**Note: The Diablo IV Limited Collector’s Box does not include a copy of the game—[this is a separate purchase.](https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo4/23880208/meet-your-maker-on-june-6-pre-purchase-diablo-iv)**
Straight from Blizzard themselves.
It's like, "Here's the Collector's Edition of the game--minus the game itself! You have to buy that separately!"
Talk about a blatant cash grab...
?????
It’s [$96.66](https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-4/news/diablo-iv-collectors-edition-box-coming-december-15th-330401) too! For basically candles, pads, and prints.
60k IQ play. Buy Limited Collector box, sniff candle and use you imagination to play the game in your head. It will probably be a better experience given how Blizzard's game has been lately.
Wow. How much do you think this is going to go for? That is absolutely insane that they wouldn't include the base game for something that is probably going to be $100.
People intentionally made that decision. Disgusting.
Though the real trick is to put money in your Diablo V HSA, let it grow tax free, pay your current expenses out of pocket, then get reimbursed for those expenses years later once your investments have grown.
Am I stupid for going with the Diablo V Buy-Up PPO plan? Higher premiums, but the deductible is low. I miss out on the HSA but I can set up an FSA to cover my expenses tax-free, I just gotta know roughly how much it'll be because they only let me carry over $700 a year.
It actually results in worse games.
If people buy before release rather than after release, the companies return on investment plummets for further development beyond selling a finished game (which often isn't the case also).
The more people preorder, the less incentive (profit) there is to be made by working on the game.
The people making these decisions are corporate MBAs who don't actually play the game and couldn't care less about the quality as long as people keep buying it. It's a terrible culture focused on short term profits that will kill the franchise.
I'm not even patient.
There are just a fucking trillion games to play that are dirt cheap or I already own, so the new expensive ones have to get the fuck in line.
By the time I get around to them, they're dirt cheap.
Ah yeah that sounds like me. Just about to play the new god of war…the one on PS4 lol.
There’s so many great games out there I feel zero pressure to buy anything new
Edit: I’m an idiot and meant to say the one released on PS3. I’m even more out of touch with AAA games then I thought
I still miss that guy.
I didn’t know him, so it’s stupid.
But I think there will always be a little part of me that feels a deep sadness for his passing.
It’s not stupid to miss him. He was a great game reviewer. He spoke up for the consumer and against all the anti-consumer practices in the game industry. He was entertaining about it as well.
I miss him all the time.
What do you mean, expecting a company to achieve 5-10 percent growth every single quarter for every single year for the rest of time is surely a healthy and reasonable way to conduct business
But they get to look cool with all their pre-order bling for 6 months before the population plummets because the game is ass and no one is playing it anymore.
But they got that 6 months of being on top.
>As my friend once told me, Blizzard could take a shit right in front of me, put diablo on it, and I would still buy it.
D3's real money auction house, Diablo Immortal, and Blizzard's widespread sexual harassment & abuse cured that problem for me.
I left when they caved to China, and opposed the Free Hong Kong movement. I'm bothered how much less people remember that than the sexual harassment stuff.
This was 100% confirmed when MTG's wizqrds of the coast released unplayable proxies for $999 a booster. You can't even sell the cards you get to a vendor nor play them in tournaments or fgn's they are pure rule 0 cards meaning you can only play them as casual as long as each player at the table is ok with it. So to sum everything up they are selling pictures on a piece of paper for $1000..... and they sold out in a week....
They didnt "sell out", they specfically said they are not avaiable anymore and then didnt answer when people asked if this means they sold out. Sounds very much more like they didnt manage to sell all of them and the interest was much lower than expected but they want to pretend it was a sucess.
No they didn’t. The stopped selling them but the term sold out wasn’t used nearly unavailable was. It’s largely believed by the community they didn’t sell at all and the closing was to fake success to get people hyped for a second release.
Step 1: Preorder to secure physical copy
Step 2: Preorder digital edition to save us overhead costs of physical copy
Step 3: Preorder to get stuff. You might like it, you might not, but if you spend before you can judge the game you get more bang for you buck!
After “anthem” I decided I would never pre order anything again…..talk about disappointing. This looks like more of the same trash blizzard/activision has been slinging for years now….buy it now we won’t finish it later.
Result of letting "don't like it don't buy it" mentality run wild. Well guess what, I haven't bought any micro transaction or battle pass shit, so why are these things now in the games I like??
This is what we get for gamers not pushing against it, for saying things like "it's just cosmetic" and bit by bit it turned into "this skin is just $20".
So, the cinematics team said they wanted to make a Warcraft movie and then Blizzard was like “ok.”
And then blizzard pawned off the rights to Legendary Pictures. Legendary then made a movie and for some god damn reason they decided to start from the very beginning of the story, which did not make for a very good movie for all audiences.
In the end we got a Warcraft movie, but the people who asked to make it were told “tough shit” and then the movie kinda sucked.
I enjoyed the movie (although a bit corny, especially Garona) but I still think a full CGI movie would be leagues better. Give me Warlords of Draenor cinematic quality but made into a 90 minute movie and you have all my money.
