Yeah like I’m not here to rail on the game over and over again. We’ve all been through the same stuff a million times with it. It is what it is. But the fact that he wants to blame Diablo 2 dynamics just not being viable anymore – that THAT’S the problem…
No I’m not just going to shut up about that. Give me a break.
They aren’t that uncommon. About 1000 runs to baal and doing his minions, or just 800 sanctuary runs. That is fairly common. Now being in a group that would give you the item was key or you had to fight.
I will go further and say I think what is bugging me the most about the comments he made (that I read in that article), came off like…“We tried to be like D2, and that was why D4 bad…but now we will be more like D3 because…”
And that should bother everyone. Not taking any accountability for their own incompetence and releasing basically an unfinished half-baked game.
I would join 7 player baal runs solo and then do mephy or diablo during their run on mf paladin xD, or the pit, never could find anything decent though.
I mean maybe, just maybe, if I give him the benefit of the doubt… Maybe what he was trying to say was that they attempted to make the game more like Diablo 2 and couldn’t do it? I mean if that’s the case, then yes I agree. They tried and they couldn’t do it.
But the fact that he said players have just moved on from the Diablo 2 type grind and it doesn’t work anymore illustrates a different thing he’s trying to say.
Honestly, he should retract saying this. But he won’t. Ego won’t allow it.
i really don’t think that it’s only about this game being half-baked. It seems to me that they didn’t understand what kind of game they were making from the very beginning. This game is simply bad at the core level, cuz it is D3 core and you can’t make anything decent outside of D3 core that is not D3-like.
It’s pure incompetence.
It took efficiency and a good amount of magic find, which again, was a great idea that is not in this game. Magic find was the trade off for efficiency. One of the many mechanics that Rod feels us d2 people are the problem for missing.
Egads, everyone just whines. Rod’s way of describing it may have been poorly worded, if he even said the things in these articles verbatim as they are being published, but the sentiment is right. D4 launch was basically a loot grind for the right rolled affixes paired with the highest legendary power you could find, intertwined with an economy based around those correctly rolled rare item affixes as a base. The rare was the white base of D2, the Legendary power was the rune. Throw in insanely rare items that most of the playerbase will never find in 20 years (think pre-droprate increase of high runes in D2 before 1.13) mixed with some rare drop uniques, you generally have the end game of D2.
They tried this with D3, and failed. They tried again with D4, and modern audiences do not jive with this. They want a meaningful end game, something to actually push that isn’t just grinding for rare items or a long leveling grind, especially when a big focus of play is on seasonal resets.
Wasn’t he specifically talking about Uber items?
He is right on the one hand, the average gamer these days doesn’t want D2, even if they think they do. However, he has also proved he doesn’t really know how to make Diablo 4 a great game either.
I’ll have to read again to see if the context is specifically this.
But even then it is still a misplaced comparison. If I wanted a zod every season in Diablo 2 I could get it no problem. I could just farm however I wanted to farm, and collect enough items to trade for it. Easy peasy.
even if we try to interpret his words in this way, there have never been items in d2 that are close in rarity to uber uniques in D4 at release.
I can hardly recall what vanilla Diablo 2 was like relative to LoD at this point. From my perspective when thinking about Diablo 2 its post the expansion and the various changes that brought.
the main point here even if Rod was referring to the uber droprate is that there is NO middle-ground unique items. There are no shaftstop/vampgaze/titans revenge/raven frost, bul kathos, like there’s no unique items like this in the game that are rare, but not impossible to find, and are actually worth using.
They went from common as rares to next-to-impossible-to-find with NO middleground for unique items, and the unique items that do drop in this game, THEY SUCK. That’s a major problem.
Aspects on gear basically ruined D3 because it made loot - the point of the game - irrelevant. Like how are you going to have an aspect that makes the player deal 120% basic damage and not have a unique equivalent that competes with something like that? The game was setup to fail from the get-go.
The fact that they have this “aspect” concept means it was NEVER LIKE D2 to begin with.
The issue is about D4 trying to recreate a system that worked and they failed. They did not take responsibility for that failure and blamed it on d2. There was no item scaling in d2, so there isnt a middle ground.
You all would be complaining if they literally made the same game with the new engine and different boss names as D2.
D2r is fine thanks. They just quit updating it in about the same time frame as they will d4 without the expansion.
Yeah this is the part that irks me. And did it on a global platform. So now when people who are less familiar with Diablo hear the opinion that a new Diablo 2 would be awesome, they might think “Well hell, they already tried that and it didn’t work - this guy’s just nostalgic and refuses to give up even though there’s proof now it doesn’t work”.
That kind of thing. Just completely deflecting blame in front of the biggest audience possible so they know that’s not their fault, just Diablo 2’s fault. And the silly people who hope for that game to have a true sequel one day.
Yeah, I take that personally.
Did he really need to? He understood that drops were low and it you very well might not find what you wanted, aka a chase item. The only reason people did see action with them is because of all the bots supplying the trade market.
Things I bought into before launch that they advertised: slower combat than d3. Slower grind reminiscent of 1-99, and real chase items. Number of Windforces that I ever found on my own in D2? None. Never bothered me, it added to the allure and legend of it.
He wasn’t saying they were trying to make a D2 sequel or system for system copy. He was just pointing out the length and pace of the game compared to what people are used to now with D3 and PoE.
To me Rod was saying people don’t have the patience for that philosophy of a slow burn to exist anymore.
No one is asking for the same game.
Pretty much everything this dev team has done has been insulting.
It all started with the Freudian “Your expectations were too high.” That was not taken out of context. You could tell that was the joke in the office.