“Don’t ask questions. Just consume product and be excited for next product.”
When you look at the state the game is in now, with it’s terrible lobby and bot epidemic, with it’s questionable servers where we used to have a 2 hour queues, where the myriad of bugs that get HC chars killed such as the waypoint delay bug, you can’t help but get a feel that this game being is being purposely hobbled. Remember, this is Activision we’re talking about. Not Blizzard. Blizzard died a long time ago. Activision is just wearing a Blizzard skin like it’s some sort of Ed Gein monstrosity.
I entirely doubt the developers are doing this intentionally. This is management, Kotick. That greedy, hooked-nosed, potbelly goblin is purposely making D2R as bland and buggy as ever so people will abandon it and go to Diablo 4 immediately when Diablo 4 eventually releases. This is the same guy that is quoted saying “there will continue to be opportunities for us to exploit the PC platform in ways that we haven’t yet.” Do you honestly trust a person who said such a thing, or how he wanted to take the fun out of making games, and if everything was up to him he’d raise the heck out of the prices? I don’t know. I know what corporatist greed looks like. This is it folks. He is purposely withholding the necessary funds and work power so D2R can fail and people will gobble up Diablo 4 because consume product and be excited for next product.
Isn’t he still gonna be CEO when Microsoft takes over? Oy vey, such a bad person.
A couple of the changes made in diablo 2 resurrection like stash and resolution were going to be made to diablo II before the Diablo III release, but they were scared diablo II would compete with Diablo III so they scrapped the planned changes hoping the game would die and people would go to Diablo III
Instead they lost their loyal playerbase to games like POE
as someone who tried poe… its not much better than d3…
i meant granted it doesnt have the “sets” issue
but it still has its own issues…
POE is much more of a “dont get 1 shot”
and it still has the same issues in maps that d3 has in rifts
which is " follow around the strongest player and dont even get a change to attack and try to pick up gear and keep up"
they both dont have “play your way” at the highest level
both d3 and poe are great games until endgame.
and while d2 endgame isnt the best… it DOES have “play your way”
it might be slower weaker and most expensive… but you CAN.
d3 does not have that and i dont think poe does either.
but i quite poe pretty fast after getting it
they ARE both fun games pre-postgame
the issue is unlike d3 you can “play whatever u want” and still clear the hardest content in the game
which you CAN in d2.
( im ignoring uber trist because that was a train wreck of a design and is EXTREMELY build limiting and is 1 singular standout issue that is not representative of the game as a whole)
I want Diablo 2 to be my go to but after playing the first ladder season I have been reminded of the games short commings. At least Diablo 3 respects the players time.
Dude, it’s mostly a visual remaster of a bland and buggy game. It’s not a new game, it’s just a pretty face on an old game.
Your issue is that you expected this masterpiece of a game when all along you were told it was just a visual update to the existing core game that remains untouched.
While it’s possible they intentionally hold back the potential of one game for fear of it competing with another, I don’t think they should in this case.
D2 has different class design and gameplay than D3 and presumably D4. A lot of people will try D4 regardless of whether or not you have a functioning game lobby system in D2R or stackable runes and gems or more stash space or more character slots etc.
When it comes to WoW classic, I think they do hold back QoL features (in fact the WotLK decision to gut the dungeon finder recently is a new and awful example of that). Is that because they don’t want it to compete with Shadowlands or Dragonflight or is it just because the classic team is shortsighted and just catering to one small group of players that they mistakenly believe are the largest or primary group of classic players?
When was the last time you played PoE? These days unless you are doing the very end bosses and just want to map you can pretty much play your way. If you want to do certain content then your build factors in just like D2 immunities in certain areas. The only reason you might be able to completely gimp yourself in PoE is because it has so many more options but then you could gimp yourself in D2 too. Personally I find PoE a lot more play your own way than D2. I am a long time player of both.
Sounds like something I said once… about a new coat of paint on an old car, that still only gets 12 miles to the gallon and needs its oil changed every thousand miles. D2R could be great, but they’d have to tweak the engine. That concept makes purists face melt like the bad guys in Indiana Jones looking at what comes out of the Ark of the Covenant.
Diablo 3 is a kitted out lamborghini by comparison.
This is the biggest problem with retail WoW also. They overly cater to the most try hard and competitive players who only want to spam the most difficult instances they can all day, while letting the world and the rpg elements of the game slowly die over time. It no longer feels like an open world mmorpg, but has turned into a lobby queue instance spam game. It feels like the call of duty of mmos.
Ummm. This is just a remastered version of a 20 year old game. Are you thinking this was going to be treated as a brand new Diablo game like D4? Do you see them making new things to the Warcraft remastered?
They don’t have ton of devs on this and yeah they will do tweaks etc. but seems like you are clueless and having way too much expectations of a REMASTERED game. Good lord. So yeah. Of course D4 would/should be the focus. That will be a BRAND NEW game in the Diablo series and not a remaster of a 20 yr old game.
The Lobby worked, if I remember correctly in D2/D2LOD. Also one account (game purchase) could have unlimited online chars. Botting, duping, and scams are close to the same… in my opinion.
So the OP does have a point. D2R is a pretty new face, but the mechanics have barely changed, and some major features are newly broken (lobby) or newly removed (tcp/ip), unlike the original. D2R may be trying to keep the Diablo franchise alive long enough for some of us to be tempted by D4. Good luck with that Blizz.