If we could convince the D4 devs to make a D2 mode called ‘classic’ and this ‘classic’ ladder would embody all the D2 qualities we enjoy. What you think those qualities should be?
‘classic’ ladder as in changes in the skill tree, itemization, and set system while keeping the engine mechanics intact. In essence, a D4 with a D2 wrapper.
D4 missed the mark on pretty much all levels
So it would need to be a completely different game
That’s what the game needed to begin with
Gameplay wise:
D4 would have been awesome with an Open class system to go along the open world
D4 would have been awesome with an Open class system to go along the open world
The environnement art looks amazing, it would have been cool to become a wanderer
Build your own class from a little bit of all existing classes in the franchise
Focus on one or multiple type of skills, the choice is yours
Like if you had a skill tree with blank slots and you decide which skill from which class goes in each
Go to skovos island to learn some Amazon skills
learn archery skills
train in javelin and spear masteries
Climb mount Arreat to train in the martial combat of the barbarians
learn their combat technique
how to strengthen they body
Visit the Vizjeri order to practice magic
learn elemental spells
amplify your affinity for fire, cold and lightning
Delve deep in the forest to encounter the druids and feel nature
learn how to summons spirit beasts and conjure earths wrath
visit the tomb of Tal Rasha where his soul is bound to the stone he was chained to while fighting against Baal
learn the art of Horadric artefacts crafting
he will teach you how to temporarily imbue your gear
Visit different cultures to improve yourself based on their different abilities that they allow to teach you after you have proven worthy after completing quests for them
but you have a limited amount of skill points, you can’t master them all. You can specialize in some, be average in all, hybrid whatever you want
the further invested in a culture you are the greater the skills become
You also get introduced to those skills through items which like Diablo 2 carry Oskill version
So you can get a bow with multishot, but only by training with the Skovos amazons you can perfect this skill
Technically there is no “born this class” in Sanctuary, everybody performs magic using mana
Diablo 1 had this kind of building liberty, classes being only limiters of how much you can do something rather than straight “you can only do these things”
Story wise:
Diablo 4 act 1:
We are 30years after the events of Reapers of soul.
The awakening of the Nephalem, sanctuary falling in a greater and greater spiral of chaos…
The heroes of D3 became certain that humanity’s survival lays with the destruction of both hell and heaven(since Imperius is hostile to humanity)
Trang-Oul, the dragon of balance can’t bear this kind of imbalance and sends you back to where it all started. Trang-Oul takes your soul and send it back to your younger non-Nephalem self to stop Baal from corrupting the worldstone.(or it could simply be him talk to your former self as a premonition through the void and time)
This is perfectly in the realm of Trang-Oul’s power
trang-Oul, the five points each holding a symbol representing one of the five elements they believe Trang-Oul to be linked to earth, air, fire, water, and time
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Trag%27Oul#cite_note-SotS-2Disclaimer:It could simply be him through the void, speaking to your former self, instructing you how to stop Baal as a Premonition dream.
You succeed, but the void being an plane exempt of time and space allows Lilith to witness and remember the reverted events and your time jump
Trang-Oul also being a Being of the void created a window in order to communicate with you, like he did with Rathma, Lilith took note and is a fast learner, she now can do similar and communicates with Rathma to plan how to summon her back
DEkard Cain is alive again and Tyrael is still an Angel
Diablo 4 act 2:
At this moment, Sanctuary just witness the destruction, terror and hatred that the events of Diablo 2 created. Lilith takes this opportunity to ask for assistance for her plan to muzzle Hell once and for all
She claims that she is doing this to protect her children, the humans of sanctuary.
We accept the offer and venture hell with her and Rathma
She manages to becomes one with the burning hells, Rathma emprison her in a soulstone and drive it into the Burning hells core… now having the control over who gets to respawn and having control over all the minions of hells.
