Diablo 4 from hopeful to worried

General Discussion
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so the early d4 videos i had watched made me hopeful that we could get dark terrifying and gore combat like we did in d2. fast paced exciting and when you could teleport / open a door and BOOM that huge pack of champion or those souls would close in on you in an instant making you worry for your life making blood splat everywhere in an epic scary moment…

but seeing the last rogue gameplay video with the almost cute (maggots?..thing) with tiny looking round claw that almost look like it want to hug you bad time… the very very slow combat pace … i mean you can attack fast but it seems like it’s planned for you to actually use some filler ability like oh monster please wait while i tumble dramaticaly before i shoot a line of arrows that will then be on cooldown for 1 min then ill use caltrops cause… well something has to be in between these two cooldowns?..
and those monsters attacks… does that seem like hells monsters from your nightmare would spew rotating lightning beams and bombs that warn you with a red glow before they go off? that’s what used to put me way off diablo 3…

if im going to feel emotionally invested in a game again… i have to feel like i am realisticly put in a fantasy setting… ie: monsters from hell if i was imagining them they would be scary with dangerous looking spikes and firey eyes and they would be big and fast and could arrive anytime and surprise me. they would look nasty and tough and tormented.

and if i was fighting… i wouldn’t have “down times when i just run around a demon” id be scared and want to bash at the thing as quick as i can with all powers available…

if this is to be up to d2 standards… it has to let me feel these emotions not warn me 5 seconds in advance that if i don’t move i might get killed by a bouncy sheep looking maggot that throws bubble gum… and im fine with the maggot idea but cmon it has to look slimmy diagusting and showing intent only a mere second before it’s aiming for your throat… not like a teddy bear with pincers…

d4 has to make us able to tailor our characters to become deadly demon killing machines custom made for us and then pit us against some meat army from hell with some occasional high rank beast that make you want to sit straight and on the tip of your chair cause it just got real…

so ill say this at last… i really hope what i have seen in this last video is gonna be reworked cause if not i guess d2 remastered will be the only thing ill be waiting for game wise and it literally breaks my gamer heart. add drama and tears here xD

anyways i might be getting too old and maybe I’m just not getting used to what current public love in games…maybe it’s me that’s wrong but i had to give my bit of feelings to my favorite game of all times in hope it reach for those currently working on what could be a wonderful game if only…

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I am glad that you got all of that off of your chest. I can go for a walk now and enjoy the day.

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I feel you!
I fear fixing the gameplay will be a make it or break it scenario for me and I bet a lot of casual players will be put off by that same thing.

If you want change, what you can do is weigh in on the topics that cover this point here on the forum and in the process flesh out your opinions even more in the process.
In the topic i linked you will find a well fleshed out opinion on gameplay that you can start to ponder and compare with.

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Music can help to reach new emotional levels. Ive said its what this series needs to keep old veterans on board. Just add Beat and kids are on fire again. Add a few Skull and Dragons to UI, might help too. Photomode as loading screens, you and iconic Diablo monsters in one picture.

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And one of the reasons you could run around monsters in D3 was lack of hit recovery which in d2 is really only avoidable if you play a solved meta build and /or use battle order runeword to get your hp buffed up above the trigger threshold which is a percentage of your health 12 percent.

It not the whole picture at all but that is one core reason d3’s combat is lacking.

other factors of many include things like open maps, doors monsters cant open, how your char hops/doesnt run and relys on movement skills on cooldown, which is always going to be full when it’s up unrelated to your attacks or how much you attack, lack of on death like frost nova aoe that freezes you, lack of spike damage outside of greater rifts, and again lack of losing control via hit recovery. other things too, lack of running out of arrows or quanitity which would make you vulnerable, lack of death penalties so you don’t want to die, lack of monsters having speed that swarm you, lack of maps that have sharp corners or stairways or things to get jammed on and so much more.

the whole d3 system is setup to let you just ‘smoothly’ (which is not a good thing when its way too much of it) walk around, movement skill, search for elite pack and onto the next. very little challenges you in this system, which literally is the core of the game combat, along w rare loot.

yes in greater rifts challenge is there but that’s different its also not as much as d2 when you aren’t playing an op meta build. the challenge in gr is avoiding 1 shots and sticking in group play, or a very slow moving solo gr build also avoiding 1 shots and kiting.

