As a casual player who just finished the campaign, D4:VoH was an okay experience.
It pretty much matched my experience with the base game and my expectations for the expansion were met.
While I don’t feel that the game was bad, it was definitely mediocre. I don’t begrudge spending the money on the game however I am more more confident in my appreciation of Diablo 3, which I have been playing more of lately.
I can’t easily identify much about what I did like about VoH but I will say that as a player who doesn’t care about min/maxing type of game play or many of the other ARPG tropes that player seem to enjoy engaging with, I was sufficiently challenged with boss fights to not lose interest entirely.
The things that turned me off the most:
The artistic direction of the game can be summed up as such: mud mud and more mud. I’m a fan of the grimdark aesthetic but this game has next to no contrasts or highlights. Everything is the same shade of muck.
The game play mechanics aren’t well considered. Outside of boss fights it just seems like the entire game design focused on mindlessly mowing down endless waves of enemies without any skill expression necessary. Auto battler game play is not what I expect from an ARPG.
Finally, the story was bottom of the barrel level writing. I can’t identify with any of the characters, not even my own. The dialog is so eye rolling that I would use cut scenes as an opportunity to get up for snack and bathroom breaks. The patronizing tone and the overly dramatic and impossible to believe emotional exchanges between the characters makes me question if the writers have any of their own.
Well there ya go.
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How about the new class?
Sorry you gave money to a pretty terrible group of employees.
I didn’t play the new class.
You didn’t review the expansion either. You dumped a shi**y take about your experience with it, meanwhile agreeing with being OK with giving them more money even if there was no redeeming point to ask for it in the first place.
10/10.
No one cares about your rant. Go play PoE2 if you just want to complain. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
in this innovation accelerated era, being just okay is not okay.
Okay in that I don’t feel ripped off but I’m also not impressed enough to say it was the experience I expect from Blizzard.
I’ll probably won’t buy the next expansion if things remain the same about the pain points I described: art style, story, and auto battler game play. Instead I’m happy to just play Diablo 3.
I’m not terribly interested in PoE. I wasn’t interested in PoE 2 but I’m hearing that the game play is more twitch skill based rather than auto battler, which is my style of play so I may check it out.
i think thats why it makes me so tired and sleepy when im trying to play, because visually its so dark and dull . i recommend poe2 a lot, the graphics and gameplay were much better, but it has similar issues like d4. movement speed and class balancing is a joke
Unfortunately too many players screamed bloody murder when D3 was “too cartoony” and “not dark enough”.
They gave Blizzard PTSD.
Well now the art style is set so grim dark you can’t even see the models through the extra thick layers of mud and muck washes.
Sometimes the customer is just wrong.
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I never really paid too much attention to video game story lines. Often the stories were written up by not extremely talented or creative individuals (I can think back to some games in the late 90s the stories had to be skipped they were so awful). I do remember somewhat the D1 story, cant say I paid much attention. D2, I probably paid attention the first time. D3’s was kind of, dumb is the word I would use.
But this VOH expansion story was mind numbingly awful, and the team behind this story should simply not do any further Diablo ones. Not that I typically care about a video game story, I am after all there to play a game not watch a movie. But this story could not be entirely ignored. I wish it could have been skipped 100%. It was only after that I could a full summarization of the story that I facepalmed.
Kind of makes me think that this current development really needed to make a separate game, maybe call it Lilith Queen of bad stories, and have a Diablo game actually have a Diablo with a Diablo-esque story
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I don’t think anyone wanted bland coloring like that’s the only way to make a dark style game lol. Dark style would be gore, bodies laying around, brutality of people in the game, how you equate that just to bland coloring I have no idea. I would consider cyberpunk a dark game, the feel, the atmosphere and the harsh story is what makes it that, the game is visually vibrant
My biggest problem of the campaign was your character (and all characters, really) care so much about Neyrelle - but myself as a player really didn’t so there was this massive disconnect. The game was prescribing to the player what they should be feeling rather than trying to actually elicit that feeling.
I also found the amount of “okay stop now, we’re doing a cutscene” parts to be extremely high and unbearably long. The first spirit realm gate or whatever you call it where Eru does his unga bunga chants for what feels like literal minutes to open it up in cutscene like he’s charging the spirit bomb for 3 episodes. I very seriously think it took me less time to clear the dungeon it opened up than the length of the cutscene.
Idk the entire story is steeped in this feeling of unearned melodrama. I’m not a writer or literary expert so I can’t tell you why I feel this way, but I definitely feel this way about it.
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Apparently neither are the Blizzard writing team.
I remember having a long discussion on the D3 forums at the time where many players specifically argued exactly that, that the game wasn’t colored dark enough and that the art was too “cartoony”. I even remember posting screenshots that compared D3 to D2 highlighting how much more vibrantly colorful and “cartoony” D2 was by comparison. None of those discussions focused on “dark themes” or “blood and gore”, mostly because there is plenty of those things in D3.
What players were actually complaint about was that they wanted a photorealistic and lifelike 3d models and lighting effects in an environment that was “dark” (ie lots of hard to see in shadows) because the modern gamer opus overly obsessed with photorealism in games.
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? D3 does look cartoony still to this day, not sure how that relates to color. It’s more the models they decided to use for d3, it gave a wow feel. I’m not going to say people weren’t complaining about color because people complain about everything. The theme being dark is what most people were hinting to.
Yeah this needs to be repeated more often.
Besides having many dusty color schemes for the overall theme, Diablo 4 makes use of a ridiculous amount of fog that washes out all the colors there are left. Only a slight distance from the character shows increasingly thicker fog and blur. It is just too much.
In this picture https://imgur.com/a/GYyDrr1 I have increased black level + exposure to remove some of the fog (I am no professional). The setting is daylight scenery but if you compare the unedited (2nd) to the edited picture (3rd), it looks like that the original has an ongoing solar eclipse or suffers from bad air quality.
Imo the graphics team should lean more to working with shadows and not so much with fog in order to create the right atmosphere.
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