Why are open world activities and bosses so devoid of rewards or gameplay progression and loops?

PC General Discussion
1

You have the potential for what seems like an actual flavorful living world, with events and mechanics which you even tried with Black Citadel boss and travel mechanics.

And instead the game has devolved into a dungeon tile spam gear farm simulator with little else or any attempt to immerse the player in the world and setting.

Highly cinematic and atmospheric world bosses or legion events abandoned with awful rewards and boss fights that end in seconds, and those boss fights that don’t end in seconds end players in seconds instead, which is why every build is designed to skip the mechanics of these bosses.

Herald of Hatred and Belial and even the likes of Zir and Andariel feel like actually fun mechanics if by T12 they weren’t massive pools of HP with similarly massive one shot mechanics.

Potions have lost all their meaning in terms of an HP managing resource and stats like thorns, life regen, life on kill, and other such triage based combat concepts quickly become obsolete as the game always ends up falling in health spiking territory of either going 100-0 in under a second or said health bar never moving at all given enough stats.

This game seems like so much missed potential with stellar and immersive campaigns, voice acted NPC’s and events, improvements to map development and exploration with the hidden statues, the secret fishing easter eggs, and occasionally some cool puzzles.

All sidelined for the loot casino into pit pushing pipeline.

Why? Why abandon the other concepts ARPGs have just to solely pursue a single gameplay loop of gear treadmill through a few select 2 minute dungeon activities?

Why degrade the combat with massive mob density that just makes visibility and reactivity to mechanics fall apart? Instead of mob density, dealing with more meaningful combat with the mobs that doesn’t amount just running through faceless hordes, but elites feel actually like elites with a choreography you want to dance around, where the dodge button is used more than just to get out of the way of a fire on death aoe.

The best part of your game is starting an expansion campaign and having some reasonable cadence to the combat where the HP for both the player and enemies aren’t just ping ponging all over the place, talking to NPCs and discovering and feeling some sense of impact in the world. Then it quickly gets abandoned for getting through enemies and activities as fast as possible for the right loot to complete the season’s journey.

So much could be done with the combat and open world that isn’t just a sea of VFX vomit and dense hordes of mobs covering all the floor and your character and the only determinant of combat success is whether you’ve stacked enough damage multipliers and damage reduction multipliers alondside max life.

10 Likes
2

Surely one of the biggest questions about D4s whole messy development.

Spending all that time and money to make a relatively large open word… to then just not use it much.
It cant have been the original idea at least.

3 Likes
3

I feel like this is a personal problem. When I log into D4, I do what I want to do in it. Sometimes that’s fishing. Sometimes that’s bossing. Sometimes that’s questing. I do what I feel will be fun, and if it’s “sub optimal” relative to everyone else, so what? I’m not everyone else.

Nobody’s holding a gun to your head and demanding you only do warplans. Play the game in the way that’s fun for you. You’d be surprised how much fun there is to be had when you stop restricting your definition of what “fun” even is in the first place.

These two are a little more objectively answerable. Simply put, D4 wasn’t originally intended to feel like “D3.5” but it has slowly co-opted more and more elements from it over time because that’s where the money is. I know I’m enjoying it a lot more nowadays, and I can’t be the only one because these types of style shifts keep happening.

4

If you want to enjoy any mythic uniques or even build some particular skill synergy builds, you don’t have the luxury of that flexibility, as well as the cosmetics tied to end of season journeys.

I’m not even talking making leaderboards here or pushing beyond pit 100.

Some builds are simply not possible because drop rates for uniques are absolutely nonexistent on some difficulties and season journeys are not completed by just any build; the balancing for Torment X+ is such that you are forced into meta builds and the gear to make those work is not coming from open world participation.

I made certain to no mention any competitive aspect because I simply don’t care for it.

But you will definitely not be able to just play what you like, in that case open world or events or legions or bosses and derive any meaningful character progression to go through the season journey this way.