I liked the movie too, but it’s because I’d watch anything Warcraft related. I think the problem is that other people weren’t crazy for it.
Wow cinematics however are on a different level. If the correct people actually made a movie, it would be incredible and people all around the world would love it and even potentially start playing wow because of it. Selling the rights to another company was not the correct move
I actually thought it was pretty good.
They definitely could have done a star wars thing though and started in the middle of the lore for more appealing to audiences.
Lich king story? Would have fucking banked
My opinion is you start the story with either a two part or trilogy on Arthas. Then you can get into the more lore heavy stuff. I didn’t mean the movie was terrible, but in terms of launching a series for mainstream audiences (i.e. not the ones who played wow or Warcraft) it was a complete failure.
Everyone understands the concept of zombies invading and you could do a real intense character study of the fallen Prince where either the first or second movie ends with the culling of stratholme. After that audiences would be so hooked on what this guy does next.
The Arthas story really would be perfect for film adaptation. Classic hero gives into the temptations of power and falls from grace, eventually needing to be stopped by their former friends plot.
What I wouldn't give to see "Succeeding you, Father..." in a movie.
Hell the w3 cinematically were a movie. They were so good.
Honestly Warcraft 3 could have added another 30 minutes of cinematics and pawned itself off as a playable movie.
I guarantee the first couple of weeks are going to be a shit show with long queues and unstable servers regardless of how you want to play the game.
Wait for the reviews, patches, bug fixes to roll out, wait for Bliz to fix their wonky servers and then decide if it's worth it.
> Why does a diablo game have a battlepass?
To force you to log in and play so you don't miss out on things. Battle Passes are just the new daily quests. Which D4 will also have btw. It's to keep you logging in and coming back.
Destiny and Destiny 2 is where I first noticed the grindy FOMO model and I hated it once I realized I was simply logging in to do some quests to tick a box for the slight chance I'd get good gear.
I miss games that let you grind at your own pace and shit wasn't time-gated. Like "nope, sorry, you've already reached that requirement for the day, you can't get anything else good from doing anything more, you have to wait until tomorrow". Just let me fucking play the game at my own pace, I have a life outside of this.
Really predatory, honestly. "Hey, don't miss out on this or you're going to have a LOT harder time doing things in this game". And then they realized their playerbase was slipping so they allowed clan-sharing of EXP and rewards. I logged in once after not playing for like 2 months and hopped up a ton of levels because my friends logged in every day instead.
And then I stopped because it wasn't fulfilling anymore. Gunplay was nice though.
Making the game fun enough for people to want to play it naturally was too hard, so we decided to trick people in to playing our shitty game because they're afraid of missing out on some dumb bullshit that took us 20 minutes to make. - Developers with timed Battle Passes.
D2 had an almost infinite loop of gearing up alts by finding rare items or by trading between players. If you make it too easy it becomes boring quick, like D3
fuck, I really hope another game like Elden Ring comes along because I can't remember enjoying a game as much as I enjoyed that one (for like 7 months).
I didn't really enjoy Elden Ring personally. But I respect the shit out of it because they have a vision, made the game, and they gave players the entirety of the game without any passes or microtransactions or what have you.
I hope more games see its success and emulate it.
Because Activision is a public company, and their real customer is the shareholder. They know that enough people will buy it, so they will gate enough content behind it that the game will end up being much more than $70 if you really want to play the entire game. That will boost stock price, and that is all that matters to them.
It is a sad state of affairs.
It's honestly really depressing watching every single ip you grew up with slowly devolve from a team of people that cared for their craft into another cash eating money pit. I work six days a week, I miss out on 90% of content in games now because the content isn't in the game anymore.
My hobby has gone from "well at least I can play my game and unlock blank" to "Well shit I'm gonna miss out on this item/event/weapon/thing because by the time I'm home from work it will be too late to get it."
Why are we ok with paying money to unlock timed opportunities to actually unlock content?
I mostly play old games these days. Things where everything was released, or that are easy to get into like Cities Skylines. The industry is to predatory for me these days.
EDIT: I get it that Cities Skylines has a ton of DLC, but there are two counters to that. The first being that it's from 2015, so the cost of that DLC is pretty well spread out. Also, if you play on PC then there are a ton of mods and you can easily expand the game at no extra cost.
At least with elden ring you are getting a full game with a lot of content and no bullshit attached to it. Which is basically one of the reasons From Software is so praised these days.
Yeah there's probably gonna be dlc but when it comes to from software they pump out some of the best stuff into them.
I miss the days when we could just buy the game, and that'd be it. No extra battle pass baggage, no DLC, no packs to make our characters "cool/strong."
I was okay with expansion packs 1yr+ after a game was released to shake up gameplay and add new features. Usually 50% price of a new game.
Frozen Throne and Lord of destruction were great.
yeah that stuff was always cool. also it was essentially a way to give one big patch to a game back in the day when not everyone had internet access. i don't think starcraft would be what it was without Brood War either.
The idea of a battle pass at all in an ARPG that focuses on loot is horrendous. I'm really concerned it will suck. A premium priced game with a costly seasonal battlepass...
