Whenever I see a post about something is too rare / grindy please consider that overcoming challenges provides a profound sense of accomplishment. When players invest time, effort, and perseverance into achieving seasonal goals, the success feels more rewarding. This sense of achievement boosts the belief that hard work pays off.
The struggles and triumphs associated with overcoming challenges can lead to appreciation for the journey and the outcome.
The lack of difficulty means there’s little need for strategic thinking or skill development, which lead to disengagement.When everything is handed to us without effort, there’s no sense of progression or growth.
If there is no way to balance things out, please consider to present players with a choice of easy casual and hard mode competetive servers.
I see D3 as a distinct genre offshoot that is defining the iso-ARPG space and D4 is a continuation of that path. Diablo is going to get faster and it’s linearity more aggressive with other series having to go the more classic route. The modern version of the iso-ARPG is going to be something you beat in a few days.
It’s “grindy” in this game in this slipstream to wait a week. It just is. And that’s by design and I suspect it will continue that way. A number of players will leave and a number will stay.
To be clear the fundamental undercarriage of the game doesn’t “support” what you’re looking for. You will need to go to Path of Exile 2.
What is a reasonable grind for one person is not for another; developers, for better or for worse, have to balance longevity with player fulfillment to create retention, and not every one is going to agree with their choices.
“Time spent” however, is not a challenge. The only metric in this game is time. In that case, if a grind feels too long, when the goal is met, it is just as likely to provide relief that it is over. Killing the same enemy a thousand times to get the right drop is not a profound accomplishment; it wasn’t any harder the 1000th time than it was the first.
id disagree. Since, as you say time is the only metric that matters in these kind of games, it is a challenge to be patient. You need to adjust your build, as you dont have item XY yet etc
Heck, we see how impatient people here are. No mythic on day 2 of a season? omfg.
I for sure hope that d4 turns arround and becomes a bit grindier again, because s7 is really zoomy. right now we might as well could just have an npc that gives us whatever we want.
This is a culmination of the last year. While S7 feels quick this was something started in S3 and then Loot 2.0 was the admission of the end of “grind as a game”.
To be frank we can craft mythics through getting other crap. And you get two just for showing up and playing the game as intended. You can recycle them to repeatedly try to get what you want too. Grind was dead long before this. It’s like watching a virus finally take hold.
Fair, point, for me though, as opposed to some games where I’ll stick myself into a single loop that tests my patience, such as trying to get a specific drop in a jrpg, that’s the entire point of D4 and as long as it remains fun and I get something out of it, I don’t consider it challenging.
Challenge being “can I bring myself to even play this game because I need X to do anything actually fun?” is a whole mess of ick, but yeah, it’s here, it’s in other games, yep.
I don’t know. I always see these posts about wanting more grind but then everyone looks for ways to cheese that grind. Every game out there has guides on how to do X, Y, or Z the fastest, easiest way. So I really have to question how much people truly want to grind. Or is it more they want to cheese past the grinding and feel superior to some poor sap doing it the hard way.
Well, the problem is that the nature of gaming changed over the past 10 years. The introduction of the “souls-like” for instance created a generation of players who thrive primarily on challenges being laid bare and managed through ingenuity and sheer willpower.
You can’t willpower RNG. So in turn the games that had grind as we know it disappeared. The reason why Nioh lives rent free in my head is because of this interesting fusion between RNG based gaming and this “souls-like” bare challenge based gameplay being masterfully completed. The game has excellent RNG with high amounts of determinism as well and is balanced to the tee. It’s also very, very fast.
Well, D4 and iso-ARPGs that rely on RNG have no place in this era. So yeah, for every person saying, “slow it down” there’s a guide out there to overcome that very person, and the people who buy games now, the younger persons, they’re the ones who have to carry the mantle. Old people and their ways are dying. It’s that simple.
To drive this point home it’s been 5 days and people are already gaming the system on how to get the lost altars or whatever they’re called. Already!
I think one issue with trying to figure this out is that it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of “these are the same people that said this.”
It’s probably an entirely different population of people that want the game as efficient as possible and to be running 100+ bosses a day and T4 geared by day 2, than those who want a long grind because they feel it satisfying, and those like me, who want something in the middle so the game remains relevant for awhile but doesn’t feel like the steady drip gets turned completely off super early.
I frankly do not understand either outlier. I don’t want to play a game like a job whether or not that completes everything quickly; I also don’t want to do the same thing for months and try and keep thinking “the next fight just could be the one!”
