Played for 20 minutes yesterday to remind myself of what’s going on. Superficially I think the game is very well-made. The graphics, environment, animations, details, sounds, user interface, vibe/immersion quality, lack of gameplay clunkiness, it’s all there. The good side of Blizzard lives on. It’s even fun playing for a bit. Then you realize that’s the game, an attractive but hollow husk, like a lifeless anime waifu doll.
Diablo IV is actually, and unfortunately, defined by an unending simple cadence. What does that mean? It means you all know what your characters do. You also know that no matter what the environment is you will do that exact same thing. Your actions are limited and regularly and rigidly repeated, to the point of relying on one spammable button for much of your gameplay.
Why did seemingly other simple games like Tetris or Mario succeed to provide entertainment over a long period of time? Why is League of Legends still so popular? First person shooter games? I think it’s because they have more varied cadences. Diablo IV is so reliant on walking through everything spamming a few actions that all that effort into getting so much right recedes into the background. It’s like playing Tetris with the same shapes coming in the same order. It’s like playing Mario if the screen always scrolled to the same section you just went through. All the games I have mentioned that have passed the test of time have gameplay variability in common despite having comparably simple basics. Players don’t necessarily articulate this but they do experience it. The control basics do not translate into a mind-numbing simple cadence that never ends or varies. An essential part to having fun in gaming is being forced to react, overcome a challenge, and be rewarded or frustrated in succeeding or failing to do so. The actions of players have to matter. In this game the actions of players don’t really matter because they simply get repeated over and over. That is the abysmal gameplay failure of Diablo IV, which some misinterpret as a strength, underlying the limited appeal and dissatisfaction with the game. It’s a cancer on the entire genre that no one really diagnoses as such.
As far as I can see there are three options. The first one, the most likely one, is doing what you’re doing going through the motions like the players. You have your own ideas, you implement their ideas, it doesn’t matter in the end. The game is mediocre at best, bad at this point like nearly two years since release. It’s the road to Diablo V, by which time the hope is that magically some source of innovation emerges - it might as well be AI given no person seems to have a clue. Option two, developers and decision-makers actually sit down and consider the question, “Why is the game bad, and can we actually target the bad quality?” It’s pretty common now for players to express frustration with lack of difficulty and number boosting in the Pit to simulate difficulty without making the game any more fun to play. How can you possibly, working with what you have, make the game challenging in any sort of reactive or variable manner so that your players stop eating their boogers while they play? Can you do that? Imo you better really start pondering that question. Third option, the least likely, is doing something you appear thoroughly unable to do and try innovating mid-life with whatever crack team of bug spreaders you’ve got trying to push this game along to nowhere, to selling some season passes and stuff until Diablo himself shows up in 2026 to euthanize this project. In the vein of reactivity and variability I’ve suggested what a more advanced system of character actions can look like.
I realize by forum standards this is already a multi-volume tome but I want to remind everyone reading again why this game sucks at a fundamental level.
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There’s nothing to do once you got your ultimate build and paragons, just kill some monsters again and again. It’s quite like a bullet hell game, just kill, but at least in a bullet hell game you have to be worried about enemies movements.