D4 is a buggy mess. 2 months? no way in hell

[Steve-6849]

@Daimos-21955

D4 is not an “MMO”. It’s an OPEN WORLD game.

Whats the difference?
How does it work that an MMO isn’t an open world

[Shadout-2849]

@Daimos-21955

D4 is not an “MMO”. It’s an OPEN WORLD game.

It being Open World is completely fine. Haven’t seen a single complaint about that tbh.
It being a required Shared World, not so much.

[Daimos-21955]

You seem to understand “open world” literally: that it’s a world which is open. That’s not what it means in game design jargon. “Open World” means that various world design patterns are used and that the game progression is non-linear. An “MMO” uses different design patterns and principles. For ex. in an MMO your character progression is MUCH slower, there are no “seasons”, there is often “tab targeting”, people often play in parties, you fight less mobs at once, fighting a single mob takes much longer, loot often doesn’t have random affixes, you are expected to play the same toon for years, the main control scheme is often WASD + TPP, etc. The list of differences is VERY long.

[Steve-6849]

@Daimos-21955

For ex. in an MMO your character progression is MUCH slower, there are no “seasons”, there is often “tab targeting”, people often play in parties, you fight less mobs at once, fighting a single mob takes much longer, loot often doesn’t have random affixes, you are expected to play the same toon for years, the main control scheme is often WASD + TPP, etc. The list of differences is VERY long.

that in no way explains how an MMO isn’t an open world, from what I’ve seen of WoW you can literally go anywhere you want just like open world

[Daimos-21955]

Dude, an MMO IS an open world, but an Open World game is often NOT an MMO. People call D4 an MMO, because it’s an Open World game.

[Taril-2855]

@Steve-6849

How does it work that an MMO isn’t an open world

There’s plenty of hub based MMO’s out there.

Whereby people sit around in a shared hub and then load into instanced “Mission” areas.

These are not open world.

@Daimos-21955

For ex. in an MMO your character progression is MUCH slower, there are no “seasons”, there is often “tab targeting”, people often play in parties, you fight less mobs at once, fighting a single mob takes much longer, loot often doesn’t have random affixes, you are expected to play the same toon for years, the main control scheme is often WASD + TPP, etc. The list of differences is VERY long.

None of those are indicative to an MMO.

There’s tons of MMO’s which have literally none of those features…

The only defining point of an MMO is that there are many people playing in a single instance of a game. With “Many” being more than your average 10-32 person multiplayer lobby.

Hence the title “Massively Multiplayer Online”…

[Daimos-21955]

Assuming that your reasoning is right then a pure text mode MUD game would also be an MMO. Notice that we have TWO TERMS: MMO and MUD. If more than 32 players is not a “lobby game”, so it seems that a 64 player game world you would classify as an MMO, which is clearly wrong.

[Taril-2855]

@Daimos-21955

If more than 32 players is not a “lobby game”, so it seems that a 64 player game world you would classify as an MMO

I never said that I would classify a 64 player game world as an MMO. I simply stated that 10-32 players is an average multiplayer lobby.

There are of course, multi-player games that go to 64 or even 100 player lobbies. But the average is 10-32.

Not that my personal take on what would classify as an MMO has any bearing on what DOES get classified as an MMO.

I’ve seen games that only have up to 50 people in a single hub world and instanced missions of 1-4 players only, still have the MMO title.

Publishers are often fairly loose with such terminology… But it is what it is. If that is how such terms are used, then that is what such terms define as is the nature of language.

It happens a lot these days…

MMO’s that aren’t particularly Massive.

ARPG’s that are not RPG’s and/or don’t have notable amounts of Action.

Roguelikes that aren’t like Rogue (The more appropriate term for perma-death games that don’t use ASCII art is Rogue-lite)

RTS’s that aren’t Real Time…

[Saidosha-1136]

Not that it really matters, but MUDs were the OG MMOs. Not having graphics in the traditional sense still didn’t mean they weren’t words where multiple people could congregate for the same objectives, or ideally be able to do meaningful things on their own. They never saw the numbers of today’s games, but PC market penetration was also a different beast pre-Everquest or maybe Runescape if that was your thing. The whole “massively” angle is a bit of a misnomer when you analyze server/party structure where after a certain point other player numbers either don’t matter or are hindering your progress because something wasn’t accounted for.

• Someone that used to code for that stuff.

[Daimos-21955]

What I’m trying to convey here is this:

1. D4 is NOT an MMO. It’s an Open World game and that makes a BIG difference in design.
2. Different game genres are collections of design patterns. A typical MMO is so different from a typical MUD, that they belong to different genres.
3. Game genre names are labels for collections of common design patterns. Thus it follows that D4 is not an MMO while it definitely is an Open World game. D4 uses much more Open World design patterns than MMO patterns.

[Hobbes-21472]

Diablo 4 is an MMO, just think of how many times you had to walk minutes to the next part of your RPG loop (loot → improve character → kill mobs). If Diablo 4 was an ARPG there would be no need for mounts.