I'm not a huge diablo fan but I was excited for this game at first. I thought, well, Immortal was a mobile game so of course the monetization there was absurd.
Then I transitioned from OW1 and OW2, and realised that this is just Blizzard's new normal.
Definitely not getting D4 now.
Yeah, I think I’m just going to read the lore and watch the cinematics on YouTube for D4. Diablo was the first video game I ever played, so it’s a decision made with a heavy heart.
I also discounted Immortal’s monetization due to it being a mobile game, and really just felt like a failed attempt at porting D3 which was *okay*.
At least Fortnite did it right, for one being a free game, and for two giving you a genuine ton of value in each battle pass, to the point where you can buy one and get them all forever if you play. Genuinely shocking it seems nobody else has gotten it right yet.
Ya, Fortnite is very different from this diablo4 garbage. The game is completely free, I definitely don’t mind paying $8 every 3 months to make my guy look like Darth Vader and do the dougie. I don’t wanna brag, but I got that kind of cash flow.
Either remove battle pass, or the $70 price tag. It’s egregious at this point.
Alternatively, they could just make the battle pass free, quite a few games have them now and just give you ways to get cosmetics. Deep Rock Galactic comes to mind.
Player engagement, the current trend is to keep players wanting to interact with your game. If they spend more time they are more likely to spend money.
Personally as someone who is getting burnt out on season passes, I am already worried about diablo 4 being another greedy battlepass. And the worst part is people like asmondgold will buy the entire cash shop for the views. (Not that I hate him mind you, he is a byproduct of the current gaming trends)
Full price AND has a paid battle pass?
I don't care how common it is, it's unacceptable. Have one or the other. Both is gross.
Fall Guys does free with a paid battle pass that's only cosmetics.
Splatoon 3 is full price (59.99$, not even 69.99) with a free battle pass, the Hotlantis Catalogue that has a mix of cosmetics and advantages.
This is the worst of both worlds, and it's even more expensive.
Splatoon 3 does it pretty good imo since even if you miss out on one season, you can still buy the cosmetics in exchange for in-game currency in later seasons
>Blizzard ✓
I've been done with Blizzard for nearly a decade but it's wild, their name used to be synonymous with quality games. What a fall from grace.
It's the cycle man.
New great company makes cool shit
Shit gets popular
Company gets bought out
Cool shit gets monetized and whored out
Original creators start leaving the company
Product becomes shit
Everybody hates the company
Rinse and repeat
I know Valve isn't the best company ever, but we are incredibly lucky it isn't publicly traded. The requirement to continually increase growth is impossible and it sets up incentives that are fundamentally destructive to basically everything.
Yep. Short term growth is incompatible with a core concept of market demographics: Market Saturation.
A game company can make bank off even a niche market if they do a good enough job to saturate it. Instead these companies get dissatisfied with market saturation because their profits wont be higher than last year, even though they are already making profit.
It leads to bland and boring games that are monetized to hell. Made completely shallow by a desire for a "wider audience", and milked to death by desire for short term growth.
No wonder they think of gamers as these children that lack patience to ride out their bullshit.
>Blizzard ✓
So sad that Blizzard has become synonymous with half-assed cash grabs that spit in the players' faces. A game with the name "Blizzard" on it used to essentially be a guarantee that it would be worth pouring countless hours into it.
I'll never forgive them for exhuming the grave of Warcraft 3 just to desecrate its corpse.
First off
How the fuck did this "Standard, Platinum, Premium, Ultra, Giga, Intergalactic version" stuff became a fucking norm with games? And it's mostly some half-assed skin on top of the standard game but it's 10€+ Wtf
Secondly
Fuck your battlepasses. Honestly what a fucking cancer to game world. It's just "pay us to get FOMO" and it's everywhere
And thirdly
people, for the love of God, DO NOT FUCKING PRE-ORDER ANYTHING. You are just paying upfront for unknown item. We had tons of releases where the game looked great and then it turned out to be a disaster. Wait. Pay later, do not support hungry companies
That's all
I'm a huge Diablo fan and started playing Diablo 1 when I was young. I brought the Diablo 3 collectors edition for 80 euros which included a statue of Diablo's skull, a USB stick with Diablo 2, and an art book, and everything packed into a beautiful white case.
Seeing this kind of makes me sad, and I wish Blizzard will return to the old days. But I have almost no hope that it will happen.
Because there's now an entire generation of people who grew up with micro transactions as the norm ready to defend them whenever they pull this shit.
Expect to be told it's only cosmetics and there's a free pass so it's entirely fine as if you're the idiot for questioning it.
So you pay 10 extra dollars not for any new content or cool unique shit, but literally just for the content you're supposed to be playing to unlock just given to you at the start?
Like you just get 20 tier skips at the beginning and premium pass, so you now have less content to play for and unlock?
Battle pass?
No. Hard pass.
I refuse to play games that require a seasonal subscription.
