To all saying the game is boring

PC General Discussion
1

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 bossā€™s 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. Iā€™m not asking for souls-like mechanics, but currently, every action is very fast paced because of the scaling. Most players spam 1 invested skill, donā€™t 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 comboā€™ing their skills and making a devastating strike at the right time. I donā€™t 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:

  1. Combat will be longer and harder; and for players who like fast kills, they will not be happy
  2. You do need to be focus more on synergy of the skills so they work well together to achieve a certain effect.
  3. I donā€™t 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).
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Agreed. ARPGs should be ā€œaction-packedā€ rather than a large number generator simulator. Fights should feel like mini Bruce Lee action flicks where each punch and kick is seen, felt, and has follow-up consequences.

Shameless link to a similar post I wrote yesterday:

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The game is boring, confirmed.

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V.A.T.S, for D4? i dunno man.

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This game is R.I.P.
I really loved at the beginning. Now I just stopped play it and I will never back because developers do only worse. Now I just read forum how other players get t frustrated and try find something in this gameā€¦well part of them will end up like me: Disappointed. Other players will stay for sure and game will roll but personally I do not see any future for this game.

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The future of this game is grimm, on top of dev decisions, the several suggestions made by the community, bland and bold also made rhe game worse over time, game was trivial, now it can be played without even Watching,afk gaming. Such a great game.

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I donā€™t think itā€™s boring. It gets repetitive when youā€™ve spent already >40-80 hours on it across multiple seasons. Itā€™s honestly expected and replayability while allowing meaningful new content to be out per season seems to be something D4 is still figuring out and they also still are working on skills and paragon changes.

8

I agree.

My two cents: This game and HotS have a fair amount in common. In fact, i have my controls set up in exactly the same manner. Z for mount, qwer-d etc. Nobody ever called HotS boring. Broken yes, but boring? Not so much. Diablo 4 is like PvE HotS.

Im sitting here comparing HotS to Diablo 4 and wondering how the HotS devs were able to balance HotS whereas Diablo 4 is in total disarray.

Why was HotS exhilarating and Diablo 4 boring? Diablo 3 came out before HotS, so they came by everything honestly.

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The boredom comes from lack of progression for the most part.

During beta the game was still boring, but that was for a different reason.

You either had a build that was invulnerable and destroyed everything on screen, or that was incapable of killing a single enemy (and in some cases, both - looking at you blood mist necro).

The game play was boring because you just went to a dungeon, hit blood mist and moved around while the entire screen of enemies just exploded. No interaction, no threat, no skill required etcā€¦ Then you get to a boss, and they (used to) refill their HP bar in half a second from an attack that was unavoidable, whilst taking no damage because of various effects and the fact that you could do no single target damage (especially without corpses).

Now, itā€™s a little different.
Now itā€™s boring because you get to 100 relatively quickly, max out your glyphs, get all the gear you want in just hours, and then have nothing to really achieve, outside of maximizing your masterworking and getting 3GA upgrades, but for what purpose?

If thereā€™s no real ā€˜goalā€™ even if itā€™s a moving goal thatā€™s never achievable, then whatā€™s the point? Having no point, no challenge, no progression, makes doing ā€˜anythingā€™ boring no matter how ā€˜funā€™ those individual things may be.

Grinding pits to 200 is a goal to some people, but thereā€™s no leaderboard for that, thereā€™s no bragging rights, because the game balance is so bad that unless you play a barb youā€™re unlikely to get past 150 anyway.

Grinding the actual leaderboard dungeon is so much fun that about 10 people play it a week (I donā€™t really know how many people use it, but iā€™ve not stepped foot in it once, donā€™t plan to, I was not convinced by the campfire chat that it was going to be interesting and seeing the few streamers that have gone in play it once and never again, it just doesnā€™t appeal to me).

I can already solo the Uber (200) bosses, iā€™ve already killed Uber Lillith (S2), already got a Shako/Starless skies, and cleared NMD100 in minutes on all classes (in this season), with all glyphs at 21.

Doing anything more than that just seems pointless right now.

I liked the D3 infinite paragon, because you were always progressing, always getting more powerful, always able to push your legendary gems and GR higher, and it was shown in your position on the leaderboard to boot. We donā€™t have that in D4.

