Fix Diablo 4, you're a dev now

  1. Apologize to the community.

  2. Change the development team entirely. Pay premiums for quality designers instead of hiring out the back of a pick-up at the local Home Depot.

  3. Take the game offline for 2 years. Rework core mechanics like: loot, trading, the open world based on existing player feedback. Observe PoE2 beta and what is effective; have a server slam beta test for 3 days quarterly in the final year. Implementing player feedback on what features work from PoE2 between each test.

  4. Re-release with a free seasons pass for existing licence holders.

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You are an excellent Diablo fan

They need to poach people from other games and quit prioritizing monetization. I mean Gemma Chan is gorgeous, but seriously, are all of Blizzards ideas just cheap gimmicks? Hire brilliant nerds, pay/treat them well, and tell the bean counters to screw off. Otherwise, I hope D4 fails & becomes an industry cautionary tale. Oh, and fire some shot callers without rewarding them with a severance bonus.

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  1. Delete barricades blocking your mount in the open world
  2. Make waypoint discovery account-bound
  3. Have the mount cd reset after climbing
  4. Delete 25% of useless affixes on gear (resistances included)
  5. Remove stun from wind-empowered mobs
  6. Add offline availability contingent upon launching online ONCE to improve HC experience (Not sure how you’d prevent cracking still unfortunately)
  7. Add a limited quantity herb vendor to the alchemist
  8. Add build load-outs and a reset paragon option
  9. Add character-specific key binds
  10. Replace the shared stash with an additional tab specifically for sharing between characters
  11. Cap enchanting costs to 1 million gold
  12. Allow players to improve codex of power with the rng aspects they find
  13. Fix the BUG that prevents tooltips from appearing on gear upon mouseover
  14. Make the Hell map we saw at the end of the campaign a world event rift we can play in
  15. Add more chests around helltide zones and revert gift of mysteries cost

If they did 1/3 of this I believe they’d receive nothing but praise.

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Sure gimme the source and a normal budget :slight_smile:

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  • admit that butchering the first D3 and introducing the couch console crap system with cooldowns was a step in the wrong direction so fix 1 : removing cooldowns all together

  • remove unstoppable and balance crowd control and introduce faster hit recovery, including an animation not just a stat check

  • online lobby where players are thrown in an can chat, inspect each other, have a short signature in their profile etc

  • some sort of matchmaking system so people can group up

  • in game ladders for NM dungeons and pvp

  • massively simplify dmg and dr by removing 80% of all the idiotic affixes

  • altering affixes so that character functionality comes from the character rather than the surroundings, for example “gain X based on how many monsters are around you”

Fundamentally I would base D4 on D2 mechanics, an actual aarpg and probably the best ever aarpg, rather than couch console wow inspired huge fail D3 and from there I would maybe take a few activities from D3 such as grifts.

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I’ll have a go…

1.) Immediately no-load the first mip level of each environmental texture, reduce particle effect complexity and add hard caps for how many of each can be on screen at the same time. This is to reduce the performance issues of a camera looking down at the ground(laughable on today’s hardware) so the game camera can be pulled out to see ALL of the “aggro” range. This will prevent AI from one-shotting players offscreen AND provide threat detection for squishy range characters.

2.) Reduce the affix pool. Personally, I don’t want this because you can make some pretty good items that stack damage with them. For example, you can roll lightning critical strike damage AND critical strike damage on rings at the same time. Potion drop rate has its uses in builds. All these affixes make some builds viable, and provide build diversity. The reason they need to reduce the affix pool is none of the designers have the ability to manage the complexity of those combinations. They are so busy looking at their “data” and reacting to it (see pre-season cool down nerf), they haven’t the capacity, or have too much hubris, to see what that data says about THEIR design. They will continue to nerf and buff, season after season, until all their dart throwing results in something THEY think is balanced. They need to cut down the permutations of affixes for themselves.

3.) Get rid of any event dialogue. Rule number one of ACTION rpgs is…don’t get in the way of the action. Is it annoying after 10 times? 100? 1000? If eventually it will get annoying to the player, DO NOT PUT IT IN THE GAME.

4.) Same as above, but get the UI off the screen. If the player requests the UI, bring it up. But no one needs to walk out of town in a hell tide and have a window pop up covering the enemies in front of you. Players don’t need to see their town portal will close for the 10,000th time, they need to see what they are fighting.

5.) Cap reroll of affix cost to 10 million or less. If people want to buy billions of gold and get their BIS gear, let them. Stop trying to slow down people who play the game at least 8 to 10 hours a day. There are so many possible builds on only 5 characters right now, you’d do better to make it easier to play many characters than to try and drag out the amount of time it takes to perfect one build.

6.) Provide more options for leveling glyphs. Personally I won’t step foot into a NMD. I have to read a sigil description with a damn scroll bar on it. Then I have to back track all over the place and do events on a timer if I so much as accidently click a chest or shrine in combat. The design has made what should be an oasis of discovery (chests and shrines) into things you want to avoid clicking on.

7.) Move all the loot to the enemies. The second rule of ARPG design is to reward the player for what they are doing 99% of the time. Killing enemies. As things stand right now, enemies are an obstacle to loot. I know in my case this is why I dislike playing this game. What you are engaging in 99% of the time is not rewarding. The designers seem to they should reward the player with a chest at the end.

8.) I would start weeding out from the dev team(s) anyone that would be on the JV team in a varsity industry. They need to rebuild their tiers of talent. A healthy studio has veterans that have institutional knowledge of the code base and previous game designs that shoulder most of the heavy lifting, a middle tier of talent that is working its way toward veteran status, and younger talent with promise that will eventually become exceptional through experience and mentoring. I think Blizzard lost the top two tiers. If you make that effort now, things will gradually get better.
If you don’t, everything will fail consistently like D4 has. It has a few things that are fun, but to a certain extent, they are only things the designers themselves couldn’t screw up.

thats it, they are a dev now, they are clueless how to fix the game, cause its exactly how they made the game