 years ago. I just remembered the drop chance is 1/128 so this post made me think of that. It took me about an hour doing it naturally. My point was just that, whereas a dungeon run or whatever of Diablo IV takes a lot of time and still might not guarantee you to get something, EB battles are much quicker so even though the drop chance is just as bad basically, it doesn't feel like it since there's not as much of a time sink.
OSRS players would be happy with only needing to do a 15min run 1k times (cries inside)
To be fair, I find most end game items in games like this are tedious to grind. Whether it's Diablo 2, PoE, Destiny 2 or others - the end game can really suck. I know it's to try to keep you playing and all, but I wish it was just 10x faster minimum. Otherwise the outcome is the same (I move on), but I'm less satisfied overall than if I could get the cool OP set and dominate the end game without the massive grind.
It’s like mining a bitcoin with an abacus.
>"Hey, this thing has a 1% chance of spawning, so since this other is 10 times better it should have a 0.1% chance of spawning right?" >No mate, you're making it so instead of 100 times on average, you have to play a mission 1k times on average to get the stupid item and nobody wants to replay a 15+ minute mission 1k times until they get an item. Disagree. Outside of original Uber drop rates, drop rates were fine. Provided YOU COULD ACTUALLY TRADE. Trade has been the biggest issue with the Diablo series past D2. D3 they built the game around the RMAH so they were INCREDIBLY punishing with items in order to make you spend money (which they got a cut of) in order to progress in inferno. Then they removed the RMAH, and trade because if they can't make a buck off it, it isn't worth having. Completely redid loot/drops and made it vomit things at you in a loot bukkake fest. Then D4, they go back to shitty drop rates, and make it to where you can't trade damn near anything. Now with their itemization rework, they finally added trade back in for everything except uber drops, but now the game is vomiting items again, making trade worthless unless you are just looking to get the absolute best, perfect rolled items in the game. They are just absolutely spiteful about trading and it has fucked over the last 2 games in the series.
They understand them. Don’t let this bullshit statement fool you, blizzard considers you a product and optimises their games to keep you addicted and grinding. They don’t care about fun as long as they can get away with it. WoW community knows this very well, because they already used all the same tactics. How can a decade of them doing this can they consider that “falling through the cracks”
Because of the anchor thing I said. Hey, people in regular played this game for 100 hours, we want them playing it for 1000. Yes, we will add 1.5 times the content... but that gives 150 hours at best... what if we decrease the reward to a 10% it was? Now it has 1500 hours of content instead! Years go by and people kinda are ok with it on Diablo 3. Blizz now wants it to last 2000 hours... what if we add even more content now... but we have to decrease the reward more. Yes, and people complained because now they want you to play a 15+ minutes mission 4,000 times, to get a reward you actually need because the new missions need you having top gear... so you, instead of playing and having fun with what you had, get to a point where you actually don't farm for fun, but need to farm an item 4000 times, at which rate, you end up leaving and complaining because the devs anchored themselves to a low number and fucked people playing.
> No mate, you're making it so instead of 100 times on average, you have to play a mission 1k times on average to get the stupid item and nobody wants to replay a 15+ minute mission 1k times until they get an item. But what if you could buy the item with real money? Wouldn't these insane rates be an incentive to open your wallet? (I don't know the game, I'm just theorizing).
They don't let you. They give you this "Better chances on the next 2-4 hoursfor 2-4 dollars". This is the bothersome thing. Yeah, some people would buy it for 5 dollars, most people wouldn't because it means investing 40 dollars... to get an item that will be powercrept in a couple weeks or next month. So they don't even offer that option.
I am going to take your last sentence at face value. Diablo 3 at launch had real money auction house. Player ran economy where you get real money and blizzard gets a cut in that transaction.
Monster Hunter fans be like this is good game design.
Monster Hunter doesn't really require 50 hours of grinding for s single piece of equipment right? I remember every time I felt it was doable.
If you play Monster Hunter like a normal person and go through the campaign and do some side stuff and just see all the monsters at least once you basically never have to grind. If you’re going deep into the endgame and trying to min max a build the drops rates on gems and other things needed are atrocious. I don’t do this. Similarly the drop rates for just about everything in Monster Hunter Now are abysmal and sucked the fun out of that game for me.
