Out of curiosity, I found a list of league’s that PoE has had (season equivalent), and randomly selected one. I landed on “Rampage”. It launched a few years after the game.
I looked into what this league offered, and it brought to the game a killstreak mechanic and 3 new unique items, and thats about it.
Am I missing something here? As far as I’m concerned, this first season of Diablo 4 offers infinitely more.
Much like seasons in D3 and even this one for D4, PoE leagues were hit-and-miss in terms of new mechanics or content.
I imagine D4 will be much the same.
Why are you comparing a 2014 league season in POE to a game that released in 2023 
?
That said I remember Rampage being a crazy, fun, adrenaline spike for a while before I got bored of it. The rampage mechanic and items are still part of the game today.
I don’t believe the year of creation has nearly as much to do with it. That’s equivalent to saying any video game content created in 2014 and before is essentially bad and can’t be compared against.
I literally picked one at random on the list.
I’m glad you enjoyed it though, but it seems like it was a pretty barebones implementation of a season.
First season of D4 introduced legendary gems from D3 but with more restrictions. It created more bag space problems and added more dungeons you have to grind specifically for the malignant hearts instead of just incorporating them into existing dungeons.
“Infinitely more” is not the words I would use, “previously thought up ideas made worse” is how I would choose to describe it.
There are always going to be hit and miss seasons…I feel like you looked intentionally for a miss one.
And that’s from someone who doesn’t really care much for PoE.
Infinitely more means quantity - plenty of new seasonal aspects, heart powers, etc., compared to a randomly picked season where the only addition was a kill streak bonus.
I just looked up a few “Worst leagues in PoE” lists just now, and Rampage doesn’t even make it. Apparently seasons like “Beastiary” and others were worse.
My point is that the iron is hot and the present is a great time to criticize, but lets not pretend its main competitor, the holy grail, the messiah of ARPGs hasn’t had its own fair share of missteps
Actually, you’d hope there’d be “infinitely more” in a 70€+ game with a 10€+ Season pass to unlock seasonal stuff than in a free game with a free league mechanic…
I bought Diablo 4, the base game, and enjoyed it. Seasonal content and cosmetics don’t cost me a dime more, unless I choose. I’ve paid much more for much less honestly.
It was more in the context of what POE was in 2014 and who GGG were in 2014, vs now.
You are comparing a fledgling company with a year or so into their first ARPG release vs a behemoth releasing the Fourth iteration of their RPG, with well over 20 years of experience and eminence in the ARPG domain. What they have shown is inexcusably lazy, incoherant and incomplete. The story itself was great, i really enjoyed that. Then we got into the midgame, and endgame. Thats where D4 is significantly lacking. It’s just not fun, at all. Rampage league, in comparison, was a blast - even with the lack of any significant endgame content at the time.
If you want to go so far back, look at the expansion releases that POE, as a free to play game, did at fairly regular intervals and think about whether Blizzard, with a $70 game, will match that frequency or content…
Also, as someone mentioned previously, the Rampage league mechanic was added to the basegame after the league ended, where Blizzard has stated from the get-go that seasonal content is only for seasons, and will be discontinued once the season ends.
They have stated they will keep seasonal mechanics where they fit, and bring them to the Eternal realm. It’s at their discretion that they’ll make that decision, which they mentioned on one of their fireside chats.
Compare that to the D3 league that was just double treasure goblins. The upcoming league is readding a rogue like mode and a team based gladiator style battle that will probably rain rewards. You can basically build up the difficulty through a risk reward system then if it is too hard you can sell that map to at least get some reward out of it.
They are also releasing 14 new skills, skill tattoos which would be like replacing a dex node on the paragon with movement speed, class reworks, and more… D4 released a mega boring gem system that disappears after the season is over and a bunch of nerfs.
We know nothing about future Diablo 4 seasons, but that sounds like fun. Glad they are whipping out something solid in their 11th year of seasonal development, compared to D4s first season, that was designed during production.
D3 has 23 legendary gems, D4 S1 has 32 Malignant Hearts which ones came for D3?
Ok here you go buddy, i just did a quick lookup
The second expansion, Forsaken Masters, was announced on 31 July 2014 and released on 20 August 2014. It comes with a host of new features, including crafting, recruitable NPCs called Masters (who remain at the player’s hideout offering them daily training missions and specialized items), customized personal hideouts, reworked passive skill tree, new gems, Beyond and Rampage were leagues in 1.2, former Ambush and Invasion content added to core game and more.
source = wikipedia
So yeah, an actual load of features added. The Rampage League itself had features added on top of all these. This is the second expansion, within the first year of release.
The killstreak mechanic was massively impactful on clearing content, and changed the way you played the game at the time. It was also probably the least impactful league in the history of poe, interesting that’s the one you “randomly” selected.
Also, it launched alongside the hardcore “beyond” league, in which killing enemies next to each other spawned extra enemies, and killing those enemies next to each other spawned rarer enemies, and killing those enemies spawned beyond bosses such as Haast, Bameth, and finally Abaxoth, the end of all that is.
Here is a random video of Abaxoth spawning, to give an idea of what he was like. This is a couple of years on from the league I think, he was much harder on release.
Beyond was one of the most popular mechanics in the game for a long time, and was functionally the defacto mechanic attached to every map whenever it was available for many, many years due to the massive number of enemies it creates.
These leagues ran simultaneously, and you could choose between them. They had their own challenges and different rewards for each, meaning that if you didn’t like one, you could play the other. Back in those days hardcore was much more popular than it is now in PoE, and while I’m sure there were still more people playing softcore, there were masses playing in both.
They don’t do the split league mechanics anymore but the leagues are typically much larger in scope than what beyond or rampage was too.
Some of the old leagues were definitely underwhelming. I didn’t play back then so I was shocked to find that some of the current in game mechanics used to be leagues.
However go back and look up Heist, Betrayal, Delve, or Expedition. That is the sort of seasonal content that hopefully Blizzard will sometimes do for D4 (and hopefully PoE will do more like that as well. I can not emphasize enough how much I hate the current league Crucible).
Poe actually runs, and it’s free… so you know I’m not paying to beta test their game.
Well since people (mostly PoE fanboysd and people who just braindeadly hate on everything with this game without giving constructive feedback) have started to go this route and compare everything in this game to PoE.
So i guess we can say it is a fair thing to compare it to PoE too when PoE isn’t actually a good example.