Cool stuff for D4

General Discussion
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Some ideas of cool stuff for D4 (maybe too weird or tangential, depending on the “right” direction for D4), and miscellaneous thoughts:

  • “The Greater Rift”: There is a particular place that some very strong monsters really want. If players claim this spot, a portal opens and unleashes endlessly-more-difficult waves until the monsters retake it.
  • Wandering monster packs, and even large armies roaming about
  • Towns that come under attack and must be defended (or one particular town as a special case), or else you must wait a while (or help rebuild the town with some tradeskill?)
  • Player-controlled monsters (Play without creating a single character! You’re weak but together you are strong…)
  • “Thieves’ Guild”: The avenue by which players “go hostile” toward other players?
  • Allow PK, but there’s an emissary-guy that gives you a “diplomatic immunity”, basically a buff that condemns anyone who PKs you. (Or make players invincible, and the emissary is just an elaborate “toggle option”…if you must.)
  • Each character is running around with a different “karma”. Monsters grow more aggressive toward characters with bad karma, traps are more common too, and overall there is added trouble & misfortune.
  • In Hardcore mode, equipment loses maximum durability every time you repair it (and PKing can similarly permanently damage the equipped armor pieces that drop)
  • If you die in PvP, you must win a rematch with the same opponent or you LOSE a piece of your equipment.
  • Maybe some in-game incentives and/or honorary accolades for winning with mediocre gear or similar power-handicap (eg. a child NPC you are trying to save will flee from you unless you are wearing no helmet) instead of “best gear always”.
  • 3 stats “trifecta”: Power, Speed, and Mind(?); among other benefits, Power increases damage, Speed increases base move speed, and Mind zooms out the camera, so you will definitely want all three of these.
  • PvP zone: Blatant MOBA-style tug-of-war between two teams.
  • PvEvP zone: Monster/boss race and/or endurance-trial between two teams.
  • Paragon is fine, whatever.
  • Infinite paragon is fine? as long as it’s “isolated” to single-player (ie. gets stripped away in PvP and similar settings).
  • Time-gating a few extra bits of power (“levels 90-99”) is potentially annoying but fine.
  • Would be nice if it didn’t take hours to find the first decent challenge.
  • 2 teams send endlessly scarier monsters at eachother

ORIGINAL POST

Everything that D4 needs to please D3 players:

  • Tight, responsive controls
  • Lengthy, satisfying story
  • Practical, sensible user-interface
  • “Endgame progression”
  • Not too difficult

…is par-for-the-course, all-but-guaranteed for D4.

But D4 can be “great” and not only “decent”. That’s where D2 player input can be valuable, who desire an expanded skill-ceiling beyond WoW, D3, etc.

Blizzard already said that all of D4 will be solo-friendly. So whatever competitiveness that D4 offers will have no effect on non-competitive solo players.

Not trying to be incendiary, only saying that, better not sell D4’s legacy short for the sake of players who would enjoy it regardless (legacy or no legacy). And who knows, these casual players just might enjoy D4 all-the-more, when it has guys like Kripparian at the forefront, pushing its boundaries to the utmost.

tl;dr: No good reason that Diablo series shouldn’t be at the forefront of the ARPG domain in every possible way.

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Word of advice: don’t speak for other players. I love D3, and that isn’t a conclusive list of what I would want in D4.

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I want it to be a friggen nightmare personally. I want to die a lot because of cool and innovative boss battles.

Gives me a reason for the progression, rather than just a randomly inflated value we call GR’s

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Yeah, how could you not like something more when a guy like that is involved :S
/rant off. I’ll never understand streamer celebrity.

That would be disappointing. Difficulty is good. Blizzard once believed in Easy to learn, hard to master. I’d love them to give that a try again.

D2 input is certainly valuable, just like D3, PoE, Grim Dawn, Sacred 2 etc is. Whether D2 player input is valuable, it varies a bit more I think.

One (of many) things D4 needs to please this D1, D2, D3 player is No trading though.

Couldnt let this one pass either. Not exactly what D3 is known for :smiley:

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We would take you more seriously if you didn’t set this thread out to be a blatant trolling attempt from the get go (flagged as such), so it’s obvious you aren’t looking for any real responses.

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Yes, you really set yourself up to “go down in flames” when you profess to speak for everyone. Never works, trust me, I know from experience.

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Alright, there are certainly outliers of the D3 community with more fighting-spirit & hope for the game than I gave credit for. It was wrong to insinuate them all as “casual”.

