The more I think about D4 in its current shape, and the more I comeback to my initial post where I was saying that I feel Blizzard tries to mix things between World of Warcraft and Diablo way too much since Diablo 3 came out.
The Legendary items from D3 are still labelled “Legendary items” in D4. In D3 it was already a direct consequence of how they were spelled in World of Warcraft, and it was a straight difference of how they were named in Diablo 2.
In Diablo 2 those legendary items were called “Uniques” , and what may have seemed like a small difference suddenly appears as a major change because it was just the start of some bigger ones that ended up being a direct influence of what the current World of Warcraft game is.
This is where I come back, once again, to my initial point, where I think the biggest issue the Diablo license has to face as a whole is the current generation of developers who seem to be deeply rooted and influenced by World of Warcraft and its success.
And the whole philosophy in the current development of Diablo IV tend to say the same. The way they want to make it more like a “MMO” rather than a true Hack’n’Slash game such as how Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 or Path of Exile are.
When they announce an “open world”, “World Bosses” with dozen of players involved in the combat at the same time, and so on,
It’s weird because they claim having a will to come back to the roots of the series but in another hand they don’t seem to know what those roots are. In a way it may be understandable as Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 were both made by developers which are no longer in the Blizzard company (as far as I know).
And I felt the same when I heard they have some ideas about adding some sort of “end game” content that might be tied to what “Paragons levels” are in Diablo 3.
I feel like they share the same common understanding of “end game” content they had to make Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft (post Wrath of the lich-king), which seems to be necessarily tied with an “infinite progression”.
They really need to understand that a vertical progression isn’t mandatory in any kind of hack’and’slash/aRPG games, and Noxious point it out perfectly well in his video.
And this is why we can see a bunch of people who was just too young to enjoy or to know a game like Diablo 2 at his time, or just wasn’t the kind of players to enjoy that kind of game at all, who tend to argue the biggest weakness of Diablo 2/LOD was its lack of end-game content.
And they tend to say that because they seem to see it only throught the lens of this “common understanding” of what end-game content is and should be linked to : an infinite progression and power increase.
And with all of those things in mind, it gives a huge hint of why the recent Blizzard games/extensions all seem to be made with the same philosophy, which tend to limits creativity.
It’s really sad and I hope they’ll take the best out of those feedbacks.