I’d say give everyone what they want - some prefer playing mainly endgame, others not. Fine - add options for that. I’d choose to skip leveling to 40 after the first char.
Btw, this topic is here (they are looking for feedback on it):
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Can I enter the discussion for a bit? I think a lot of it depends on what I can do to level up. It is an overused example, but I will mention PoE here. 2 characters on PoE is my limit, because having to run the story every time is so boring. And even then, by the second one, I’m already speedrunning.
So, I’m all in for having to level up your characters every time and for it to take awhile, as long as there are fun activities to do so. I feel like D3 does it very well. I can run the story, run rifts, do bounties or just mess around on some zone I like. The methods aren’t balanced, but there is a variety of things I can do.
If there aren’t many activities, I agree with Skelos. Just give me a option to jump start my alts, like Borderlands 2 does.
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Sure. I’m fine with “adventure mode” as an option.
A lot of the activities you can do in end-game should be around while lvling as well. Even sounds like Blizzard is doing that for D4.
Though playing the campaign should be just as rewarding (and challenging of course) as playing free-style.
Diablo 3 really failed at that part.
Yep. That has to stay in the past.
Which is a different thing from lvling.
I want to make an observation about the skill tree approach, in part to draw out a difference I see in the development of Diablo aesthetics in relation to the feel of the character (seen in the talent/skill trees) and to give my thoughts on this.
The look of the talent tree at this point looks pretty cool graphically, and there seems to be good depth for character development. However, the whole idea of a skill or talent tree as the major place for character development has shifted substantially in the iterations of the Diablo games so I want to know where D4 is headed in this regard.
The distinction I see has part to do with the aesthetics of the skill tree, how it looks and what it does for the character, as well as what this then says about the characters themselves. To recap the franchise in this regard, Diablo (1) had no talent trees, but all characters could learn via tomes all the spells in the game, and I believe base classes had a different starting skill (warrior had repair, for instance) but these could be also learned or easily replicated on any class. Diablo 2 is the first skill tree in the franchise, and its first iteration had a clear progression of links between skills as prerequisites, progressing in tiers of 6 levels each up to level 30 with the most powerful skills. Later, skill synergies were added to boost the damage and effects of certain skills, making for arguably a more dynamic interaction of the skills with each other, even if this limited the pool of viable builds significantly. The common factor in both of these was that your character had to spend or consume something you earned to learn these things, that they might not be able to use or know them at all if you invested no points in them. Also, aesthetically, Diablo 1 and 2 retained the stone/engraved catalogue of spell selection and point investment (they also shared stat points, but that is a different issue), which means that the skill tree felt like a place where you stored your skill investment points, meaning it was something you added to your character rather than was innate to your character. The skills were native/pre-set to your character in terms of that character’s theme/archetype, but unless you chose that skill it would not define your character in any way.
In Diablo 3 the skills for a given class are all eventually unlocked as you level, along with a passive and rune system for defining the parameters of various builds. In this sense, the skills were not learned, but emerged from your character as part of their innate power as a nephalem. The point here is that in Diablo 3 the character themselves were the source of their own power, which they realized in various forms (skills, runes, passives) as they level up. In previous games, it felt more that the skills were external and had to be learned and added onto your character to define them.
Now we have Diablo 4, which seems to be adopting a skill tree model, albeit with significant changes from Diablo 2 (which had 3 separate trees or branches) and looking a bit more like the feel of something like Path of Exile in its conception (though much reduced in scope as it is for 1 class each), or even like Skyrim to some extent (the constellation skill tree things, it has been a while). While artistically it looks nice, what seems to be the case is that, once again as in Diablo 3, the skills seem to emerge from the character themselves, not as skills you learn that you add to your character. The tree is representative, as I take it, not just of your abilities you learn, but of your whole character - and this is what feels more Diablo 3 than Diablo 2 to me. This is partially due to the fact that the aesthetic look feels “alive” and organic, as if it were part of or a natural extension of your character, rather than the spell book/catalogue gothic look of Diablo 1 and 2. The spellbook or skill tree in the latter games were clearly external and additional to your character, whereas in the former the character simply is the skills, like it or not (obviously gear has a place in this as do other things).