But it’s fair that players are like that - but also except for a couple hiccups in D4’s history, I think it’s clear that since later D3ROS, Diablo caters more to the zoomers and the middle ground, than it does to those who want a game for life.
I enjoy the hell out of D4… but my one gripe is the difficulty. Yeah… T4 tormented bosses can 1 shot you and all that… and while the Pit is cool in theory… it’s still just a chain of exponentially higher health pools.
Even taking a broken SB to high pit runs last year wasn’t fun… it was just super grindy with the endless QV spam. I had more fun with my Sorc who only cleared a 95. Still grindy though.
Ugh i queued up a youtube video while brushing my teeth last night, about how to find lost altars.
Go to T4 > Sure
Use draught > Sure
Go to Hoarfrost Demise dungeon > I don’t like where this is going
Run through without killing anything and check every corner > ew
Return to entrance and reset dungeons > more ew
Wash/rinse/repeat until you get everything you want > kill me now
So the most efficient way to find the altars is to crank up the treadmill and avoid actually playing the game.
That’s a big fat no. I will find them through actually playing the game while targeting the correct activities, or i won’t interact with that mechanic. Cruising through trivial lair boss fights for an hour… or two… or more… is boring enough. At least i’m KIND OF playing the game when i do that and something is happening… i’m getting gold… i’m getting runes.
Yeah… the grind is irrelevant when people can make it irrelevant… which is worse when Blizzard’s only solution is to make the cheese grinder take longer… which just becomes exponentially more punishing to people who genuinely play the game.
Yes Release quick mode. At level 60, an item pack, I have all legendary powers released. And let me play the game without tripping over legendary and without being able to spend as many skill points as I did.
D3 was interesting because it literally created two camps of players we would discover 10 years later.
D4 was either going to be like D2 or like D3. There was no inbetween. Obviously it progressed along the D3 route and got both faster and more linear.
A lot of people hated D3 (I presume you are one of them) but a lot of people really liked it too.
Well that’s the world we live in now. Games have to be difficult by their own merit but difficulty is measured primarily in immediate terms rather than through attrition over time. You bring up the quickest way to get “the thing” and how artificial it feels but that’s what is considered to be the actual “boss” in this game: Getting the thing. The joy of serendipity just no longer exists in this era and being “surprised” is no longer allowed.
Basically before you begin a game of any sort every method of access to completion has been thoroughly cataloged. The only people who play the game are the cataloguers themselves and they do so in teams so they swarm these games and completely destroy them like cartoon termites and then sell the results.
I’m glad that’s true for you. I’m in my 60s now, and I feel like I’ve played a million games. I don’t care about challenge anymore. I just want to play through the game and see what it has to offer.
In the case of this game, I’ve yet to come anywhere near FULLY maxing out a character’s gear in a season. Not even close. So I’m always a bit reticent to accept arguments in favour of making the game harder to get gear.
You can’t make a project with a bunch of failed ideas that was unanimously rejected by its community all of a sudden be a success because a number of years have passed and a totally new community was formed around it.
What you can say however is this; D3 was a massive letdown and failed to capture its core audience. Many years post release, a new type of community formed around it that loved the game.
You can’t just casually erase the past and start in whichever period you feel is more relevant or helps you most to prove your point. That’s disingenuous.
You do know that’s the backstory of a lot of game series that are popular now like Fallout? Moving out of tactics and turn-based was a great decision for that particular game. Again, you make me feel old, because so many things exist where this was how it formed. The old guard rejected it but the young loved it and took it to heart.
If you bought even Helldivers 2 expecting more Helldivers 1 you’d be solely disappointed but obviously H2 > H1 if you asked most people. A large number of them probably did not play H1 though which is just very, very different. Even Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls are very different with a lot of people never playing Demon’s Souls for PS3 but being introduced to Dark Souls. Obviously Dark Souls won over Demon’s Souls as the formula for the metroidvania element versus the instanced based worlds.
The issue to me (and all may friends that play Diablo except for one) is not being able to play season content with the eternal character.
I do like the grind, but if all that awaits that character is exile or deletion, it loses purpose. And I definetily don’t like having to do the same grind to play the same character that I already have in eternal realm, for which I’ve already spent a lot of time playing.
If it was up to me, I would have players being able to play seasonal content with the eternal characters. If this would be a problem for people that likes the seasonal reset, fine, split the playerbase, I don’t care about the bonuses that comes with the season if in exchange I can still play the characters that I already have and want to play.