hmm… I was waiting for poe2 long time ago but then I realized that I might not even be able to participate in the beta if it costs hundreds of euros. I mean I want to support good games, but my budget is somewhere around 20€. I could buy 1 premium quality brake pad for my car with that kind moneys.
The impression we have is that they are lost. We don’t know what to do. They are afraid of nerfs. But there are nerfs that are necessary. The PTR is proof that it wants more refined feedback. The problem is that we have no idea what they will do it in season 4. I think it’s past time for them to say what they intend.
I don’t really envy them.
They’re corporate, so they’ll have a hard time making an individual push for change even near the top, and at the top, they’ll be trying to appease their shareholders, who will probably be directing changes to appease the playerbase.
The playerbase that clearly wants at least 2 different games, each one incompatible with each other in philosophy lol.
It’s going to be hard to make anyone happy that way, if they can’t figure out ways to effectively split the play experience up and make different player groups happy, they’re going to have to choose one to focus on eventually.
Many ideals they had didn’t work. I believe the end of the game would be Level 100. But they saw that diablo players want more, always more. And it’s not new content every season. The large player base wants a real challenge. We need to add power after 100, and for that you need items. But none of that was thought of. They made a game thinking that every 3 months the community would come back to play with the powers of the season again, but that’s not what we want.
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idk for me main problem with D4 - they took 0 risks.
Even when D3 was released they build a completly different game, yeah a lot of decisions were questionable and bad, still it was new.
There is nothing new in D4.
As a result, when promoting the game, they promised a lot of new things, it seemed to many that they had learned the lessons of d3, but no, we still have d3 ressurected, only it came out even worse because at least d3 RoS had a target audience and an understanding of what their clicker should look like.
In d4, we have lazy programming with 0 risks, an absolutely rotten game that resembles d3 too much, but at the same time, in attempts to appeal to different audiences, even the few good elementary things from d3 failed.
And in my opinion, it is no longer possible to get anything other than d3 out of this game due to lazy programming. But then they should have said right away that it would be d3 ressurected, and not fed with promises.
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What vision? Money, money, money. Game stutters and lags. We should wait for a complete edition.
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From what I see from D4 is that it launched as a hybrid of D2 and D3, with that being their direction, but it ended up pitting two camps against each other, and it appears they must’ve decided the D3 camp was the largest and better chance at longevity for the game, so they pivoted to making the game more like D3 and less like D2. It basically started with the nerf to leveling speed and has gone from there with (from what I’ve read on the forums) such things as sets, pets, wings, etc.
I strongly believe that S2 was accidentally good. They gave us ’too much’ and we actually had fun. They’ve wound it back now to the original vision of a crushingly boring grind. S4 is the last chance for me. If it’s not at least as good as S2 I’m uninstalling and not coming back.
nah it just way more simple.
D4 was build on D3 mechanics, you can’t appeal to D2 camp with D3 mechanics.
In fact, you can’t make d3 into d2 and vice versa, these are completely different games.
Actually, that’s why I wrote about lazy programming, because d4 was based on the d3 code and engine, on which you can’t build anything other than d3.
You will not be able to do a good and interesting itemization, because the mechanics of d3 and other things will not allow.
They initially lied, this game never tried to make something really new or at least try to take something good from the old parts, they just redesigned d3 with new models, new names, etc. things.
This will continue to happen because it will simply be unrealistic to build something else from this, why do they keep pretending that this will be another game - I have no answer to this, because it’s high time to say that let’s at least try to make d3 with improved graphics, it would be at least honest towards everyone.
They didnt open a PTR because they knew what they were doing.
They opened it because they are desperate for input.
I not sure who put a bigger half baked game out in 2023…Diablo 4 or Starfield.
They definitely did have a direction for the game tho…Battlepass with Cosmetics shop.
Their passion is money and it shows.
Even from a casuals perspective i completely agree. Both that the only thing they seem consistent on is the live service, and also they seem quite good at taking player feedback.
