Itemized list of in-game issues at the end.
The beta was a joy to play – I relished every moment in-game. Solid combat, interesting skill choices, nice environments, and promising gear itemization. The outdoor world boss was a highlight. A nice flourish. I haven’t thought about D3 this entire weekend, despite just playing it the day before. I want more D4! Huge Potential.
However.
I’m getting the distinct impression I’m at a museum looking at a portrait where the background has some areas of nice work, all a bit too in focus, while the portrait itself, is blank.
The background work in the portrait is equivalent to the campaign, the combat, basic systems, the game engine and the UI. The campaign, so far is very, very good, and the combat is solid, but not as crisp and visceral as Lost Ark’s. The basic systems seem solid but are no where as deep as PoE’s. Discounting the disco’s and login issues, the game ran very smoothly on my beefy system, but the cpu load and ram usage were much higher than I expected, compared to the listed suggested game specs. The UI, sadly, needs work on many levels.
The empty face of the portrait is Dungeons, the bull in the china shop, the cranial bomb. They are an alarming area of concern. They seem very much like Lost Ark’s dungeons, most of which are boring and a chore after the first few play-throughs. Problems w/ the D4 campaign dungeons include: pacing, far too much backtracking, no room to dodge stuff, lack of mob density, bosses drop nearly no loot, and by far the worst offender of all: no replayability. If the dungeons in the end game lack replayability, after a few days of engagement, the game, will be DOA. All the work and attentions poured into the campaign will not matter. Once word gets out that the end game is an empty husk, the game will suffer a player exodus and you will have to come up w something miraculous to have any hope of drawing people back in.
Developing the end game after release would be a catastrophic game design failure. Hopefully you guys started work on that after nailing the concepts of gear itemization. Good itemization, and access to it, is the allure that keeps player retention high
Dungeons in the campaign have multiple problems and if the end game dungeons use the same tile sets and characteristics of the campaign’s, you have a very, VERY big problem. If so, drop everything else you are doing, and address this NOW. This is by far the biggest problem in the game, everything else you’ve worked on, or need to fix, are distant, tertiary issues.
Group play communication and organization in D3 added a significant dimension to the replayability of D3 – problem solving and making adjustments on the fly, are a huge component of pushing.
The end game, the portrait, might be killer, everything might be fine, but the focus on the campaign in your dev blogs and youtube vids, strongly imply an incomplete end game. If so, this is a deal breaker for anyone who spends significant time in games.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope that this game will be a masterpiece. A game where I can immerse myself in thousands of hours of post campaign bliss.
One last big concern: Botting. It is toxic in the extreme. Mid season ban waves are deeply flawed, as the damage has already been done. People who bot create a wake behind them, they accelerate the power gains of everyone they regularly play with, in the extreme. Botting needs to be dealt with straight away. Conversely, banning innocent people, without recourse, is far worse.
Not sure what substantive tactics can be used to combat botting, but I think two approaches in Lost Ark would have helped with their botting plague:
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slightly randomized placement of way points, stashes, vendor/blacksmith npcs, and environmental obstructions – would likely snag primitive bots.
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graphing player time spent in any given zone vs how repeatable their movements are. Eg a “player” only farming one mob via auto attacks, to the pixel, for 24 hours a day, for 5 days is a dead giveaway.
Itemized list of in-game issues
Bugs
Surprisingly, I only came across one: On my sorc, if I tried to teleport across some gaps that have jump points, char then cannot use the jump points at all, after failing a teleport. Had to take the long way around.
Towns
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Waypoints, blacksmith, and the stash are all far too far apart from one another – that traversal time will very quickly become an irritant. The town, not towns, that everyone will use will be the one w the shortest collective time needed to traverse the WP/stash/vendor route. Players will NOT care about what the town looks like and all the resources you spent to achieve what any given town feels like. All I care about is an open dark gray space with with a waypoint, stash, vendors, and blacksmith that are 20 feet apart, at most. Next dungeon go, go, go. Don’t care about the vibe. Don’t care what it looks like. Town is lava. Don’t make it worse.
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However, something needs to be done about bots. You will need to have a randomized pathing to reach the stash and vendors from a given waypoint. Having pathing that gets bots stuck is a sure fire way to get feedback from players that botting is occuring.