And war plans are just massive to character progression and player power. From massively increasing experience, to drastically changing boss spawns and strength, as well as what mechanics are introduced and especially the loot drop.

5

I have roughly 5 Tyrael’s Mights and a Melted Heart of Selig. Had something else that I melted, don’t remember what it was. Probably a Ring of Starless? My build doesn’t need primary resource except when I “teleport” with Sever, or on the rare occasion I need to re-summon a skellie mage.

The secret? Crafting Undercity Tributes and Amalgamizing them in the Cube. 5x blue Armaments = 1 Yellow, 5x yellow = 1x Leggo, 5x Leggo = 1x Mythic. Does it take a while? Sure it takes a while. But, the results speak for themselves.

Then don’t play on Torment X+ if your build can’t handle it (yet). I’m currently on Torment 8.

Sure you can. It just means you won’t progress as far or as fast as meta builds.

6

You won’t be completing mythic undercity tributes on open world gear. You won’t be gaining these tributes in any meaningful sense outside already doing the non-open world content.

I don’t really need tips from you. My season journey is done and I got paragon 250. I have a stash filled with uniques, and I know how I got them, and it sure as hell was not from doing open world or legions or world bosses.

Most were actually from mephisto keys and a few from mythic tributes after Torment X+. They sure as hell are not guaranteed drops from either (nemesis lairs are a better farm anyways, yet another war plan exclusive), and especially not below Torment X. The mephisto keys drop extremely rarely on high torment tiers.

Good for you that you are on Torment 8. The difference between 8 and 10 is massive and 12 is magnitudes, to the point where a class has maybe 1-2 specific builds capable of reasonably completing the content without massive gear and paragon handicaps.

7

What was the original vision for Diablo 4? A much darker, slower game? If, that’s the case, what happened between the original vision and the version of D4 we have now.. I know there was some development hell involved, which is why Rod Ferguson was bought aboard.. but other than that, I really don’t know the backstory on the development of this game.

8

The people who just wanted a gear casino farm simulator were the loudest and got listened to.

After the rough release they progressively heard for demands of mob density.

Which was damaging to the gameplay in so many ways, from visibility, to the downstream effects of cluttering the screen with hordes of enemies attacking synchronously.

The result is all skill expression is lost in the combat and it just becomes a stat check scenario where you either have the gear to facetank and mow the hordes or you don’t, zero nuance about how the combat plays out as you just mash stuff on cooldown and pray it does enough damage or that enemies don’t evaporate you the moment they make contact.

2 Likes
9

Because you have an ARPG being designed by an MMO company, they think endgame rewards should always be reserved for the hardcore “raiders”, everyone else…well let them eat cake.

10

You ask why…

But I think, deep down, you know the answer.

11

It’s because potions and incense was taken out of the game. Thats where you got the ingredients

12

I feel like this is how it should be, though. The hardest optional difficulty in the entire game ought to be extremely hard. I think when you say stuff like:

That to me signals you want something more akin to an Elden Ring, or maybe a fighter. Something where combat is more involved than your typical “generator → spender + cooldowns” loop. Which is fine, not everything is for everyone. However, I think it’s disingenuous to brand the majority as somehow whiny and incompetent:

People who “just want” were not necessarily a vocal crybaby minority. I rather think enough people voted with their wallets to shape the game into how it is now. You gotta figure, “most people” don’t post on the forums at all. They’re just playing the game.

Blizz’s roots go far deeper than MMO’s.

Yes, exactly that. D4 was originally built as a “return to form” departure from D3, harkening instead to its Diablo 1 and 2 roots. Hence why the vanilla areas are mostly drab greys and browns, and why we initially had mob scarcity and why leveling used to be very slow and methodical. Used to be very grindy, too, with Renown (area based reptutation) being reset every season, along with statues that granted skill points and other bonuses that needed to be found every season. Time was when we needed to clear at least 3 strongholds per zone every single season, do a certain amount of side quests, complete a certain amount of dungeons.

