I Finally Figured it Out

PC General Discussion
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It may have taken me 2 years, but I finally figured out my problem with D4.

It’s how it was marketed and sold to us by Blizzard based on the success of its predecessors.

Objectively, each game in the Diablo franchise is at least a solid ARPG title worthy of our time and money if we consider each game independently as if the other titles didn’t exist. However, D4 marketed us a product that would incorporate the best of D2 and D3, but somehow managed to come up short in unexpected ways (The Armory took how long? conduit shrines really? Where’s Diablo? Runes seriously? Loot chase? Leaderboards? What game am I really playing here?) If blizzard sold us D4 under the proper guise that it’s an early access Beta that will take time to incorporate the things that worked in D3/D2, like POE 2 is doing, I would’ve accepted all of these changes each season. Instead, I bought an unfinished product that was guaranteed to sell based on past performance of the franchise.

As the saying goes, “past performance does not guarantee future success.”

Each season is shaking the metas so hard that I no longer look forward to playing seasons. I absolutely enjoyed seasons in D3 and it kept me coming back, but in D4, I dread a new season because I feel like I have to relearn an unsatisfying game and the boring endgame loop/loot chase simply isn’t worth relearning it. D4 is about 2 years in with an expansion and it still hasn’t figured out it’s identity. To be fair, D3 didn’t really find itself until it’s first expansion, but I’m tired of hoping and waiting. Each season in D4 feels like a new Beta test to figure what should be part of the base game, where seasons in D3 were something that slightly changed the meta in a way that was fun to learn by changing something small (Free RORG, extra cube slot, and my personal favorite - the ethereal weapons). D3 would have balance changes of course but usually centered around a set for each class rather than the entire class itself. Without sets, you have to balance aspects that could apply to multiple builds, further complicating the balancing process. I knew generally what to expect each season in D3 due to how itemization was largely centered around set items, excited to find out the new twist that I could theorycraft my build and work towards. It was easy to figure out each season, but not so easy that it would be a bore.

Use maxroll as a guide to game identity: Maxroll build guides would be easy to modify in D3 based upon the twists each season and clear changes to set items impacting builds, but in D4, the build guides basically have to be re-written from the ground up after each PTR. This is what I mean when I say the game has no identity. There is hardly any foundation to build around in the game which makes expansions and seasonal content meaningless to learn and chase. Changing the foundations each season is not new content or a season, it is a completely different version of the game almost unrelatable to the last.

I’ll come back to D4 in a few years when it’s on its 4th expansion with Diablo in the game, all expansions go on sale for 1/4 price, the foundations are set and seasons don’t entirely recreate the game. Until then, enjoy the Beta test as I know many of you do, but realize you are providing a service to blizzard for free that they used to pay people for before live-service gaming took over. I appreciate that games get tested one way or another, I just prefer to spend my time elsewhere while a game figures itself out. I prefer to buy complete products at their peak, not shoes with no soles or a ferari without an engine. I’ll play other games I know I’ll enjoy in the meantime while D4 cooks to the right temperature.

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Idk about “relearning” so much, b/c their systems are too simplistic if anything… but I will raise a beer to the other half: unsatisfying & boring loop. :beer: Yes indeed. And “dread” is right - b/c naturally I’m fighting my own copium as a ‘lifelong’ Diablo fan… maybe it feels fun this time? Maybe enough things were tweaked to cover up the stale itemization & the meaningless mobs?

Copium tank running low, thank goodness. Almost empty. Be safe in your travels. :beer:

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what happens though when the spagetthi is cooking too long.

They started development and didn’T knew what game they wanna make just that it has to make lots of cash.

Now they are in the middle of the game lifespan and they stil dont know what to do witht eh game but they wanna make cash

In future they will still not know where to go with the game they just know they wanna make cash.

D4 was never about making a good game…

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I’m disappointed too. Maybe the better anology is that D4 is still mystery meat in the oven and I am more disappointed with each passing season. I’ve learned there are plenty of other games out there that are cooked to the right temperature and out of the oven. I know what they look like and that I’ll enjoy them.

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D4 started kinda meh. I was hoping it develops to a good direction but now with S8… the roadmap of creative bancruptency…

And then we have TQ2 coming right around the corner. Gosh i loved TQ…

YOU SAVED MY HORSE…

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Hey hey now, I JUST ate my hot dog & fries, I’m trying to regulate my intake.

“Mystery meat” - I’ll allow it. My analogy earlier was “sandbox mode” in the studio. They’ve got a bunch of sand & some knickknacks & they’re trying to figure out what sort of game to shape out of it every time they get back together for the play date. We could replace the sand & knickknacks with mystery meat - so picture a bunch of sullen devs in a giant vat, slapping some mystery meat around to make it ‘different enough’ than before to pass it off as a new menu item. They don’t have a lot to work with, and the boss won’t supply them with the ingredients they need even if they happen to have cool ideas. They’re gerbils in a cage just like us.

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Completely agree. I’m a gerbil in my cage at work too. Shareholders run companies, not the people who build and sustain them. Devs got it tough and aren’t the problem, they’re stuck in the middle just like the rest of us.

