I feel like the devs made us pay for a broken game and now want more money to fix it

PC General Discussion
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Maybe someone can talk me out of feeling this way, but I strongly feel that Diablo 4 should’ve been designed at least halfway close to what it is in VoH, from the day of launch. Diablo 4 was an expensive game, and there has been no shortage of begging for money constantly since the game launched. Now that we have an expansion that finally brings Diablo 4 into the realm of a good ARPG… well I just can’t help but feel that I paid for early access. that I paid for a “not ready for launch, in-development” game. Because of this I am finding it just unacceptable to pay for an expansion for a game that did that to us. It feels like rewarding the company for it.

At the same time, I am getting a bit of FOMO if I don’t buy the expansion, especially as someone who has casually enjoyed diablo games since childhood.

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Welcome to live service gaming.

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Diablo 3 didn’t even have adventure mode until a paid expansion. Original Diablo 3 was story-mode only.

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at the end of the day it doesnt matter how you feel about it and what you think should have been there since release. It wont change anything.

However, it was pretty clear whats going to be in the base game. Was it enough? not really. Still we knew what we are getting.

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I get you, but ultimately it’s up to you what you plan to do about it. As Borg said D3 was also pretty bad at launch, with quite literally no endgame to speak of until the expansion came out. Then it took several years after the expansion for us to get themed seasons.

Now your mindset may never change, but your actions can. Do you want to keep paying for this product or stop ‘rewarding’ a company by not paying for their products? The ball is in your court friend, always has been.

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Its called running a business…not begging for money. And of course an expansion is going to cost money.

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I played season 1 and quickly realized how unfinished this game was and decided to put it down until the next major expansion. D3 was in a similar boat in that it did not feel complete until the expansion released, hoping history repeats!

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What a nonsense. Diablo 3 had a fantastic campaign on launch and the best endgame ever in any ARPG game (Inferno mode). That was the height of the entire franchise from a gameplay perspective. Every fight mattered and was challenging and you never new if you can survive the next corner or if 3 packs of rare mobs smosh your face.

Cannot hear it anymore. Sad enough all the crybabies canceled inferno mode so quickly. Now look what d4 is now, it’s a complete joke where we once again need 27 difficulty scalings because everything is a mess.

At least get your stuff together, d3 (vanilla) had issues but it was miles ahead of anything D4 ever did so far. That is a whole other league.

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I’m inclined to disagree but it would seem your mind is made up. What you want isn’t Diablo 4, that much is clear. Good luck to you, may you find satisfaction in another game of your own choosing.

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There’s no reason to talk you out of the way you’re feeling.

At this point, they’ve removed/changed 80-90% of the base game because it was so terrible.

You’re literally paying them more money to jump into their next beta (read: expansion).

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Welcome to perpetual be— sorry, live service games.

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If you dont want to crowdfund the fixes for this dumpster fire, then wait another expac. Im seriously considering it myself.

Will make decision after 2 weeks of voh going live.

Vote with your wallet and dont let it live in your head forever.

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Think of how many full price AAA games are absolutely terrible.

This isn’t just a Blizzard problem. They could be part of the solution…the choose not to be. That’s fine, not every company seeks to act in good faith. Hardly “their fault” that greed and corner cutting exists.

Imagine you a profit seeking corporation. If you knew, with certainty, that your well loved IP could be released as trash and people would buy it anyway while you continue to work on it and release more portions at high prices…what would you do?

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I mean i am still waiting for them to fix Minion necro, have waited since launch.

Will season 6 be the time they finally make them viable ?

Or S 7,8,9,10 ?

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There are also a lot of big AAA studios in big turmoil with mass dismisal and so on.

Maybe there is a coincidence :thinking: :thinking: :thinking:

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Agreed, if they released the game as is now back at launch it would’ve been an absolute banger (though not a fan of the excess of scaling and powers at the end)

The problem is I feel like I’ve been abused, it feels like they specifically ignorred the “average Joe” and listened exclusively to Youtubers and Streamers and no matter how much the “average Joe” was struggling and talking how the game needs to be more dynamic and not necessarily force everyone to top tier at all cost and “streamline” the game even more and completely kill the sense of accomplishments of progressive and partial manner

100 or bust, Tormented boss or bust, Pit 100 or bust, Horde 6 or bust, e.t.c.