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The game is fun until you realize thereā€™s no depth, and the dev team doesnā€™t seem to care about adding any outside of straight bricking your gear.

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feels like I should clarify a bit:

  1. Some of the suggestions I made are towards improving the game focus; I personally donā€™t think D4 is a bad game right now.
  2. The part I want to note (unfortunately it was at the very end) was that the game has decently at least 50-80 hours of gameplay, and each season so far is adding around 10-20 more hours on average per player. I donā€™t think thatā€™s a bad stat, but the reality is a lot of ARPG players expect the game to be significantly more replayable, and the current design of game not giving enough attention to the combat and action itself makes this a harder goal to achieve.
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Not getting into solutions (at least not in the moment), and will read your post @OP but replying first of something that Iā€™ve had a thought for a while

The game got released as 25% in mistery 75% streamlined

Then a massive nerf patch kicked in while still having ~70% streamline - people asked for buffs (meaning - even more streamlined experience) - the game became 85% streamlined

Then density got increased (cause how dare them put us in situations that we havenā€™t quite been in before right ?), making the game ~93% streamlined (or to be more exact => 7% BS and 93% streamline)

Kept it like that for a whopping 2 months, nothing was changed, tweaked, offeredā€¦ Everyone had the same ā€œdoseā€ of salad of ā€œstreamlined BSā€ only some completed (i.e. ate it) 100% and others 99% (i.e. couldnā€™t beat final boss)

Then came S2 with damage formula recalculations => +10% streamline, and boss farm runs => - 5% streamlined => resulting in a whopping 98% of content being streamlined (BS became a special category as well but the important part is 95%+ streamlined)

Then came S3 - nothing changed (except perhaps a few more percentages of BS was introduced to counter the extreme amount of streamline)

And now weā€™re here - even though it was important and improvement overall - with more ā€œperfectā€ gear the game became even more streamlined :smiley:

Now also consider this:

The game is a ā€œone big blobā€, i.e. Open world (no sense of completion and a very vague if any true sense of progression - other than level accumulation)

What do we got ? 99.99% of the game being literally streamlined

And then the streamers come in and complain about the 0.01% non-streamlined stuff lol (actually not now but beforehand), and even the very little bits that required a bit of adaptation/thought became streamlined - probably resulting somewhere in the ranks of 99.995 streamline percentile :stuck_out_tongue:

I mean - one cannot even imagine this being so bad direction being forced to make the game more streamlined and more efficient in every possible facet of it - even if they liked to lol

And now after 4 seasons and a complete year ? - people got fed up from streamlining (imagine that, funny how some of us didnā€™t need a Crystal Ball to foresee this coming since S0.5 lol)

:100:

The thing here to understand is that result achieved is the exact opposite of the intent

If you wanna make the game finished, people will find a way to ā€œcontinueā€ further, if you wanna make the game ā€œendlessā€ - people will feel like being driven (and played) by outside unexplanatory factors

Almost as if put in a wooden rack floating on a river that flows in a circle = and people be like ā€œI wanna get outā€ (I mean why does this feel weird to even say tbh :P)

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I bought into that initial vision of combat and still think its more satisfying.

I donā€™t know if its a ā€œsouls likeā€ experience that people donā€™t want, I think its more of an MMO combat experience people donā€™t want which i get.

I think though the combat needs to be slow enough to let the combat system shine. Iā€™m not a fan of PoE combat, and canā€™t get into the game because of it. When you donā€™t have the engine for good combat, you mask that by hyper speeding combat up and put effort into other things like system/loot/crafting.

Blizz doesnā€™t need to be hamstrung by hyper zoom zoom because they have a really good combat engine.

PoE2 looks to be different though with a much better combat systemā€¦ It has to slow down to allow comboā€™s and weapon swapping to be relevant. Look at the PoE2 druid. Laying down a volcano, then ground slamming around it to increase the damage of the volcano is cool as heck. How would that be relevant if it was expected that you should just zoom zoom across the screen never slowing down?

I donā€™t know, it seems Blizzā€™s answer is just to buff base skills/items rather than add new synergy.

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No rest for the bricked!

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Itā€™s because so few skills and builds are good. No diversity whatsoever. All this work put into designing all these skills just for them to be useless nuggets of crud. Design uniques based around them that no one will use.