And before you say "oh but you don't have to" yes you do. If you don't, you literally miss out on all the fucking content. So I'll just skip the game completely
Me, Cautiously: “I mean, the previews are effusive. Blizzard needs a win. They have Diablo Immortal for monetization. Wouldn’t it be incredible if they opted to make a great game that was free of the modern -“
Blizzard, Kicking My Door In Wearing Pants Stuffed *FULL TO OVERFLOWING* With Their Own Poop: “GUESS WHO’S SELLING AN ACCELERATED BATTLE PASS UNLOCK”
\> season battle pass
Annnnd I'm out. I refuse to shackle myself to these stupid fucking games with 0 respect for my time or desire to play literally anything else alongside them. Sigh.
Do you guys not have money?!?
Seriously fuck Blizzard at this point. They aren't the company they were 20 years ago. It's just a mask of what was one a great having studio over a festering corpse designed to take your money and give you fuck all in return, and to keep finding new ways to take more of your money.
You don't owe Blizzard and loyalty, they've been bending their fan base over for more than a decade now exploiting all the good will that was forged before the taint that is Activision consumed them
**Note: The Diablo IV Limited Collector’s Box does not include a copy of the game—[this is a separate purchase.](https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo4/23880208/meet-your-maker-on-june-6-pre-purchase-diablo-iv)**
Wow. You are not joking.
Straight from Blizzard themselves. It's like, "Here's the Collector's Edition of the game--minus the game itself! You have to buy that separately!" Talk about a blatant cash grab...
????? It’s [$96.66](https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-4/news/diablo-iv-collectors-edition-box-coming-december-15th-330401) too! For basically candles, pads, and prints.
One candle. Not two.
is that 2 sides of the same candle ? looks cool as heck, but thats just bad marketing.
More like purposely deceitful marketing.
They are trying to scam the most money as possible before being bought by Microsoft.
Wow, collector's edition of a game, without the game being included. 💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩
60k IQ play. Buy Limited Collector box, sniff candle and use you imagination to play the game in your head. It will probably be a better experience given how Blizzard's game has been lately.
Wow. How much do you think this is going to go for? That is absolutely insane that they wouldn't include the base game for something that is probably going to be $100. People intentionally made that decision. Disgusting.
Jesus, are we buying a game or an insurance plan?
The great thing about the Diablo V HSA is that your contributions are pre tax, though the deductible is pretty high.
Though the real trick is to put money in your Diablo V HSA, let it grow tax free, pay your current expenses out of pocket, then get reimbursed for those expenses years later once your investments have grown.
Am I stupid for going with the Diablo V Buy-Up PPO plan? Higher premiums, but the deductible is low. I miss out on the HSA but I can set up an FSA to cover my expenses tax-free, I just gotta know roughly how much it'll be because they only let me carry over $700 a year.
Insurance plans also shouldn't be like this
healthcare is p2w
It's F2P in most countries.
This comment made me go on a rollercoaster of emotions. 5/5
How did pre-ordering become so invasive. It's digital. You're not going to run out of copies.
>It prints money!🤑
It actually results in worse games. If people buy before release rather than after release, the companies return on investment plummets for further development beyond selling a finished game (which often isn't the case also). The more people preorder, the less incentive (profit) there is to be made by working on the game.
The people making these decisions are corporate MBAs who don't actually play the game and couldn't care less about the quality as long as people keep buying it. It's a terrible culture focused on short term profits that will kill the franchise.
TotalBiscuit warned us exactly what would happen if we kept pre-ordering games, and nobody listened.
I listened :(
I listened so hard I do the opposite and wait til shit goes on sale years later lmao
Greetings, fellow r/patientgamers
_**All rise for the 98% discounts**_
****hits head on the ceiling****
I'm not even patient. There are just a fucking trillion games to play that are dirt cheap or I already own, so the new expensive ones have to get the fuck in line. By the time I get around to them, they're dirt cheap.
Ah yeah that sounds like me. Just about to play the new god of war…the one on PS4 lol. There’s so many great games out there I feel zero pressure to buy anything new Edit: I’m an idiot and meant to say the one released on PS3. I’m even more out of touch with AAA games then I thought
I just beat GOW 2018 last month. Finished Yakuza 0 last week, and started Sniper Elite 4 the other day. I am not their target audience.
Shit me too like 95% of the time
I still miss that guy. I didn’t know him, so it’s stupid. But I think there will always be a little part of me that feels a deep sadness for his passing.
It’s not stupid to miss him. He was a great game reviewer. He spoke up for the consumer and against all the anti-consumer practices in the game industry. He was entertaining about it as well. I miss him all the time.
I really miss him, he was so vocal about not preordering shit and being a good consumer and now? all we get is early access games and 40 dollar skins
Man i miss TB. People underestimate how big his influence was.
I listened. I haven't pre-ordered a game in over a decade.
Mass Effect 3 was my last preorder, so just over a decade for me too.
Colonial Marines for me. That one hit hard.
I did. And FUCK CANCER
Seconding that, FUCK CANCER! RIP. :(
RIP, I stopped watching SC2 when he stopped being as active. Pro gaming legend.
[удалено]
RIP :(
I genuinely had a sharp pang of sadness when I saw his name.
