Eh, most of the people who harp on others for doing it… do it themselves. Someone wants to make comparisons to the game? We should welcome it.
It’s not like the one guy who used to come here all the time talking about DI and all its changes.
Either way, we’re talking about Diablo, a game series we enjoy. Just let it be. This place is a small fraction as busy as it used to be. If we start playing pseudo forum cop, trying to cherry pick rules, it’ll do nothing more than deter people and we’ll be left with the echo chamber crowd and, as you said, those same 3 threads on repeat.
I love what D3 is now, but let’s not pretend that this was the vision when they first made the game. D3 on release was a completely different game from what it is now.
As for OP:
I’ve played lots of D3 and love the game, and played just a little D4 (up to lvl 80 or so) and feeling “meh” about it so far, but D4 has way better indicators for boss attacks than D3. I’ve learned the animations of most D3 bosses, but not because there are red indicators on the ground for where the attacks will hit. Skeleton king for example doesn’t have an indicator for his walk-and-swing attack, or any of his other attacks. Same for other bosses.
While in the boss fights I did in D4, all major attacks had clear red indicators on the ground, which made it way easier to dodge already in the first fight with a new boss.
If you don’t see them properly in D4, then that might be an issue with your graphics settings.
Not my experience at all. D4 felt very smooth, as does D3. I set force-move to side mouse button (like I have in D3) first thing after opening D4, and never had that issue. Maybe you should try that as well.
It’s clear that you don’t like D4, and that’s ok. You say here that it’s because you don’t like the mechanics of D4, but the things you complain about are really same or better in D4 compared to D3. I think at least part of it is that you are used to and understand D3, while there is a bit of learning curve to start over in D4, and as you are not putting in a lot of time, it feels frustrating for you to not be as experienced in D4 as you are in D3.
The issue with d4 was that they tried to take things from d2 and listening to the loud minority whom alot of them were just d2 purists. D2 purists got used to the flaws and believe there are no flaws. D2 were too outdated and doesnt fit todays audience.
Eventually blizzard admitted it was a bad idea and scrapped alot. Not everything but the game direction changed. Since then d4 been on the right track and it only got better. D4 got pretty much all endgame content from both d2 and d3 implented in some sort of way. And as it wasnt planned from the start it needs tuning.
Yeah, D3 has changed a lot but there was always a fundament in the pacing, sound/art design, sense of humor, etc. D3 was always a wonderful world to me, even before RoS. I remember playing through the campaign over and over because it felt so well produced.
I never got that far with D4 even though I was determined on getting addicted to it. D4 just isn’t addictive enough. When I played it, I didn’t even get excited over the loot, and seeing packs of monsters made me yawn. In D3 (and D2) I can’t stop killing.
I also like pushing, I would not have played D3 for 15.000+ hours if it wasn’t for RoS and Greater Rifts, it made grouping more meaningful as well.
But from the base game, D4 feels uninspired to me. I haven’t played the expansion though, but why would I buy that when the game already is bad. With D3 I couldn’t wait to jump into the expansion, and was blown away by it.
I know that these features are why many player play but for me they are the ones that make my eyes glaze over. I tend to mostly ignore that kind of game play, instead focusing on engaging with mechanics. Basically I treat Diablo and other ARPGs as a RPG lite Top Down Dual Stick Shooter.
I don’t have time to reply to everything you have here in detail but I’ll try to address some stuff…
If you look at these boss fights, even the ones you mentioned (posted a video below), there is a clear difference in the design. Yes there are dances where you cannot avoid taking damage BUT the fight was purposely designed knowing that would be the case. On the other hand, dodge phases clearly allow you to identify and navigate around the arena to dodge them.
