I would also argue Dungeon Siege was not so much about the item hunt as exploration and leveling, as well as controlling a party, as well as co-op mode and modding. End game in these games do not have to be all about finding the shiny thing, and I would argue that not having other things to help support the item hunt (a reason to get the shiny items) just makes the game feel blander.
Dungeon Siege I don’t think is a good fit for this one. DS is far more RPG than IsoA. I see it but it’s missing that distinct feeling you would get from a Vran or Last Epoch type loot game. It’s not that type of loot game. There’s a much deeper linearity to it.
Sure, but keep in mind that in that era, every company was trying to make a “Diablo-killer” and trying it in their own unique way. Dungeon Siege was absolutely one of those experiments. Same as NoX, or even the playstation 2 games that came out with the same sort of gameplay, from the Dark Alliance and Everquest games to X-Men Legends. It was only later on that the games seemed to focus more on the loot aspect, post Path of Exile and Diablo 3, Titan Quest and Grim Dawn, probably the most “successful” in various ways of the experiments.
Loot isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the only focus of these games. Doing so severely limits the longevity of the game. There needs to be something more to it, a reason to have the loot hunt. D4 really only has the loot hunt for the loot hunt’s sake, and because of this, feels absolutely useless to play and replay.
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Not it wasn’t, D4 had easily a 40h campaign & side quests plus an endgame that while not extensive did offer a significant challenge - killing Lilith and beating NMD100 were not trivial. There were lots of things to do even pre-season. Just not so much endgame stuff. You could debate whether it had enough content to meet expectations but it was definitely a complete game that players could easily sink hundreds of hours into.
Plus on top the promise of free seasons every 3 months which they have largely stuck to.
Look at other full price games, most of them you play a campaign through once or twice, maybe find some collectibles complete a few trophies and you’re done. Often this is done in well under 50h.
Both games are being constantly worked on. And we all know POE2 will not be free if you want any remote sense of QoL and if you really want to get into endgame it’s probably costing you about the same as D4 did on release.
D4’s release price was standard and the content was easily competitive with most other full price games on release. It was only lacking compared to other very specific games, even on release it had way more content than D3 or D2.
I get some people don’t like games advertising their shop stuff, but both games do this. In the case of POE2 it’s arguably “Pay to have any efficiency whatsoever”. Not saying this is wrong of them, I think it’s a reasonable compromise. But it’s really only free if you don’t want to have any storage and spend ages trying to organise it. (Tinfoil hat moment - I think there’s a reason they won’t add an auto-sort to basic tabs, and it’s not because it’s difficult)
If you want a good amount of storage with decent QoL, due to POE2 having so many different things you might want to collect (but will probably never use) costs about the same as D4. D4 at least had special tabs for keys, potions etc without having to pay for them.
Not to mention if you want to sell anything you need to pay for premium tabs.
I’d say POE2 is free to try and gives you enough to support one or two characters through the campaign. But if you want to be able to craft better gear etc with any degree of efficiency you need a lot more storage space which you need to pay for.
I’m not criticising POE2 here - I got the most expensive pack available on PS because I think it’s not an unreasonable approach to monetisation. But let’s not pretend POE is in any way cheap if you really want to get into it. The fact they offer supporter packs for $480 shows they are more than willing to take lots of money from players for things they either don’t need (cosmetics) or only need due to the amount of different nicknacks and bases you need to try and manage to actually get anywhere.
What. People can trade completed rune words and they do all the time lol.
I have been for like 20 years on and off… In hardcore mode.
That’s like suggesting to make D2 a completely different game. D2 as is does not have a pit like system and it was purposely designed that way. D2 does not have exponential scaling like D4 where the difference multiplies over and over again as you rise pit tiers.
I think you underestimate the difference in power between builds. A Hammerdin completely focused on damage is hitting 20k per hammer. That’s perfect gear, and most Hammerdins hit far less. A Frost Maiden, one of the weakest builds in the game and not META at all, is hitting 2.8k physical + 4k cold damage per arrow, so that’s 6.8k per shot. That’s only a difference of 1/3rd the Hammerdin damage, which means you only take 3 times longer to kill things compared to the Hammerdin.