D4 would not have sold half as well without it’s predecessors. I now judge the true success of a game in any franchise based upon how well the next expansion/game sells at release. I didn’t buy the D4 expansion and see very little reason to with how S6/S7 turned out (the spiritborn rollercoaster). S8, by the looks of it, won’t change that either.

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Unfortunately, unless you’re satisfied with Steam figures, we don’t have any idea how well Vessel of Hatred sold - might not have any idea even after revenue report comes out this summer. It was clearly a half-baked product though (my hunch is it was cut in half before release, to meet a deadline & maybe to allow for the Akarat-Paladin connection to develop in the next expansion).

Eh idk… Blizzard is very good at marketing. They can probably sell another lemon. Best bet is to wait a week & gauge reactions from trusted opinionators.

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I have no doubt that the expansion did not bring in great numbers simply based on how much they constantly bragged about how much D4 made. “$666M in five days! $1B and counting a year later! $150M in microtx!” What have we heard about sales so far for VoH? Nothing, because it’s not impressive, though probably enough to keep it going for another expansion or 2. The unimpressive figures will represent how good/bad D4 really is, not the sales that D4 launch brought because that was all from marketing and brand/franchise success. I can’t wait to see the articles post that DI Microtxs made more than VoH sales in the same period.

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Of course it was. Basic marketing 101. They never let that attitude go and we got an easily manipulated advertisement instead of the next great game in the Diablo series.

My thoughts as well. After looking at the roadmap of copy/paste nothingness it may be much longer than that. I gave up on D3 for 6 years for less garbage than what we are seeing with D4. There are too many better options available to keep me busy.

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All of the heavy advertising should’ve been a red flag for me. A good game from a reputable franchise will sell itself. Damn you Megan Fox, I’m not simping for Diablo anymore, but call me anytime.

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Preaching to the choir here.

Live service continuing revenue

Game? what’s that?

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The 666 was a gimmick (they said “over $666m”) because it’s the number of the beast :imp:… meaningless PR. The $1bn/$150m was from the revenue report they have to publish every summer by US law.

That’s why I say we’ll have an idea in July (fiscal report Year 2).

You may be right… my hunch is you’re wrong, only b/c they’re good at selling a lemon, and their target demo for D4 aren’t very “online” (an advantage for a marketing dept)… and the target demo don’t have a lot of options in this space. As long as they keep gameplay simple they’ll probably do ok.

Year 3 is the real test. Switch 2 sales will have peaked in June (unless supply chain is broken) so… only thing going on in Year 3 is the next expansion & some skins.

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Mebeh. Mebeh it’s the sort of advertising that does well on TV… all the KFC & Burger King & Trolli tie-ins… TV crowd. (We permanently-online players don’t see ads anymore… when I hear one now, I get a panic attack). They’re aiming for ‘couch dads’ who watch a lot of commercial TV, plus mobile gamers (possibly Immortal players). Just a hunch.

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Obviously 666 was a gimmick. My point is the constant articles about the sales and success of Diablo 4 was over the top corporate gaslighting as if it needed to be sold into a ponzi scheme. If the VoH was anywhere near as successful we would’ve heard something by now in a quarterly earnings report blasted into the media. If it were something worth talking about, people would be talking about it and they’d be talking about the success in campires etc.

We shall see. Spreading the game to new platforms provides a minor boost but nothing sustainable for a game that’s largely made for PC gamers. I think we both agree, its not a matter of “if” but “when” the numbers go down because the product simply doesn’t deliver a sustainable revenue stream.

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It wasn’t. You know why. They changed their course. When you have a company and you release a product and you say “We will do this and that” and then after same time you change the plan you know the plan was a failure.

They constantly had to change season layout. They have to change the addon release layout. They had to rework core systems right after release.

D4 might be a succesfull game, but it is not as succesful as Blizz predicted it to be.
Since they have no “emotional” attechment to the franchise anymore and simply treat it as a “lifeless” product you can be sure the moment D4 falls below a certain point of “lucrativity” they will decapitiate the game and try to squeez out the last drop of blood.

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be more open minded. don’t be too harsh.

these are the kinds of achievements young people (devs) can manage today. we shouldn’t compare them to their predecessors. instead, we need to adapt to the new era and environment, rather than expecting the new generation going backwards to adapt to us.

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So => I do what Maxroll says I should do

That to you is what you say => an Identity ? :person_shrugging:

See the problem ?