The lesser and prime evils flee hell to not be killed and fall under the control of Lilith
They flee to sanctuary where they reek havoc
Diablo 4 act 3-4-5:
You roam sanctuary to kill all the Dark exiled
Diablo 4 expansion:
Having seen the events of the black world stone, Lilith’s plan is to do it again, but we’ll this time. She wants to reborn Tathamet, she’s a mother afterall, birthing is her perk.But this time it’s gonna be done right with the missing parts like the burning hells and the most powerful necromancer to assist the revival
Imperius tries to stop it with his army but get rektd, in the process he miraculously fall on the prison of mirror and rescue Inarius
Back to heaven Inarius is weird. Little the angels now, he’s not one of them anymore, he’s not himself, he’s not anyone. During his torture in the prison of mirrors he elaborated an idea to bring back his tortured face and how to eradicate everything and everybody that lead him there
Back in heaven Inarius takes control of the Crystal arch and tune it on himself to absorb the light&sound of the death angels energy instead of letting them reborn. This process heals him, but can’t heal his heart. It becomes addictive and he can’t stop doing it, so much that he starts killing other angels to feed on them
Inarius becomes a Super Angel, the closest thing to Anu
Lilith’s Tathamet reincarnate wants to destroy heaven but Inarius won’t allow it
In Diablo 4 we aren’t the center of attention, we are side assistance, spectators, trying to limit the destruction created by the battle of gods we witness
Diablo 4 expansion 2:
We get to face the weakened victorious god
Tyrael helps us by informing us of a very powerful Horadrim artefact, strong enough to weaken the Entity down to our level to be able to vanquish it . This artefact was created by Zoltan Kule and Jared Cain and could only be operated through their blood to prevent it from falling in the wrong hands. Dekard Cain being the descendant of Jared offers himself to do it, knowing well that at his age and being a diluted bloodline of jared, it would ultimately kill him.
We defeat the God and in Diablo fashion… we return to status quo since the death of the gods recreated the burning Hells and Heaven
Endgame application:
We even got a glimpse of it with the original item designs where there were angelic and demonic powers
Its still a full-on ARPG gameplay but with faction system for the endgame
Humanity VS Heaven VS Hell
Playing the storyline, you are face with choices that makes you choose between Lilith, Inarius or Humanity. those choices are just flavour since they all end up the same way, you die, Lilith killed you because you are with heaven, Lilith betrays you if you side with her(mistress of betrayal afterall) and she kills you just for being a human trying to stop her. Finishing the Storyline you are Reborn as an Angel through the crystal arch or a Demon through the burning hells or get revived by Rathma. This would give good replayability to the storyline by having 3 paths, give cool looks to characters and create a justified neverending endgame
Endgame applications of this choice
Fight to gain control over towns and areas. The precedent behind this could be like the existance of the pandemonium fortress. This forteresse was built to protect the worldstone from falling into enemies hand but through time it changed hands regularlaly. With Lilith’s uprising, world stone shard(giant ones) scattered all over Sanctuary are being the main target of Power Seekers. Fortresses are being built around them to protect them from falling into enemy camp
Having control of a WorldStone fortress could grant buffs to its faction members while doing quests in surrounding areas. Players could contribute to the fortress’s power by financing it with ressources, making the guarding monsters stronger, creating a natural ressource sink for the game.
They already said they wanted to make it a Massive open world, this would take full benefit of it. There would obviously still be normal dungeon crawling, you could play the game without even caring about this mechanic. The only difference would be that Those fortress grant Shrine like buffs to allies on a certain radius on the map, its basically a Tug-o-war for faction buffs
Its still a traditional “Clear dungeons get loot” arpg, but its just a flavourful twist to it. It could also be a good pretext to have pvp ingame. The “Faction” system taken from MMOs is just there as a justification for the endgame repetitive grind, it turns the players into the “Eternal Conflict” mode
A faction conquers a Stronghold after X consecutive victories
Victories are:
- Pvp 4of7 duels
- stronghold assault: players run what is exactly like a dungeon, so it’s pvm. Attack players face the defending forces of the stronghold while defending players face the offence monsters, pushing them back
Ie: Heaven tries to siege a Hell conquered stronghold. Heaven players face demons and undead while hell players face angels, archangels and other Heavenly creatures
It just gives a lore/thematic reason as to why you would endlessly grind dungeons, because the other side is also doing this to get stronger…
https://youtu.be/IBAKjviBElo?t=249even Tyrael talks about the hero choosing a side
I got it for free and I don’t play it…
Im afraid D4 is well past the point where it can be saved or make me spend any money now. It just doesnt have the feel and the atmosphere that D1/D2 had and the itemization is probably the worst i have ever seen in any ARPG.
There are so many issues in that game that i dont even know where to begin, the game is broken from the core and beyond repair, you would have to start from scratch with most of its systems
It’s just not a Diablo game in spirit. And that’s why I don’t care what kind of updates they add to the game. It will never be a Diablo game. These modern devs just completely converted the game into something else, and they don’t even realize that because they don’t actually play Diablo or enjoy it.
Take a look at this item name:
Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander
They actually believe this naming convention can fit in a Diablo game. These guys are talentless hacks.
Exactly. Just what i said long time ago, its not the same game they just abused the name to make people buy it. The game is not even worthy of the name and legacy of its predecessors its just a hollow shell, a ghost of what was once the greatest game of its time. I quit and uninstalled the game before season 1 even started and never played it since, to me it was just a 100$ scam and none of the updates they have made so far have changed my mind in any way cause the current itemization and gameplay cant be fixed without a complete rework.
