I know, the last one is still only 9 days old, but I’m curious what do you want to hear about.
I believe that the most discussed recent topics seem to not apply: skill trees (already addressed), trading (no hope for news until release), PvP (seriously?), itemization (too broad and generic).
What would you (reallisticaly) like to hear about?
This last quarterly updated noted that the next one will be focused on itemization updates.
OK, ty.
I knew but, same way the last one was about 2 things (skill tree and Enchantment System) with light ideas about other topics, like Angelic/Demonic/Ancestral (itemization), I didn’t get by reading it that it would be restricted to a single-topic.
Also, the sentence about updating about items later this year sounded to me (wrongly, as it seems) a bit like an out-of-the-cadence update like the 1st David Kim’s post-Blizzcon update about this exact same topic.
Also, as I’ve said, I was looking for something more specific. For example, if people were more interested about Angelic/Demonic/Ancestral power, rarity tiers (as you’ve hinted talking about the stat ranges on rares/blues), runewords, and so on. In fact, what triggered me to make this new thread was the runeword topic having way more presence in other sites than here, guessing if it was a coincidence and people wanted to hear more about them or people here actually cared less about that.
I’ll fix the OP then, ty.
Are there more quarterly updates planned for 2021?
As an IT (DB) geek, I’m curious about what they ment when they say “sharded servers” and how that improves D4 game play (vs D3, etc).
Also - infrastructure (and how it improves game play).
But, i dont expect to get an answer to those questions. So, here is one that should be answerable:
how will Difficulty Levels work?
Both. I don’t expect any specific topic, it’s the best way to be disappointed. I don’t want to be frustrated like those who are waiting for specific updates for their classes in Diablo 3.
No one knows how long it will take for the game to go alpha, or when it will go beta. So how do you know that ?
It is true. However, I am convinced that these topics will be addressed sooner or later, when the D4 team feels ready to talk about them. We all look forward to them addressing the topics we are interested in. But soon™.
It’s quite possible. We have no idea what stage of development Diablo 4 is at. In any case, until the last 2 classes are revealed, we can honestly think that we are far from alpha. Personally, being optimistic, I’m betting for a release towards the end of 2022. Which would leave us more or less 8 blog posts to come.
If D4 has an open shared world then you can’t really compare it to D3 which has individual instanced games. Two very different things.
They most commonly use it in WoW to handle high population areas. This recently article on how they handled some of the server tech behind a WoW Classic event goes into some background on sharding in a shared world. It also discussing layering and what the difference is between the two. Worth a read if you are interested in server tech and game impact.
As always, thanks for the info.
It answered my question about sharding.
PVP is important to me. Trading is important to me. Itemization, Including the story into end game and shortening the cooldowns drastically are all important to me as well.
NO NO NO NO NO and NO!!! Please NO SHARDING in Diablo 4. For the love of every square inch of Sanctuary, keep it Diablo and NOTHING like that raging dumpster fire known as World of Warcraft.
Diablo has instanced games that only allow 8 people (D2) or 4 (D3). There WILL still be dungeons in the game that use that tech.
The open world has options. They could do separate servers like old WoW to keep populations in zones reasonable for hardware/playability.
OR they can use modern tech to shard content (basically giant instances I think?). It is odd if you want to see your friend at X place and they get sharded away from you. That is prevented by proper grouping.
We shall see how this all plays out. No matter what, this is going to be a diff version of Diablo. It may work, it may not. We shall see.
Ultima Online used sharding. It’s hardly modern tech. Basically when a server becomes too crowded the servers will spawn a new instance of that section of the game world on a different server cluster and move some players to it. Another method is to add more server clusters to the existing instance to handle the increase load. EVE Online is an example of this. Each method has its pluses and minuses.
I highly doubt they’ll make it like old WoW.
I imagine they’ll go for sharding and it will most likely work like current WoW or Destiny 2.
Would you really prefer the old WoW model with separate servers, so that if you wanna play with someone, who’s not on your server, you would have to make a brand new character?
I don’t see them doing that.
As long as they have dedicated us east servers I’ll be happy. I’m not, in 2022, going to play a game with 80-150 ping…living In NA Like in D3.