I might have been among you, if Inferno was never nerfed. That was Diablo III’s heart & soul (infernal though it may have been), and they crushed it. I could overlook how boring Hardcore was, until that day, D3 as I knew it ceased to exist. I guess there is now “Torment” but I lost all desire, RoS was too late.

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Come on now. Five minutes spent looking around these forums will put lie to the claim that Diablo players aren’t picky :joy:

The players are passionate, and when you have so many passionate people gathered together you’re going to get equally as many passionate, differing opinions.

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Definitely needs to have difficulty!! That’s what makes HC mode more interesting, and for less bots. No account based Paragon. Ladders also make game more interesting, especially in HC. Need balance without having crappy gear polluting the loot table for all time (blackthorn’s).

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This by itself eliminates… uh… non D3 games?
so there’s that.

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I can see where D3 is the best ARPG option for many, by default.

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Let’s be real, D4 isn’t an RPG and shouldn’t be compared to ARPGs like diablo 2. It will be the same as Diablo 3, a fantasy action game.

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If we’re being real then even Diablo 1 and 2 are a mere shadow of what an actual RPG is.

The series has always been far more focused on the A and not the RPG.

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You’re probably not wrong. I can’t imagine it being hard to please any active D3 player. By tunneling D3 they have proven to not care about good itemization, lengthy loothunt, RPG elements, good storytelling etc. They just want to slay monsters in a game with a good engine and QoL features. Maybe GRs of some sort. Simply releasing D4 is likely to be enough for this crowd.

What Blizzard must aim to do is get back the millions and millions of fans that left D3 because of everything it isn’t. edit.

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Speaking for myself, I play D3 for a few reasons…

mainly because it’s Diablo, and I Love the lore. No it’s not perfect, Far from It, But it is fun in bursts, and keeps me engaged in the Universe…

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Not at all the case. Only D3 focused entirely on the action. D2 was not that way and neither was D1. Those games were about items and characters. D3 is about killing demons. It’s a huge shift. The Diablo 3 devs didn’t play Diablo 2, and didn’t know how to make a Diablo game.

They (Jay Wilson) sat down and came up with seven “Diablo design pillars”.

[quote] Did Diablo III have an official design document?
Jay Wilson: No, not really. I certainly had a PowerPoint that I put together, which described high-level pillars of the project, and was seven things that we considered to be the core of the game.

Do you remember what those were?
Jay Wilson: Those seven things were: approachable, powerful heroes, highly customizable, great item game, endlessly replayable, strong setting, and cooperative multiplayer.

We basically said these are the pillars we have to live by. Each one has a description of what they mean. And any time that we have a question about what the game should be, we just look back at those pillars. And that was our goal. That was how we set the project up.

We had some others, too, that were more [about] what we’re adding to the project. And they were more feature-based, so for example, the PvP mode was one. The bigger focus on RPG elements was one, because we wanted it to be a more story-based game, without getting in the way of the action. So there were a few more like that.[/quote]

They didn’t understand Diablo 2, they just took the buzzwords, wrote them down, and made an action game because “that sounds fun”.

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If we’re being real for real, maybe games shouldn’t be built to have this kind of nuance that keeps players engaged for years, if not D4 then no game at all, and it’s better that they don’t.

Poggers

Spellbooks in D1 were definitely “about the coolest thing ever”

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It’s worth noting I didn’t say that Diablo 2 focused entirely on the action. I said it was far more focused on it over the RPG aspects of the game.

People can go on about Diablo 1 and 2 versus Diablo 3 and they certainly did approach the genre in very different ways, but at the end of the day all 3 games are about the action. They’re about killing demons to get loot that lets you take on stronger demons.

Did Diablo 2 have more RPG focus than Diablo 3? Sure, but that’s a bar that’s so low that it’s sitting on the ground so pointing out that D2 is slightly higher than the absolute minimum isn’t exactly a huge achievement.

Even in Diablo 2 the action of killing demons was the core thing that mattered. That’s what you got all those levels and items for: Being better at killing demons for loot.

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oh yeah im actually super picky about one thing.
that is the infinite lvling , scaling difficulties.

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Not really. D2 was (is) about trading and pvp. Killing baal on hell isn’t very hard. Killing demons is a fun way to get items for trading and pvping.
D3 is a semi-failure (D3 PVE is way better than D2’s) because lacks both core aspects of D2.

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