A Tip for Diablo 4 Developers

What to do in order to make Diablo 4 great? What to do in order to make it MUCH better than Diablo 3?

It’s simple. Go online and do careful “market intelligence”. Go to forums like this one and other, like IncGamers, and plow through thousands of hate posts about Diablo 3. I have about 1k hate posts on IncGamers about D3. You will notice various patters and you will find countless thoughtful posts by very experienced Diablo fans. After you have done this you could write yourself a big “feedback report” which contain all the common complaints. This report could be used by current D4 developers as a guiding beacon to avoid making the same mistakes twice. By solving intelligently all the problems found using this method you could make D4 ten times better than D3.

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they aint do that :stuck_out_tongue:
they rather do the same stuff all over again, lower the contrast of the graphics and say “this is what long time diablo fans have been waiting for”
xD

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Its always going to be a balance between what the old fans want, new player base like and making the game sell to be profitable.

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The focus should be on solving problems with the franchise and delivering PERFECT quality. Profitability comes naturally from this kind of approach. You don’t start with profits in mind. You start with QUALITY in mind and then profits come effortlessly. Diablo series did A LOT of things well. That’s why it’s still around after so many years.

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Those 1000 hate posts will manage to hate AND love everything, being in direct opposition to one another.

Blizzard certainly should learn from their many, many mistakes. But the playerbase is not exactly one coherent group they can easily learn from. I guess Blizzard will have to think for themselves :frowning:

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Do you think game developers take hateposts serious when people just don’t like it because it’s different? They’ve been collecting intelligence on the game for sure but those “hateposts” of yours are way below down the list.

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of being on the WoW forums, it’s that the playerbase will simultaneously love and hate every aspect of the game since we’re not exactly a hive mind.

Also that reading too much into only the complaints coming out of the forums will not lead to a good game. They tried that in Cataclysm and it resulted in them flipping back and forth because people kept complaining no matter what they did, and in the end nobody was really happy and Cata is remembered as one of the worst expansions in the history of the game.

Looking at feedback is important but Blizzard also needs to pick a target audience and stick with it. Trying to make everybody happy will result in nobody being happy.

People also need to understand that Diablo is not going back to being Diablo 2 again. They might do a few things to nod back to the way the game used to be, but they’re not just going to rehash Diablo 2.

Not saying you specifically want this OP, but there are some people around here to seem to hate on everything that isn’t just rehashing Diablo 2’s ideas with updated visuals.

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I just say they should RESEARCH what people say because they can detect many repeating patterns in that hate. This allows pinpointing all the major FAILURES of D3 which then can be removed from D4. They shouldn’t blindly do what people say they should do. I will now enumerate some VERY common complaints about D3.

  1. Graphics looks like WoW, Disney, not dark/gothic enough.
  2. No strategic builds, no “permanence”.
  3. No attribute point assignment.
  4. Arcade mechanics, arcade elite affixes (lasers, bombs, mortars, etc.).
  5. Skills system with no strategic depth.
  6. To much focus on 6-piece sets.
  7. No endgame (before RoS).
  8. To much focus on endgame grind.
  9. Leveling is treated as unimportant.
  10. Killing Decard Cain. Just resurrect him. :slight_smile:
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The Diablo 4 team does seem to be taking into account our feedback so far.

It’s just considering the feedback of everybody, not specifically only the people who hated Diablo 3. Like it or not, the Diablo 3 fans are going to be considered when making Diablo 4.

and in my experience all too often the hate about Diablo 3 boils down to “this isn’t Diablo 2 and I don’t like that”. We’ve had a number of threads trying to come up with interesting ideas for how to bring back assignable attribute points, and there’s always people hating on it simply because it’s not the Diablo 2 system all over agian.

Which was a badly designed system in the first place, in my opinion.

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Ok. Just resurrect Cain and I will be happy. :wink:

Case in point :slight_smile: I’d find it silly to resurrect a death character like that. No matter if his death was handled well or not, the character is dead. Why bring it back.

I agree with most of the other points though (except 1 and 4, what is arcadey about bombs and mortars? :D)

at least, it doesnt have to do anything with a serious gothic style RPG

Cain is an ICON of Diablo. Everybody knows him and everybody loves him. Don’t ask why resurrect him. Ask why a random butterfly witch killed him.

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he was an old, weak man
a random fallen could have killed him

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Cain was a VIP. VIPs have an escort. Like YOU. :wink:

He was like 175 years old and was slain by butterflies. It was his time. Let him go.

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How many times did YOU die in D3? How many times were you resurrected? Don’t you think that Cain deserves it just ONE time? :wink:

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Agreed. Even if he didn’t get killed in D3, he will died of old ages in D4 as the plot took place more than a decade after D3 story.

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Then resurrect him YOUNGER, so that we may have him again in… Diablo 5.

As much as I liked Cain and as much as I think they did his death badly, he’s dead and gone.

If they can just resurrect people whenever they die, death looses meaning in terms of the story(and even if D3’s story wasn’t great, that’s not really an excuse to just give up on it entirely).

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