Yes, game from small team of ~60 people offers more than multi-billion corporation with thousands of employees and unlimited resources. I’m talking Last Epoch - and while I understand budget games will never match Blizzard in production value (graphics, cinematics, etc) - it outclasses it in almost every other way while still being early access game.
Few key takeaways:
- has better more customizable stash with search functionality (can you imagine that?)
- A single skill skilltree is bigger and more customizable end entire class skill tree in D4.
- You also have class tree which is more about stats still offers more than entire D4 class tree.
- Itemization is competent, affixes makes sense, crafting makes sense, has more uniques while still in early access.
- It has endgame bosses with unique loot tables for boss specific loot - can you imagine that? And generally has more end-game content than D4.
- you can have loot filters to filter out irrelevant loot by individual affixes, item rarity, base types on combination of these.
- It has competent game core mechanics - where there’s nothing redundant nor anything missing. It has competent mechanics for defenses (where resistances actually work), a barier system that actually is reliable source of defense layer which you can’t say about D4, it has competent damage scaling modifiers that play all nicely together.
So yeah small team on tight budget is providing more while in early access than multi-billion corp with experience in genre for over 20 years now. That’s freaking embarasing.
PS: I’m not saying Last Epoch is perfect nor that it should be everyone’s cup of tea - but it shows competence in designing game systems where Blizzard is completely and utterly clueless. Game as budget limited is not as flashy and good looking and story campaign is a mess I guess - but it’s still shocking how coherent mechanically game they are offering while still being in early access.
Blizzard seriously has no excuses for all the much deserved critique and should be absolutely embarrassed for what they delivered here.
65 Likes
My guess is that the game director was pushing for a mega patch for the 1st season instead of the traditional approach where the 1st month is spent issuing weekly or bi-weekly fixes for the most egregious stuff. Doesn’t matter if you have an army of programmers is the mandate from up top is misguided.
4 Likes
Because they want to be a billion dollar company so they don’t have to deliver.
When a studio gets big and big corp buys them they become crapyer and crapyer.
See CDPR. Made an awsome franchise, than threw out a half baked 
, or even less just to apeal to impatient investors, and entitled fanatics.
People got overhyped and expected too much. Never get hyped and never expect anything from AAA companies anymore.
17 Likes
Short and simple answer. This game was released before finishing development. At least 6 months to a year early.
11 Likes
Too many people involved, no clear vision. This is what we get.
21 Likes
Mainly because they focus on pretty graphics and hyperexpensive cinematics. im pretty sure thats where 95% of the Diablo 4 development costs (besides marketing costs) went, and gameplay and QOL features were neglected. It doesnt need to be good as longs as its pretty. Otherwise there can be no explanation for, for example, the mount. Im pretty sure that a single coder could have done a better job with that in a week.
4 Likes
Not even a factor - because itemization and game mechanics are ludicrously bad. Like okay - not enough endgame content can be explained by this, but not the atrocious itemization or game mechanics (so items, affixes, stats, offensive mechanics, defensive mechanics and how all that interacts with each other) - is simply just screaming in lack of competence, not lack of dev time.
If they had no clue how to do this - they they should have reiterated on D2 itemization and game mechanics and just add modern combat feel and ofc solve one of big D2 flaw - inventory filled with pots and charms so that you have space only to pick up a single item.
Again the summary is very coherent design in Last Epoch, where in D4 things don’t make much sense and everything feels so disjointed and questionable on how it even came into existence.
A simple example - who thought VULNERABLE is good idea and that should stack to levels where you triple your damage with just this one modifier - but then having skill which can’t even utilize it making them immediately unusable (as you basically do 1/3rd of the damage in best case).
These don’t come from rushed release - these come from complete lack of competence in designing such game’s subsystems.
8 Likes
too many cuts of the pie, and desire to each have more for less is why.
5 Likes
OP post rhymes to what I have in mind. There is no excuse for Blizzard when other much smaller game devs able to pull out games that have a lot more diverse and deep mechanics than D4…
2 Likes
After playing both Diablo Immortal and Diablo 4, this is my conjecture.
I think the developing team forked into two paths. Because the original Diablo 3 concept was supposed to be more MMO-like instead of what is Diablo 3 today. They tried to revisit this concept that eventualy leads to Diablo Immortal.
(We do have to acknowledge that mobile ARPG games in Asia were killing all the precedessor PC ARPG games from 2015~2020. These B-tier game publishers were making billions. Blizzard needed to adapt to this new trend)
We thought to believe this game to be an April Fools Joke. Not actually… They were serious about the content features and it turned out to be quite impressive. But their greedy P2W business model ruined it.
During the development of Diablo Immortal and all the community criticism towards the Diablo mobile game, a different team picked up building what the fans desired it to be, an ARPG game.
So if you actually played both games, then the puzzle seems to match. The open world being so empty and no peer to peer content interactivity is all into Diablo Immortal.
1 Like
It’s not eve as much as having deep complexity - but rather having coherent design where individual elements play nice with each other. Like for example from Sorc perspective - why I only do damage if I applied frost nova (which is almost the only reliable way to apply mandatory Vulnerable status)? First of all - this just silly design in itself, and secondly it pigeon holes me into being basically melee character even if I do damage with range skills…
Just one of most apparent and most complained examples, but everything that wrong with itemization, mechanics, balance, endgame goals and progression has been said already in depth, so I won’t repeat myself.
You expect a big patch on s1? lol
Last Epoch is in early access since April 2019 (first plan for release was April 2020…). I like that kind of game development (Hades want this way and it is a masterpiece). And I think it is part of what makes LE a nice game.
But can a “multi-billion corporation” can go this way?
Or maybe you can consider that D4 is currently in early access and hope that future patches will add missing pieces 
.
Yes and I won’t be disappointed. They need S1 to go smoothly and are stockpiling big fixes for the S1 patch. Not all of the fixes but some.
You don’t even need 60 employees.
Wolcen is much better than D4 and had just a few devs.
1 Like
This doesn’t make sense because as you can see S1 doesn’t have a mega patch. Season 1 a very very tiny patch.
I’ll explain what happened since people don’t know. D4 project has very high turn over and has had several different game directors. You can clearly see the project lacked focus. Realistically most of the game was developed just over the past 2 years and they fell back on a lot of old design ideas from D3 without fully understanding where those ideas originated from or what people liked or didn’t like about them.
1 Like
S1 hasn’t released yet…sooo IDK where you’re getting your information from. Got any sources?
I disagree on this one. Wolcen is literally most broken aRPG in past decade where most of the crap didn’t work and from what I’ve been told - it still doesn’t for the most part. Which is why it sits at 56% positive on steam which very low for steam standards as even 70-80% positive games are mostly very average and mediocre.
They flopped with mechanics and itemization far more then even this game.
Which game do you think made more money? Last Epoch or Daiblo 4?
That is your answer.