This should have NEVER been a thing to begin with. Let’s do a fair take (for a change)

  • Re-imagine D3 without Maxroll

I know it’s kinda hard to do at this point but just try imagining it…

What do you think of that game this time ? (in terms of satisfaction, identity, all those things you mentioned…)

Re-imagine playing all the seasons from D3 with a “wrong” build, or say a good portion of them, cause this time Maxroll doesn’t exist

  • Would you STILL be satisfied with that game ?, would you still think of it as something advertised properly… ? :thinking:

Must say, I’d find it hard to believe you would, but hey who knows, perhaps you would, maybe…

It’s just I find it hard to believe (according to even your own words) that

  • People need GUIDES to like a game or give it an identity :person_shrugging:

Really ?, so if say IGN props a game it’s a good one, if it doesn’t it’s a bad one ?, why should I (or you, or anyone else for that matter) care about that ?, if a game works - it works, if a game doesn’t work then guess what:

IT DOESN’T WORK

If a game requires guides, or filters, or “streamer advice”, or “do only this and ignore everything else”, or really any of those things, and those things make you suddenly do/work 50x better (or in worse cases thousands of times better) => then frankly I can’t help but feel that there’s something really inherently wrong with that kind of a game

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Wow SMH.

Rule #1 Stop misquoting people and adding words and different context in your requotes that were never made.

I never said “People need GUIDES to like a game or even give it an identity” as you quoted me saying in your post. I was conveying how guides change from season to season as an example of game identity (doesn’t mean it’s the ONLY thing that gives it identity). If a game changes a lot each season, then it doesn’t have an identity and is still trying to find it IN MY OPINION. D4 has build guides and I don’t like the game and there are plenty of games without build guides I like way more than D4.

Now that we got that out of the way…Did I personally attack you or your family somehow that you assume so much about how I view the game by simply using maxroll as an example for game identity? What did maxroll ever do to you? I played D2 and D3 well before I even knew about maxroll so why don’t you eat your words for a moment and listen to what I was ACTUALLY saying instead of seeing me mention maxroll and sending you into an unhinged rage?

You implied so much about what I said without even understanding what I meant (thank you reddit for creating people like this - I can’t even make a post without gettting people who rage when they see 1 word and assume the worst).

I don’t use the build guides myself but it doesn’t mean I haven’t taken a peek from time to time to see what people who play the game for a living are using (I personally prefer off-meta builds in D3, which I learned on my own because it was easy to figure out based on the changes each season). D4 is impossible to figure out the meta because of so many multipliers that stack in inconsistent ways along with unintended bugs you can only figure out by testing each PTR and season. I got so bored of trying to figure out D4 after 5 seasons, even after they “simplified” the item affixes because it’s impossible to calculate a good build when there are 3 multiplicative damage categories that each of the additive damage types fall into that you would’nt otherwise know because the game doesn’t tell you. Then when they buff new item/skills each season and add “boss powers”, you think it’d be easy to figure out what will be stronger next season, but it isn’t, because some bug makes a build that is 100x stronger than the other builds and breaks the season. Sure, they said they would start fixing these bugs early in the season now, but these bugs should never exist in the first place if a game has a solid identity. They make these changes each season because even after nearly two years, they still haven’t figured it out. Hence, I reference build guides to summarize the the chaos these changes make each season, leaving the game with no fundational identity from season to season. I never said anyone should use build guides or has to use a build guide to enjoy the game.

I like the content the maxroll guys make because they play games at the highest levels for a living. They give unfiltered honesty about all ARPGs helping me decide what games are worth my time. They have said many times they have to completely rebuild guides each season in D4 because so much changes every season (which could be a good thing if the rebuilds were logical and not because of bugs or unintended buffs they didn’t plan for). D3 had minor tweaks by the first expansion each season, the endgame loop was fun, and there was way more that I wanted to do by the expansion in D3 than D4. I knew what to expect in D3 without any major bugs each season, and I have no clue what to expect in D4 and don’t really care anymore befcause none of it seems to stick.

Take maxroll out of it and clearly tell me what D4’s identity is each season that you look forward to (which won’t change next season)? D3, I can clearly state regardless of each season what was built on a solid foundation by the first expansion (itemization, greater rifts, gem upgrades, leaderboards, goblin packs, etc) and it was much more fun than D4 is at it’s current state.

Why don’t you reply to the actual point behind my post instead of one small part of it I was trying to use to demonstrate a point. Clearly you love Diablo 4, what gives it identity that keeps you coming back, and how is it better than D3, D2 or other games? Stop reading posts looking for something to hate on and rather focus on a counterargument to the topic at hand if you disagree.

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Ok, let’s redo this better in more details

This is true, D3 did all the damage and D2 despite having a huge flaw that D4 inherited with no questions asked, still carried the hype overall

This is surely, well as we could all see and feel, true :slight_smile:

This is why the game has to be hard at the end (and slow down in progression), so that process of “relearning” it becomes a thing of refreshing for everyone (as opposed to for only those that play to the very end)

Lest to say we’re omitting the “unnecessarily long journey” from previous season because of having accumulated too much power, certainly an excessive amount than should be possible

Ok, so this is what I mis-quoted ?, you surely say that you consider D3 having an identity and read Maxroll to “re-fresh” your learning curve to have a new turn on an old/er build… ok, sure, whatever :stuck_out_tongue:

The only thing you’re truly complaining about is having to do it more often than before

So what is that I misread or misquoted ?, whatever this is is not really gonna move the needle cause the statement itself to begin with is self-contradictory by nature :person_shrugging: