I just quit+uninstalled D4 a week ago and moved back to POE.
And one thing that offered instant gratification, was vendor locations in POE towns.
For things as basic as moving between stash and vendors, D4 had to tuck stashes so far away in each town. And also decided to make stashes unavailable in many “outpost” or “semi-town” locations.
So you say they’re doing it for world-building? Right, nothing feels more immersive than online randos barging into my room checking on the same stash + wardrobe I’m using.
They did a dim-witted half-assery that offered neither the convenience nor immersion while in town. The towns just look “bigger” than in regular ARPGs, but in no way more alive or interesting.
Everytime I landed in town in D4 I immediately felt sapped, and as that repeated over a play session + the lack of fun things to do just made the whole thing a chore.
P.S. I’m not even camparing to the POE’s Hideout system. I’m just decribing basic vendor layout in towns.
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It done on purpose, Joe Shelly in the Fireside Chat when asked why the dungeon time was altered, he fumbled bad. For those of us, who are parents, EASY read too see he was dishonest, then turned to the old guy to his right, our left for support as he babbled nonsense.
Joe Shelly is the issue, he fumbled D3, they fired the director and put SHelly in charge of d4 and we have this game. Full of potential, but lacking bones to be great and stand on its own.
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Many things are designed to waste the players time for no reason like this.
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That the one who never opens his mouth to talk? His teeth stay oddly together when he speaks. Always looks like he just woke up from a Power Nap that did him no favors.
They need a new team in general, their philosophy behind decisions is just some of the dumbest things I’ve heard. We implemented 5 second teleports out of dungeons because we brought back the dungeon reset button, no wait it’s because HC characters might abuse it, oh wait it was a mistake let’s revert it back to normal.
Pick a direction, please.
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So you want the blacksmith to be inside the inn next to your bed?
Attempts of which lie will stick
To be fair, the bed is just cosmetics. You can have one NPC that does all the salvaging which includes sigils, seasonal gems, items, etc.
K-town isn’t too bad. I tend to always port back there. Sure, things could be a bit closer together, but there are towns that are much worse.
Plus, I like the atmosphere and the cats.
Just port to the tree. Stash right there, blacksmith right there, vendor right there. No different than having to go to your secret place in POE. Only time you need town is jeweler, occultist, and alchemist. Pretty rarely once your character is established. Only thing that needs to change is letting us set where the portal button takes us regardless of zone we’re in.
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No. Outside next to the portal.
Because your group needs instant gratification…W -E - A…
The blacksmith is pretty close to the portals on each town. Could they be closer? Sure. I personally don’t feel like it’s a huge hassle.
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Petition to get Shelly outta here!!
There should be a way to set your teleport location to a specific town.
Seems like someone didn’t play diablo 2.
Nah it was kind of boring
They should give us a clan outpost that we can customize the layout of. As well as allowing us to select our default town portal location.
They missed the forest for the trees on this one.
The idea was worldbuilding. They wanted to create a downtrodden, desperate, broken world where what little human settlements remained, were all hodgepodge makeshift kind of things that sort of grew out organically. So you have twists and turns and dead ends and inefficiency. And to that end, it worked. Most of the towns in D4 actually DO feel natural, as if you could put them in the real world and they could function.
The problem is nobody cares about that most of the time.
In practice, what the players really want is the opposite of what we got. Port to town, sell the crap, stash the rest to sift through later, and then port back to action.
We can look at the aesthetics and admire the realism on our own terms, during downtime. There’s no reason we couldn’t have an equally realistic worldbuilding experience where the waypoint was in the “market square” and all the vendors were lined up in a row, like an actual market place.
Don’t you feel immersed though? You can get your steps in AND increase dwell metrics for Blizzard in one fell swoop!
This. People play D4 for three main reasons: killing vile evil, loot loot loot, and becoming powerful. Everything else is window dressing, honestly.
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