In Diablo 2r, the eternal hunt for MF items and achieving lv 99 kept players working towards an endless goal.
In Diablo 3 until the most recent season the goal was to raise paragon and upgrade to primal ancients which kept players working towards an endless goal.
In Diablo 4, there isn’t an endless goal. Even if you raise your tears of blood to maximum level there’s no reward to seek beyond that. Duriel runs are easy to find without ever needing any materials, I’ve done over 2k runs mostly from joining players in trade just out of boredom.
I’m seriously hoping that an endless reward system is added in season 3. Maybe just something that slightly increases character power through xp beyond 100 would be nice, however tiny it may be at least we would get something for our playing time.
got my glyph to lvl 200 yesterday, now all is left is to fish for a good map and pray for not vampire mobs, i spend more time on loading screens than playing.
The developers mentioned that they designed the game so there is an eventual end to player progress. It isnt meant to play continually. You do the season content then play other games.
I am hunting Moby Dick at the moment. It feels endless. Despite a finite resource game of gear, paragon, etc, this thorns barb keeps dominating the PvP field. Not sure how to defeat this uber monster. It feels endless indeed.
Also, game should increase gold cap from 10B to 100B or 1T to keep up with the game inflation. Half joking, half serious.
There is an end goal when you are talking about D2r sorta. The end goal for D2R is perfecting that character with BiS items. Sure you could go further to have those perfect rolled BiS items. Level 99 is a personal goal for players, there added skill points later on a build are typically throw away points and the 5 stat points are more than likely going into Vitality anyways. This is where the sorta comes in though that makes it feel like an endless goal. You have the choice to farm for items using MF which thus lets you build out or perfect your character currently due to Trading. That is how D2r remains sorta endless is the economy of trading.
D3 true there was endless goals. However there were reports of a player reaching 20k paragon. Which speculation appears to be a “cap”
D4 used AoZ to sorta attempt to create an “endless goal”. If you listened to some of the campfire chats they talked about wanting to still grant power progression to the player without breaking the game completely. They know that players enjoy have some progression. But going the Route of D3 endless paragon is not the way, im sorry. D4 will turn into the mad house of difficulty tiers that D3 got. We don’t need another 15 World Tiers.
Personally, I really liked the endless grind of D3. Once you max out in D4, what’s left? Find gear with better stats? That gets boring really quickly. At least in D3, you could grind away for the perfect gear rolls and still be getting paragons for you hard work. And as far as seasons go, basically the same thing. You start new characters and build them up… usually based on the gear set that was freely given upon reaching milestones in the season. After the seasons end… your paragon xp just gets added to your non-seasonal paragon xp. This was great as it really would have been demoralizing when you’d grind out a season and amass 5-600 paragons… only to lose them at the end of the season. Why play at all? D3 was great for folks with limited playtime. I could jump in for a week or two, finish a season, collect my new wings and pet… and then shelf D3 until the next season. Another bonus to D3 is that it works for everyone (regardless of age or skill level). For those of us aging gamers, it’s great knowing that difficult encounters can be usually beaten just by grinding out enough paragons to offset your lack of gear or reaction time.
That being said, I really hope that they wind up giving us endless advancement in D4. If not, I for one won’t play long. And let’s face it, endless advancement is needed. At the rate that they come out with new games, it’ll be 10-12 years before D5. I’ve been playing for a month and I’m already wishing they’s just let me fill in the rest of my paragon boards.
Actually, both games were wildly popular in their day. They had a lot of issues early on, but they got sorted out (opinions will vary on this comment). But here’s the thing… each of those 2 games lasted over 10 years before their next versions rolled out (with a lot of people still doing seasons in D3). Everyone was bored with them. It was unavoidable. Now you’re getting the same thing with D4 and it hasn’t even been out a year yet. I’ll be honest… I barely remember D2. But D3 was all about perfecting your gear sets. Grind out the best primal gear with the optimum stats. Perfect out a character and move on to another one… usually during a new season when a gear set was offered that was of interest to you. Rince, repeat. Go back to old characters when Blizzard made changes and re-optimize the affected characters.
But here’s the thing with all of the above. What kept most of us playing was that you could run 20-30 or more rifts in a day and get absolutely nothing of use in terms of gear… but you still got some paragons for your time spent. Once you’ve hit level 100 and 225 paragons in D4, nada. These past few weeks, I log in, run a few dungeons… get nothing of use and them get bored and log out. I don’t really want to log out, but you get bored with the lack of progress. So now comes the wait for a year or so until the expansion pack comes out and they re-introduce Diablo and maybe the Paladin or Demon Hunter class (the usual… add to the current story line and bring back something that’s a fan favorite… and happily collect $60 a person). And then we all jump back in, play for a month or two… and wait another 8-10 years for D5 to roll out.
Did you play these games?? I’m not doubting your wisdom when it comes to game popularity but there still exists a large playerbase in D2R and support sites like D2JSP.
D3 was ruined by capping paragon at 800 though but up until the release of D4 it was very popular and the endless grind for paragon raising your primary stat in minuscule amounts was at least a reward for the grind.
D4 once you hit 100 all there is to do is log in, run dungeons and bosses for no power upgrades once you cap your AoZ glyph is 200. What i’m saying is endless goals would enhance the game and give players a reason to play other that spending hours sorting loot and clearing stash.
I strongly disagree. It might be fun for some players, but it forces every player to reach a certain paragon level to complete different types of content.
D4 is not in a good state of affairs right now, but I don’t think bringing an endless paragon from D3 or Diablo Immortal is the key to solving it.
Instead of an endless goal, I would prefer if the team added something akin to the Atlas Passive Skill Tree from PoE. You could create your own endgame builds and optimize them for the content you like and specialize in.
More options controlled by the player > More dangling carrots