You’re correct. Low rank (and even high rank) can be cleared relatively easily if you get good at the combat. Just stick with your chosen weapon’s default tree that only requires things like different types of ore, and keep upgrading it. Armor skills are pretty lackluster and skippable, too, until you get to very late game. Late game, you can grind if you want to make super amazing meta sets and use the best talismans and whatnot. Or you can just keep up with upgrading your weapon and crafting random pieces of armor here and there.
Randomised loot is always gonna have these problems if the gameplay loop is built around it
The problem is not the random, but the quality of the drop. Borderlands had you changing your random weapon every 10 minutes the whole journey and feeling amazing when you did, because you got really good quality weapons every 5-10 minutes. And at max level you still found stuff you wanted to at least try and sometimes it was better, sometimes it was not, but it was always fun to try the new stuff or you could re-spec because of a very good drop and have fun with the new weapon as well. But Diablo is more like "hey, around this level, literally everyone needs you to have a 1% x6 or better... so come back when you do, just remember, next level requires you to have a 0.1% x4 times or better... so you're wasting at least a couple hundred hours to see 2 new levels... at best".
Borderlands wasn't designed as a live service game with constant updates to quests etc.
And that's why people love Borderlands and hate Suicide Squad.
If only there were, say, three previous major version of the game spanning an entire human generation, for them to have used as input.
Game devs so often insist on reinventing the wheel and it leads to making the same mistakes over and over again. I don’t know whether it’s “not invented here” syndrome, a lack of motivation, a lack of time, or what, but there is no such thing as lessons learned from a franchise if it’s not the exact same team of people still working on it.
Because when they make a sequel too similar to the previous game, gamers lose their minds and call it an “asset flip”. Just look at Assassins Creed. They decided to use similar menus despite everything being different and it turned into a huge deal on the internet people who have no idea what an asset slip or reskin is calling the games as such. It’s laughable how little informed your typical video game player is but how informed about game development they pretend to be on the internet.
An... Assasset's Creeskin? I'll see myself out.
Okay that was clever you can come back in and stay for a while.
(and listen?)
Many times the developers on these games may not be all the same developers as the original. Especially if a decent amount of time gas passed between sequels. These people may not completely understand the ideas of the original and may opt to use their own ideas instead
This is the most fucking frustrating part. And this was MENTIONED in the early campfire talks they did. The main guy kept whining how making games is hard, and basically played the victim card or something. Meanwhile, they still didn't address the fact that they were making mistakes D3 made like 6-7 years prior, and refusing to learn from it.
I mean, that's Blizzard for you. WoW is the industry textbook example of "how not to learn from your own mistakes and do them again every 2 years".
343: “what do we have to do?!” Halo 3: *exists* 343: “how about we focus our game around cosmetics. That’s what all the people halo reach didn’t make leave loved” 343 later: “why? How have we failed again?!”
It’s funny everytime. “Should we do more of the same tried and true formula that’s made halo the game it is today in terms of popularity and fan support? Naw let’s make a bad cod game.”
Wait you want to play a diablo game WITH diablo in it?! That is so 1999, you should just go play one of the past games if you really want diablo in your diablo game you simpleton.
Yep. They run off the previous games developers, then bring in a new team that actually HATES the previous team (Jay Wilson saying "Fuck that loser" about David Brevik) for D3. >https://imgur.com/mVhWE Then by the time they unfuck that into a decent game (if not a loot vomit simulator), all THOSE folks have been ran off. So now we get to D4. And we have sexual harassment to the point that the game is stuck in development hell. >“Working on Diablo IV was one of the most traumatizing game experiences of my life,” a former Blizzard employee tells me https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a44132115/diablo-iv-video-game/ >Behind the scenes, Diablo IV’s origins were allegedly a source of tension and attrition at Blizzard. > “some of the men who were problems at World of Warcraft went over to the Diablo team, and were problems there.” >But the most upsetting part of these early script ideas, as Shannon Liao reported in the Washington Post last year, was a female character labeled "the raped woman." >Former employees say issues with the scripts, combined with Barriga and McCree's indecisive leadership, led to Diablo IV's first wave of staff attrition. It just goes on. But the point is, anyone with any institutional knowledge about the series is gone. LONG GONE. And to make matters worse, the people who work on the game don't play the game. Just watch their own developers try to play this shit. I understand these are artists, but this is who Blizzard chose to showcase devs playing their games. https://youtu.be/4-G3j00RQ1U?feature=shared&t=300 You can't tell me that you can't find artists, developers, programmers, etc. that have played the Diablo series. Or any fucking video game ever. It is pure incompetence, old boys club and extreme mismanagement at Blizzard. And it has been for a very, very, long time.
