Hey Activision Blizzard.
I figured I’d offer some feedback on diablo 4. I’d like to preface this by saying I enjoyed a good chunk of my first playthrough, and think some aspects of the game were quite good.
The voice acting was above average, Lorath killed it, awesome job there.
The aesthetics were impressive, good job art team.
The three proper cutscenes were memorable.
The setting and characterization of the continent’s subcultures was pretty good. I particularly enjoyed the attempt at some classical dnd feeling “old ways” druids.
Class identity was deacently strong at a surface level.
I’ve been a big fan of isometric arpgs and dungeon crawls for most of my life, have played a fair amount of ttrpgs, and was a huge fan of Blizzard entertainment growing up. I recognize that you guys are people and don’t wish any ill will, but I am going to be very critical from here on out.
There’s a lot of this game that leaves me wanting, especially compared to it’s predecessor in diablo 3. I’m not sure if this was some kind of executive deadline issue, which forced your company to churn out this game a year or even years before schedule in order to meet some quota, or if what I see as major failings in the game are just ineptitude. I want really deeply to believe that the spirit of blizzard is still trying to deliver good games, and that you are capable game designers. Here is a list of issues I see personally in the game as it stands, which have ultimately lead me to realize I will likely spend a lot less time with this game than previous titles.
-monetization; this caused me to quit WoW, and condemn and be utterly disgusted by diablo immortal. I am willing to pay personally, as an impoverished gamer, something in the realm of 600$ for a game I enjoy if it offers enough content and enjoyment to justify that expense. I’m happy to pay a monthly subscription for a game that respects my time and delivers better and better content, even when I don’t play(ffxiv for example). I don’t feel cheated at a 70$ price tag, but I do find the shop, the way seasons reward currency which mathematically incentivizes a player to interact with the shop (1998 coins? Really we’re hiding predatory monetization in cheap “666” references now) and the fact there is a constantly refreshing icon alert for new stuff on said shop, incredibly vulgar and disrespectful, especially after something like diablo immoral. It detracts from what is good in the game, and selling in game cosmetics while offering less overall free cosmetics than a previous title is incredibly disappointing. The fact that their price point is between two and five times more than what I would consider reasonable for in game cosmetic prices, is frankly laughable. Ideally I’d love if you would Pick one; charge for seasonal battlepasses, or charge for cosmetics. I don’t think this will happen, but I’ll shout it into the void nonetheless.
-game balance; this clearly didn’t receive enough internal testing.
I am not paying 70$ to be your guinea pig, and the fact that feedback from the betas is still not implemented in the game is embarrassing. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be balance patches, or that the game shouldn’t be refined after launch.
I feel the time investment vs reward is much less fulfilling than diablo 3, or 2.
I am not an engagement metric, I’m a human being.
Resistances should not be a dead stat, and it should not take months to make them not a dead stat in the game.
Vulnerability is broken, as a single stat bucket, it is and never will be balanceable. It needs to be moved in the formula to the same bucket as all status conditional damage modifiers before it can realistically be salvaged as a concept. Arbitrating the value of the best singular stat in the game by a plus or minus value is just delaying any real fix to that issue.
Off screen damage sources and infinite cc chains against the player are poorly designed and unfun mechanics which should not have been a baseline when diablo 3 addressed both of these.
I would recommend looking at some deeper mechanical arpgs and other video game boss designs. One shot mechanics are not difficulty unless there is skill expression involved in avoiding them. Buildcraft is not skill expression.
-bosses; bosses should be designed around skill expression, and I hope you guys can improve this in the future. Instant death mechanics are awesome and brutal, but only when executed in a way that allows for skill expression, and as it stands there are many instances where effects have basically no telegraph and end up being rng. Overall, I feel boss complexity is absolutely lacking. Compared to the likes of diablo 3 bosses like belial or the angel of death, it feels like a complete step backwards both in variety and difficulty.