People loved it the first time through it. Once they learned they’d have to farm all of this content over and over again though? The honeymoon phase wore off fast.

Over the next few years, changes would be made that some people (perhaps mockingly so) now refer to as making D4 more like a “D3.5” type experience. I love D3 and so making this game play more like a game I enjoy is fine by me. Others, like Crescent, preferred the old style.

And that’s really all it boils down to. Different strokes for different folks.

1 Like
13

From the various leaks about the games development (heck, a book has been written about Blizzard with D4 as one of its examples of developer hell, sadly haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but it is supposedly pretty good for anyone interested in game development hell), the game development was rebooted at least once.
In the early years, as crazy as it sounds, it was supposedly meant to be a Souls like. Which would indicate a much slower and darker game, focused on combat over gear. As much as I would personally love that, it didn’t sound like a great move for a main title in the Diablo series tbh.
This was all before the game was officially announced.

Then they restarted it as a more traditional A-RPG, but as Dimlhugionn said above, even at that point it was marketed as a step toward D2, and leaving behind everything D3 stood for. That design seemed to last up to like a year before release, where more and more changes started going in the direction of D3.
About half a year before release there also were multiple credible sources writing that Blizzard was feverishly trying to rush the game to a release date. Beyond the rush that always come leading up to a game release.

Though even at release it was pretty far from D3. The real move to becoming D3.5 only came around Season 2-3 and onwards

2 Likes
14

Ultimately they had to know balancing with a near infinite scaling end game was going to be an issue from trying to balance D3. I loved D3 and every season was the ultimate balancing act that never quite happened, even though occasionally it was close. However, you were often forced to pick one of the cookie cutter builds if you wanted to be efficient. One of the things that made D2 more interesting is that there was essentially a difficulty cap, which meant that numerous builds were capable of doing all the content offered. After which it came down to speed, survivability and preference. I understand the allure of “pushing” higher and higher tiers but at some point you’re just pissing in the wind until someone figures out the absolute meta destroyer and then everyone flocks to that build or ends up feeling weaker by comparison. (I’m not talking competitively, I’m talking personally - if you play one build and switch to another that performs drastically differently, your game experience is similarly affected).

I’ve complained about the lack of build diversity since the game’s inception. Often you’re just picking a single skill and then stacking stats until that skill can overcome game mechanics. This is pretty common in ARPGs, but the problem I find with Diablo is that there’s usually not multiple avenues to success. Everyone ends up with similar builds just like in D3 and character expression is very limited.

I agree that D4 is one of the best looking worlds out there (aside from the ugly UI). You can tell they wanted it to be vast and imaginative, but instead you’re lured into gameplay loops that aren’t always fun. At least when the meta was nightmare dungeons, you did a little more adventuring as it were, but it still felt a bit thin. At this point, there’s probably no return to the slower methodical gameplay they wanted initially, but I would love to see some real thought put into character building, which is the real appeal of ARPGs. You have games that are skill based and games that are character building based. Diablo is more of the latter, but that aspect often feels unrewarding when the power creep is dull and your choices are predetermined. (Tbf, the power creep used to feel way worse when monster level was scaled very heavily and no matter how much you leveled/geared you didn’t feel like you were making much progress.)

15

It just sucks how much missed potential there is with immersive and environmental storytelling and having a living world with class expression.

All in favor of doing the same dark corridor tiles zooming with teleport spam with the same orbiting projectiles that clear the interchangeable hordes of mobs with no defining features or distinguishing mechanics.

16

I am with you: the open world is absolutely amazing. The “caves” “dungeons” etc are actually more the “roots” of D4, but are from a period where NVIDIA did not even start shipping dope graphic cards.

I said it x times: having way more open world activities and exploiting more Skovos would be amazing. An alternative to infernal hordes in the open Skovos with a tower defense mechanics or so. I agree that we would welcome more rewarding activities like the current Hell tides (that are way better than in previous seasons thanks to the activities score)

2 Likes