EVERY SINGE damn season the “path” and requirement was elongated and raised to the highest bar, and therefore time was “reservedly wasted” for everyone (regardless if having it or not)

Forcing everyone to go all the way being the perfect recipe for time waste and exhaustion… Not respecting people’s time for those that can’t afford to not play 200 hours, and then making everything easier/trivial made it even worse as well

Not to mention the absolutely DREADFUL scaling and balance for the most of first 3 seasons and the overkill on scaling in S4

The game feels like it was ALWAYS designed for the Streamers, and I’ll say even worse - always designed to be a 5 day miracle after a season release and be done. Leave everyone and everything else in the dark and behind (meta or bust every single season)

Frankly EVERY single thing I can think of was either reversely prioritized or reversely fixed… Eventually some things got better, but only and only AFTER some disasters were also tried out

A very few things I can think of that were fixed for the right reasons and the right order the first time, it was always design fixing based on fear of “top tier eschalon of player’s” criticism instead of doing the right thing the first time

And FOR THAT I feel some non-negligible dose of resentment and yes, I also feel somewhat abused but more importantly super exhausted for no reason tbh

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In the event that Diablo IV was structured to be Diablo III ROS 2.0 from the start then only Diablo 3 fans would have purchased the game.

Diablo IV in how it released was a massive improvement over Diablo III vanilla in many ways. Diablo IV’s World tier system was unique to the open world environment. For it was structured in a way that was an evolution to the difficulty states from Diablo II and vanilla Diablo III. As in (Normal) (Nightmare) and (Hell), that would be unlocked from completing the story and then a reset would happen to then again play the story once more, but with added changes to mobs and such.

Structurally, Diablo IV was meant to be a successor to Diablo II with Diablo III game mechanics. Though yes, this may have been the reason for the outcry.

Diablo IV vanilla up until Season 4, for good or for bad, was a compromise between Diablo II aspects and Diablo III development mechanics. I at least favored that style of the game before Diablo IV just out right adopting Diablo III ROS centric design structure following season 4: Loot Reborn.

Simply because it was new literally in the sense Diablo IV actually tried to make a hybrid of a game between the two. Unlike Diablo III that tried to be a soft reboot for the IP like Resident Evil 4 was to Resident Evil of the classic games.

I am not. Diablo IV VOH has clearly decided now what type of player base it wants. Thus I have no reason to have fear of missing out. i played Reaper of Souls before.

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Kinda like taking your car in for new brakes, The Mechanic installs new breaks takes the car for a test drive and hits another car. As you stand there waiting, The mechanic pulls up and you see your front bumper smashed in, you ask can you fix my bumper? he says sure I’ll get you an estimate.

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absolutely. im with people who say d4 got released in an unfinished state, heck, even the devs said it was pushed too early. But one thing d4 had going was a pretty smooth start.

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Can’t find much fault in OP reasoning. The realization that it was de facto early access should’ve come months ago (maybe it did).

If they’re giving you fomo, they’re doing one thing right at least. But it’s not obvious to me that the new systems & features ‘complete’ the game or revamp how it feels to play (idk). The core loop, the environmental design, the apparent lack of vision when designing systems for actual gameplay… instead theory-crafting & making the live build the actual first testbed (and lately PTR)… I think that’s all still there. They’ve just set aside “new elements” over time & earmarked them for an “expansion”.

Just ask yourself if the new elements are quite enough to make you want to “buy to try” or not. For me it’s a definite “no” for now, until I see people testing them out, commenting about how they feel to play, if the various game loops are tedious or not, if the UI changes actually feel good (or ‘work’), if there are server performance improvements under the hood… how many class mechanics are deranged oversights that show lack of talent or professional diligence (what the community reflexively calls “bugs”)… how the Paragon actually feels to interact with & if it’s an improvement (I mean there’s account-wide Paragon, so at least they’re acknowledging something).

Practical observations every consumer can make.

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