I will try to describe my vision of how the game should be, mostly based off of my frustration with some of the features from D3 and other competitive titles in the genre. Some of these thoughts have been in my head ever since D3 came out, so I’ve had a long time distilling them. I will try to keep it short and on point.
Itemization
Loot should be diverse, hard to get, rewarding and at the same time feeding a certain sensation of progress. Make that rare drop meaningful, make us excited with a short-burst of anticipation when seeing that high ilvl base/rare/unique drop. I will try to sort my thoughts out in the form of some quick notes, expressing my own, personal vision of how loot should be.
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Diversity . Weapon types should matter and they should add a flavour to your build, with stats that could roll on certain weapon types only. Wielding different types should have both physical/visual impact as well as that implicit advantage compared to other choices. Just a simple example could be crushing blow on heavy maces, some bleeding/crippling/severing effect on two-handed swords, etc.
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Rarity . Rare drops should mean something. They should be a viable option when certain rolls allign, making them preferable to a unique in some builds. And that said, loot throughout the campaign should NOT be a placeholder gear before you hit end-game and start farming for those god-beams. Drops throughout the campaign should matter, and there should be uniques that could drop at lower levels, or as your progress, but still be viable as an end-game option.
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Scaling and tiering. Please abandon this MMO-ish approach to gear. The idea that stats and rolls scale as you level up, making you just swap that 25 lvl chest with a lvl 30 chest, just because it gives more of the same, has nothing to do with our vision of how a Diablo game should work. I am seeing people being extremely vocal about it, and I think it’s fairly reasonable. What really stopped me from playing D3 and RoS was, among many other things, the fact that you’d easily get all the sets and legendaries you could dream of. Then you’d have to search for the same item, but with perfect rolls. Then you’d search for an ancient version. Then for an ancient ancient version and so on. It makes loot a trivial chase of numbers, instead of getting excited from that one lottery ticket. You get showered with loot, only to discard 99% of it, annoyed from all this useless junk. Take a spoiled kid for an example. It has all the toys and presents in the world, but it would never again feel excited about any of it anymore. It becomes oversaturated, but hard to satisfy.
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Uniques and Sets. Uniques should NOT be all about making a specific skill do this or that. If you have a wand that makes your X-spell do Y more damage, or do something really strong, then you’d be compelled to use it if you want to play with that X-spell. It could be OK to have uniques empowering certain spells if it were more of a synergy between a certain array of items, thus making a build more diverse loot-wise. Or, if the unique modifies a utility skill, that could or could not be used, depending on your personal preference. You won’t be FORCED to use this particular item. Instead, I’d prefer things like ''all of your <type of> spells now do Y". And Y could be some bizarre, obscure effect, making you wonder how to build around it, requiring you to juggle with other rolls/stats on other gear slots or try to get that one unique that enables you to ignore a restriction or reach a certain breakpoint. Then I can choose between a variety of spells or skills, trying out what I like the most, instead of being forced to use X, although I don’t want to and X just doesn’t fit my playstyle ( or aesthetics 
) That’s what I think makes other certain games excel in that department. It’s OK to have obscure mechanics, and it’s OK ( for me, at least ) to have items that have this ‘‘what the hell is that’’ effect that would really make you wonder who would ever use it. Like something that rolls on that particular item only, with no relation to certain skills. It adds a layer of depth, and a very sub-conscious feeling that there’s more to it than meets the eye. At some later point, there comes the streamer/guide/whatever, that’s figured it out, or has made a really genius synergy with some other skill or item, and now you want to try it. Which, in turn, means you’d chase something in the future, investing more and more time into the game, ensuring the longevity of the product ( which is all we would ever want from a diablo game in the first place - an evolving, breathing, consuming world with endless possibilites ( of slaying demons, of course ) ).
I’ve seen you guys talk about sets and how you want to escape the set-meta that’s dominated over D3’s entire lifespan. That’s good. Sets were doing exactly what I described back there, forcing you to use one particular skill and setup. The only diversity that ever came was with patches that nerf this or that, making you swap it with one of the other two viable sets out there. And so on. Which is … ugghhh.
In general, uniques and sets should not force you to be a certain build. They should make it so that you could build around the skill you prefer.
But again, these should be really, really unique . Without their unique-ness being ruined by tiering. And certainly not just candy dropping behind every corner.
And it’s OK, for me, to have Boss-specific drops. Or at least increased drop chances from them.
STORY AND ATMOSPHERE
From what I’ve seen in the demo and from the panels, things are looking quite nice. I like the bleak, despondent undertone. NPCs are looking ravaged, haggard, barely surviving in that wretched world. The village from the demo is very reminiscent of the D2 act 1 zones. Dull, dead vegetation, withering trees, crumbling crypts and burnt houses. Spot on!
But I’ll give my thoughts anyway, since we haven’t seen much of the other stuff.