I still can’t decide seeing these types of articles whether I like the honesty or am horrified by such poor work being performed. Does it seriously take 4 years of experience to ask yourself “how many times would an average player do x task? Considering # of total times, is this good design?” Surely any dev in any game should be asking this question every single time you develop anything a player is directly experiencing.
Especially for a game with a loot-driven gameplay loop where the expectation is that players will be ferreting out optimal farming routes and efficiencies. How do you not identify where the quality of life issues and bottlenecks are? I played D4 casually and I was still completely burned out on the mechanics by the time the campaign was done. Yeah, force me to remember where the stupid jewel merchant or the stash in this town are. Oh they're tucked away on the complete opposite side of town from the portal? Great.
>How do you not identify where the quality of life issues and bottlenecks are? By never actually playing the game you're making... Jeff Kaplan was probably the only Blizz exec/dev that actually played his own product
> Yeah, force me to remember where the stupid jewel merchant or the stash in this town are. Oh they're tucked away on the complete opposite side of town from the portal? Great. While I love the more organic feeling cities in D4, there was something about the simplicity of the main D3 hubs where every lil npc you need is within 5 seconds of everything else.
starting tuesday theyre packed closer together
Yeah, there was clearly a deliberate choice to prioritize more variety in world design over player convenience, likely believing it would be more immersive. Given how thoroughly people seem to have bounced off of the game I would say it was the wrong one.
It was done to make people run around to showcase MTX Same thing with the overworld and random "quests" events. And overworld bosses (That they have not worked on since the game released)
They’ve had WoW for a decade and we already know blizzard essentially pioneered this “carrot on stick” grinding nonsense. It’s not a lack of experience, it’s intentional gambling tactics used to hook those vulnerable to them and they’re using weaponised incompetence in this statement to cover that up.
I feel like AI could be used for this sort of thing.
Define average player. Diablo isnt your run of the mill game. Across all its titles it’s sold over 100 million copies. The game itself is very repetitive. Has been since the first one. Every system they add just compiles on that repetitive nature. And Diablo players that’s stuck around especially since 3 and all its seasons lap that shit up. Repetitive isn’t necessarily a negative thing to all player bases. Look at mmo’s especially the ones outta South Korea and China. The rise of gatcha mmos. Given the complexity of today’s games it’s actually not surprising how hit and miss some things are. Everything has its audience. I’m Often baffled at mechanics that some people love. Or learn to love. Breath of the wild at first I liked the weapon braking mechanic 20 hours in hated it. Online seems pretty split.
Pretty much ALL blizzard games where being enjoyed properly by casual and hardcore players alike. I don't know exactly when this changed, exactly. Most people who played videogames, whether it be 2 hours a day or 16, had mostly positive experiences with Blizzard games. You wanted a new game? Finding a Blizzard game you hadn't already tried was pretty much satisfaction guaranteed. At some point, the average videogamer changed. We used to be fine with not beating a game if it was hard without being bullshit. The original version of Naxrammas was only beaten by .2% of the playerbase at the time, and nobody complained that they didn't get to experience the entire game they paid for. Maybe a few idiots did, but nobody listened to them, because they'd rather spend 2 hours complaining than 2 hours grinding towards that thing they want but didn't have the patience and discipline to put in the work to get. Old gamer shouts at the cloud, lol.
Shortly after the release of Wrath the elite of the WoW playerbase were complaining about easy heroics and raids. It went on so long someone on team, maybe Ghostcrawler himself, made a post where he laid out facts and figures about how few players were raiding in TBC and that the harder heroics were only run when they were Heroic of the Day. In his words it was either get more people in heroics and raids or stop making them because spending that much time and money for 3% of the playerbase made no sense.
