D4: What is content. A case study of overuse term

General Discussion
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My local library has a lot of book, also a section of board games & game night every month, also collection of DVDs etc.
The library however remain the same size over time. The library can claim it has a lot of contents, which is a lot of books to read, & board games to play, movies to watch.

A theme park like disney or Universal can also claim to have a lot of contents, by that they have more areas with entertainment like rides, playgrounds, shows, or new stuff that replace old ones.
Both can claim lots of contents, but are vastly different.

So what exactly is my point then? The point is not all contents are the same. Simply having more isn’t always better. The type and quality of content matters.

I bought this up because content is a word keep throwing around, especially by PoE hardcorers, often as way to dismiss D4. I played 1500 hours of PoE (base to my steam account tracking) so I am not some hater or noob about the game.

But it is so overuse & make it sound far more impressive than it actually is.

Contents like new region to explored, & quests, rewards from these new contents, are not the same as, now we have 5 new uniques, and a mini game with a mini boss.

Don’t get me wrong, having new uniques and mini game are very nice, or new game mode. They are however not the same as new region, the same way, a new book or boardgame in library is not same as a new jurassic area of a theme park.

The problem using contents as argument for games like POE is the contents are the first type. I feel improvement, add on, expansion of features (more ways to craft, more items type, more mini games), are better discription.

D4 at launch will have MORE contents, as in the amount of real estate, ie outerwords, dungeans, towns than any arpg, and by a distance. What D4 lack in contents, are the amount of variety in activates to do, within these gameworld contents, and amount/varieties of loot like numbers of uniques.

Both types of contents (bigger gameworld, quests), vs (more game modes, loot, crafting) are important & I want an arpg to have both!!!
PoE did the latter well, maybe too much that create bloat, while pretty bad in world building. The world is pretty stagnated.

D4 out of the gate will have a strong foundation in gameworld content, & we still have more than 1/2 of santuary not unlocked at launched!
Post launch I expect more gamemodes, loot crafts etc will be added, on top of expanding also the game world to hopefully all of Santuary.

If the D4 team do not screw up, this will be one of the greatest game of all time let alone arpg.

1 Like
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Diablo historically is very raw out the gate and gets updated to versions people look back fondly of over time.

Diablo 2 was not pretty at launch, certainly not the glory days of 1.09 that everyone looks back on positively.

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I do agree here, It seems like the game is just tree of whispers bounty box reward spam for easy legendaries, and keystone dungeon pushing (basically keys in wow) infinitely.

The difficulty of everything else and the base world seem to be very easy at all difficulties.
Begginers should be able to complete the story, but not go to torment easily.

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That’s nice. The library around here used to do that but ceased the program after the 10000th theft/non-return. In most cases, it was “OK” in that it didn’t cost them much money, relying on donations and such but for some, the books and other things lost were more valuable or did cost them a little something. This is why they now pretty much only allow check out of dime-a-dozen paperbacks and virtually everything else is a “reference book” that must stay on site. And, they don’t touch game stuff at all.

5

Thats sad. These thieves spoil for others. When I was a kid, I like to visit the library to borrow 3D animation/programming books as they cost too much for me. I will then write all the info, & file them, since I need to eventually return the books.

These days, you have so much resource on internet, books are barely needed, but in the 2000s, it was another thing.

I still keep the love for writing notes & file them. I love learning. I just picked up Blender last week, (after giving up on Autodesk Maya which I learned as kid ffom books. Solo Artists & Indies are screwed by them), & already has multiple pages of learning stuff.

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This is what I see. You need to build the foundation of the house, before you start putting things inside the house.

In D4 we already have a stong foundation. Our house is done. We can improve the garden, add a winter garden later, but the foundation is done. From launch onwards, we can focus on adding stuff to the “house”, the crafting, charms, runewords, battle arena etc.

For me, no arpg has even make me feel we are in a believeable fantasy world. The places are not join, & you only visit very small areas retrictive areas. In end gamne, they just give up, & just portal you in and out of game instance. taking away fantasy of a believeable game world.

I want to immerse in the game world, as much as fighting mobs & getting loots.
Lost ark probbaly come closest, if you regard it as arpg.

Contents, in form of more regions to visit, is as import to me if not more, then moer uniques, more loot typle & game mechanics.

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So far the open world hasn’t really impressed me since it largely feels like it’s not really adding much to the game beyond the novelty of having a large game world(and frankly, I’ve seen larger so even that’s not terribly impressive).

