Okay…obviously this dude knows his stuff…what happened? 
People don’t take you seriously in groups if you don’t show confidence and have good social skills. He’s probably being overshadowed by co-workers. Even I got wrong impression about Joe S from the campfire chats because the way he talks is not very convincing.
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There are only two types of games: those that are funs, and those that aren’t.
…moving the cigare in the mouth…
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Tell JS: Just do it.
… and if he doesnt deliver… its a bad shoe.
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right? i really couldnt care less what other devs say is right or wrong. Its just like this Brevik thread. Stop doing awesome pawsome interviews and just deliver.
If JS comes up with a great game, ill happily play it.
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I would say its more so just evolving what D3 wanted to be, I mean its been going down that route ever so much. D4 has no identity of what they want it to become. PoE2 ironically feels like its the same boat right now as a game it doesn’t know what it want to be either. I mean they just dropped the new Dawn of the Hunt with a new class, that they wanted players to use a Parry Mechanic in a game where you get swarmed by mobs…
PoE2 - Went more with the Souls like dodge roll telegraphed boss attacks just like in a souls game. There is a Raise Shield and now Parry in the game. Which are Jank and no one wants that’s people clamor that PoE2 should be how PoE1 is.
D4 - Its just up in the air at this moment. I get that they want to increase the difficulty of the game in Season 8. But what does that entail? Just a new torment tier? Just like how D3 did it? Which to be honest. D3 Vanilla at launch was downright HARD and unplayable for some classes to an extent. Then all the changes, made it a cake walk to get to Torment X. Just how D4 is going.
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The guy worked on d4 and will forever be the designer of garbage.
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A big difference between the dodge roll in POE2 and D4 is the cooldown and you really shouldn’t be using it much more than we do in D4, anyhow. For most things it’s just better to move than use the slow dodge roll.
The best advice I’d give a new player to POE2 is to just treat it like D4. Stop thinking it’s a dodge roll simulator and just build damage and defense like in D4. Especially in the campaign, just getting the correct resistance up vs bosses greatly reduces their damage.
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TLDR; you are one of those noobs that enjoy one shooting bosses with maxroll builds on day 2 of the season and pretending that’s ‘endgame’.
D3/D4 is a candy crush based game.
Reasoning about nothing.
And please, stop writing about poe 2 if you haven’t played it at all, you look stupid when you write your “expert” opinion about something you’ve never played.
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“Dex” in the context of D4 is the combat/gameplay or the Action part of the “ARPG”. In S2 they completely removed it, that’s correct. Yet another major reason this game is trash.
No hope for the game or franchise as long as this guy is on helm.
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Wont disagree with this on defenses and resistances. But the dodge roll is a feature of the game and is useful. I know when I played sorceress and on some of the Act 1 bosses you are not just simply moving out the way. Lachlann does that spirit explosion that tracks you and you can’t just move out the way its a dodge (probably can if you have high move speed) . Act 1 final, boss depending on class / resistances you can face tank the swipe attacks others cannot. Similar to the Leap Slam if you are moving as soon as he is in the air chances are you will beat the circle before the slam on you. But honestly safer to roll. What about Act 3 poison lady?
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In other words, he gave a talk on how to make a 
game that nobody likes. You know who else gave a GDC talk? Jay “and then we doubled it” Willson.
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I think better examples are fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken. I, as a player, can practice combos to the point where if you make 1 mistake, I can punish with a combo that hits for over half your life. It’s a very hard combo but I spent 100’s of hours practicing it and can pull it off nearly every time. It’s actually these kinds of games that gave me unique perspective compared to other players & part of why I understand things where others don’t.
What happened with Joe, since he is no longer game director?
As for the presentation, in principle I like the Str, Dex, Int categories. But they are also very simplified, to the point of being a bit meaningless. Especially in how he uses them to fit his argument.
Most RPGs will have elements from all three categories (which Joe also acknowledges, but claims they focus on two). So does D4. But sure, it is not a very dex based game, albeit, probably more dex based than most RPGs (I mean, quite a few are turnbased).
D4, and all A-RPGs, are definitely very Str based.
Int is the most interesting one tbh.
Yes, planning a build belongs to the Int category. But so does decision making during combat. He seems to focus on the former only.
D4, and many A-RPGs in general, is lacking in interesting decision making in combat.
To be fair, the dev team has talked about that topic before as well; dont know the exact interview, but something about whether your decision making happened before starting the game (preplanning a build) or during the game (combat). He also hints at it in this presentation. As far as I recall, they argued it had to be before the game.
Which I consider to be nonsense. Sure, it should be before the game. That is basically a requirement to even be considered an A-RPG, the build planning phase (even if you just steal a build from the internet).
