In D2 you find a Unique item that you don’t need it, the item still has value. You find a Shako and you don’t need it, you trade it for something you want. Diablo 2 is a trading loot hunting game so there is always a REASON to play.
In D3 and D4 the items don’t retain value due to lack of trading and social ARPG aspects. You finally find a perfect Temerity you need okay cool. However you find another one it’s worthless. The items have no VALUE!!! If items have no Value in an ARPG it’s dead! Period! This is why D3 died and why D4 will too.
If there is no trading in a loot hunting game…There is no game!!
Diablo 3’s failure? That game was packed on seasons, what are you talking about lol. It’s not meant to be a game that’s played 24/7, it’s a dungeon grinder ARPG. This isn’t WoW.
Pindle runs take quite literally 10 seconds each… and is optimized for loot drop/efficiency.
A comparable run to NM dungeons in D2 would be the Cow Level. Picking up Ancestrals and Leggos/Uniques only in a NM dungeon I would get maybe 10-15 in D4 depending on the dungeon, a Cow Level I would be ecstatic to have anything drop that would be worth picking up.
The other thing to highlight is that there is no equivalent to Pindle/Baal/Meph runs in D4, which is a serious downside and those all play to the slotmachine mentality which is why D2 is so successful.
There is trading in Diablo 4 though. The only useful thing that can’t be traded are uniques. I have enough legendaries of each aspect at the max roll that I don’t need to trade them.
There’s just no platform to trade in D4. It’s too cumbersome.
Dead seasons. D3 died nearly a decade ago. D3 is regarded widely as a massive failure as it lost most of it’s players many years ago to other games.
More players play D2R today then D3. There is a reason to play D2R, there isn’t a reason and hasn’t been a reason to play D3 since 2014 or somewhere in there.
D3 is a laughing stock and ruined a great franchise. It wasn’t a sequel too D2 and PoE made the true Diablo sequel. These are objective facts. D3 is a completely irrelevant game. Don’t get me wrong I bought it like many… I haven’t played since 2014 though like the majority and wouldn’t touch that game if you paid me.
I played D2R waiting for D4. If D4 doesn’t fix what is wrong…it’s a waiting room for PoE2 and history repeats itself.
Well, marketing sales are still hard numbers, which are actual facts. D3 did not sell 30mio+ times because people hated it.
Quality is determined by opinion.
All of you D2 Andies hem and haw that base items are valuable, magic items are valuable, rare items are valuable, unique items are valuable, set items are valuable… this is what you asked for, that more than just legendary items are useful.
The main problem with this game is the inventory/storage . How anyone can enjoy a looter game when your inventory fills in less than a full dungeon run and you have no storage space to stash your plundered loot is beyond me. It’s not like they just slightly missed on the inventory/storage. They missed by an order of magnitude. Inventory/storage should each be roughly 10 times their current size. It’s a shame the bean counters completely ruined their game to save a few pennies on data storage. In current form, this game is unplayable.
It was riding D2’s coat tails immensely. If any other developer released it under any other name it would have failed miserably.
The people who continued playing the season as the game went on were undoubtedly blizzard fan boys who think blizzard can do no wrong. But they did. The game was garbage by every metric relating to a game design perspective.
Am not sure what your point is here, because you are saying these numbers out of context. You might be too young to even realize these things:
D2 was a huge success for its time. The game was released only for computer gamers. Back in the year 2000, most households were just getting into using computers, and most people used dial-up internet connections. It was a different world back then. So, this game sold 4 million copies to a world that barely had technology to use it.
D3 is available for 6 different platforms - selling 30 million copies isn’t surprising. Considering many folks here will buy multiple copies so they can play on their PC or XBOX and also the 6 different platforms, that number is within the same realm of sales as D2.
D2R, I’m amazed a remake of a game that was 20 years old at the time the stat you posted (5 million copies) sold so well. That speaks volumes to it.
You are conflating number of copies sold with quality of game, though. It’s just an invalid measuring tool. ActiBlizz has an OUTSTANDING marketing department. If the devs were half as competent as the marketing team, we’d have a good game now!
D4’s development has been plagued with issues since the start, and it’s on the same doom train as D3 was.
30 million copies sold, one of the highest selling games of all time. It was more than successful, it was one of the most successful examples of a video game in the history of mankind.
What tool should we use? I can’t think of any better metric for the success of a game other than the metric that actually tracks the success of the game.And success of the game is what ultimately matters. No one cares if a few PoE andies mald, what we care about is whether the game is successful enough to justify continued live-service content which so far D4 has proven strong enough to justify.