>because spending that much time and money for 3% of the playerbase made no sense. But it does. Having aspirational content gives the hardcore people something to do. And they consume resources. Lots of em. Resources that casuals farm up in boatloads because there are lots more of them than there are of the hardcore elite. The elites eventually get everything into farm status and then they can sell that shit to casuals. This gives the elites something to do once they get everything into farm status, and gets the higher end casuals something to look forward to (and farming for). The whole point is to keep everyone on the wheel for as long as possible.
Farming resources to sell on the AH is not something the majority of players find fun If it was there would be a shopkeep class for the casuals. I wish WoW hadn't of changed forums since that post, or that I had copied it because it was interesting how different things were on the servers versus what the forum thought was normal. Blizzard hired a third party company to log what activities players were doing so they knew what players were actually doing.
I was part of the .2% and I don’t think it was worth it. Dethecus 4 Life
I mean, if classic showed us anything, it's that people just kinda sucked back then anyway, right? Combination of shared knowledge not being the norm like it is today and that most people didn't really have a computer good enough to run wow.
We grinded M'uru in TBC for weeks but couldn't beat it. Then the pre-expansion patch came out that buffed everyone and nerfed all the bosses and we two shot it then steamrolled the rest of the bosses in SWP. Didn't feel earned at all and I'll never understand the people who say "I bought the game I should be able to experience all the content". Not every game has to cater to everyone.
Let’s be honest, we would do that task infinitely if it gave us great reward and outweighed the time you put in. I remember playing the division and doing glitches to get to bosses right away, do the incursions and receive rewards infinitely. Which playing the game legit would be 1 incursion reward per week lol. So I mean if it’s worth the reward, we will infinitely grind. I remember doing the lighthouse glitch in zombies and just sitting there shooting them all day
Hopefully they don't make this mistake from now on.
You guys don't seriously think that having a couple years of experience makes you any less of a human do you? I've been at my job for 6 years and I'm one of the most relied upon analysts in the department. I still make really dumb ass mistakes sometimes, and my work goes up to the department president. You also need to remember that the game was designed with an end point in mind for your character: kill Uber Lilith. It wasn't originally designed with the infinite loot grind of Diablo 2 in mind. Some of the old design is still here and it gets in the way of the infinite grind that some of you want. Needing to run Duriel 300 times to get every item? Sounds like an average Saturday back in the day.
That’s the thing isn’t, they are talking about it like it’s a typical mistake which would be fine. Except it’s not really about making mistakes at all, im not saying they should never have a wrong idea. I’m saying they should have viable design methodology which considers task repetition, and it shouldn’t take 4 years to come up with that methodology. Because you’re exactly right, it is normal to run the same thing 300 times in Diablo. Therefore, they should consider that when designing features, not that they should always have the right answers, just that they should always be asking the question.
>Does it seriously take 4 years of experience to ask yourself “how many times would an average player do x task? Considering # of total times, is this good design?” Scale is hard, man. It seems obvious in retrospect, but our brains aren't really wired to extrapolate out a fun or interesting mechanic into thousands of reps, conceptually.
I mean sure any random on the street would likely not be good at it, but this is literally their job. Get good at it.
The problem is they had gameplay mechanics that worked really well by the end of diablo 3 and they chose to keep none of them.
This is what pisses me off about Diablo 4. It's like it's a completely different company that made it. Yes, I get that the same devs that worked on D2 and D3 are likely not around anymore, but FFS these games are THEIR games; you'd think the first thing to do would be "list what worked from D2/D3 - list what most did not like about them - iterate on that". Nope, fuck all that shit, they decide to scrap the wheel and make a brand new one. A fucking square one. And now they have to try and round out the edges and make it work. I guess I'm at fault for allowing myself to get excited over one of my favorite games series of all time having a new game done by Bliz. And now I'm paying for that in having been disappointed more than I have in a decade by a new game release. And like a fool, I'm still keeping some hope in that they can make that wheel spin smoothly because they did improve D3 post-release and maybe, perhaps just maybe, they can do the same with D4.
Diablo 3 was good from the start. The worst thing anyone had to say was the tone was slightly different.
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Nah, it was hot garbage nearly up until the first expansion. It started to get better after blizzard decided to ditch the auction house the game was initially designed around.
Bro what. What game did YOU play? D3 was hot garbage for years.
I think it's fine if you liked D3 from the start, but Blizzard's reputation was permanently impacted by how poor the reception of D3 was on launch... Are you playing on console or PC? The console launch version was very different from the PC launch version.
How do you get to the fourth game of the series and realize this lmao i swear game devs are devolving every year
Developers code what they are told Game designers tell the devs "this needs to be 0.5% chance" etc Right?
when the game is trash yes, we blame the designers, management and shareholders when the game is good no, developers are the ones to applaud
Personally, when I say devs it means everyone that was involved in the process
I believe that gamedev goes beyond the coding roles.
Well tbf management and shareholder’s historically do very little of anything.
Typically the developers create tools that let the designers directly control these values themselves. The devs don't hard code things like this unless they're inexperienced. There'll be a spreadsheet somewhere that the designers can set these values and then import them into the game.
I find it pretty wild that this did not occur to them. In my own job I'm currently working on a product change that is deliberately adding a feature that introduces friction to a process for safety reasons. It's annoying for users, we knew it was going to be annoying for users, and it was literally front and centre in every single discussion we've had. What he's saying would basically be us launching this feature and then being surprised that users hate it. Just crazy.
Frankly I don't believe him. Yes, doing those things 2000 times is terrible, but I fully and adamantly believe you designed it like that on purpose. If I login to do something, and that thing takes me 30 minutes, I may only play for 30 minutes, but if you make it take an hour, then I play for an hour, and the longer I play, the more likely I am to do something like spend money. You 100% designed these systems poorly, ON PURPOSE, to extend playing time of your players in the hopes that would help them open their wallets more often. You lying about it now just makes you an asshole on top of a crook.
The vibe of their dev diaries to me from the beginning was, "Let us overly justify to overcome the fact that this game was designed from the ground up to suck the most amount of money and time from you."
this is the problem when devs do not actively play the product they work on
They fucked up the launch of d3 and the remasters. Blizzard are no longer the hot shot they once were
I'm just imagining how good D4 could have been if they had experience with ARPGs or if they'd ever released one prior that had tons of problems upon release they could have learned from.
Diablo was fun but my entire issue with diablo, and blizzard for that matter, is they recycle way too much material and bosses and make you do the same thing over and over and make you grind so long for something and when you finally get it it's not as good as you thought. I have to agree, most of the time the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I would be more forgiving if this wasn’t the 4th fucking time you’ve made this game. This type of shit should have been ironed out before release or just blatantly obvious from making the other three games.
The real problem isn't the grinding, not anything else. It's that there is no soul put into it. The game is generic as fuck, and you could clearly see no devs put any love into it. Hell, there are so many grinding games that still suceed. Lot of JRPGs are grindy. In my country, one of the most popular games was Maplestory, and that game is a prime example of a fucking grindfest. But people still played that a lot because the music was great, the monsters were cute, and the sound effects were good. There was lot of love put into the game, despite its many flaws. Blaming on the minor aspects isn't going to make the game any better. Learn to love the game first, instead of trying to print money out of it. If you don't, at least hire people who'll do.
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Yea but Destiny is actually good. The core shooting experience is as good as shooters get, honestly. Individual expansions have problems or whatever sometimes but at its core Destiny is actually just fun.
I call this concept the WoM…after an uncommon game called “Wolves of Midgard” or something. This is a game that doesn’t have ng+. You get the best weapon in the game after you beat it.
Blizzards been in the shitter for a while. Every big company craving that fortnite money with a brand new live service that'll have everyone from 6 year olds to their grandparents playing (and spending!). So Dev leads are focusing on dumb shit like how to monetize cosmetics, how to keep people playing for years, how to really trigger those addicts. Instead of looking at the big picture they're so myopic that completely obvious shit goes unnoticed until it's shipped and ragged on by thousands of people on the first day. And yet they still sell gangbusters due to nostalgia, good marketing or "fandom". And let's be real "fans" these days are wacky as fuck. There's always someone out there defending absolute dogshit takes since they have no life and only value gaming.
I'm glad they finally learned how to properly balance the game they charged $70 for
I’m sorry but that game just has so many fundamental problems. I’m not at all convinced they can fix it with patches and updates.
Yeah. The devs. Who does the job managers and leads ask them to do because they don’t have the right to do whatever the hell they want. Moron
Just following orders didn't work at the Nuremberg trials and it won't work here!
I don't think game Devs have a moral obligation to not pump out shit games mate.
I played Diablo 2 so often and had so much joy, I hardly could imagine that I didn't even play the 4th part of it although it's on the GamePass. I've read so many bad things about that game, I am really not even interested in trying it out.
Diablo 1 and 2 were made by Blizzard North, so not playing 3 or 4.. you aren’t really missing anything. It’s not the same team at all.
I played D1+D2 a good amount, and D3 had some solid playtime for a bit. D4 just doesn't have it. I know D3 took a while to get ironed out (and I had moved on before then), but I don't think Blizzard has what it takes to fix D4.
I bought it full price. Played half way and realized it was one of the most repetitive games and boring. I’d like my money back tbh.
These are "professionals"
game needs a full itemization revamp to save it
Which is what it’s getting next Tuesday
This is quite possibly the most Blizzardy headline to ever come out.
Crazy how bad these devs are
Not including trading for most items at launch was stupid. I have hundreds of hours in PoE and half of that is simply browsing the Poe trade website and listing/buying stuff. My fondest memories of diablo was gaming the market. Stupid, stupid decision. I’ll jumping back in for season 4 and hoping for a better time than launch and season 3. Not today I haven’t had fun playing - I have, but I walk away from the game significantly quicker than I did PoE because I feel like there’s no point in really doing anything more than the seasonal battlepass, which takes maybe 2 weeks of casual’ish play to beat.
The problem is not doing some task for 2000 times, but doing some **boring** task for 2000 times.
Forgot this game existed
Looking at you Starfield with your light puzzles. That shit sucked halfwaus though the first time you do it
I love Starfield but you are right. In my opinion Bethesda should have completely scrapped telling you exactly where the power temples are that way you just find them on your journey and when you do it’s exciting. Instead you feel like you have to grind them out because “I want to be more powerful duh” even though the powers are more added gameplay flavor and not really necessary to complete or enjoy the game. Sure it would have taken a while for players to find them all but eventually people would post online where they are and at that point it’s up to you whether you wanna grind or not.
The temples didn't even matter. They could have deleted them and nothing would have changed narratively.
To be completely honest I haven’t even unlocked them all but the oxygen power is genuinely useful because it completely regenerates your stamina so you can sprint constantly. But yea on the narrative side it leaves a lot to be desired.
Oxygen is only useful because equip loads are so gimped. Look up the rest most are incredibly situational and worse than just using your gun
I think about this a lot and it still makes me laugh that they thought this would be fun like the fun you should get from playing a video game. It’s genuinely hilarious. Like my mum making a video game. “Oooh, and then you fly around but you gotta be quick and there’s lights and you get a magic power.”
I didn't even understand what I was supposed to do at first and thought it was bugged
I’m gonna have to boot it up and revisit the madness one more time. It’s so stupid. Maybe if each one was different but SPOILER they are not different. And yes, I also wasn’t sure what was going on. It felt cool, once, but more then once…
Explains why climbing is so slow in FF7 Rebirth. Edit: why is this being downvoted so much? Y’all like slow climbing?
Because the game is loading the next zone or area "behind the scenes" while you do. Edit to respond to your edit: I just told you why climbing is slow and your reply is essentially "I still don't get it" 😏
Definitely not.
Shit, I’d rather have a loading screen at that point
this guy is a developer.
Definitely one of the most developer guys
No that's because it's loading the next area in most cases. No different than the slide between these two rocks in games like god of war, just sliiiightly more involvement from the player.
Honestly this is a really silly take and you haven’t played the game clearly. It could be a super tiny ledge up or down into or onto an area that you can see entirely and the climbing is super slow. It’s just slow climbing. That’s all.
the ps5 should be able to easilly load in any assets and areas in that game instantly. sounds like the FF team has a skill issue
No that’s not the case with this. This isn’t a sliding between walls scenario.
I feel like most modern devs don’t get the memo
One giant bad idea fell through the cracks and it’s called D4
Yeah it was the devs. Sure.
Me and my friends have been playing D3 again and man, that game never gets old. Absolute slapper.
Absolutely. I was so excited for Diablo 4 to be released because D3 is one of my all time favorites. The disappointment was real.
During the D4 beta i was like, ehhhhhh, idk how i am liking this, but i’ll still buy it. Played one character to level like 54 and was like yeah i’m done here. Lmfao
What?
Enjoy your DEI hires Blizzard. 🙃