But it should also be during gameplay/combat. “Knowing your enemy” so to speak.
It has never been either/or. Lots of games manage to do both. RPGs in particular.
Joe claims that many card ands trategy games are int games. Which is definitely true. But NOT because of the decisions you make before the game starts, but very much based on the decisions you make while playing (countering his own view on the definition).
In Slay the Spire or Starcraft, yeah, your knowledge before the game starts matters a fair bit. But the decisions you make while playing matters even more. Slay the Spire forces you to build as you go, due to its RNG. Starcraft forces you to react dynamically to what the opponent does. You cant just preplan everything.
Other nitpicks; he argues that you can generally know the power of a character when they encounter a given challenge in a Str game. But that is kinda weird to claim, when Str games are often the type where you can choose to outlvl content, by playing more. You very much cant know the power players will have when they reach X in many of these games, including Diablo 4. That specifically is the idea behind the Str design.
He argues that Souls like is Str/Dex. Despite preplanning and builds mattering a lot for your power (only more so thanks to limited respecs, limited crafting mats etc.). As well as knowledge during combat. If anything, Souls is more Dex/Int (of course, it is str/dex/int)
That point toward the end; ‘make sure to make the type of game your fans expect’.
Ouch!
TLDR; D4 is a str/dex/int game. Lots of games are str/dex/int games. Much more useful term than A-RPG for sure!
D4 is lacking in the Int department, much more so than the Dex department.
Diablo, and A-RPGs in general, should be Str/Int games. Not just Str.
And dont forget decision-making during combat. Builds are important, but they should not be everything.
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Very dumbed down and incomplete picture of things. I guess he wanted to give a brief summary but IMO not really hitting the mark. I’d rather define games more like
- Creative => games where you’re allowed to do your own things in ways you like, even after gameplay is done (Skyrim for ex.)
- Competitive => rules set in stone, options scarce and perfection of gameplay matters, who gets faster/further is the winner (Starcraft, HotS, DotA, e.t.c.)
- Traditional, i.e. “Single” player “ladder climb” => long-term games with hard baseline gameplay, just enough easy content to get hooked up on but then it gets quite hard (not all the time ofcourse but in general the game remains quite hard) (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Doom Eternal, Serious Sam, e.t.c.)
That being said => the problem with D4
- They’re trying to push it into first category while not allowing any freedom to the player to experiment (or very little)
- They’re forcing the game into a second-category game with little deviation and trying to spark some kind of a competitive spirit, but it has absolutely zero competitive content or multiplayer, and finally
- Despite the game being perfectly designed to be a one of the third type they keep straying away from that over and over because of fear of backlash
Now considering how shallow the playerbase can be at times, not sure should I not blame them and understand the flexibility, or blame them quite hard for allowing the viability of that kind of expectation from the start 
I somewhat agree here, D4 is 100% not hopeless but they created a situation where they sold a product to peole who wanted to blast like its D3 and a product where people wanted slow grind-ish into convoluted builds PoE style.
They sold to 2 different playersbases and no matter what someone’s gonna get mad.
I get that and what I’m mad about is that absolute low effort fixes for problems.
Recent example? Freeze is redundant because it’s outright better than cold so we’re gonna nerf FoF to provide vulnerable instead of the CC effects.
Or the Andy Visage semi-undocumented nerf that gutted the item hardcore.
It’s just an ongoing theme, to solve perceived problems they screw people over bad. It’s an awful armature hour approach.
How I would have fixed the issues I presented as an example of a balanced approach?
Remove the Freeze effect. It’s redundant. Cold builds into freeze. Why the hell is freeze an applicable effect at all when cold x whatever number makes freeze happen?
Remove it and leave FoF alone. Rebalance cold and freeze to reflect that freeze is what happens when enough cold is applied.
For Andy’s Barrage, it just shouldn’t have a cooldown on it’s effect application at all. It doesn’t scale except for specific things so it was never a problem. Someone decided to hate on the item or it causes server issues which I doubt.
If it’s a server issue then you need to fix your bad crap code. serious. It’s nowhere near the most egregious DoT builds. Not at all. It’s about 3/4 there.
Don’t get me wrong there are times the dodge is very useful. But when the game came out everyone was overusing it and eventually started to adapt.
They changed FoF and the tempers because they didn’t like that you were getting all of that crowd control for free.
If they’re going that way, that’s fine, but a lot of damage still comes from crowd control and the game has too many damage abilities compared to utility abilities.
Now that would be a thing to put on a roadmap. Just so that we are aware.
Instead we get “earnable pet”.