My bad, I didn’t see the name. You and I are diametrically opposed on what is fun and online forums only incent doubling down.
May the RNG be in your favor.
Firstly, I miss Farscape…terribly. Great show.
Anyway, there’s a reason a bunch of developers, including at least one from Blizzard, lamented over Baldur’s Gate 3 and how gamers shouldn’t expect that as the new industry standard.
It was an extremely solid release, and it wasn’t shallow.
Diablo IV is a shell, a dressed up shell. The foundation wasn’t solid and fleshed out enough to expect anything but a community ravenous for new content…which I predicted ages ago on the forums, specifically saying that now the devs would have to scramble to churn out new content just to keep the community that remained invested…and here we are!
That’s not because gamers demand additional content every day, that’s because the content they delivered wasn’t enough for a solid release to begin with… The foundation was little more than, and I frequently say this because of how apt it is, dressed-up Magic: Legends, which was a canceled ARPG that never reached launch because of the criticism outweighing the investment. I beta tested it, which is why I was so vocally critical in the beginning of Diablo IV.
They felt too similar.
Gamers are certainly impatient and content hungry, everyone knows that…but that’s not why Diablo IV had such a mass exodus and why those who remain are so content hungry, it’s because not enough effort was actually put into the game’s foundation and, apparently, spread thin by developing the first two seasons and expansion alongside the game prior to launch.
That is an absolutely INSANE way to develop…I don’t even care if I’m not a developer, I’m going to say that with absolute confidence. How they didn’t realize this is where they were heading is beyond me. I assume MANY of the actual developers on the team knew where this was going, which is why they leaked info about crunch and displeasure with the game’s direction ages ago…that everyone, myself included, ignored because we’re all foolish.
I even forgot about it because I was only reminded when someone brought up the article here on the forums…but those on the team basically warned us all ages ago, and we just didn’t care.
In that, we certainly are to blame.
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This is perhaps the last time I’ll say this but I’ll be as much as obvious as I can:
If you treat yourself like a drug addict and talk about “dopamine” all the time that’s what Blizz will do as well
I know I may be overreacting but seen others use this stupid analogy and frankly I’m fed of it. IN FACT think may be the biggest problem and reason why we are where we at at this point
So perhaps remove that self-patient treatment language for once and actually focus on solving a simple problem instead of trying to “cure” everyone with some kind of miracle formula (if it even exists)
That’s a one thing, the other is - there’s not only dopamine, there’s also serotonine, and adrenaline. Perhaps try balance those things out a bit ? 
, just a thought, maybe ?
Christ sake you people are treating yourself like addicted patient and then we all have to wonder why we’re getting the treatment that we’re getting
Like, I know this is probably offensive post but for at least for one day and for once STOP TALKING ABOUT FEELING INTAKES AND DOPAMINE, and simply try to fix what you see
ANOTHER point exactly - stuck in a challenge/reward cycle forever and then we have to wonder why they give us a perpetual hamster wheel of 200 hours pointless gameplay followed by 200 hours of banging against the wall on 5th
For Christ sake stop being reward-centric all the time that’s why we get 200 hours of nothing followed by “Uber” content only. Just fix the problems you encounter and see, and respect our time and effort pls, stop with this nonsensical obsession with power and power fantasy, let the game thrive on it’s own and climb difficulty gradually
That “power fantasy” grind is a bonus if and only if and only after the baseline game works properly - which currently is not the case obviously otherwise we wouldn’t all talk like this
And even more - we can live without all that “addiction” for a few seasons and actually for once just FIX the problems in the game without worrying what happens after 500 hours of playing and whether or not a character becomes OP
Everyone DOES play 50 hours and experiences the terrible repetitive gameplay, who cares what happens after 500, fix the first thing first and let time tell for what happens later ffs
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I’ve said it since the beta. This game is flat out terrible. What the Devs fail to understand is that the game is so bad because it has no depth! If you’ve played diablo 4 for 20 minutes… you’ve played it for 10,000 hours. This game is so casual, So Bland, so boring… Everyone who “worked” on this project should be fired. I say “worked” jokingly because there is NOTHING unique about this game. I CAN PLAY A FEMALE BLACK BARB THO! WOW
Game delays may upset consumers, but the developer doesn’t really care as they know they can make that up by putting our a really good product. What is driving crap releases is “investors have no patience”.
Even indy developers have to answer to someone (except Chris Roberts 
)
True.
Or, well, speak for yourself! That article was part of the reason I didn’t buy the game directly. Game was clearly aiming for a disaster launch long before release date.
Seriously though, yeah, customers do share a lot of the blame for accepting and supporting what the devs are doing.
Addicts are partially to blame for their own situation as well. But the dealer who pushed them into addiction certainly is too.
Heh, kinda agree.
I dont mind speaking about dopamine affects. But not only does it describe players as mindless drones/addicts that just eat up Blizzards trash, it is also usually used incredibly wrong, as some absurd way of saying “Blizzard do what they must do because of dopamine”…
You can create dopamine effects in all kinds of ways. It definitely does not need to be through daily login bonuses and other such nonsensical stuff.
Now that is more true.
Albeit of course also not broadly so. Plenty of investors have extremely long patience.
