Pick a true visionary and leader.
Why was Metal Gear so successful? Hideo Kojima. Dark Souls? Hidetaka Miyazaki. Path of Exile? Chris Wilson.
Pick a leader and visionary who truly seeks to create a fantastic piece of art for a target audience of arpg fans. Maybe that’s a more mmo approach that doesn’t do seasons, caters to casuals more. Cleans up all the time wasting and difficult to scan through stats.
Or maybe it’s someone who understands what made D2 good like 4 stam 4 strength leather belt philosophy, more than 6 skills with a game that’s unapologetic about difficulty like Uber Lilith.
D4 has no artistic soul or cohesive overall direction that brings it all together. Way too much overuse of assets hidden behind simple procedural generation. Too long xp grinds to emulate a long time to execute content instead of having an actually long fun adventure. And massive overcomplication of using systems that are actually really simple. Having a decimal point on stats is just bad. Having so many DMG VS is just bad. No idea how these went so far in development.
One ultimate leader with a vision for a certain type of game, with the confidence to be unapologetic to other types of players. And the passion to truly want to make it good for the type of players that like that type of game because they plan to play it for 10 years themselves. This is the person that should be making the hard decisions to execute on their vision with a final word on everything to make sure the game has an overarching plan and end goal on how to bring it all together. A requirement should be that this leader is a player of the game and a hardcore player at that even if they are a hardcore player that prefers a casual playstyle. They should be able to and enjoy and be participating in completing all content in the game IN THEIR SPARE TIME imo. Otherwise I do not trust they truly love the game and should be in charge.
Someone with the stones to take criticism from the community and disagree with it because it doesn’t fit with their vision.
Games are art. Blizz should take a chance on and hire a real artist. A real gamer not someone who wants to be a games designer but has no desire to actually play the game they are designing. I don’t want to play that persons game when it comes to long term arpgs. This is a genre that requires a visionary that actually plays the damn game.
D4 feels like it was made by compartmentalised departments on some corporate formula Blizz execs think they cracked after years of trying to figure out how to addict us to games instead of just making good art.
And the whole marketing run about end game being planned from the beginning was a complete lie. Blizzard have no integrity. Hire someone with integrity.
Gave feedback for a long time. Defended this game after launch. Then it started to settle in. The feeling that I’m not playing because I’m having fun. But because of a game smartly designed using player RETENTION data driven analytics to waste players time on overmanaging, overcomplicated actually simple systems (not where the depth should have been). And launching with as little a viable product as possible. Clever massively funded marketing strategies using the buzzwords you want to hear with smart management of dev time to pump out the 120+ dungeons you wanted that look just good enough for the first 50-100 hours of play before you realise how flipping repetitive they are (play for the next 10 years!). Years of Blizz execs and money men collecting data on our psychology. It feels like I’m pressing a drug button (am I allowed to say drug?blizzforumsamirite).
Blizz don’t know
- How to have enjoyable stats on items that aren’t time consuming to read through and sort DMG VS WHO CARES uninspired actually hate my loot and inventory
- How to have an inventory and stash that isn’t awful to experience, time wasting, not even a search feature or sort by affix shame on you for wasting years of peoples lives collectively because you can’t implement such simple features (aaa billion dollar company 7 year development)
- How to make interesting uniques that people actually want to use
- How resistances should be working
- How overpower should work
- How Uber Lilith should be balanced
- How classes should be balanced to have at least more than 2 viable build per class for launch
- How tier 100 should be balanced
- How to provide an experience for both casuals and hardcore players
- How long it should take to level…
- How to have an enjoyable horse experience
- How to have an armour system that’s intuitive and easy to calculate among other calculations
- How to make dungeons not feel like repetitive over used asset reflips
- How to have interesting nightmare sigil affixes
- How to have a season 1 that isn’t a few caves with boring season mechanic single mob and terrible boring boss that’s the content for an entire season you want us to pay for with battlepass?
- How to have items that actually feel like upgrades when I replace them I can barely tell I’m doing more dmg even when going from 3/4 bis stats to 4/4
- How to have affixes that don’t just feel like sets
- How to have paragon tree that doesn’t just feel like I’m adding dmg and nothing else
- How to have numbers not be so high
- How to have vulnerable not be so important on every build
- How to recognise only 1 weapon would be used by each class making the rest useless because of obviously op default stats
- How to not have the most egregious gold sink I have ever seen with actual rerolling and priority stat bugs causing players to dump weeks worth of gold farm and can even brick the item with too expensive rolls
Some quotes from a post no one read but should.