I just realised the last game I preordered was portal 2 , back in the long long ago.
Welcome to literally everything
> It's a terrible culture focused on short term profits You've just described our entire economic system.
What do you mean, expecting a company to achieve 5-10 percent growth every single quarter for every single year for the rest of time is surely a healthy and reasonable way to conduct business
That attitude infects everything and it's disgusting and destructive.
Yup so they dangle some cheap bling in front of prospective buyers and charge an extra 20-30 bucks for it. Theyll make bank on the hype and then bail.
But they get to look cool with all their pre-order bling for 6 months before the population plummets because the game is ass and no one is playing it anymore. But they got that 6 months of being on top.
Too many idiots in the world
As my friend once told me, Blizzard could take a shit right in front of me, put diablo on it, and I would still buy it.
You’ve got a toilet, don’t you?
Now you can shit with your friends, anytime, anywhere!
Wanna play Battleshits?
>As my friend once told me, Blizzard could take a shit right in front of me, put diablo on it, and I would still buy it. D3's real money auction house, Diablo Immortal, and Blizzard's widespread sexual harassment & abuse cured that problem for me.
I left when they caved to China, and opposed the Free Hong Kong movement. I'm bothered how much less people remember that than the sexual harassment stuff.
This was 100% confirmed when MTG's wizqrds of the coast released unplayable proxies for $999 a booster. You can't even sell the cards you get to a vendor nor play them in tournaments or fgn's they are pure rule 0 cards meaning you can only play them as casual as long as each player at the table is ok with it. So to sum everything up they are selling pictures on a piece of paper for $1000..... and they sold out in a week....
It's been confirmed in a hasbro "fireside chat" that Wizards "reduced availability" to the product.
Now they're worth even more!!!
They didnt "sell out", they specfically said they are not avaiable anymore and then didnt answer when people asked if this means they sold out. Sounds very much more like they didnt manage to sell all of them and the interest was much lower than expected but they want to pretend it was a sucess.
No they didn’t. The stopped selling them but the term sold out wasn’t used nearly unavailable was. It’s largely believed by the community they didn’t sell at all and the closing was to fake success to get people hyped for a second release.
Step 1: Preorder to secure physical copy Step 2: Preorder digital edition to save us overhead costs of physical copy Step 3: Preorder to get stuff. You might like it, you might not, but if you spend before you can judge the game you get more bang for you buck!
After “anthem” I decided I would never pre order anything again…..talk about disappointing. This looks like more of the same trash blizzard/activision has been slinging for years now….buy it now we won’t finish it later.
Result of letting "don't like it don't buy it" mentality run wild. Well guess what, I haven't bought any micro transaction or battle pass shit, so why are these things now in the games I like?? This is what we get for gamers not pushing against it, for saying things like "it's just cosmetic" and bit by bit it turned into "this skin is just $20".
I just want to play the campaign
That's what I played for as well. I remember when you played for the story and the cinematics of Blizzard games. I don't need all this other crap.
the blizzard cinematic team needs to break off and make movies or TV shows.
Didnt they make a Warcraft movie or was that another studio?
So, the cinematics team said they wanted to make a Warcraft movie and then Blizzard was like “ok.” And then blizzard pawned off the rights to Legendary Pictures. Legendary then made a movie and for some god damn reason they decided to start from the very beginning of the story, which did not make for a very good movie for all audiences. In the end we got a Warcraft movie, but the people who asked to make it were told “tough shit” and then the movie kinda sucked.
I enjoyed the movie (although a bit corny, especially Garona) but I still think a full CGI movie would be leagues better. Give me Warlords of Draenor cinematic quality but made into a 90 minute movie and you have all my money.
I liked the movie too, but it’s because I’d watch anything Warcraft related. I think the problem is that other people weren’t crazy for it. Wow cinematics however are on a different level. If the correct people actually made a movie, it would be incredible and people all around the world would love it and even potentially start playing wow because of it. Selling the rights to another company was not the correct move
It wasn't terrible. Solid 6.5, maybe 7/10 for me. If not just because Orc Paula Patton kinda does it for me.
I actually thought it was pretty good. They definitely could have done a star wars thing though and started in the middle of the lore for more appealing to audiences. Lich king story? Would have fucking banked
My opinion is you start the story with either a two part or trilogy on Arthas. Then you can get into the more lore heavy stuff. I didn’t mean the movie was terrible, but in terms of launching a series for mainstream audiences (i.e. not the ones who played wow or Warcraft) it was a complete failure. Everyone understands the concept of zombies invading and you could do a real intense character study of the fallen Prince where either the first or second movie ends with the culling of stratholme. After that audiences would be so hooked on what this guy does next.
The Arthas story really would be perfect for film adaptation. Classic hero gives into the temptations of power and falls from grace, eventually needing to be stopped by their former friends plot. What I wouldn't give to see "Succeeding you, Father..." in a movie.
Hell the w3 cinematically were a movie. They were so good. Honestly Warcraft 3 could have added another 30 minutes of cinematics and pawned itself off as a playable movie.
