Wasted potential is the greatest sin of all. Especially when it was touted as the game that would redeem Blizzard in the eyes of many. Unfortunately it has not, and it will not.
Blizz’s track record of taking the Copy/Paste lazy way out of doing some real work continues.
It seemed to start when D3’s cancelled 2nd expansion was cannibalized and several of its zones were copy/pasted into Adventure mode over time. Sescheron, the Moors, the Act 4 areas that I don’t even care to remember their name etc. They added nothing good to the game, just more boring bounties.
D2R is D2R, the same fossilized ancient game from 20+ years ago with a fresh coat of paint, nothing to write home about.
I only bought it because I hoped Brother Laz would finish his big awesome-looking mod which would’ve been a spiritual successor to MedianXL. Well…that will never happen since Laz completely abandoned said mod & disappeared off the face of the earth.
So there goes ~75 bucks wasted, because otherwise it’s still the same fossilized ancient game underneath that isn’t worth playing through more than once for nostalgia’s sake. And I couldn’t manage even that before giving in to the overwhelming urge to uninstall.
Then came Immortal.
- all of its classes are a direct copy/paste from D3, albeit massively watered down and missing half their skills. If the class was lucky, it got 1-2 new skills.
- 99% of “legendary powers” are simply copy/pasted D3 skill runes or a 10% damage boost to a skill. How innovative!
And then…the one we all REALLY wanted to see. I started feeling iffy about D4 when they announced the Sorceress & Barbarian were returning. How many more times are they gonna beat those dead horses? I was kinda looking forward to the Druid, because I thought they would try to innovate and do something awesome with them…right?
Wrong. I can go on about this all day, but in a nutshell: almost everything class-wise is a direct copy/paste job from D2, with a skill or two copied from D3 (Call of the Ancients for Barb) and downgraded to look plain stupid (the awesome-looking Seismic Slam is now flinging dirt in monsters’ faces).
The Sorceress only has 1 new skill that is hardly anything to boast about, and everything else is a direct copy/paste from D2. Levelling one to 25 in the beta was a truly soul-crushing experience.
They tried to bring back the Rogue from D1, but in name only, because she’s really a watered down D2 Assassin with a couple basic bow skills stuffed in there. If reading up her D4 skill tree doesn’t put you to sleep, playing her WILL.
As for the Necro, well…how else can I possibly describe it, other than a downgraded even-less-fun version of D3’s Necro?
This trend is excruciatingly soul-crushing. I actually thought, theoretically, D4 would keep me playing for YEARS the same way D3 did, even with its myriads of faults. But at this stage it wouldn’t even keep me playing longer than Immortal did: a few months. For all its faults especially in Itemization, class-wise D3 offered us upgrades all around.
- the Wizard is not just a boring elementalist, but it raised the bar and gave us something awesome to try.
- the Demon Hunter is the lovechild of the Amazon, Rogue & Assassin with the voltage turned all the way up.
- the Crusader is literally an ELITE version of a Paladin. Elite = Better.
- WitchDoctor is a remixed Necromancer & a breath of fresh air.
- the Monk was brand new all around.
Moral of the story is: D3’s replayability factor was doubled with each new class we could try, because each is great fun in its own way - poor itemization notwithstanding. If you got bored of one class, you could try another and another, because each one gave you something new to experience.
But in D4 the replayability factor completely goes out the window. We’ve all played D2 to death, and then they brought it all back again with a fresh coat of paint in D2R. You’d think they would be smart enough to try and give us something in D4 that we haven’t already played to death, but Blizzard’s laziness knows no bounds.
And don’t get me started on the uber-boring item affixes that make the D2 stench even more unbearable because they look they were ripped right from it.
“We’re making a brand new game so we’ve copy/pasted all the classes of a 20+ year old game into it, and we genuinely think it’s the best idea ever”. Yeah, not quite.
It’s a damn shame because D4 could’ve been so awesome if they had employed even an ounce of originality & innovation in class design. But clearly, there’s not a single forward-thinking person left in Blizzard. No interesting classes to choose from = no playing the game. And all the time they spent designing that oh-so-pretty game world = wasted.
I didn’t pay $140 in my currency to play the same boring classes with the same boring skills copy/pasted from a 23 year old fossil of a game.
And so I’m taking my money back, because I’m not about to wait years for a new class DLC that will again most likely be copy/pasted from D2, like the uber-boring Amazon & Paladin.
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