I mean, if you’re so smart and are able to identify Diablo IV’s direction, then by all means, enlighten us. I would certainly love to know what it is that Diablo has in terms of direction, because all I see are half-baked attempts at incorporating seasonal mechanics that are then backtracked and made close to irrelevant because nobody likes them.
I didn’t even bring up Last Epoch, but if you want to talk about the elephant in the room:
Last Epoch is a much lower profile game. It doesn’t have the marketing spin Diablo does nor the legacy. Moreover, it doesn’t have the resources at its disposal that Diablo does, yet it’s a far superior game in terms of what the ARPG is designed to achieve. It is a completely fair comparison to make in terms of highlighting everything Diablo IV gets wrong in spite of it having Activision, a mammoth publisher in the industry, fully backing it.
D3 made incredible headway in sales and then its momentum died almost instantly because the game greatly suffered due to underbaked mechanics and systems as well as anemic rewards that were gutted thanks to the RMAH. RoS made it a better game, but not even Blizzard was capable of recognizing that game as a success. If it was the future, Blizzard wouldn’t have abandoned it to make Diablo IV.
You’re being so unbelievably dramatic, it’s bordering humorous. I’ve gone on record saying that I like Diablo IV. I still like Diablo IV for what it is and I’ll probably play it for the foreseeable future, but I can’t deny that it’s struggling. Diablo IV going in a “different direction,” if you can even call it that, doesn’t scare me because, at the end of the day, I have several other games I can play instead. I’m only voicing my concern because I like the game and would like to see it live on for many years rather than being abandoned three years in for Diablo V.
I never asked for the leveling speed to increase. I still think that was a bad decision post-season 2 and even said as such in a thread I made. Moreover, AoZ is a bad example because, while challenging, it was challenging for all the wrong reasons. It was overtuned and didn’t provide a lot of incentive to complete.
Above all, don’t you think this is emblematic of Blizzard having no direction? All they do is cater to player demands rather than zeroing in on a goal and working towards that goal, even when those demands are stupid, such as in the case of leveling. They’re floundering around and basically giving the community whatever it is they want, which does make the game worse in the long-term.
I think, if Blizzard had a goal, they wouldn’t be so quick to waver. They would have an outlined design philosophy and would push back when the player base demands something a bit outrageous. They don’t, because they have no idea what they want out of the game. They just give us whatever we want in the hopes it’ll appease our discontent.