UI
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would be VERY useful to have a filtering function in the stash tab. Eg after running a dungeon while the group is waiting on you the ability to dump said pieces into your stash, and then have a search field that would allow to look for any specific gear in a variety of ways (eg “+1 to hydras”, “body armor” “rare” etc.) It is not 1990 anymore.
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characters should be able to sort the categories of different crafting mats, the order (and implied importance) of categories now is awkward as vieled crystals are at the bottom of the screen and a player has to scroll down through a ,list of irrelevant items (no, I don’t care how many flowers or plants I have) to see how many VC I have.
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when looking at the character inventory screen, it would be nice to be able to add other materials to the bottom right of the inventory window by being able to select which plants, ores, etc one wants to show up on the right side
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when looking at “materials & stats” I think most players would be concerned with their stats first, then salvage mats, then everything else, so all of that should be re-ordered
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character sheet doesn’t have persistence of settings when viewing different mat categories when relogging in.
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When I went to the occultist, a legendary that had too high of a level req, and I tried to replace its legendary power w another to lower its lvl requirement, allowed me to apply an aspect in the UI window, and charged me the gold, didn’t alter the itemand then gave me an error. The process should have been grayed out in the UI.
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player inspection needs massive work, as players will need to weed out clueless people from the groups they are trying to smoothly run. When trying to run stuff efficiently, one doesn’t have the time to explain basic gameplay, gearing, role, pacing, positioning for 20 mins for every new player that joins the group. Its not elitism, its that three people in the group just want to get stuff done, and don’t have the time to explain to some rando what they are doing wrong. Being able to see if someone has the right type of stats for their given role is key to filtering out the chaff. As it stands, it takes far too long to try to see what someone’s build is and if their itemization is any good.
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Be able to inspect your offline friends. Eg is my buddy level 11? 14? So I can level up a new char to be at the same point in the game so when he logs in, there isnt a huge disparity between the characters.
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hard to inspect a specific player when a bunch of people are milling about/standing on top of one another. current inspection/interaction of other players is awkward, perhaps change to click on someone via a toggle key that only works in non pvp areas to prevent namelock in pvp situations?
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Hard to tell when a party member is in a dungeon, perhaps a note next to their name on the map, eg “in a dungeon”
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When Mousing over Obols, should show current/max
Gear Itemization
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No sets, please, god no. Zero. Set items strip away any hope of build variety and much of a player’s agency. Six piece sets in the current game state would choke down the gear chase to only 3 items, and futhermore, since the power of sets in D3 were so massive, the stats on any given set piece were of little relevance until much later in the game, beyond what most players would play. Set items ruined D3 – resulting in zero build diversity. Set design often involving kludgy or unfun mechanics. want to have sustained player engagement? – you MUST allow a huge variety of builds to be enjoyed and discovered. Nothing like hearing about some new build that Wudijo, Alkaizer or Ben have come up with that look like tons of fun to play w entirely new mechanics, orf even better, breathing new life into a class that is viewed as dead, eg the current “barbs suck”. Alkaizer made a killer WW barb earlier today, he made it work.
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affixes, if there are prefixes and suffixes, players need to be able to CLEARLY see if a given stat they want to replace is a suffix or affix, so that the affix they want to replace it with is a valid possibility (eg can’t replace a prefix w a suffix in PoE or D3). Not knowing will brick a premium piece of gear and can be devastating (eg people quit)
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cant see the tier of a given affix on items – this is important, especially when trying to min max gear, the multitude of affixes/suffixes to memorize, and the approximate odds of acquiring a specific one need to be easily grasped by players, especially w the very, very steep costs of rerolling gear to get a given affix.
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with the time investment players might be pouring into the game, it is EXTREMELY important to be able to lock items on one’s character, especially if the same keybind is used to vendor items and to swap gear on characters from their inventory, very, very bad. Eg, when half awake at blacksmith, I thought I was vendoring items, but accidentally swapped some junk items from my inventory with my premium pieces of gear.
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rerolling gear seems to have too steep of a cost after the first few attempts
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Itemization (in the context of a lvl 25 sorc): 1h weapon choices are anemic; off-hands are even worse; Staves are far better, but not something to drool over; gems itemization doesn’t seem to cover enough of a spectrum of builds
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life regen and attributes on gear seem very weak