D3 dropped the ball on combat outside of its group play endgame. D4 is not understanding what d2 did so well at. Just try it out, if the game sucks and is just like d3 well, move on. we cant make d4 the right way the devs already solidified the game’s core, its over with, they aren’t going to overhaul the core level things they already did which we can see is very diablo 3 like. sure they can change skill percents and things like that but not core stuff.

accept d4 isn’t what most of us want it to be, not here on the polarized forums i mean in general diablo ppl what we all want in the world. Try it out, if its bull, buy switch and play those games on the couch or other good pc games from the era when pc games came with all game long challenge not just endgame challenge to rope in new players.

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If you want D2, go play D2 while you wait for D2R…

This is D4.

#dealwithit

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Yes and this whole situation would be remedied if the devs handled it with the ‘change’ they promised in 2019.

  1. Dont just talk to streamers, like they did with llama and not us / twitter / reddit / youtube / whatever else here?

  2. State the reasons. Dont hide like they did. Dont say "hey, we got a / more than one reason. No need to say what they actaully are bc that would be transparency. ‘we didnt like it’ means zero. why? Why is all that matters so we can see if it’s sound reasons or not.

The fact they did not state why is why there’s all this talk and questioning.
We are stripped of something good without a reason why.
Yes hit recovery is good, bc without it, use examples if you reply to this one they are mandatory, how do you die in d2 w/o hit stun and how often of a players death count are non hit recovery related deaths? I know, its VERY hard to answer this once bc hit stun is so important. It make you gear btw, lame or not, to over health it. thats not a bad thing thats learning how to gear a game, games are about learning things not just killing and not thinking (think normal rifts in D3).

So, you may hate hit recovery, but without examples as to why it was bad for D2, and/or why dying is bad in d2, and always living is good gaming, not being challenged is good gaming, your hate on hit recovery needs examples supporting your claims. They are very bold.

So im opening it up to you i have a humungous thread about hit recovery or reply here both are talking about (mine directly this thread indirectly) why d2’s hit recovery was a major feature of it’s combat and why d3’s combat is lacking bc it didnt have it.

You can use as many examples as you’d like they are hard to find.
If you could list 2 really good reasons hit recovery is bad for diablo, and how d3 did it better, that be a great start to this debate. 2 is a lot less than 10 or so.

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im not worried the slightest, i feel the game will be better off if people like you stay away from it. game is shaping up to be really good and it does not need this negativity yet, and your feedback is lacking.

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Don’t be emotionally invested in the game just play it because it’s fun. If it’s not fun don’t play it. Just keep it simple mad. This isn’t rocket medicine.

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Stripped of something good, then says hit recovery and no reason. One, we weren’t stripped of it. The game hasn’t released so we have gotten nothing to be stripped of. Two, they said the played around with it and didn’t like it. That’s reason enough.

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Beef, “didnt like it” is not a detailed reason to know why.
hit recovery is something good, my reasons are in my gigantic thread we’ve been talking for 4 days. No i dont have the energy to type all that out here in a post it would take 2 hours. to summarize sure, but i referenced my thread to that person which is leading to where they could find an example.

again
we did not like it is a reason not a detailed reason or anything to go off of.
so, effectively its not a reason for learning why something was done.

Why dont you like this?
“i dont like it”
Why tho?
“i dont like it”

There’s no why. why is what we are seeking to learn.

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We don’t need a detailed reason.

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They don’t need one. “We tried it and didn’t like it.” is all the reason they need. it’s their game. They don’t need to run every design decision through us. They don’t need to tell us anything at all.

One of the reasons Blizzard is so anti communication is exactly this. They mention something they are thinking of doing and the forums take it as an iron clad promise something is happening and through a fit when it isn’t implemented. Then they run to the forums screaming about how “Blizzard lied.”

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This stuff reminds me of my daughter when she was a toddler and was told no to that candy she “needed”. No she wanted it. It’s sad that adults still confuse the two.

