Not much of a “free roam” fan myself tbh, makes games feel pointless i.e. kinda without a goal almost like
BUT, pretty sure there will be dungeons that feel “progressive” and kinda “rotate” from time to time, and/or at least add some environment hazards and/or verticality to the game on open spaces so doesn’t feel like an endless kite… 
Wow it’s really hard to imagine for a person like me when there’s that open world and then dungeon crawlers are like “uuugh nooo sun baad where my cave D:”
But I guess this game will have it for everyone xD
Yeah, my view too. Not a fan of open world games. The best of those are usually the ones that try to pretend they are not open after all.
Worse for an A-RPG seems to be the lack of randomly generated layout though. Seems like it could hurt replayability immensely.
Then of course there is the whole forced multiplayer aspect. Which makes it hard to see how they can use the overworld at all in endgame. How can you have a controlled difficulty experience, if there might be other random people around. My expectation is that the overworld will be left to die after we end the campaign. D3 style. Which is pretty damn sad.
Don’t speak for the player base, “we” certainly never empowered you to speak for us.
Pretty sure they are using a kind of “sharding” for D4. So in a way the world will be “Semi-Shared” with others. So this could still allow for different levels of difficulty to the overworld if they wanted to do that. Since they could just shard similar people together. Just like PvP if it is not level gated in different areas, then I’d assume to balance they’d shard you with people of similar levels.
World Boss encounters could be made more difficult somehow allowing for players to be placed into different instances of the game based on difficulty or something. 
Sure, but if you are doing Challenge X in the overworld, even if you are in a Torment 5 Overworld (just using D3 names for simplicity, I sure dont want that…), that difficulty goes out of the window if someone else randomly shows up and start clearing the area you were going through. Or maybe someone already cleared the area 1 minute before you showed up.
There is no control over the difficulty, and thus Blizzard cant design any real endgame content in there. Unless they make your own instance of the overworld each time you do some endgame content in it. Which would be my solution for sure. But that goes against their Forced Multiplayer design.
It’s like trying to do a Baal run in D2, where someone already killed Baal right before, or even while, you showed up, with no way to tell you aren’t alone in the game. I think I have a decent imagination when it comes to how games can work. But I dont see how that can ever work.
We already have a ton of MMOs to look at. And none of them are able to have meaningful, challenging endgame in the overworld, for the same reasons.
Yeah that is what is wrong with Diablo 3 itemization. Its a completely inefficient use of time to design affixes for every single skill - no matter what you’d probably end up recycling stuff from other skills. It overwhelms the item pool such that you end up restricting drops based on class. It would be overwhelming probably for the casual players anyway, and it wouldn’t have the depth that more serious players are looking for.
There is nothing wrong with some class specific items (not necessarily restricted to that class) that increase or alter a specific skill in a significant way. It shouldn’t be the focus. Itemization should focus really on general stats that interact with different skills and other stats in different ways. That is the itemization I want to get lost in. How can I incorporate this item into a build for my character, can I incorporate it better into another?
Except if you were doing a Baal run in D4 you wouldn’t be actively joining or having someone actively joining your game. (Though I’d assume something like a Baal run would be a Dungeon in D4, which are separate from the overworld.) The game would be technically deciding that for you in the open world. Which could mean events that appear for you/your group. Could be separated for you/your group meaning others wouldn’t be joining in and others would be phased out so that it only let you/your group do it without randoms. If they decided that type of event was something for you/your group alone and no one else. Which I’d assume something considered “endgame” in the overworld would be for the most part. But a random shrine or chest event, is not really endgame.
At least that is one possibility.
End Thoughts - They need to talk about this type of stuff more for us to know for sure. how exactly this would work for situations like you suggested “Endgame” style events/activities that don’t need other players besides yourself/your group in the overworld. Because they don’t give very clear answers/examples as to how players get phased from one another.
Agreed
This isn’t a new line from me, but I generally take the stance that content the majority can’t experience is not content worth developing. This includes items, dungeons, bosses, and so on. Balancing difficulty and rarity is the tricky part here, but in general, the harder you make something to do (on your own), the more rewarding it should be. Don’t fall into the trap of considering time sinks as true difficulty, either, or that things absolutely have to be multiplayer. A grind of 1000 times is no more meaningful than a grind of 100. No one likes failing MP events because your party are a bunch of derps, either (And you still have to run it 999 more times! Aren’t you thankful?!).