- Demons and Prime-evils CANNOT be chatty comic-book villains that taunt you and reveal their plans as soon as you enter the zone, only ''because I’ll devour your soul anyway", or some other nonesense like that. Horror and HELL should be about the unimaginable, the madness that torments the fragile mind of us mortals, something that cannot be fully grasped. Their motives should be alien to a human beings, yet the aftermaths of their actions could potentially unveil and progress the story. The most powerful ones ( be it bosses, mini-bosses, Lillith, etc ) operate on a completely different level of perception and exist outside the constraints of our imagination. So why should they engange in useless pratter? It should be the hero’s task to find away of stopping them. By slaying each and every one of them eventually, yes. But still …
The horror in D2 was also in the unexpected, the fear that upon entering that side-area, a pack of extra fast zombies would bash you to a pulp. You should think twice before clicking. It’s OK to have such zones or side-areas. Something that would reward your extra effort.
In-game cutscenes ( like the one with Leoric in D3, for example ), ruin the surprise from a fight. There should be oh sh*t! moments where the boss emerges from the gloom of the crypt and simply charges you as you frantically spam skills and potions.
As far as the campaign goes… I heard somewhere that the campaign could be ignored? That you could jump straight into adventure mode, or its equivalent? I don’t think that’s a good idea. D3’s campaign could be ignored, after you’ve finished it once. But you’d never really want to bother with it again, anyway. And nothing that dropped mattered there, so why would you? But I’ve NEVER felt starting a fresh char on D2 and going through the campaign a chore, or something you’d have to endure. It was an inevitable part of your journey, and stuff dropped that made it worthwhile. Also, that’s when you made your build, investing in those first levels, figuring it out and so on.
END GAME
I believe that, with a loot system done right, the end game does not need to be something groundbreaking and never-seen-before in an ARPG. In D3, it wasn’t that bad, it was the loot that you’d chase during that endgame not quite worth the engagement in the long run. But here are my quick thoughts on how it should be.
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Boss farming should be a thing.
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Endless exponential progression via GRifts became dull in D3, at least for me, really early on, since the only thing it gave back was bloated numbers. More of the same, with a percentage of an upgrade in the same area - be it stat or gear. Thus, the need for adding more torments, then more tiers of the same items all over again.
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World bosses. We haven’t got much info on those yet, but I read some concerns regarding the encounters. There will always come that time, when the population on the servers will be clustered around early and late game. I guess that there will always be enough players to group around the highest level areas/bosses. I hope there’s a way that these will scale based off of the number of players engaging in the encounter, and that it would be extremely difficult ( but doable ) to do it solo, and not a joke for a a fully-geared party.
And finally, seasons. They should, no - MUST - have some theme around them that’s not about cosmetics only. If we’re going to have an MTX store, or something like that, then seasons have to offer something else. They should add new mechanics, new items, reshuffle the deck, make new builds viable ( with those new items, not by simply nerfing or buffing existing stuff ), adding new bosses, end-game challenges, as well as making me want to engage in the campaign all over again with a fresh char. There should be a legitimately SANE reason for us to sink a few more weeks/months into the game and experience something NEW.
I will leave a few one-liners as a conclusion, stuff that’s not going to make or break the game for me, but stuff that could be reworked or improved.
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Mob flashes when you hit it. It’s kind of console-ish, a thing you’d see in a fighter game. Immersion-breaking. Please consider removing it, or at least give us an option to disable it.
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Make the UI customizable, so that more people would be satisfied. Let those who are sick of numbers floating on the screen turn that off, for example.
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A flexible trading system. There should be a way for us to help out a friend that’s just starting the game by giving him some head start with a few useful items. Mythics could be bound on equip/pickup, though, if they are that powerful, so that you don’t abuse them.
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Not sure about this, but - cross-platform play? I don’t know how that would affect things server-wise, and PvP would certainly suffer from it ( I guess controller vs mouse and keyboard is not exactly fair in an ARPG ), but it would be cool to have someone else casually grinding with me, in the same room, on the big telly.
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Paragons are not very healthy as a game-design. And have to be disabled in PvP? If they are just high numbers for showing off, let people grind them, if they will. But I’d prefer a game without them.
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Stick to the medieval, minimalistic art regarding gear and architecture. Please don’t make heavy armored chars look like inquisitors from Warhammer 40K or something.
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I really find the long names on identified stuff on the ground an eye-raking chore. Most of us that have stuck with Diablo for all those years are in our 30’s and 40’s. And we’ve spent A LOT of time on the PC. Keeping things clean on the screen is a mercy. Last Epoch has this neat option to disable expanded names, leaving only the item base name with a few dots next to it indicating how many affixes / suffixes it has.
Some last, rambling thoughts.
Surely, we would always look at D2 with nostalgia, but let’s admit it - most of that unique atmosphere and gothic horror it had instilled within us could be based on the fact that, given the technology available at that time, most of the stuff was left to the imagination ( and, bear in mind - the imagination of our younger, preadolescent selves ). That’s why a book will always be more impactful than a movie or a game - it let’s you imagine all the creepy stuff and re-live it in your head. We did not need flashy graphics to sh*t our pants when entering that abattoir with the Butcher in D1, because the imagination kicked in the moment we heard that iconic FRESH MEAT one-liner. No taunting, no cutscenes, no time to prepare for that meaty thud that one-shots you. I know stuff like that is hard to achieve nowadays, and the technology lets the game designers achieve a more vibrant, flexible world with as much realism as possible. From what I see, D4 is shaping to be a tremendously ambitious project with a lot of boxes being checked for many of us grumpy, nostalgic old-timers. For that, I could only salute you.