-campaign; this should be replayable on a single character on every difficulty, or every boss and dungeon from this campaign should have been repayable in some capacity on a single character, with rewards that properly incentivize it. As it stands, most bosses outside of the msq feel incredibly bland and one dimensional, often a pass or fail based on stats and stats alone, and the rewards are bleak. Committing the time to clear a dungeon should give me a little fountain of rewards from killing a boss, even if that is just a fountain of gold. One of the absolute worst feelings in this game is overcoming a boss that challenged you and having it drop literally nothing.
-dungeons; The advertisements for the game are disingenuous pertaining to these. There are a handful of dungeons in the game, and they are repeated with slightly different mechanics multiple times throughout each region. These need to be refined. I’d love to see them systemically diversified so that the narrative drops within mean something, rather than being flavor voice overs and text to justify a samey buildup with a vaguely different tragic tale. This is a massive missed opportunity and borders on a feeling of false advertising, like if you pointed at seven pictures and then played 50 unique sound files each time pointing to one of these pictures and claiming it was now different. On the same subject, there needs to be less mechanics to open doors overall in dungeons, and a broadly vaster set of narrative implements for those locked doors. Yet another point lacking diversity; dungeon and cellar events. There should be double if not triple the number of random event types in the game to what there currently is, as a baseline.
-enemies; there’s a shameful lack of enemy type diversity. 15 enemy types is not a great foundation from which to already be implementing reskins, especially at a point when there is a wealth of enemy types from previous games to draw inspiration from. This also applies to the generic boss pool. In addition, cc mechanics and minor knockbacks need to be addressed. There is no reason some enemies should have multiple stuns and a knockback that can all be layered if cc is also going to be used as an elite affix. Being repeatedly knocked back, or chain stunned by a single mob, and the way that effects inputs should have been refined in the beta and implemented before release.
-crowd control; enemy crowd control on the player should have diminishing returns. This has been a thing in nearly every game this company has released, these are your games, I shouldn’t have to tell you why that was a good idea implemented in all of them at the request of your playerbase.
-visibility; fov is too close for 99% of the game, and toggles for condensed damage values and to disable damage value display, as well as change the text size of damage value display should be features in the game, as should a brief event log for damage tracking, especially resulting in player death.
-storage; double the size of every inventory, only load the direct inventory of a player to other players on their shard not their stash. Allow legendary affixes to override and be stored at the occultist, farming legendary aspects is already time consuming, having to save good rolls of rare legendary aspects and not use them is wholly unfun, and a negative feedback system for the loot gathering gameplay loop where loot management is already a point of friction at a base level.
-loot; remove and refine general affixes. Resistances should not be broken for any length of time in this game after general release. Damage while close and distant and if effected by every status individually gets to a point where it is largely meaningless over-complication. Refining this system would be a huge win for loot management. Things like individual status damage multiplication should be relegated to direct damage. Damage multiplication from statuses should be consolidated into a singular stat, call it vulnerable. The exception to this would be second stage statuses for sorc, ie;frozen. As it stands most affix rolls are 1/40,000. Think about that as a human being, and then the fact you ideally want to roll 24/1,000,000 as a baseline for any given character, ignoring the item power level system. Just one more reminder that resistances shouldn’t be in a broken state as an in game system for any length of time after a general release of the game. Season 2 as a set date for a fix is a joke.
These are a few points of critique I can offer as player feedback that I would like to see implemented in the game. Again I would like to say I enjoyed my time with diablo 4, it was a good game, but I would like to see it be great. That being said, I might play around in the season a bit, but due to the predatory nature of the game’s cash shop and so many underperforming and poorly executed features in the game, I think I’m pretty much done with it unless there is some serious improvement to the game in a more consumer friendly timeline. I’m sure I missed some stuff in trying voice my concerns and critiques for the game, but I wanted to voice what I remembered while I was thinking about it so that I can at least offer some feedback and solutions to problems I’ve perceived in the game. Thanks for your time and effort and best of luck.