Virtually nobody complained about not getting a free expansion, my guy. The perspective on an expansion is more or less “This shouldn’t be released before the game gets fixed,” which is 100% fair. People want to spend money on Diablo IV, but they aren’t going to do it if the game is still broken.
Official statements or not, it’s unbelievably tone deaf of Blizzard to move forward on it, or at the very least wait until they’ve pumped out a few more patches until the game is in a somewhat marketable condition. It reads “Yeah, we know the game is broken, but here’s an expansion for the game that we expect you to pay for because that’s just how we’re operating with this game.” Even worse if preorders go live the same week.
People aren’t being unreasonable about this and I think it’s very strange that you think they are.
The game isn’t broken. There are very few actual bugs, especially compared to a lot of recent titles. Most of what people complain about are balance issues and a lack of named items to chase. They are going to be taking a big swing at both of those issues with S2, and will be continuing to improve them every season after that. S3 is adding leaderboards.
The xpac will also likely come with additions to the core game, just like all the previous ones have. So talking about that would seem advantageous and would be welcomed by anyone who actually wants to see this game be good.
So again, people getting outraged about the existence / timing of an expansion they already know the existence and timing of is not reasonable. They already had an outrage cycle about this. Do you think Blizzard’s D4 content at BlizzCon should be just about upcoming seasons?
The condition of the game is only “broken” for people who have spent hundreds of hours playing it. There are tons of people who played it for far less time, enjoyed the hell out of it, and either moved on to other stuff or are still enjoying it. Those folks are interested in what an expansion will add to it. Giving them one next year instead of in 2 years will be a good thing, both for them and for anyone who wants there to be more stuff in the game.
The people who are the most dissatisfied are going to remain dissatisfied. It’s a game about capped progression. It’s not going to have D2’s item system (though hopefully D4’s will improve). It’s not going to have D3’s speed of leveling. It’s going to continue to have an MMO-ish open world and all that that entails. I would bet it’s never going to be built so that a streamer can play it for 500 hours a season and still be having fun.
Coverage on places like IGN and PC Gamer isn’t anywhere near as bad as it was for Cyberpunk, so “D4 broken” isn’t even really a thing outside the ARPG streamerati. Both Cyberpunk and D3 are seen as redemption stories specifically because of the things that were added along with their expansions. All in all, the idea of “fix the game before selling an expansion,” just makes no sense at all when the complaint isn’t that servers don’t work or game-breaking bugs prevent play, but rather than it eventually gets boring.
Storage space is broken, resistances are broken, itemization is broken (and not particularly fun and oversaturated), the game still suffers from memory leak issues, and there’s still pervasive rubber banding occurring in-game. This is only a sample size of the issues that persist in the game and doesn’t even begin to cover the exploits that seem to be discovered every other day at this point.
I recognize some of these are being addressed like resistances and (allegedly) storage space in season 2, but there are still lingering problems that they’ve seemingly ignored like itemization and the fact that the game plateaus at level 70, which shouldn’t fundamentally occur in an RPG where level 100 is the cap.
Moreover, what Blizzard says they’ll do for the game doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to happen. You’d be wise to approach anything Blizzard says with a healthy dose of skepticism. I’ve championed the concept of being excited about the future of the game and wanting the game to get better if you’re at all invested, but it’s not like Blizzard’s more recent record has been doing right by players. Time and again, the company (across all teams) has continued to lie and design the game against player interests. They do one right thing while doing two wrong things in the process.
Like, there’s no denying that there are parts of Diablo IV that simply do not work. The game was released too early. That’s even something corroborated by the devs. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the game. Hell, I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 when it released in 2020 despite all of its issues, but I was able to recognize that the game was fundamentally broken.
I shouldn’t have to pay money for an expansion for the game to get good. That’s my point. The game should have been good already, but I’d settle for it getting better before the next expansion gets released. However, the idea that I should welcome an expansion simply because I want the game to be good is a ridiculous notion. Setting aside that there’s no indication the expansion will be good, there hasn’t been anything to suggest Blizzard will do right by its community to make such an investment worthwhile.