They say they listen to their community but still they try to convince us that the crap they made is the best ever, but in reality they just want u to play it “their way”
Yup, I just find it funny how Diablo went from cartoony WoW graphics in D3, to “dark graphics” in D4, and their modern playerbase just mindlessly plays it as if that’s a normal thing to happen to a game.
Asmongold, Rax, Wujido, DM. None of these guys question that, and they sure didn’t ask for that. Yet they act like D4 is some great game worthy of redemption.
Blizzard is still using Diablo 2 players to hype up their crypto-scam worthy products.
what would it take me to buy D4?
Blizzard would need to show they value the consumer
they would need to give us back the chat functionality we had in LOD.
which included:
offline block list and unlimited amount of mutes
message filtering where we can add any string to make it auto hide that message
and the actually ban the extremely obvious spam bots once they are reported.
let us make and moderate our own chat channels
and restore /f m functionality for freinds currently logged into d2:R
all of which LOD has.
thats it, thats all it would take.
show me you are willing to put he bare minimum amount of effort into keeping the game in a functional multiplayer state
I agree to all of this except im not gonna spend any more money on D4, that game is just not Diablo its a completely different game
I’ll pick it up when it’s in the digital bargain bin for around $5.
So probably never.
Dont waste the 5$, they are better spend on some of the other cheap sh… just leave it in the bin
I’m interested in playing through the storyline. That’d be worth burning $5.
If someone is holding a gun on my head and forces me to buy it, then I would.
What would get you to buy/play Diablo 4?
These are the bare minimum requirements. D3 Fool me once, shame on you. D2R Fool me twice, shame on me. They got me twice. Now it will take some work to make me give this company any money for any product ever again. If conditions are satisfied, I’ll buy D4 and play through the story mode once before uninstalling it forever.
they would have to take the game completely offline. go back to the drawing board.
make it EVEN darker. even gloomier. not that fake gloom. it’s just a color pallet. (an awful one i might add)
they would have to tone down dmg, who needs to do 20 billion damage? why? the first weapons in the game don’t need to do 100s of dmg either. everything just scales so ridiculously in new games.
also monster scaling… LOL how dumb is that?
i don’t even know, maybe put DIABLO as a boss. maybe?
Agreed. Most of the environments in the game look like they’re made of clay because of their muted color palette. Even Diablo 1 looks better.
PvP Arenas
Auto lvl/exping/mf
Paladin/Warior class
it’s like they used water color or something, in a video game, it’s horrendous.
Already did.
I’m having the time of my life with the current season.
That said, I never expected it to be like the classic games to begin with and I get a completely different type of fun from it compared to D2R. I’m also the more unpopular opinion here since while I like all Diablo games, I’m more inclined towards the D3, absolutely love the art direction in that one.
Funny enough, I enabled the higher contrast mode that increases the saturation and makes the game less dark and more like D3 because I just wanted to be able to see the mobs better.
It’s really hard to make Diablo 4 a Diablo 2 like experience just because the skeleton of the game is so different. But, I think the best way to do it would be to introduce an NPC that gives you a trade currency that you can turn items into. But only items that people would actually want. Things that would actually sell for something on something like JSP.
So this NPC gives you a currency that you can then use to buy other items from players on an in-game listing system. Keep gold out of it. Such a system would eliminate the need for smart loot as well, which would help the item hunt, and alting experience.
Of course to make all of this work they would need to redo their system of itemization. They’re on the right track now but are still eons away from something that could simulate D2.
In which case I would hire CharlesJT, from this forum, to consult.
But hey, if the sky’s the limit, I would just copy and paste the entire Diablo 2 itemization, including runes and runewords, skill tree, and passive points. Put that into Diablo 4’s engine and it would be game of the year. Then just slowly build off of it and the franchise is completely revitalized.
Of course, then you need to add ways to farm like D2. Basically put pindleskin type mobs in every cellar. With the ability to drop any item in the game. With some of them having more proclivities drop runes, like Travinval farming, for instance.
Get rid of farming organs. Just let people repeat farming the boss over and over again. Just put them in a dungeon at the halfway point. This is where nightmare dungeons might shine because you can change and randomize how difficult the route is to the boss is every time. Just make sure the boss is at the halfway point and not the full nightmare dungeon. No more pedestals and boxes. Let people just exit out the dungeon and reset it if they want to see if they can get an easier version of it on the next one (like dropping a baal run if it’s dolls and souls). Change drop rates so they are appropriately rare on spammable bosses like that, of course.
Make a custom game list for people to create specific games for specific purposes.