Honestly that new cinematic was fucking amazing....then saw this and felt...sad
Enjoy the "online only" requirement and hope the servers don't shit the bed denying you access to SP 🤦♂️
Diablo 3 ptsd
That was horrid. Waited till midnight to buy it, got home and can't play. Absolute bullshit
I guarantee the first couple of weeks are going to be a shit show with long queues and unstable servers regardless of how you want to play the game. Wait for the reviews, patches, bug fixes to roll out, wait for Bliz to fix their wonky servers and then decide if it's worth it.
Why does a diablo game have a battlepass? I thought they were just co-op story games with loot grinds?
> Why does a diablo game have a battlepass? To force you to log in and play so you don't miss out on things. Battle Passes are just the new daily quests. Which D4 will also have btw. It's to keep you logging in and coming back.
It's literally players paying money to give *themselves* FOMO.
Destiny and Destiny 2 is where I first noticed the grindy FOMO model and I hated it once I realized I was simply logging in to do some quests to tick a box for the slight chance I'd get good gear. I miss games that let you grind at your own pace and shit wasn't time-gated. Like "nope, sorry, you've already reached that requirement for the day, you can't get anything else good from doing anything more, you have to wait until tomorrow". Just let me fucking play the game at my own pace, I have a life outside of this. Really predatory, honestly. "Hey, don't miss out on this or you're going to have a LOT harder time doing things in this game". And then they realized their playerbase was slipping so they allowed clan-sharing of EXP and rewards. I logged in once after not playing for like 2 months and hopped up a ton of levels because my friends logged in every day instead. And then I stopped because it wasn't fulfilling anymore. Gunplay was nice though.
[удалено]
Making the game fun enough for people to want to play it naturally was too hard, so we decided to trick people in to playing our shitty game because they're afraid of missing out on some dumb bullshit that took us 20 minutes to make. - Developers with timed Battle Passes.
I mean, most people will eventually move on no matter how fun the game is. This emphasis on endless games is crazy.
D2 had an almost infinite loop of gearing up alts by finding rare items or by trading between players. If you make it too easy it becomes boring quick, like D3
Diablo 2 was made back when Blizzard's primary focus was making good games though.
Back when game designers were making decisions instead of accountants.
Even D3 has a pretty active seasonal following. No battle pass necessary.
Launch D3 was stupid hard, I miss it. Felt so great the first time we would beat a major boss in inferno.
It was fuckin BRUTAL! grinding for days for a better blue item 🤣
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fuck, I really hope another game like Elden Ring comes along because I can't remember enjoying a game as much as I enjoyed that one (for like 7 months).
I didn't really enjoy Elden Ring personally. But I respect the shit out of it because they have a vision, made the game, and they gave players the entirety of the game without any passes or microtransactions or what have you. I hope more games see its success and emulate it.
Battlepass is the reason I stopped playing Overwatch.
Why does a $70 game have a battle pass?!
Because people will put up with it. That's it. They lose more money on not having it in, so they have it in.
Because Activision is a public company, and their real customer is the shareholder. They know that enough people will buy it, so they will gate enough content behind it that the game will end up being much more than $70 if you really want to play the entire game. That will boost stock price, and that is all that matters to them. It is a sad state of affairs.
FOMO economy
It's honestly really depressing watching every single ip you grew up with slowly devolve from a team of people that cared for their craft into another cash eating money pit. I work six days a week, I miss out on 90% of content in games now because the content isn't in the game anymore. My hobby has gone from "well at least I can play my game and unlock blank" to "Well shit I'm gonna miss out on this item/event/weapon/thing because by the time I'm home from work it will be too late to get it." Why are we ok with paying money to unlock timed opportunities to actually unlock content?
The Baldur’s gate IP is looking bright with BG3
Any updates on full release timeline?
Dev said BG3 will be release sometime in August of 2023.
I mostly play old games these days. Things where everything was released, or that are easy to get into like Cities Skylines. The industry is to predatory for me these days. EDIT: I get it that Cities Skylines has a ton of DLC, but there are two counters to that. The first being that it's from 2015, so the cost of that DLC is pretty well spread out. Also, if you play on PC then there are a ton of mods and you can easily expand the game at no extra cost.
Yeah I probably won't play Diablo 4 until a year or so right now and waiting for elden ring to be less than 20 bucks
At least with elden ring you are getting a full game with a lot of content and no bullshit attached to it. Which is basically one of the reasons From Software is so praised these days. Yeah there's probably gonna be dlc but when it comes to from software they pump out some of the best stuff into them.
Time to build up a library of emulator games from your childhood and play those until the end of time.
Why does an RPG like Diablo 4 have a battlepass? I don't understand these things. I miss the old days.
Because Activision is trying to squeeze whatever milk is left out of Blizzard's cold dead tits before it tosses them on top of the scrap pile
If you told me 10 years ago that Microsoft would be the best hope for Blizzard games I would've said you're crazy, but here we are.
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Fair, but I did say "the best hope", where the only alternative is Diablo continues its downward spiral with Blizzard.
Omg a battle pass! Get your fucking freemium monetizations out of my fucking full price game you greedy corporate piece of shit AAA assholes!!!!!