Two months ago, I would have agreed with you. Today, I’m not so sure. For months, I was a major proponent of the opinion that Twitch views didn’t matter, but the game has sat well below 1k for a few weeks now, nearly all content creators have since moved on from the game and only make videos when news about the game drops, and from a personal perspective (and I’m not saying that my experience is definitive, only that it’s a stark contrast from what I experienced during the middle of summer), my friends list and clan have dried up entirely. I don’t see anyone in-game anymore, and I don’t even think I could spin the 600-some odd viewership for the game to be a normal thing. PvE games will always lose their viewership after some time, but I never anticipated a game like Diablo IV to dwindle that low, especially when the game just released.
I know that Blizzard enthusiastically stated “It’s okay to leave the game,” but I feel that statement was, more or less, directed at people who were concerned about Diablo being another live-service game in which the developers kept us on an infinite treadmill of a grind and prolonged certain activities in-game to pad out time-played metrics.
I don’t think such a statement reflected their expectations for a vast majority of the playerbase to leave the game four months after launch. People come and go in live-service games all the time, but a drop-off this dramatic doesn’t typically occur unless there’s something deeply wrong with the game’s core gameplay loop.
Furthermore, and this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion so brace yourself, but those people who spent hundreds of hours playing this game are the game’s bedrock foundation for the community to exist on. At the end of the day, after your average casual player quits playing because they’ve either lost interest or have moved onto a different game, those people who have spent hundreds of hours playing will still be there playing the game.
Yeah, as much as I want to think that Acti-Blizz would actually try to play nice, I’m sure they’ll drop the bomb at Blizzcon on the expansion.
I’m already as close as 99% not coming back if they release the expansion so soon and if the content is not worth the amount they’ll be charging (I’m sure the expansion won’t be any cheaper than at least $30)
Nope, you just get to the top end of items before you get to the top end of levels.
Lots of people on this forum and similar ones agree there’s something off about items, but there’s a ton of disagreement about what, even among those who care about it.
There are some issues like this that affect some players, but they are not major game breaking bugs. Basically all of the GotY candidates have similar or worse issues.
Tons of exploits have been fixed already. Very few have been found recently (though perhaps that will change when more people pick the game up for S2). This seems like an indication of them “fixing the game,” not an argument that it is broken.
They have made comments that they are addressing the plateau issue to some extent with the bosses in S2 and then with the new mode in S3. Hopefully they will also find ways to make items more exciting the late game.
Again, if the issue is that there isn’t enough in the game to keep people playing for hundreds of hours, an expansion seems like a great way to fix that. Most expansions come with beefy patches that add a lot to the base game because you can’t really have it operate differently for those who don’t buy the xpac. “Fix the broken game before selling more game,” is a reasonable comment if the base game didn’t give people their money’s worth. Even some of the harsher critics of it say that it easily gave them their money’s worth.
Yeah you never know. But being outraged because the things they are promising are things you want but they might not actually deliver them, seems a little absurd.
There are balance issues and some choices that people aren’t happy with. That’s not the same as those parts not working.
It probably would have gotten less backlash if it had gotten another 6 months of development. But again, that’s not the same as it being broken and it’s also true of many games.
By people who left the company taking to a reporter about the crunch time back in late 2022?
But you should have to pay for the game to have more content than it had at release. That’s usually how games work. D4 has more content than most released games. You say you aren’t asking for a free expansion, yet there’s some list of things that “simply do not work” and that Blizzard has to fix before even announcing an expansion?
Yes, they all stopped playing after putting hundreds of hours into the season a month and a half after putting hundreds of hours into the preseason. It was a small season without much to do and the devs have said that future seasons will be larger, but it turns out that a game that is made to allow casual players to finish a season in 3 months is not great for streamers. That also doesn’t make it a broken game.
The game hasn’t somehow gotten worse in the last 2 months. It’s gotten incrementally better. I know it feels like it’s dying as more people move on to other things, but that’s intentionally the nature of a seasonal game. Baseball doesn’t die because interest wanes in December.