You’ll have things like world event that seem like they’re pretty much just random events from Diablo 3 that didn’t need an open world, and other features like mounts and strongholds seem to largely exist to mitigate the size of the open world.

It being a shared open world could have been something but they also don’t want it to feel like a MMO so they’re pretty much undermining any benefit of the world being shared.

The strongest point of Diablo 4 right now looks like it’s going to be combat. It looks like it’s built off Diablo 3’s combat which is a very good foundation even if there are a handful of things built on top of that I don’t like in D3(that hopefully don’t find their way into Diablo 4).

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That depends on how much one value an immersive game world.

If you look at PoE, or D3, you are basically going from a portal in town or your hideout then back to your town or hideout. There is no immersive factor. Some people I guess do not care, but I do, & I think I am not alone.
Its wonderful you can walk from a swamp region of a map to a desert before climbing up a snowy moutain, & yo can move forward, backwards, & sides. As oppose to a loadscreen between region., & game areas are connected corridors.

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Diablo 4 is going to have waypoints and strongholds are supposed to unlock even more. It seems like it’s going to be a lot like WoW where there is a big world and it was cool to see it at first, but then it quickly turned into 99.99% of the playerbase just skipping past it.

In my opinion if you want an open world to feel immersive you need to get rid of a lot of modern day QoL features and make the open world a fundamental part of the core gameplay loop, and doing that is going to piss some people off because they just wanted to spin to win on their barbarian in a dungeon.

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I am not content with content, not, am I.

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Content as defined to us in RPGs consists of occupations and past the actual content of an RPG.

The path in an RPG is the goal and this must be hard, rocky and very tedious. RPG just… Development of the character in a very slowly opening world, with a nice story and long gameplay to connect with the world and feel at home. Understanding the action in the moment as the content is RPG.

If you want to be through the RPG first and think that now the game begins, then you don’t mean RPG, but rather the imposed occupational therapy such as farming instances for items, world quests or raids.

In an RPG, everything is linked to the actual sense of play, or extend it like professions, which itself is already a very large and massively impacting subject area.

Items and such things, are not the core of the RPG, but lie as a ring around it, but already further away than, for example, crafting, which itself can be seen as a dense sheathing of the core of RPG.

All the rest moves further and further into the outer rings and only enliven or fill gaps, but are not the actual content.

We, however, currently in our RPGs in online, but make the outer rings of an RPG the focus.

This makes all the RPGs today feel so flat, weak and unsatisfying, because these side areas, can not fill an RPG, they can only occupy and at most with the means carrot->donkey primitive urges address, but which end in a spiral of nothing.

RPGs start at level 1, not at maximum level. If you reach the maximum level in an RPG, you’re not far from being through the game.

Sure you can continue the path to maximum level or redefine it with a little trickery, in which you consider the level of the chararacter as completed and then offer a new level path with a different progression, which if it with class progress and good story around it, would certainly work very well, but means much much more effort than constantly fill a new dungeons with bosses and the item spiral more and more to turn up until the game has become totally irrelevant.

RPGs are the way to go and that’s where you have to invest all your energy. At maximum level, you can let it go on like that in an MMORPG, for example. But the cornerstones of an RPG must not be abandoned and that is the game world and its presentation and how it is implemented.

That means that the enemy NPCs and the mobfight against them are the central element and they are not cones to clear. But real opponents in an authentic lansgamen world with friction points and weaknesses of the character, which he can improve with professions and co-op group play, thanks to synergies with each other, and thus achieve more and it is more fun.

Then we also have classes in it again, which are currently completely drowned because they have no meaning and purpose, Supporter…!

CC classes, supporter classes etc. are only powerful and meaningful and fun when the game world demands it and these sports games about items, numbers and spreadsheets in the so-called endgame absolutely do not do that at all…

These game principles are not RPGs, they are something completely different, a genre of their own, that was put on top of the RPGs and they go to ruin because of it…

Away from this blowing through the RPGs, back to playing the hard game world with lots of content over months and years per character… To really get back into a world and live there as one being of many lives, not feeling like everything is just dry straw and you are the flamethrower… that doesn’t do anything and is not an RPG.

It can be in this way, hardly immersive gameplay feelings and certainly not an intense role-playing experience in coop and differences, if the competition always demands balancing.

It’s time to turn back to real RPG…