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It’s just the alpha version. As for slow combat, D3 doesn’t give that vibe when playing on low difficulties either. Slow movement? Crucial for upping the stakes and threatening your position. I have hope. They learned a ton from previous games to create an engaging experience, just I won’t be buying that most likely so I don’t exactly care if they ruin the series or make it the best there is.

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Sure i could of said wanted and do retroactively mean that.

I thought of that word swap after the fact as well was replying to above to say that same thought.

The question then is
is it wrong to want a reason more than “no”
is it?

I dont think so, i feel its like, totally rational to be like why?
Maybe some insanely well read philosopher or sage could come into the forums and answer this life question.

Is it wrong to want a why when told no?
You have any thoughts beef, or above poster, or should i ask the sages ?
And, isn’t it not transparent to not explain things in detail / only tell a streamer something? I mean that’s just bad business.

Telling us why when they promised transparency in 2019?
I mean you are acting like wanting transparency and why is wrong on a gaming forum. Just be like yea i get it we want to have our opinions heard on a gaming forum or talk about it with other gamers and known why they think these things helps us do that / allows us to.

instead of the angle you have of “no, you are wrong, nothign about what you said is anything near right”.

I think the abrasiveness is too much so im checking out big guy.
Also i work ft nothing implied by that but it is work time for me so hit u up later.
No offense meant by that.

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No, and don’t misunderstand my attempt at correcting your choice of words. You can want all you want. It’s natural to want to know why things are done. I myself would like to know what happend and why the felt it wasn’t fun/working.

But I don’t need to know, nor do I care enough to demand answers to these things. As far as I’m concerned, what ever direction they choose to go in is their right. If I don’t like the overall direction I won’t buy. If I do I’ll buy. If the game is fun I’ll play it. If not, I’ll stop. It’s not that important to know why IMO, just that they did.

As for transparency, you got it. They never had to mention they were playing around with hitstun/recovery, but they did.

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We were given a reason why, and in your thread plenty of people have explained why constantly being CC’d isn’t fun.

Also streamers are generally a valid way of getting information to us in 2021. I don’t even watch Twitch and with events like Blizzcon you can still find summaries of everything they talked about online if you just want the info dump.

Like it or not, streamers and YouTubers are part of gaming now and part of how developers interact with us because of the number of people they can reach through them.

As for the transparency thing in general, they post quarterly updates and have changed things as a direct result of feedback like ADA powers, uniques, and attributes returning.

Sure they don’t do everything we ask for, but that was never a realistic expectation.

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You call “not feeling right” a reason.
Just wow.

Yeah, as many explained why casual repetitive arcadey-combat of D3 isnt fun either.
I know this is just a pre-alpha but from everything we have seen they are just using D3 as a base.
If they dont improve upon similar to D2 mechanics and just use D3 mechanics as a base count me and many already out of D4.
I have read in many youtube videos already of people disliking the idea of scrapping Hit Recovery.
You can keep alienating the franchise even more when they are releasing D2R to get people accustomed to it before releasing D4.
At this moment, D2R is the only redemption Blizzard has regarding how its reputation has gone to the ground in the last years.

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What do you want, an essay on why constantly not being able to control your character isn’t fun?

People explained why it’s not fun. This isn’t some big secret we’re all keeping from you guys.

You guys just don’t like the reason given.

That’s nice. I’ve never once said they should make Diablo 4 combat just like Diablo 3.

So I don’t really care that you don’t like Diablo 3 combat. It’s not relevant to any points I’ve been trying to make about hit recovery.

They’re still changing a bunch of stuff around. Saying it’s like Diablo 3 feels like saying Diablo 3 is like Diablo 2 because they’re both isometric games where you fight against hordes of monsters.

They’ve said they want to get away from numbers inflated into the billions which everything we’ve seen suggests they have even if they didn’t return it to exactly Diablo 2 numbers. We’ve got more in-depth character building where you can’t unlock everything. We have builds available for characters that get away from a reliance on cooldowns. We have attribute points back. Spells in the game aren’t all tied to weapon damage.

but of course if you thought Diablo 4 was just going to pretend Diablo 3 didn’t happen, you were always going to be disappointed.

They’re not and never were going to just make Diablo 4 into a rehashed Diablo 2.

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