We don’t actually know what the drop off in players was like though, only in streams. And the number of viewers is dependent on the number of steamers. People look for build guides at the start of a season. Late in the season they have little use for them, and the guides didn’t change much with S1, so it’s essentially 4 months into the “season” for build guides. Streamers ran out of stuff to do. It happens in all these games and D4 is particularly bad for their needs. That still doesn’t mean it’s broken.
Look, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to refuse to buy an expansion to game they don’t find fun. I think it’s unreasonable to be angry that the company wants to sell one to people who do find it fun.
Because most people who say basic QoL is missing either mean the D3 armory or the PoE loot filters and many stash tabs with stash search. Armories are something a lot of people specifically don’t want in the game (so not a fundamental QoL feature), loot filters exist in literally 2 games, one of which isn’t out yet, and D4 is going to add them. Stash search is being added in S2. The stash is too small, they have a dumb limitation on it, they are working to fix that. I guarantee you they aren’t going to make anyone buy the expansion to get loot filters or more stash tabs.
Another common complaint is set items. If you want set items that’s fine, but not having them isn’t a broken feature, it’s a design decision. Aspects are instead of sets, because they do a lot of what the D3 sets were doing, but with more flexibility.
You do you, I feel free to think. A dev version being pushed to be tested at this moment is def not an expansion. But hey, I can call it version 8 and still be an alpha.
I mean, there’s no “hint”, they already announced “yearly” expansions (with at least 2 expansions already signed). We also know that a part of the team is dedicated to thoses expansions, another part to even numbered seasons, and another part to odd numbered season.
So there’s nothing really new here.
Doesn’t matter. They killed the game with the nerf patch and season 1. They failed to put their best foot forward with season 1 and the game has suffered as a result. Had they included farmable campaign bosses, improvements to the loot/aspect system and more QoL fixes with season 1, we’d likely have a different outcome.
I think he is referring to a bunch of articles in which both former devs and blizzard’s leadership talked about how on the one hand the game was postponed several times but ultimately rushed and released too soon in order to meet some quarterly earnings.
Basically they needed to show profits and they couldn’t delay the game anymore. You can google it yourself. These articles are also shown in most of youtube videos that talk about how bad D4 is.
It’s smaller because of how it functions. They literally cannot give us anymore storage space because of how it works. That means it’s broken.
Lol, okay. I mean, you’re wrong, but okay.
So is this just a situation where you bury your head in the sand and scream “LALALALALALA EVERYTHING’S FINE” because that’s what it certainly seems like.
They can fix thousands of exploits. If there are thousands more, then it shows a deeply systemic issue with the game. Right now, that’s how it’s looking: Fix one exploit, another exploit emerges.
What does it matter if they left the company? They worked on the game and are more intimately familiar with its underlying mechanisms than you’ll ever be. Time and again they said that the June 6th release date was unfeasible, potentially even with crunch. That screams “This game will not be ready come June 6th.”
I think what this amounts to is you being incapable of accepting that Diablo IV might have an issue. I like Diablo IV, dude. I think it’s a pretty good game, but I can’t deny that it’s struggling to keep up and retain player engagement the way it shouldn’t be.
Honestly, I think a lot of people are only sticking around in forum spaces at this point to see what Blizzard plans to do with season 2, but I’m willing to bet that if season 2 fails to capture any sort of interest, Diablo IV’s going to be in some pretty hot waters. It’ll probably continue to live on, but it’ll be a fragment of what it should be and/or could have been.
“Activision Blizzard employees developing the upcoming dark fantasy action role-playing game “Diablo IV” say it will be hard to meet a June 6, 2023, release date without working significant overtime, in a process they say has been plagued by mismanagement. The release date, which has not been announced publicly, comes in the same month that Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion acquisition is set to close. The company is incentivizing employees to “crunch,” an industry term referring to working late evenings and weekends outside of regular work hours, by promising them perks some workers say are paltry.”
“We were never going to hit our date without crunch,” said a former Blizzard employee of a previously-intended “Diablo IV” internal release date. “And even with crunch, I don’t even know if we would have hit our date.”
“It’s writing checks that somebody else has to cover,” said Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the New York University Stern School of Business. “Assuming the deal goes through, Bobby Kotick doesn’t have to give you cash, plus, rushing a title might erode the value of the franchise if it’s not bug-free.”