This is like a textbook definition of rose tinted glasses.
Every company exists to make a profit first. Often, making a game fun is the best way to make profits, because if people love your game then they’ll buy it and tell their friends.
This kind of absurd revisionism of the (for profit) games industry is hilarious.
(Source: I worked in games industry from ~2000 - 2006. Profit - selling lots of games - was always a motive. Maybe some indie devs “just wanna make a fun game”.)
Some builds aren’t even worth mentioning, and people will just tell you to change to a different one, which is the same as being forced, I’m sorry I meant shoehorned.
I for one am still having fun. I know in Diablo 3 the game died at the end of each season. It was a normal thing. From talking with different people, I found that they would have different goals for each season. Like some people would have a certain Paragon level they wanted to get to or they wanted to do the achievements or things like that. Then they would stop playing until the next season.
Really sad how Season One has so little content. There is zero incentive to play it. No one wants to re-level a character to 50 and stop playing because there is no end game.
Then I guess I’m playing Diablo wrong.
I’ve always done it like this every season I’ve played in D3. 1-2 weeks finished the season journey until about Paragon 1000-1500 and then did something else again.
In Diablo 4 I will do it exactly as the devs suggested.
I don’t worry about Endgame as long as I enjoy the game itself.
If this would be true that not a lot of people are playing, the #1 explanation would be this dumb “Seasons” system. Because tell me, why would you play in this Eternal Realm (the Realm where old folks die) if there’s a Season around the corner forcing you to start a new character and completely excluding existing characters from the new and cool content?
I’ve been struggling with this myself. I stopped playing not because I wanted to, but because I see no reason to start a new character before the season start and also because I feel like grinding with my main is useless because apparantly all the cool new stuff he’ll miss out on anyway – until an expansion comes out.
The Seasons system is incredibly dumb. “It’s great to bring old players back in and bring new players in”, sure… and it’s great to have current players simply stop playing.
Helltides are empty. They were only populated when the incompetent dev team broke the drop rate and everyone was desperate for Shako’s. Once again, another pointless endgame activity.
Game has zero end game re-specin skills cost a boat load of gold builds are locked behind uber rares.
You end up playing the same build forever and getting the same items forever. Open world difficulty ends at level 95 and all we are left with is NM dungeons and they are bad.
Yesterday the game informed about a new active helltide i was standing at the precious waypoint of lovely Kyovashad. Guess what. Quickly after the info a lot of players around me ported.
At the helltide: Every small event full of players. Every few steps “hello”, “greetings” etc…
In reality, the MTX shop is totally half-assed, and the game itself is more complete than any of the other Diablo’s on release.
It also has an actual story.
Whenever I sign in, there’s always other players. I see them in town, and basically everywhere aside from the dungeons I go into, obviously. I rarely do a random event without someone else joining in, helping out, and then running off. I do it too. If I see someone fighting, I help, then move on. I’ve also accidentally fired at many, MANY other players when I first see them enter my screen. Glad there’s no ‘friendly fire’ haha.
Yeah, acti-blizz is a greedy megacorp. But if that’s really your issue, why buy their products in the first place? They’ve been a greedy megacorp since D2, really. Definitely by the time WoW first dropped.
There are millions of indie game available right now. Buy one of them.