I think the player expectation with ARPG in general is honestly a very interesting one (myself included), not passing judgements but just noting some observations.
Tldr, ARPG is niche and hard to not be grindy past a certain point.
ARPG bootstraps itself to action & player power. Because it is not as much plot / story driven, and most players only really care about the combat itself, the progression of the game focuses largely on item and stats chasing. Unfortunately, there is only 1 way to get these items and improve your stats, and that is to fight enemies. Now, I do think there are a couple of things (others have mentioned) that D4 could improve to make the fight more interesting:
- Increase boss diversity and attack types (with each season we are currently only getting around 1 more new boss). Perhaps expansion has the possibility of doubling this, but at a certain point, countering the same looking boss with similar moves will feel boring and mechanic.
- Improve map diversity (that may get solved to a point where a players feels good enough about the number of new layouts & locations with expansion).
- Improve player mobility (i.e. make evade even more accessible and/or reduce cooldown on the mobility oriented skills) so they get more opportunities to dodge; at the same time, remove bossās 1-shot mechanics but keep some of the longer wind down attacks punishing enough that users need to dodge subsequent damage or heal.
- Slow down game pace and give players more time to focus on the combat itself. Iām not asking for souls-like mechanics, but currently, every action is very fast paced because of the scaling. Most players spam 1 invested skill, donāt really dodge attacks, and focus on just the damage numbers and how fast the boss health bar goes down. It is not surprising that doing this repeatedly and just wanting the number to go higher could tire people out. I personally think there is a lot more potential in slowing the game pace down slightly so players get to focus on comboāing their skills and making a devastating strike at the right time. I donāt know how the rest of you feel, but when Blizzard showed the gameplay reveal about 3-4 years ago, the intentionally slowed action when a sorceress freezes a pack of enemies to make time for a meteor to blow apart the frozen bodies felt extremely satisfying to watch.
Unfortunately, slowing the game pace will also mean a few things:
- Combat will be longer and harder; and for players who like fast kills, they will not be happy
- You do need to be focus more on synergy of the skills so they work well together to achieve a certain effect.
- I donāt know when we will get there. Synergy between skills is an ongoing issue since the focus has still been largely on if a skill can make into the endgame or not.
One last thing,
- Usually, a major AAA game is considered decently successful if the average playtime is over several tens of hours (maybe >40 hours). Some ARPG players have the expectation that the game needs to be near infinitely replayable (I feel like when you already spend >80-100 hours on the game, you will be bored with certain parts because the content will repeat).