More importantly, the color palette, the tells, and the pacing are lend themselves to providing the player with the appropriate information and resources to engage with the fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh9DjgZjtbA
In contrast, look at this fight with A Woken Dead from the other night (sorry i could only find my own video of it)…
The boss tells are unclear, sometimes he’ll charge and I’m not exactly sure but I think that there is an unsaturated brown dust that covers the unsaturated brown floor in the area of the charge? or is that just some visual ambiance? Sometimes he will stand still and charge up some red lightning, but it’s not dangerous to stand it and nothing happens immediately after he stops charging. His bullet hell attacks seemed to come entirely without a tell but maybe they are the result of the red lightening charge. Also, which bullet hell attack is coming, sometimes its shooters, sometimes its orbs, or is it the red lightning circles? Don’t know.
The arena is at times packed with mobs in the dodge phase. More importantly, the reads on what to dodge is unclear if not just hard to read. First of all, the add and boss have incredibly low contrast with the environment. As I mentioned elsewhere, everything is a dark shade of mud (floor, walls, boss, adds). At some moments, the mud colored zombies take up nearly the entire mud colored arena, and often during a dodge challenge. Am I suppose to kill the zombies to get them out of the way? If I did, the fight would probably take an hour before i could kill the boss. They do deal damage and block movement but by my last attempts I just started ignoring them and focused on the boss instead. Eventually brute forcing my way past the zombie managed to work.
Then there is Raheir, who is ostensibly providing help during the fight running around with a mud brown dust circle, do i stand it that? What about the larger similarly themed mud brown dust circle that gets thrown out seemingly at random. Am I suppose to stand in that or run out of it, it isn’t clear. It feels like an attack to me but after several attempts I just stood in it since it didn’t kill me. What do the Skull icons mean? are they dead, dying, stunned, or taunted? Whats the white swirlies on the adds, should I be avoiding them when they are there or does that mean something else. None of this is intuitively clear, and mostly its because there is no color language or standard by which I can tell for sure.
I don’t have these problems with D3 and I think that its because the designers of D3 thought of these things in great detail when they implemented the fights. I don’t think that’s true of D4, which seems to have the trappings of an ARPG boss fight but not the same level of design maturity.
Its not network latency, it’s input failure. Its most likely like you said, auto attack rather than move command. This doesn’t happen to me as much in D3 because the mob waves are more patiently paced. D4 just throws mobs at you in huge globs and they all want to just get on top of you 24/7. I spend most of my time kiting just so that i can maneuver without a deathball of mobs cluttering the screen. In contrast, D3 seems to provide a variety of ranged and melee enemies to deal with, all spaced out and moving at a manageable pace. They aren’t all in your grill the entire fight.
I’ll have to add the Force Move control to my mouse if this is the case.
I don’t play a gogogogogo style. I’ll take my time and engage each logical group of enemy packs on their own. If anything, I’m generally kiting backwards through cleared areas. Still, it seems that D4 spawns additional mobs or has a larger agro range because it’s often the case that there are way more mobs in a pack than what is visibly on the screen. I think that’s a bad thing.
Yes but it’s manageable. It’s like 5 or 6 mobs that are fairly easy to kill or CC in some way. With my Wizard, I simply blink out of them.
Kind of my point. I think this is a result of all the “D3 is a cartoon!!1!” and “D3 isn’t grim dark enough!!1!” cries back at release. When I go back and look at D2, I don’t see what these players claim is a “darker and gritter” environment. I see the complete opposite to be honest. None the less, I think this critique gave Blizzard a complex, with D4 art aesthetic being over the top “dark”. In my opinion the game looks horrible in comparison to D3, and worse, the game design suffers as a result since they are now afraid of adding any vibrancy to the mix.
Just as an aside, I don’t really care for PoE’s art aesthetic either. I could barely get through the tutorial simply because I just didn’t enjoy it. I’m much more incline to play Torchlight 1/2,which is very stylized. That game to me is “cartoony” if any are, and it doesn’t take away from being entertained, but that’s just my opinion.