This is where I’d generally say D3 did “better” than its predecessors, but it also wasn’t without flaw. People like to crow about builds having more weight, but the truth is playing naked in D2 wasn’t going to get you anywhere for the vast majority of said builds. Which is to say gear mattered, and when you analyzed enough of those builds, you’ll start seeing a bunch of common (if not out of reach for the average player) suggestions, too. Leaving your corpse behind on a death unironically exacerbated this issue, as well, since there’s a high probably you weren’t going to stand and fight what just killed you at your best. Rather, you’d probably try to bait a few things away hoping for a clear shot on your return.
Really, if D3 clipped the wings on some of its RNG, improved crafting/customizing items, did something about the myriad garbage legendaries, and made a real push to make every class skill meaningful in some capacity for the 150 push, it’d be difficult to argue there’s much else that could be done of existing content.
I’m still not looking forward to D4 precisely because they’re watering down items in a futile dance to make every tier matter. Legendaries aren’t fun when they’re full of weak stats. You’re still going to have the BiS dilemma whether the difference is 1% or 10%. Making up that 9% is where I point back to my opening and how you don’t make everything “no human will ever find it” rare. And suddenly, when every build you conceive is actually achievable, you create far more game play than forcing players to spend forever on one hoping they don’t get bored and foster no desire to do it all over again with another.
What’s wrong with D3 itemization is that they tweaked the drops to please people with attention lifespan of a goldfish. Finding 1 legendary item should be crazy hard, similarly to D2 uniqs. In D3 they drop all round, currently. Next, the items in D3 give 99% of what the character is all about, which is not only unrealistic, but against any sort of balancing methodology for PvP systems. Items, for PvP to be good should just give a slight upper hand over some similar character build/type, not create 1000000% differences…
Diablo should not be about crazy buffs from patch to patch, nobody who logs out today and logs in in 2 years (assuming no expansion) should suddenly be the worst character around. That is what WoW is for…
Why?
Again, why?
How many usable primal do you have now? If it is easy, getting 13 usable primals for your character, follower and your alt should be super easy. 
I can buy them immediately those items if I really want it.
Good thing that D3 players don’t care about PVP. Most D3 players care more about PVE content.
That is rich for you to say this when D2 patches turn a skill that deals 300 damage at Lv20 to 70k damage in one or 2 patches cycle. 
“FiNdInG a LeGeNdArY sHoUlD bE cRaZy HaRd” just affirms my belief that the naming structure of item tiers perpetuates a hostile gameplay environment.
Something like legendary, mythic, or even epic instills a preconceived notion that whatever they’re linked to needs to be a sort of once in a lifetime experience that nobody else should ever find. Unsurprisingly, this conflicts with my earlier asserted notion that content needs to be accessible.
Mechanically, if the player is facing a failure in a build, it’s often a result of RNG not cooperating with them and providing them with the items they need. Our D2 “friends” would often try to take the opportunity to flex some “farm smarter” rhetoric by pointing out certain drops have better chances from certain sources, but something like that isn’t a knowledge you acquire simply through playing the game itself. At best, the player may speculate that once a certain item type can drop in white form, a unique version should be possible, but with how the TC system was designed, that’s often not the case. So, there’s potential a player could actually try to farm something they’ll never see if they don’t seek out outside data.
This segues into an other issue about planning and micro-management. Not everyone plays this way. You shouldn’t have to. It’s a contributing factor to why (free) respecs are so important and that creating a personal identity and connection with a character is not achieved by being restrictive, but instead by doing the opposite and giving the player the freedom to find what works best for them without forcing rerolls or unfun farm grinds in a build that doesn’t work or that they unintentionally broke.