All this to say that I know that the franchise has developed and is developing, and I know that the past is no predictor of the future in any necessary sense. But I see two visions developing for characters, and I didnt know what the real intention was here. To put it in the form of a question: are skills something which exude from the internal nature of the character, or something outside them that they must acquire and learn? It may seem a minor distinction, but the differences come down to whether or not our character is a mere person, skilled in some area so as to fulfill an archetype, who must learn skills as they grow and progress, or are they a superhuman nephalem thing that simply finds within themselves at certain character levels the skills they can use. Will characters be defined by skills and skill/build choices MOSTLY or by a pre-existing archetype that the character inevitably becomes, no matter what their build? The Diablo franchise has tried both, and I’d like to understand which one is prevailing here.
My two cents: I prefer the former option of the external skill style (where you learn a certain skill that then defines your character) but I see that the way the aesthetics are currently it feels more like World of Warcraft building than anything else: talent trees decide what sort of spec your character is, but there is usually one meta for this and nothing more. Diablo 2 did constrain somewhat the build choices into cookie cutter meta roles, but this need not be the case - perhaps synergies between skills can be a different system altogether, something you add that links skills together that otherwise might not harmonize.
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“We’re also excited by all the positive reactions we’re seeing to the art, cinematics, and the addition of open-world gameplay to the Diablo franchise”
" the addition of open-world gameplay to the Diablo franchise"
i cant talk for everyone, but at least for me “world of diablocraft 4” is the one thing that makes me not… excited for d4…
i have played arpgs that tried the exact same thing before… and it NEVER, NEVER works
The sorc’s enchant system could work, however i’m not a fan of the meteor example being shown. It reminds me a bit of D3’s runes. While some runes in Diablo 3 are creative, fun and game changing, most ended up becoming useless. I think if we can tightly “enchant” our skills in a way where we’re not losing the identity of the skill, or adding rng, we can make this work. The current meteor example is a bit meh, in my opinion, only because we’re changing our meteor from “it will hit this monster right here” to “who knows what it’ll hit, if anything?”. And to me, that isn’t an exciting change, it’s adding less skill and more rng. I don’t mind making some active abilities become passive, through the use of the enchant, but i’d rather not have random meteors. Maybe, like in Diablo 3, the meteors become small, but more spread out in an aoe. Or, maybe if you spend more resource, it’s more powerful (like in D3). Or even, you can add a channel where the meteor becomes more powerful, the longer you channel, up to 5 seconds or something. So someone has to stand in place to summon a more powerful spell, but doing so makes them more vulnerable.
I like the visual of the tree. I think we could maybe fill it in a bit more, and perhaps find ways to connect the branches together.
~~
End Game:
The big one (behind itemization, of course). What made Diablo 2’s end game so good to me? Variety. End game diablo 2 had a ton of things to do. Here’s everything I participated in :
Trading : It’s a loot game. What feels better than being able to trade your loot for better/different loot. Maybe your garbage was someone else’s treasure.
Baal/Chaos runs : Leveling. Getting to level 92+ was a big thing in Diablo 2. Getting to 95 was a job. Getting to 99 was a career. Leveling was a way to show your dedication to the game, the character, and your mastery. Of course, bots existed, but i’m thinking more for the legit player base.
Magic find : Decking your character out in magic find gear to get better loot. What’s not to love? It’s the slot machine effect. Will something good drop? Who knows. Addicting. Connected to trading, pvp, helps to make different characters.
Uber runs - Gubers were definitely a thing for leveling, but even besides that, not everyone I knew was able to do ubers effectively. It was difficult if your build wasn’t optimized. And you got a torch out of it !!! Possibility of big rewards.
Sojs sold to merchants… Uber Diablo… Anni !!! The excitement of seeing that Diablo is in your game. The hunt of trying to find him. Telling your friends to join. Big item reward.
Lastly, my favorite, the reason I played for so long - PvP: So many possible builds. So many hidden mechanics that took time and research to discover (faster hit recovery and cast rates, block %, item ranges, shift zerking, syncing hammers, namelocking, shift attacking, swapping weapons to get out of cc…) the list goes on and on. Testing your skills against other people was the ultimate way to bring everything together. You found your items, you leveled your character, you got your anni and torch, now try to beat other people.
And, after all that, if you wanted, you just made another character, or participated in the next ladder season to see just how fast you could be. In Diablo 3, greater rifts were the end game. And that would be perfectly okay, if they were stacked on top of the things that Diablo 2 offered. But they weren’t. It was just greater rifts. Yes, you could magic find and level. But item drop rates were plentiful, not enough of them were good, and eventually you didn’t care about 99% of what dropped. Pvp was non existent. Trading basically non existent.