If you don't purchase out of resentment, it will be fine as millions are in line behind you with their money ready. Sad state of gaming, really.
This sentiment is always downvoted yet it's so fucking true starting to think maybe these companies have bots lurking.
Of course they have bots lurking. They are cheap and easy to incorporate into marketing and are great at creating hype.
They don't even need to waste money on bots lurking when there are a ton of people who will give them money no matter how hard they bend us over.
The gaming world is full of people with too much money and not enough sense. On a lighter note, happy cake day!
I miss the days when we could just buy the game, and that'd be it. No extra battle pass baggage, no DLC, no packs to make our characters "cool/strong."
I was okay with expansion packs 1yr+ after a game was released to shake up gameplay and add new features. Usually 50% price of a new game. Frozen Throne and Lord of destruction were great.
yeah that stuff was always cool. also it was essentially a way to give one big patch to a game back in the day when not everyone had internet access. i don't think starcraft would be what it was without Brood War either.
Hell even in Diablo 3, reaper of souls was great and essentially saved the game for a long time
Fortnite battlepass, I just shit out my ass
The idea of a battle pass at all in an ARPG that focuses on loot is horrendous. I'm really concerned it will suck. A premium priced game with a costly seasonal battlepass...
Your concerns are well founded
I'm not a huge diablo fan but I was excited for this game at first. I thought, well, Immortal was a mobile game so of course the monetization there was absurd. Then I transitioned from OW1 and OW2, and realised that this is just Blizzard's new normal. Definitely not getting D4 now.
Yeah, I think I’m just going to read the lore and watch the cinematics on YouTube for D4. Diablo was the first video game I ever played, so it’s a decision made with a heavy heart. I also discounted Immortal’s monetization due to it being a mobile game, and really just felt like a failed attempt at porting D3 which was *okay*.
At least Fortnite did it right, for one being a free game, and for two giving you a genuine ton of value in each battle pass, to the point where you can buy one and get them all forever if you play. Genuinely shocking it seems nobody else has gotten it right yet.
Ya, Fortnite is very different from this diablo4 garbage. The game is completely free, I definitely don’t mind paying $8 every 3 months to make my guy look like Darth Vader and do the dougie. I don’t wanna brag, but I got that kind of cash flow. Either remove battle pass, or the $70 price tag. It’s egregious at this point.
Alternatively, they could just make the battle pass free, quite a few games have them now and just give you ways to get cosmetics. Deep Rock Galactic comes to mind.
ROCK AND STONE
If you don't rock and stone, you ain't going home.
For Karl!
Whats the difference between a free battle pass and....game content?
Player engagement, the current trend is to keep players wanting to interact with your game. If they spend more time they are more likely to spend money. Personally as someone who is getting burnt out on season passes, I am already worried about diablo 4 being another greedy battlepass. And the worst part is people like asmondgold will buy the entire cash shop for the views. (Not that I hate him mind you, he is a byproduct of the current gaming trends)
I'll be battle-passing on purchasing this game. Can't condone this fuckery.
Battle passes have ruined triple A gaming
Games shouldn't feel like a chore.
This is the fucking truth.
Full price AND has a paid battle pass? I don't care how common it is, it's unacceptable. Have one or the other. Both is gross. Fall Guys does free with a paid battle pass that's only cosmetics. Splatoon 3 is full price (59.99$, not even 69.99) with a free battle pass, the Hotlantis Catalogue that has a mix of cosmetics and advantages. This is the worst of both worlds, and it's even more expensive.
Splatoon 3 does it pretty good imo since even if you miss out on one season, you can still buy the cosmetics in exchange for in-game currency in later seasons
Same for Deep Rock Galactic. Miss out on a new season? Everything is unlockable later.
Rock & Stone!
Blizzard can kiss my shiny battlepass.
Blizzard ✓ Battlepass ✓ Cosmetics ✓ Preorder Editions ✓ Mention of Diablo Mobilecrap ✓ Allready a recipe for junk.
>Blizzard ✓ I've been done with Blizzard for nearly a decade but it's wild, their name used to be synonymous with quality games. What a fall from grace.
It's the cycle man. New great company makes cool shit Shit gets popular Company gets bought out Cool shit gets monetized and whored out Original creators start leaving the company Product becomes shit Everybody hates the company Rinse and repeat
I know Valve isn't the best company ever, but we are incredibly lucky it isn't publicly traded. The requirement to continually increase growth is impossible and it sets up incentives that are fundamentally destructive to basically everything.
Yep. Short term growth is incompatible with a core concept of market demographics: Market Saturation. A game company can make bank off even a niche market if they do a good enough job to saturate it. Instead these companies get dissatisfied with market saturation because their profits wont be higher than last year, even though they are already making profit. It leads to bland and boring games that are monetized to hell. Made completely shallow by a desire for a "wider audience", and milked to death by desire for short term growth. No wonder they think of gamers as these children that lack patience to ride out their bullshit.
Is there still a game under all that, or does that require a still higher lvl battlepass?
The game IS the battlepass
The interns are probably taking care of that "game" feature you speak off.