That said, what we should probably be considering is the elimination of item tiers as has been traditionally established over time. Garbage items found at the start of the game shouldn’t have a direct combat relevancy, and I think most of us would agree with that. This should serve as a baseline concept where, as you slide up the levels, the gear drops level along with you. Items will only have 1 or 2 affixes initially, then 2-3, 3-4, and so on until a desired endgame point. And even if you find the -1 of a tier with otherwise godly rolls for you, you should have a way to fix that. And when you have a truly perfect item, you can then add a finishing touch that truly makes it yours, your own personal legend that should hold more weight than some gold text possibly referencing an NPC or event we’ll never learn much about.
Items don’t need to be virtually non-existent. The player is the rarity, the wildcard. Give everyone the proper freedom to explore their desired combinations of abilities and you get something greater than a grind for the sake of grind. And honestly, this is further why we need to abandon classes and go way deeper into initial avatar customization. The stereotypes that Barbarians have to be dumb or that Wizards need to be frail is harmful to creativity. Let the players choose their skills, not the classes.
Fair point, I didn’t think about it that way. I still think that it will cause issues in the long run though since I think they would have to up the difficulty of monsters when someone else pops in. Otherwise you just doubled your collective power. I could be wrong but it might just be doable with some balancing and number tweaking.
So that our loot game has “holy grails” ie. mythical artifacts that are “the stuff of legends”? The concept worked for D2 just fine, but then there was no pressing need to have such items in order to tackle Hell. Of course D3V changed all that, apparently for the worse as RoS upended it all. Naturally I can’t speak on how the loot hunt of D3 season 2X compares to that of D2/LoD.
Not without cheating. And in D4’s case, not without purchasing an entire Battle.net account, easily detectable and massively more prone to pitfalls compared to, connecting to some user from J2P or whatever and joining a lobby. If the chance of having to repurchase D4 isn’t enough disincentive to maintain an idealized itemization without a compromise in design, I don’t know what is.
But we can look at it pragmatically and say, realistically any game is hackable, therefore every online game that do not employ an active team to ban cheaters and play endless “cat-and-mouse” with hackers in perpetuity, sucks. Apparently the profession of “hack author” is lucrative in some sectors for those with the skill & competence, six figures and sports car I hear…fueled by this certain attitude of unwillingness to abide by the rules of fair play and the ToS. It’s just a shame that all the solo players who aren’t interested in the happenings of the wider world who just want to play an “epic” game with a substantial loot table rife with nigh-unobtainable nigh-mythical artifacts, seemingly have to get dragged into the mess with all these design compromises. Some of us want a tiger, not a declawed cat.
Though I’m open to the idea of reimagining the “legendary” item as something more commonplace that the game is going to deliver to my doorstep, and it’s only a question of “when”, not “if”. Then the items can have some truly game-changing properties, at the expense of reducing their acquisition to a mere formality, with all the excitement of getting the Master Sword in Link to the Past. I mean, sure ok.
Of course they don’t, now. But tell that to the PvP community during D3V with extensive class guides until RoS blew it all into the stratosphere, rendering all of the meta data obsolete. And brawling was never retuned for RoS in the slightest, rendering it practically unplayable “one-shot central”. I mean gee wiz, you think that might have something to do with the current lack of interest, as opposed to this constant insinuation that the framework is fundamentally unsuitable (it isn’t, it only takes effort like anything else, and not a whole lot compared to PvE either).
If the arenas at Blizzcon were as well-received as they say, all they had to do was follow through with PvP and the game would have a lot more hype to where and King in the North would have been a no-brainer, more fans and fewer morale issues affecting productivity. I mean for crying out loud! I’d be curious to see if King in the North as it was would reach even the million sales mark in its first year on PC (and how much it would spur console sales with new editions, re-releases and whatnot). But we’ll never know due to the simple fact that D3 crapped the bed from the start. The end result is that a new Diablo experience that isn’t a remake or phone game is still years off, while D3 with so much potential and the perfect platform for more current gen Diablo (technical issues notwithstanding), languishes. One big reason being that the hype train left the station without the caboose (PvP), hastily retrieved it and jettisoned it at the next station. Whatever, it’s just as well that we bury D3 I guess, screw it. I’m just wondering who supposes that we’ll ever see D3:Resurrected. If we ever do, I all-but-guarantee that there would be sweeping changes out the wazoo and it will be D3 in theme only. So more like a reboot. Actually I’m liking the idea already.
Ah, screw it.