I’d definitely take a good long look at what Diablo 2 offered, add in some greater rifts, and see what the Path team has done with new content. I know you guys can do it. Even with what Diablo 3 had to offer, I still put a lot of time into the game. The level of polish and fun Blizzard adds to games is almost unbeatable. Just take your time and keep the communication up. Sorry for the long post. Thank you for the update. Enjoy the fall and pumpkin spice!
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With how bad the Diablo 3 storyline was, yes. Hopefully DIablo 4 will have a much better storyline.
This is a fair and valid approach… but is the old system also not fair? It was stated that by the end of leveling, a character would only have enough skill points for a few of the skills to be properly leveled, and that the rest would have to earned end game through lots(and they made it seem lots and lots) of hours of play. At some point, it would be easier for some to simply start a new character of the same class to try the new build, while others could choose to go on adding one skill point at a time until they had a character where they could switch builds with the one character.
It was a new system that comprised of pieces of the old games, that made something that created choice for the player, where the only thing you needed to try a new build was time. Either on a new character or and endgame character… which the player chooses is entirely up to them.
With some of the customizations they seem to have in mind for end game dungeons, with the keys? It seems the thought was “I got this key drop that adds ‘XYZ’ to a dungeon, how can I prep my character to tackle this… different skill? different weapon?”
Now, without all skills available I have to level a new character to have access to those other skills making that fun drop useless to me because my character could not handle those modifications to the dungeon?
Maybe I am thinking about it to hard… as I said your idea is a very fair one, and if that is the way it ended up I would be just fine, but I really think this is an opportunity to try something different. Just because the all skill system was not coveted by the fans, should not mean we do not attempt other new ideas, instead of going back to an old system. Yes, it works, but I have palyed it in every other game… again, this is simply why I am sad to see the change.
I will repeat, please Blizzard, do not take respecs away or lock them behind tough content.
I’ve said it a while back, but I believe that a good compromise regarding respec is to give every character 3 free respecs. These respecs can be used without cooldown of any kind, but once they’re used up, that’s it for the free respecs.
Now in the event that a player uses up their free respecs, there could be a craftable item that players can make that’ll give them an additional respec. The unique materials needed to craft said item could drop from any monster, but they have an incredibly low droprate. However campaign bosses can drop them at a better rate (although they’ll drop only a specific one pertaining to the act).
So in short, have Diablo 4 respec system act similar to Diablo 2’s respec system.
It doesn’t matter. A lot of people don’t play Diablo games for the story. If I have to do basic leveling while playing the same static stuff over and over again for every new character I’d probably stop at third one.
Diablo is about randomness. If you want story/quests done properly, you need these to be AI-driven and new on every playthrough. Otherwise, just give me the option to skip the basic leveling process and enjoy what I came for here.
Now you want to make everyone going through the basic campaign without the leveling part? Give me a break from that…
You need something for the newcomers - in those first 20-40 hours of an aRPG the new players should learn the basics. That includes leveling, skills, stats, quests, etc. After that this basic stuff is NOT needed anymore since it’s all static content - you always end-up the tutorial with near the same stuff to be soon discarded forever. And no, we can’t give end-game items during the tutorial - the player has to earn these in the endgame zones. That perfect vendored magic gloves in D2 has to stay there.
That literal skill tree looks really awesome! Just throwing in some ideas:
-If it gets in the game, I am not sure how it relates to the Sorcerer, feels like a Druid thing.
-Now progressing on that tree from top to bottom (instead of bottom-up) would be a great analogy of descending to Hell:)
-Going a bit wilder, gameplay wise, I could even imagine 1-3 choices on that “trunk” (since it’s definitely not a branch), defining your character’s (Druid 
) flavor like:
- “Sap of Life : gives x% life steal”
- “Rooted in Hell: your attacks cause the the enemies to rot, dealing x% damage over y seconds”
I wouldn’t mind endgame specific items. Mythics, set items, even some legendaries could be for level 40 only and only found in keyed dungeons or endgame activities. Never been a fan of getting a drop that you can’t use for 5 levels. Dealing with that on a recent play through of Grim Dawn. Level 50 and have 22 items waiting for me when I hit 58 already.
I don’t think Shadout was saying that level 40 items would drop while you’re still a level 25. Only that you may find a level 25 item that would still be useful even when you get to a level 40. Of course, for that to work, it would primarily depend on how the developers handle the itemization.
What…
I directly said the opposite. That you can lvl just fine without a campaign.