Point taken and agreed with, then. And your reasoning is spot on as well I’d wager. To me, D3 WAS “cartoony” and “not grim dark enough” but I wasn’t intending for that to be taken LITERALLY when they were making D4. Like, you look at the intro videos between D2 and D3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eAjjHq_mF0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9mUe5vHYzs
Those two videos side by side say it all. The tone, the atmosphere, the presentation, the musical score. It had rather less to do with “I can’t see” in my mind, and rather more with “is this supposed to be gothic-horror, or MCU?”
I like both of those things! But coming directly from 2, to 3, was a bit of a thematic shock.
One thing that I love especially about D3 is that it’s both possible and encouraged to gather gigantic packs of mobs. They will follow you as long as they can see you and there are tools and techniques for dragging them along.
In D2 it’s also satisfying but often not that useful. If you try to pull a pack in D4 they will teleport back to their original placement if you go too far. Laughable.
You get gear checked to see if you can survive an endurance round, simple as that. Same thing applies to Diablo 4 and you failed it because either your skills choices were not wise or your equipment was lacking. This has little to do with general design of the game but how you play it.
In Diablo 3, you won’t survive a boss fight for long when your equipment is lacking, and you dared to pick the wrong skills for the occasion. There is a reason why such challenges are made redundant by power creep in D3 because they’re tedious. That doesn’t change the fact that they exist in the game.
You may have made a mistake somewhere, or lacking a crucial affix besides cognitive checks. Can your character withstand other boss fights? Have you tested? If you keep failing other fights, perhaps design is not at fault because there are several other players who survive the odds just fine.
And I asked you if you unable to change contrast, gamma and lighting setting from video options which you seem to ignore twice by now. This is why it sounds like you are just complaining about Diablo 4 for the sake of complaining in Diablo 3 forums. Get your key binds right for force move, set visual contrast balance and you won’t get staggered attacking the additional spawns along the fight.
When you stand around the damaging effects, or indicators, you’ll get punished for that. This is just a learning phase and it shouldn’t last long; same happened a decade ago with Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 as well. Back in Diablo 1, we barely had internet for guidance and people who didn’t like “counting pixels” or “got lost” just quitted it. No harm done.
Same thing happens in Diablo 3 when you click around a monster, your character prioritizes attacking instead of moving so you work around that by binding key for force move. It sounds like you refuse to tweak your visual settings and key binds then complain about Diablo 4 here in Diablo 3 forums. Pay attention how your complaints directed at Diablo 4 only and the very thing you complain about apply for both installments in reality.
D4 has horrible color palettes and I will admit straight up, the visual clarity is a butt. Not even a GOOD butt. A stinky swamp butt with hairs and hemorrhoids. It’s total butt and jumping back to D3 makes it VERY obvious. D4 is a giant butt when it comes to aesthetics, which is ironic because they push VERY expensive - and good looking! - MTX cosmetics. Just for you to roll around in swamp-butt backgrounds all day. Though the MTX are showcased on the loading screens, I guess that’s something anyway.
Now, you can use the options to highlight your character so as to not lose yourself in the butt-drop, which helps. That is a valid point on your end, and I also echoed that to him.
But I’m wondering if the other half of the critique isn’t that the tone of the game is different from D3. It’s trying to be D2 again, thematically speaking. Which is fine, I like my goths AND my super heroes. For instance, you look at the opening cinematic from D4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH3wHY96Iv4
Very much a shift away from D3 and back to D2. But I’m wondering if, as StrangeHero said, the dev team over-corrected based on cursory surface-level research and saw a bunch of people cry “rainbows don’t belong in Diablo” so they went “well, what about mud? Mud belongs everywhere”
Too soon. The game is still in beta. Wait another 3-4 years after xpac 3. The game might be in a good state by then. At that point, buy the bundle on the Valentine’s Day sale and get the game and 3 xpacs for like $40. This is what I am waiting for.
I think at least part of it is that you are used to and understand D3, while there is a bit of learning curve to start over in D4, and as you are not putting in a lot of time, it feels frustrating for you to not be as experienced in D4 as you are in D3.