The thing about AoZ is its a race against that timer without dying. Im fine with games having penalties for dying, but if they are just copying the idea of Greater Rifts from D3, you were able to die in the GR, but that just shortened the amount of time you had to fill the bar (if i remember correctly).
It does seem like this is more so a “test” to gauge players to see if it is enjoyable or not. There has been mixed opinions floating around on the forums some enjoy others do not. I get you need to have a balance between damage and defenses, but wont you need to shift more into defense the higher you go up and rely on the damage bonus you get from the glyph to supplement for the damage loss?
Another strange thing, is why release near the end of the season for one month? Sure its “new” content to entice players who already completed their season journey and want to find more exciting things to do at level 100. Surely this “dungeon” will return in other seasons just themed as necessary.
Did you see the poe2 gameplay trailer? It’s free and they actually play test their games and leagues before they release them.
The upcoming poe league in just a few days looks pretty awesome.
Players beta testing live content is better than no testing by us and sudden release.
Things can go south very quickly if that were the case and so AoZ could be a live beta testing of future content yet to come.
The kicker to that is that most of the people at GGG really, really love POE. There’s real players and community contributors working there. It’s lightning in a bottle. There’s no way for a company as big as ActiBlizz to emulate that. Even once they’re fully integrated with Microsoft there’s not a high chance that the old Blizzard magic comes back.
The players shouldn’t be beta testing a full release game. There’s reasons why game development go through different phases like pre-alpha, Alpha, beta, full release Etc. If we’re supposed to test a game that’s in full release we should be paid for our time.
Game was never good. Season 0, Season 1 and dropped it. Game still is garbage. I don’t even know how it got nominated for anything tbh. Wait for a few more campfires, some new bugs, few xp buff weekends and that’s a wrap for the season!
One of those was to have some people decide what they think the customer wants (with market research and whatnot). Then spend a bunch of time developing the complete system. Release it. And hope they guessed right on what the customer wanted. If you guessed wrong then you wasted a bunch of time writing code that needs to be scrapped/rewritten to get to what the customers want.
Another option is to release the MVP (minimum viable product), get user feedback, then keep iterating on that product while getting more feedback from the customer. This gets the product in the users hands much faster, you get feedback much earlier in the process to course correct. This means more dev time producing what the customers wants instead of crap you have to throw out/rewrite. So yes, we are beta testers in a way but IMO that’s a good thing.
Yes but there are games that were on Early Access like BG3 (which just won Game of the Year) that let players get access and play test the game while they take feedback and tweak the game till the final release version. This would gather the diehard supporters and fans to work with the team, go through feedback loop and iteratively improve the gameplay, fix bugs, etc until the final product is so polished, people are blown away.
I understand D4 is a released game but it’s also a Live Service game hence, it is continually improving along the way while they release new patches and gameplay mechanics. I’m sure Blizz have a QA team that identifies major bugs and balance issues and already fix them, what we get is already the more “playable” state of the game.