You compare this to D4 where characters are hitting for trillions of damage vs other builds that are hitting for hundreds of thousands. That’s in the factor of ten million, meaning the weaker build needs to attack ten million times to do the same amount of damage as a single attack from the stronger build.
The scaling is completely different and saying otherwise is completely untruthful.
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First of all, /players 8 is only an option in single player. If you want to play a tougher difficulty in single player, you can always play mods too. The game was originally designed so that a single player fights monsters in /players 1, which is why you can’t change it to players 8 in online battle.net, so your argument is invalid from the get go. It was designed to scale with more players because that’s when you party up to fight the monsters together with other players.
Second, any character that can do players 1 can arguably handle players 8. The scaling from players 1 vs players 8 is a joke in comparison to Diablo 4’s exponential scaling. A players 8 monster only has 450% life compared to that in players 1. At best, that means you need to attack the monster 4.5 more times than you currently do in players 1. The monsters damage also only increase by 43.75% in players 8, which is not even remarkable. The monsters only hit 43.75% harder which is trivial in comparison to D4 where a monster might tickle in one pit level and one shot you in another.
D2 does not have exponential scaling like D4 where the difference multiplies over and over again as you rise pit tiers.
I think you also underestimate the difference in power between builds. A Hammerdin completely focused on damage is hitting 20k per hammer. That’s perfect gear, and most Hammerdins hit far less. A Frost Maiden, one of the weakest builds in the game and not META at all, is hitting 2.8k physical + 4k cold damage per arrow, so that’s 6.8k per shot. That’s only a difference of 1/3rd the Hammerdin damage, which means you only take 3 times longer to kill things compared to the Hammerdin.
You compare this to D4 where characters are hitting for trillions of damage vs other builds that are hitting for hundreds of thousands. That’s in the factor of ten million, meaning the weaker build needs to attack ten million times to do the same amount of damage as a single attack from the stronger build.
The scaling is completely different and saying otherwise is completely untruthful.
Dang the amount of account Rod has on the forums is ridiculous. Ill have to get more popcorn for this , this will be a long fight while the game burns to ashes.
It isnt an argument. Not by any stretch of the imagination. When someone makes dumb argument after dumb argument, there is only one conclusion to draw.
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Diablo 4 is goingo to D3 way more than D2 lile the developers tell will be. Not good. 
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Certain aspects of the game appeared finished to you, but it wasnt from the bigger picture standpoint.
They clearly didnt complete the social interface, trade, and stash management at a quality and level congruent with a triple A game.
What you had was the base elements of the game play(graphical mechanics etc) and core game finished whereas everything else was half baked and unfinished.
Arguably still bring revamped and redone over and over again since then also signifiying lack of actual completion.
Just because game had 40 hours of playable content doesnt necessarily imply the game was finished. Lol.
It was releasable. That’s about it.
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A throw away PoE1 league that has 19 new ascendancies blows every piece of content D4 as done as a whole just on it’s own. That’s why this game blows.
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Yeah, but playing a game for 20 years is different than playing blind (no guides, no previous knowledge of the game, etc.).
I believe it is expected for most games to feel easy after 20 years, since it is time enough to solve it alone. But how long did it take you to finish hell for the first time?
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Say’s you, Just call me skeptical after all of your previous posts 
If you want to be a smartass guy with the numbers, then do it right at least. Even if you were correct 3x dmg is disgustingly high gap, but you are not.
Hammerdin is not even remotely close to the highest hitting numbers, it gained its popularity because almost nothing is immune to magic dmg. If you want to calculate dps then you also need to factor how many hammers are actually online vs that 1 frost arrow which isn’t even the lowest hitting skill in the game.
Lightning builds can hit up to 100k easily, good luck with that comparison.
Necromancer can clear hell totally naked with the starting wand. Sorc can bossfarm in less than 1 minute vs other classes need to walk for minutes (till you get enigma, beautiful design, not cheap at all /s).
The fact that hell as the hardest content is still easy and dad gamers with 45 kids and 8 jobs claim how hardcore that game was speaks for itself.
I won’t even start with the itemization unbalanced crap with the op must have runewords, garbage uniques, garbage set items (except like 2), 90% of the rares are useless too, 99.9% of the magic items are useless, 99% of the white items are useless, but so good, it’s perfect right.