But I guess, just like we have a gaming industry that want to turn customers into mindless addicts they can feed colored hats to, we do have financial market actors that want to turn both small and large investors into a bit of the same, due to making money on each trade, each short etc.
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I don’t like nodders either.
Yeah, i saw that headline last night and thought - well that’s insulting to the player base, however didn’t think much more of it… But you’re 100% right, and they shouldn’t be rubbing salt on the wound - and least of all poking at the fanbase that is actually taking the time to give feedback and try to HELP THEM. Ludacris
The art department deserve accolades tho, the game is beautiful.
Yes but not perfect (probably for good reasons) and i personally can’t wait till the game goes to deeper depths.
Bruh, yeah, it’s our fault the game is super bugged and they can’t code extra stash tabs.
Imagine not being able to code the same thing an indie company was capable of doing in your game. Also, having the nerve of charging more for a horse than the cost of your competitor’s game. Who needs stash tabs when you can buy a made-up horse and own some of their made-up currency?
Dopamine is shortcut for pleasantly surprised, you’re over-examining this one.
WoW was great for the first 5-7 years of release after that, you could see they were struggling. And wouldnt ya know it, that was right after Activision acquired/merged them.
Blizz WAS a cutting edge company. I dont know if they still are because it seems like they are struggling with the MS merger/acquisition. Time will tell if MS can change them back to what they were, but unfortunately, there is a chance that MS just acquired them for the cash cow and rights to the game titles.
But we will see
Good rant, I liked it! it’s true too.
Then how can repetitive cycle do this ?, you realize repetitiveness goes against surprises right ?
Yes, overreacted, however it is VERY IMPORTANT to keep an eye on this. We mustn’t allow ourselves be blind for power hunger and certainly not ask for long episodes of it i.e. addiction
We should focus on issues one at a time and call out them one at a time when we see them. However we should also be aware what makes us give the feedback - if it’s impatience or hunger for power - just simply don’t do it because there’s already plenty of both of those things in the game
One of the four pillars of sustained engagement is surprise reward.
The Diablo gameplay loop achieves this with surprise loot that is amazing. Kill Duriel 30 times then finally on run 31 you get Shako.
Now that might take a long time and runs 1 - 30 feel like a waste, that’s where dependable benefits come in. That’s why I still think D3 was well designed. Sometimes I get a 4/4 primal but every time I get some para, gem progression, etc.
The alternative is something like Skyrim where there’s sooooo much content, but that’s not really ARPG territory. It’d be cool to hybridize tho but that’s a tangent.
Man you’re confusing pleasant surprise with hard labor lol
Wanna have a pleasant surprise ?, create a whole new layer of rarely rolled affixes that can substitute something existing:
- Generic buff duration increase instead of Shrine buff duration or Berserking duration
- Overpower grants MS/damage bonus instead of on elite kill bonus
- LH chance to Daze or even Knockdown instead of LH chance to Slow
- Overtime damage increased by % of Max HP instead of just Overtime damage or Overtime physical/poison/fire damage
& e.t.c., you get the point right 
Why are you so top-tier-centric all the time ?, like only lvl100s and only Ubers should do something good and the rest of 99.99999% of both loot and activity to remain “trash” as is ATM… ?
Yeah, I get it, but try understand - not everything has to be locked under hard labor or hard grind, even regular loot should be able to surprise at times to keep the players willing and inspired to continue with just playing the game in general (not grind to open Duriel but actually play anything whereever they feel like - only that no area will be a “cakewalk” and later the game will properly “adapt”)
TLDR ? - BASELINE game should climb up in difficulty and pose more and more strategic challenges while keeping not just uber/super-rare/unique items interesting but whole bunch of other loot as well
I would say that at least 70% of players would have been happy with D2R or slightly better D3 graphics. That would have minimized the costs somewhat. The stupid commercials that were produced bypassing the target group wouldn’t have been necessary either. Then you would have taken the systems from D2R and D3 and added an awesome story and the game would have been finished. Diablo 4 wasn’t finished yet and was released earlier so that you could continue to develop it on the side and sell the session pass. The game is monetized to the maximum. The companies go bankrupt because they pay out more and more profits to investors and don’t focus on releasing a good game. See Larian Studios how to do it right, I have all of their games.
The story of Diablo 4 is really modest and there are 0815 side quests everywhere and the dungeons almost all feel the same in structure. D2R (D2) was more fun in terms of dungeon building.
There was Corona during the development time, but you can see that the WOW team, for example, released a good expansion. I think there are a lot of internal problems in the development team and it was forgotten during development that you are developing a game and not a cash cow. Even if the player numbers on Steam don’t reflect everyone, this still says a lot. If you have an in-game shop and sell cosmetic items in an ARPG… why should I farm equipment… half the fun is gone. We all remember the Diablo 3 auction house at the beginning, they have now massively overdone it with Diablo 4. This is reflected in the number of players and, in the long term, in the sales figures. Diablo 4 may have a hard time next year. … earned.
I’ll take gameplay over graphics 10000x. Its why all us still have our N64 - The games were just flat out fun.
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Imagine if we were able to farm cosmetics as end game…
Ohhh wait locked behind $25 and $65 pay walls instead….
I’m sticking to D2R for 20 more years I guess…
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