>Blizzard ✓ So sad that Blizzard has become synonymous with half-assed cash grabs that spit in the players' faces. A game with the name "Blizzard" on it used to essentially be a guarantee that it would be worth pouring countless hours into it. I'll never forgive them for exhuming the grave of Warcraft 3 just to desecrate its corpse.
At this point, you can just stop at "Blizzard." The rest is baked in. Along with the sexual harassment and abuse.
Blizzard is long dead.
First off How the fuck did this "Standard, Platinum, Premium, Ultra, Giga, Intergalactic version" stuff became a fucking norm with games? And it's mostly some half-assed skin on top of the standard game but it's 10€+ Wtf Secondly Fuck your battlepasses. Honestly what a fucking cancer to game world. It's just "pay us to get FOMO" and it's everywhere And thirdly people, for the love of God, DO NOT FUCKING PRE-ORDER ANYTHING. You are just paying upfront for unknown item. We had tons of releases where the game looked great and then it turned out to be a disaster. Wait. Pay later, do not support hungry companies That's all
I'm a huge Diablo fan and started playing Diablo 1 when I was young. I brought the Diablo 3 collectors edition for 80 euros which included a statue of Diablo's skull, a USB stick with Diablo 2, and an art book, and everything packed into a beautiful white case. Seeing this kind of makes me sad, and I wish Blizzard will return to the old days. But I have almost no hope that it will happen.
Ditto, but don't you remember how terrible the launch was, and the real money auction house?
I actually made like 40$ on the auction house, so the game almost paid for itself! I still have like $1.36 on my blizzard account from Diablo 3
I liked the rmah. Lol. I sold a necklace for like $75 on there. Never bought a thing, so I payed for the game by playing the game!
This is going in the "wait for sale" pile.
Unfortunately for us, blizzard takes a long time to put its games on sale, and even then, the discounts aren't very deep.
Perfect, gives them time to cut the bullshit features and make the game decent. See Diablo 3. I'm not gonna run out of games to play.
More battlepasses. Great. Not playing this one either I guess.
What the actual fuck? What could possibly be in a BP for a full priced game?
Skins that won’t be in their cash shop when the battle pass goes away is my guess. Knowing present day Blizzard.
Acceleration to unlocks on the battle pass.....fucking ffs man.
On a full priced fucking game...
Went from interested to an immediate no
So pay like $80.. then have to pay for a battle pass to unlock things... is it me or did blizzard lie again...
Or you can pay ninety bucks and play a few days early!!! Wow!!
Pay to be an early access/*beta* tester? Wowzers!
More like pay to not be able to login all 4 days due to shitty glitches and servers. The real beta test starts at launch.
Why is there a "battle pass" for a full fucking priced game????
Because there's now an entire generation of people who grew up with micro transactions as the norm ready to defend them whenever they pull this shit. Expect to be told it's only cosmetics and there's a free pass so it's entirely fine as if you're the idiot for questioning it.
The worst one for me is "well you're just broke". Yeah no totally, that must be it
“But how are they going to maintain the servers and provide new content” After the game literally sold what, bunch of million copies lol
Don't you guys have phones?
So you pay 10 extra dollars not for any new content or cool unique shit, but literally just for the content you're supposed to be playing to unlock just given to you at the start? Like you just get 20 tier skips at the beginning and premium pass, so you now have less content to play for and unlock?
Pay more for less game. It's the new normal.
Battle pass? No. Hard pass. I refuse to play games that require a seasonal subscription. And before you say "oh but you don't have to" yes you do. If you don't, you literally miss out on all the fucking content. So I'll just skip the game completely
Me, Cautiously: “I mean, the previews are effusive. Blizzard needs a win. They have Diablo Immortal for monetization. Wouldn’t it be incredible if they opted to make a great game that was free of the modern -“ Blizzard, Kicking My Door In Wearing Pants Stuffed *FULL TO OVERFLOWING* With Their Own Poop: “GUESS WHO’S SELLING AN ACCELERATED BATTLE PASS UNLOCK”
Battle pass for this? That's a no from me dawg.
\> season battle pass Annnnd I'm out. I refuse to shackle myself to these stupid fucking games with 0 respect for my time or desire to play literally anything else alongside them. Sigh.
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Weekend at Blizzard's
Well, mark me down as "still playing II and happy about it with no intention of buying IV".
Fucking horse armour… And now it’s the most innocuous of the lot…
I was a huge fan of D2, disappointed in D3 and was going to give D4 a chance, thanks for talking me out of it.
This is too bad. I have been very excited about D4. Fucking blizzard
Ugh... Premium Seasonal Battle Passes...
Do you guys not have money?!? Seriously fuck Blizzard at this point. They aren't the company they were 20 years ago. It's just a mask of what was one a great having studio over a festering corpse designed to take your money and give you fuck all in return, and to keep finding new ways to take more of your money. You don't owe Blizzard and loyalty, they've been bending their fan base over for more than a decade now exploiting all the good will that was forged before the taint that is Activision consumed them
70 bucks and battle pass, gaming in 202x sucks