D2 is a hot piece of garbage in 2025 and you know it. It was great 20 years ago but that’s it. D2R was fine for igniting the nostalgy for a few weeks but my eyes roll out of their sockets every single time a boomer comes here and claims it’s the best game ever made
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If you want to be disingenuous with your response, don’t bother replying. You know that you cannot compare the value that D4 costs and the money they are begging for and the cost of Path of Exile 2. They are not remotely the same, in either the quality of play, the quality of dev interaction with the community or the quality of what is offered for the value asked.
You will get more with your base inventory of Path of Exile 2 for spending $0 than Diablo 4 offers for its $70. Buying the stash tabs is convenience, yes, but they are not needed, whereas D4 offers a pittance of inventory space with no option to get more. If you were to spend half of the value of D4 on convenience features for Path of Exile 2, you will have a dramatically higher amount of inventory. And that is without looking at any of the other things that D4 is begging money for.
D4 was incomplete on launch, which is why they have spent the past 2 years trying (and failing) to completely retool the game from its launch experience. Path of Exile 2, being in early access, still feels like a more complete game now, than D4 does, and there is only more to come.
They’ve been listening, they just don’t have passion or understanding of ARPG loot hunters. And QA is very bad too. It’d be best to sell the Diablo IP to a company that’s hungry. Would be nice if they sold the WoW IP too.
There are probably passionate and competent people in the company, don’t get me wrong. But the company itself is too bloated and dysfunctional to allow them to shine.
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Finished isn’t really a thing on a live service game. Things can always be improved.
The accusation was that it wasn’t ‘complete’ which, while also subjective, seems like something you would only say if comparing it to something like POE1 or a game that isn’t live service and therefore isn’t getting regular updates regardless of the exact state of the game.
Uhm, they all worked fine for me? Sure, more stash from the start would have been nice but it really wasn’t needed - not until you were getting into hundreds of hours played.
The only thing I would somewhat agree with is the guild system seems very barebones, but I haven’t really used it so couldn’t comment with confidence. It seems to serve its purpose as effecvitely an in-game friends list which notifies you when guiltmates complete achievements etc giving some sense of community if you were in a big enough guild.
I said 40h for the campaign. Completing Renown, altars, getting to 100 and doing Lillith and NMD100 was way more than that. Yes there wasn’t much variety in endgame but that doesn’t mean it isn’t complete. In fact it was the first Diablo game to actually release with any proper attempt at actual endgame activities. The others all just had you playing the same campaign areas over and over.
I’m not being remotely disingenuous. I spent more on POE2 EA than I did on D4 base game. Every MTx in D4 is cosmetic. POE2 requires at least $30 if you want a decent amount of stash considering the amount of crap you will want to store.
Without spending anything you get 4 tabs which you can’t trade from and can’t rename and can’t auto-sort. No, that is not remotely enough if you actually want to engage with their content, even the limited content they have currently. That will only get worse.
It doesn’t help that their crafting system right now relies on mass production - you want to save up at least 20 bases just to stand a chance at an upgrade, which for some items is an entire tab.
Again I’m not saying any of that is bad - if I was opposed to it I wouldn’t have bought in with the biggest pack available on PSN. I plan to return once they add more content and if they would get rid of the stupid XP loss I’d expect to sink thousands of hours into it. I’m not a POE2 hater at all.
But to keep claiming D4 and POE2 don’t basically cost the same if you want to put lots of hours into endgame is delusional. Especially since you can get D4 on sale, free trials etc. I believe the Map Stash Tab alone is 150 coins which I believe is about £10, probably around £7.50 on sale. And literally everyone is going to want that if they are remotely serious about the game.
Both games ‘beg’ if you want to put it that way. Which they have to do in some way to keep making money, which is ultimately rather important for both. D4 gives you popups to go buy cosmetics. POE2 sends you to their store every time your stash is full, or even just disorganised. Especially on console where inventory tetris is a pain.
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So there is one tiny problem with this logic: Everyone is 40.
Even if you never picked up a video game in your entire life when you’re 14 you’re going to do worse than when you’re 40 on the solving aspect and Diablo is just a giant math problem. This is why nostalgia is so confounding when talking about anything really; moving you back and forth through time is just very difficult to do properly.
Clarification: The amount of time it takes you to do something the first time when much younger is not a good indicator of complexity of a task.