That feel when you get a unique from the iron wolf reward cache and itā€™s useless because the skill itā€™s based around is useless. Makes this feel like a bad game.

2 Likes
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The best part of the game right now, to me, is the leveling process of taking a weak character and making them stronger. The closer you get to 100, the less of that happens. There is of course MW you can do to increase power but for the most part the build is set, the glyphs are done, you had the gear for a long time. There is really not many drops out there to upgrade unless you hit the fricken impossible jackpot.

There is no class diversity because the balance of this game is all over the place. You either play a super strong build that only a couple of builds per class or you play a build that you mostly struggle and are nowhere near those couple strong builds. It might take a year before a season comes a long and you can actually play the build you might want to. Iā€™m looking at you minion necro, chain lightning sorc, etc. Sure you can ā€œplayā€ them, but you are going to struggle.

There is no gear progression. Everything is entirely RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG and it drops anywhere and everywhere as long as you are in WT4. Doing tougher content really means nothing as you get the same stuff you can get anywhere else. Iā€™m looking at you pathetically weak blood maiden super farm.

The pits are almost pointless. You are just grinding to make your gear stronger little bits at a timeā€¦ just so you can do higher pits for no reward whatsoeverā€¦ because again there is no progression in the game.

The only true endboss is Uber Lilith and that serves to be nothing but telling yourself that you beat her because it too drops nothing of value. Most everything else either you one shot with a strong build or at least quickly kill it oooor it one shots you after 10 mins of frustration. I dont even know if anything in game has interesting combat because of the above. Im guessing probably not. Lilith is ok especially now that her stuff is telegraphed and more easily seen but even that boss is buggy and feels awkward when you kill her but she aint really dead until you finish all the mechanics one time and hit her for 1 dmg afterwards. Pitt bosses arent really all that interesting combat wise. Its just a bullet sponge.

When class balance is some of the worst in the industry, seasonal content is the exact same plus a half hour questline and MAYBE some seasonal power, there is no real gear progression, as well as no real point to progress that gearā€¦ you get a boring game shortly after you finish leveling.

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The game would be boring if you run out of things to do. Thatā€™s normal to me.

How people get bored?

Either of the two:

Those who beat everything in the game including Uber Lilith. They killed the hardest Bosses in the game. Thereā€™s nothing to kill anymore. It should be GGā€¦ game over. You won. But these guys want more. They failed to realize that thereā€™s nothing anymore when they have already beaten the game. They come to the forums whining that the game is boring. Why not make a new toon that is not on meta? Or just leave? And play something else?

And the other group are those who suck, reached their ceiling. Cant beat higher level Bosses. All they do is die. Of course, they would get bored. What these guys need to do is learn2play. Keep on practicing. The more the attempts/deaths, the better their finger reflexes would become.

Those who enjoy this game are those who are still on progressionā€¦ making progressā€¦ slow or fast. These people include those who havent killed the hardest Bosses in the game, very patient and has positive view that he would beat this game someday after improving his game after making gazillion practice and attempts. I am on this category. I am playing something that is not metaā€¦ a weaker build. But I believe that I could beat the game with it if I would just get more play time. I wont be frustrated if I failā€¦ I am just Casual. I am expected to fail but I didnt give up. This is just a game. What matters to me is I am having fun. Not bored.

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Agreed, The game was not really ready for release. But we all know how things go. I have been watching old reruns of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. And everytime see Quark I am reminded of just how much like the ferengi we really are. haha

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I liked diablo 4 in the beta with the druid. It was fun and challenging. I had never read through guides and didnā€™t realise that he was the weakest class. Nevertheless, I had the most fun with him. I think the changes to the aspects and items in Season 4 are good and correct. What I donā€™t like, however, is how incredibly boring and easy the game has become. Loot loot loot loot at every turn, enemies drop instantly even without thinking about a build or equipment. The game is so easy that I lost interest.

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There is no real variety in skills for you to really customize your character. There is no depth to the skill tree to give you things to strive for once you ā€œfinishā€ your build. There is no variety within the content of the game. The dungeon you run at level 1 is essentially the same experience as the dungeon at level 100, not to mention, all the dungeons feeling too samey themselves. The bosses you fight are the same, the mobs you face are the same, the events you run into are the same.

This is why the game is boring. There is nothing new to experience as you go along, nothing to strive for.