There’s 0, ZERO logical or financial reason to shove that plan if the game was booming or at a minimum as projected.
for work no. I use TDD and test classes as they are built and i also have CI/CD with inbuilt regression testing.
When i am doing hobby game dev? no - way more than 1/3 of the time is spent play testing and fine tuning. id say 75% ths and 25% writing code
How is the community perception of D4?
On metacritic it has a user score of 2.5/10.
Oh interesting! Tools! Tools that didn’t exist in 2000!
You are like a Jedi when it comes to evading obvious truths like BLIZZARD DOES NOT TEST AND TUNE THIER CODE WELL ENOUGH
You might think its cute to latch on to some irrelevant tangent and make what you think are clever retorts. I just see it as being willfully ignorant.
Also Diablo was built well before 2000, and those tools DO exist today so what is D4 excuse for constantly releasing buggy crap and reintroducing “Fixed” bugs?
Boot up Diablo 1 on your pc and compare it to Diablo 2. The fact you can only think of the name shows how shallow you’re thinking about this topic. Diablo 2 did indeed create a new genre, not Diablo 1
Diablo 2:
Diablo 1:
Review bombing is one of the few completely pointless things that humans do. You go to Metacritic and you get this:
“There are no user reviews yet for Diablo IV. Be the first to rate and review this product.”
That means that they had to turn it off because people were abusing the system.
If you look at it (unsurprisingly) the number of downvotes is way low. It’s 7.6k. A game which has 25M buyers somehow only has 10k “reviews” with 76% being negative.
Again, none of you make much sense.
If by that you mean logical arguments make no sense. Sure, I guess.
Go to metacritic and read the reviews then. The first one I see from a user called “mikowhynot” is exactly what is wrong with the the game and the rating is a 3/10
Now I wouldn’t give the game a 3, I would give it a 5/10, because at least the character controls and the class design is good. Doesn’t matter much though if the content is like now
I see what you are saying here, but to be fair Diablo was a huge departure from what came before it and i feel it is right to say it established the ARPG Genre as we know it today. D2 was certainly a different game delivered better on the original vision for Diablo and then some. It’s funny how you can make what you actually wanted to make once you have had some commercial success and have funding and confidence from backers, not to mention the improvement in technology for building and playing games in the time between Diablo and D2 
Well they have 6 month sprints with budget cuts and layoffs. So yeah, they don’t.
The part you’re missing is that Blizzard’s release spent that long in debugging because you had to be spend that long in debugging but that was a significantly simpler time. Compared to today’s architectures what would be the equivalent? Now if we’re talking about “bugs on release”, fine, but if we’re talking about seasons (which I assume you are) then yeah, they can’t, because even back then in 2000 it took just as long as the length of the total sprint to test!
You’re in industry. You should know that a 2 month set-aside for testing is impossible for a 6-month deadline. You talk about willful ignorance but you’re pretending that makes sense. That you could write code for four months and then test it for two and release. What would you even make with that kind of time and reduced resources?
Anywho, I get it, you mad, me too, I wish they’d do better, but I am not going to pretend that the constraints aren’t real and state that they reasonably could do that.
This so much.
To comment on the “lying” part of this topic, you feel PoE2’s team have been straight shooters? If so I wholeheartedly disagree:
“The game will be more accessible to casual players”-Maybe in the campaign….I’m not casual, I got everything in PoE1 done in less than 1/2 the time I’ve spent in PoE2 and I was brand new to the series. Hell, only my important gems are level 20. I’ve found 3, traded for 1 (I farm about 100-120 exalts/hr just for reference). My causal friends gave up at 3rd/4th ascendancies, and I don’t blame them. I’ll never do 4 floor sek again, I’ll just trade for a carry. This especially bothers me as I consider it key progression everyone should get to experience and complete.
None of what I have experienced in the mid/late endgame is “casual friendly” and is much more of a grind than in PoE1. And I actually like grinding. You don’t get to play with skills, because you aren’t going to find many of the later orbs.
“Console parity”-The game is unplayable at endgame on console. It isn’t much better on PC, rampant shader latency issues that evidently existed in PoE1. It’s still a dream compared to any of it on Xbox X.
“Less stuff on the ground”-Every single on death effect lasts 10 seconds that lingers (I counted poison clouds one day) when you kill multiple packs with said effects you either run through and eat the dmg if you can survive them or you sit there for eons. They just added many of them back this patch, and boy oh boy is the screen just riddled with crap and effects everywhere.
Then, for everything people dissect about what Rod says…during the PoE1 league delay announcement, their director apologized and said multiple times “I just kept thinking we got to get this damn game SHIPPED”. Early Access to me is not “shipped”, “shipped” means “fully released”. I guess it is just me, but that came across as wildly dishonest.
While I still prefer PoE2, it has a LONG way to go, and there’s a lot that will keep me from playing it more than 1 league.
There are none.
https://www.metacritic.com/game/diablo-iv/user-reviews/
I didn’t make that up.
True PoE 2 needs a lot of work, and on console it plays like crap. Character control is not something I will ever criticize from Blizzard, because they are and have been king in that aspect since forever
Right now though I don’t feel like I’m playing a game. The game feels like it plays itself and I get loot for nothing that the game doesn’t need to me to have. It’s basically just loot simulator for pointless loot. Again, it hasn’t been this bad in season 4.
If you are ranged, there is a bind for targeting that makes it “tolerable” and slightly better. I still use controller on PC but unless you change your targeting and bind interact to your 2nd action bar with no other ability, it’s rough.
You are still overcomplicating this and doing some crazy mental gymnastics.
So let me break it down for you.
Exact timeframes - irrelevant
Exact tools used - irrelevant
Tuning and testing is not the same as debugging, but also irrelevant
I’m not mad I’m disappointed - but also irrelevant
Relevant:
Blizzard has the means to produce better results, yet they fail to do so. This indicates a lack of intent to produce quality. Highlighting the focus Brevik put on testing/tuning/polish was intended to suggest Blizzard should do the same.
That is all.
I have an “argument” just as much as does anyone else posting here. You just don’t like mine, & that’s fine.
Pretty much everything that’s been “done wrong” about D4 is subjective. I happen to think D4 has done a LOT wrong. Others disagree; that’s what makes it “subjective.” & yes, if people are going to slam the “Blizz white knights,” I’m going to take shots at the “D2 cult.”
Confirmation bias is a thing, yo.
That’s hilarious, coming from a person who regularly tells the rest of us to chug the slop.
Dude who made an old game that many of us cheated at (be it hero editor or rmt) because it was otherwise so mind-numingly not good has nothing relevant to say?
I have issues with d4 but turning it into d2+ would not solve any of it. If anything this game at least doesn’t make me want to open my wallet to make the pain go away. I may take long breaks but at least I am not at any point feeling like rmt would help.
The 20 bucks I saved. . .
This is the part that you just insist must be true.
I see a lot of insistence these days. Like, what if that fact is not true? Then what?
I wasn’t alive yet, when Diablo 1 released, but I looked it up, and it says the game was mainly innovative in the gameplay aspect like moving by mouseclick, while Diablo 2 was the game, that intrinsically created the arpg genre, in the way that it is known by titles, such as path of exile.