There is zero reason the lvling experience should be static. Zero. Adventure mode is not static in Diablo 3. Or… it is I guess, but at least not more than Diablo 3s end-game is.
PoEs lvling is not static, it has random events, maps etc. all over the place.
Of course we can.
Same. Like 90%+ of legendaries etc. should only drop in end-game.
But it is perfectly fine to find good items before end-game too.
There was nothing wrong with stuff like SoJ in Diablo 2 being available before end-game.
Agreed, but that is just a matter of making gear drops appropriate to your lvl and monster lvls.
Indeed.
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Except you need campaign and basic leveling so newcomers don’t go play “Among Us” after 15 minutes (due to finding everything too complex in Diablo).
Yes, we can do everything of course. It’s just bad design to offer endgame reward during a tutorial.
This quarterly update looks very promising! Everything I read look’s like is going in the right direction and looks like the comunity is noticing it.
Love the talent/hability tree idea, already make’s me wanna play the game, try different builds, spend points on meaningful changes for the pasive or active skills. How carefull you’re aproching Ancestral, Demonic and angelic affixes that I personally don’t like.
And the unique system for the sorceress it’s awesome. can’t wait to see how great are the rest of the system classes that we’re yet to discover.
I was watching some gameplays of the demo and have some ideas for little details like small animations (for me everything i’ts about details), for example, when you’re using a portal to get out of a dungeon/cavern no one wants to see their character flipping his arms around like conjuring the portal and the bar that auto complete itself, I like to imagine casting a portal in D4 more like when Uther reads his book to mount in Heroes, a good distinguished animation with no bar and being capable of seeing the character walking in the portal like the treasure goblin does. And the same when he appears in the town, seeing the character walking out the portal it would be so realistic and incredible. Adding realistic touch it’s always good, like the health bars of the monsters… should be on the top of the screen (like D2) so you can take a peak of how much health this monster has but still being able to clearly appreciate the battle through my character and the monsters movements, animations, and skills. otherwise still looks like D3 when you can’t understand anything from the battle between the heatlh bars, the numbers of the damage, and the skills animations
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Is this official Strawman Wednesday or something?
Nobody ever said there should be no campaign. Quite the contrary, I said the campaign needs to be rewarding as doing adventure mode, and it needs to stay relevant even in end-game. Diablo 3 failed hard at that.
Sorry, but people who find A-RPGs too complex, might not be the players you want to cater to.
A-RPGs are not complex games. Even PoE is very easy to sit down and play initially.
Yes, the same grandma who can sit down and play Diablo 2 or 3, can also sit down and play PoE. They might not get all the game systems, but it isn’t required either.
It is however not bad design to offer end-game rewards during lvling. Which is not a tutorial.
Heck, if anything it is kinda bad game design to have tutorials. The whole game is your tutorial.
The skill tree looks nice.
I like the D4 class specific systems a lot. Something tried in D3, but not quite reached that goal. (It was still an improvement over D2).
I do wonder, if you want to reset your skilltree, is that possible or do you need to fully build up / level a new character?
I wouldn’t like the latter…
How many characters are we allowed to make? I mean in D3 it is not that much…
I like the secondary thing for sorceress. Does remind me a bit of certain legendaries in D3…
I hope all end game content / difficulties / levels are obtainable without playing insane amount of time.
Reaching gr150 solo in D3 (without seasonal buffs) takes insane amount of time…
Having to play for it, put in (much) effort is fine. But not insane amount of effort…
Putting more power in the character and less in items is good! Items should be just mods, in my opinion.
Please do not implement insane rng like primals in D3… Especially not getting the item with undesired stats…
In D3, secondary stats are rarely used, because the one reroll is needed for power.
It would be great to have a option to also reroll the secondary stats in D3. So, when implementing the itemization in D4, please ensure we can -eventually- obtain, build, create, roll or whatever the wanted stats and values on the items. At least on the hard to get ones.
A magic item should never be more powerful than a rare one. A rare one should never be more powerful than a legendary one etc. At least not by themselves.
We should be able to equip all slots with highest tier of items.
I liked it in D3 legendary much better than rare, rare better than magic and magic better than white.
While we are waiting for D4, can we perhaps get more content for D3, please?
I would gladly pay for a nice D3 expansion.
I am looking forward to more D4 news. I love your approach to share things and discuss things so early on in development.
I hope you only release it when it is truly done. Like Blizzard used to do. Yes, I can wait.
It seems you already nailed some things :).