The majority of what’s conveyed however is directionless, the entire project seems at best a platform to implement corporate checkboxes with anything qualitative being secondary. Maybe some manhour allocations as part of the service operation to offset risk of player abandonment.
At least in the last livestream, the devs seem less flippant so they’re probably getting drilled about the player numbers. Its less than 5k on steam. Hopefully they’ll have one chance to… at least pretend as best they can to be old blizzard… before it turns into a repeat of d3 (ie, they release a successful expansion but get cancelled anyway because no players are left).
I enjoyed D3. I also enjoyed D1 and D2. As has been mentioned, i’m playing D4 my own way and most the time having fun
Speaking of vision/direction in games, damn, upcoming A-RPG ‘No Rest for the Wicked’ had its big gameplay reveal today. They are definitely saying some of the right things.
Such as describing how the pacing of these games went in the wrong direction after D1 and D2.
Or them talking against the false premise (also often repeated on this forum) that casual players don’t want difficult or complex games.
Kinda hard to imagine they can pull it off though.
Could be a breath of fresh air for the genre. As good as other recent A-RPGs have been, their combat is still very much the same kind of stuff as in D3, D4 and PoE. Sadly.
My main concern is that it feels like the game is going down the direction of exponential powercreep and tons of pointless difficulty levels. Game has already become totally unbalanced and laughably easy (compared to launch), yet here we are getting a patch full of buffs to so many things and not a single nerf - with more promised buffs to come. Some buffs are all well and good but need to be in tandem with nerfs otherwise D3 has clearly shown us what happens when all you do is buff the ‘weakest’ things to keep up with the strongest things ad infinitum.
I feel like they only have 2 chances left to correct course and ‘redo’ the game for the better. 1) with the season 4 big overheaul to items and skills 2) with the expansion though that’s a painfully long wait away. I really hope they do but I’m not holding my breath…
While lost epoch didn’t do anything to get my attention, wow, this definitely did.
At the most basic level, diablo has been chasing a stereotype, not even going for it directly, while moon actually has a vision. It was inspiring to be presented with an offering of something new. Also if they pull off all the items on their list should be good.
Yeah i put that on my wishlist immediately.
I think both these new games have benefited from diablo being so daft and blaster calibrated, if you want more than dopamine flashes and a casino similator, playing d4 will upsell these games multiple times over just for not being diablo.
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The original design concept of D4 is also a slower paced more tactical game if you see the early trailers. But I’ve been saying that it can’t be accomplished by just reducing mob count/density and making your abilities slower to regenerate (that would make it just suck) but by turning the game into a skill-based game, which NRftW pulled off.
Funnily, NRftW is going for that painterly look which is exactly what D3 went for but we know how Diablo fans hated it.
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No it’s not. 20 20 2
Heh, yeah. I generally dislike D3 quite a bit, on nearly all its design.
But the graphics were good imo, maybe the best in the genre. I’ll take stylized art over “realism” any day.
In my opinion the main issue it that Blizzard teams in general still have their mindset locked on 90´s.
Over the years they do the same mistakes over and over and don´t learn a thing about the errors of the past.
It happens in Diablo series and WOW too.
In addition to being directionless I’d also say the game is very uninspired. There are very few new and unique design concepts. I can’t think of anything in D4 that hasn’t been done better already by another game.
The open world aspect is likely what they meant to be the big thing, but Blizzard has this philosophy of tuning difficulty to the lowest common denominator. They would never tune open world content to be anything other than 100% win rate for the player regardless of skill, gear, or choice.
The skill trees seem like they were very likely thrown together last second. Each skill has 2 choices and very few of the choices drastically change the behavior of the skill. They don’t need to become POE to make the skill twigs more interesting, but they need more than they currently have.
Over and above all of this, it’s not apparent to me that there’s talent in the D4 development team. I’m sure this has been brought up a million times, but how is it possible they can’t program the stash system to work properly and how are they unable to prevent item duping? These seem like gaming concepts and issues that have been around since rpg’s were invented. Surely Blizzard has code repositories that have a working stash system from their previous games… What is going on with this? Why is the coding so bad at a fundamental level?
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