Why is every Diablo game so different?

PC General Discussion
1

They keep making new games instead of just making the existing game better.

Like Starcraft II didn’t reinvent the wheel, you know? Playing Starcraft II just feels like playing StarCraft with way better QoL.

But you still mine minerals and collect Vespene gas. Barracks still make marines. Medics still heal marines. Siege Tanks still blow things up.

Why do the Diablo devs feel the need to reinvent the wheel every time?

Diablo IV isn’t a terrible game, it just feels like a totally different game than Diablo III, which was a totally different game than Diablo II.

As a result very few people are ever really happy or getting what they expect. There’s always arguments about how the game should be, because the identity of the franchise has been so mixed up.

15 Likes
2

It seems like it is blatant disrespect for the past dev teams.

It’s the “F them, I can do it better and now is my chance” mentality. They are out of touch with their fan base, that is clearly evident in all aspects of this game’s design.

All they had to do is deliver the BEST of the previous iterations on a new game engine - give us the itemization of D2, the social networking of D3, and improve the end game loop of both of those games in this one.

Nope - we get this weird hybrid MMO/ARPG that doesn’t do well in either genre.

20 Likes
3

Yeah, all they would have to do is make an actual sequel to Diablo 2 using the exact same mechanics/items with new content and updated graphics and new builds. If they did that, didn’t try to add a bunch of extra garbage like finding blocks all over dungeons to put them on pedestals or all this other nonsense filler, they would have another hit on their hands.

It just blows my mind how this fact just flies over their heads every time.

11 Likes
4

Jay Wilson and the current D4 team is really the old D3 team. He thought everything about d2 was bad, and made it a mission to remove all of it and start over. Which is why D3 wasn’t a good game and why D4 feels so much like d3.

Here are some famous Jay Wilson quotes:

"One of the pieces of feedback we got during the internal alpha was that skill points as an element of our skill system didn’t really suit the game, It created a lot of conflict in terms of what the players would choose to do. So what we had is this system that has these six – it used to be seven, now six – slots, that implies that you should have six skills, but a system with skill points? Well, you really want to dump every single point into one skill. "

“I feel that in a lot of ways the current system has more choice involved in it compared to Diablo II because that finite limit of how many skills you can take versus the number that you have means that you have to make a very restrictive choice, so we focused a lot more on restricting the number of skills you have and having that be the interesting choice, as opposed to skill points, which are really commitments before you even know what you’re committing to.”

Question: Have you ever thought of adding servers for old WoW Expansions?

“No! And by the way, you don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t”

“We made it hard enough that our internal team couldn’t beat it. Then we doubled it.” - btw, inferno ended up getting nerfed hard soon after release. Another big lol

Pretty sure he was wrong about almost everything he said lol. He was arrogant, and I think some of that rubbed off on Rod Ferguson and some of the rest of the team.

6 Likes
5

I’m a simple person. I liked having healing AND mana potions. I will die on this hill.

14 Likes
6

Yup, that’s why resources feel better into D2 and PoE, because you can manage your resources with mana pots.

1 Like
7

I mean literally this. Why spend over 2 decades perfecting a genre and then decide to start from scratch. I bet the same person who thought this was a good idea is the same person who designed the “trash rooms”.

If you’ve run any NM dungeon ever, you know what I’m talking about.

7 Likes
8

They keep losing talent, for one, but they also promote specifically based on who drinks the kool-aid rather than who is actually creative.

Acti-Blizz, by all accounts, is an extremely toxic work environment. This sort of environment is counter productive to creativity.

We saw D1 and 2, and D2 was a true sequel to D1, but the original team left after Blizzard chased them away. Now, they’re so incapable of keeping talent, every single team on every single game is entirely different.

But yeah, if they could actually make true sequels, their games would be much better. How can someone make something better if they don’t have any working knowledge of the previous thing they’re trying to improve on? How do they continuously pump out ARPGs using teams and leaders that have literally no experience building ARPGs? It genuinely seems like the teams for D3 and D4 weren’t/aren’t even ARPG players, nevermind ARPG devs.

2 Likes
9

This is my thought as well. They’d have a 10/10 game if they did this. But these d3 devs are arrogant and think they know better OR Activision is pushing hard to keep the game as casual as possible. Both maybe?

5 Likes
10

It’s hard to keep talent when Blizzard pays some of the lowest in the industry. Blizzard actually thinks it’s justified, because it’s such an “honor” to work at Blizzard. I’m not making it up, that got leaked somewhere I forget where exactly.

4 Likes
11

I don’t really agree.

D4 is just a worst version of D3. If you look at how everything plays after you finish the campaign. They even use the same game engine.

1 Like
12

Blizzard, as it seems, is the best stepping stone in the industry to get a position with a good company.
:face_with_spiral_eyes: :skull:

Do you have any source to back up the game engine claim? Some say it is a new engine; others say it is D2R or D3. Does anyone actually know?

If it’s the same engine as D3, then implementing all the lacking features should be easy to do.

13

I don’t even think it’s a matter of keeping it too casual. Look at the feedback from D3 players, they all think D4 is too difficult and complicated, lol. Using your brain isn’t part of a D3 player’s ethos.

The single most impactful problem, right now, imo, is the lack of an endgame loop. Fundamentally, the first and foremost end game loop should stem from the itemization. Without trading, a portion of that is instantly lost. However, you can recover from that, if everything else in the itemization takes that into account and is 100% perfect, but there are literally no chase items in the game. The 5 or 6 (they want us to believe are chase items) aren’t actually capable of dropping, for one, but the rest of the unique items aren’t even useful and get overshadowed by legendaries.

D2 has 400 unique items. Blizzard would need to multiply their current amount of uniques by 20 times, in order to match that volume, since each character only has access to 20 unique items (currently), everything is class specific, and there is no trading. On top of that, they need to make unique items actually worth using, lol.

I think it’d be extremely difficult to keep people rabidly playing without trading unless the itemization was perfect, but even doing that, trading was one of the addictive qualities that kept people playing D2 for decades.

How/why the current team doesn’t understand this, just shows their ignorance of the genre. They are not ARPG players, therefor, they aren’t ARPG developers.

The second biggest thing that kept people playing D2 for decades was the PVP, and right now, the PVP is complete and utter trash. I spend quite a bit of time on the Fields of Hatred because I’m a PVP addict in every game, but my god, if they’re going to include something in a game they should plan on making it worth playing. I’ve seen an endless stream of threads from new players who are playing an ARPG and/or Diablo game for the first time, and they can’t even comprehend why the PVP was left so underdeveloped.

It was fine for D1 and 2 because of the time period, but for the record, the original team had planned on guild halls and PVP specific game modes in D2. They had also planned on multiple expansions. These are things we would have seen, enjoyed, and been able to reap the benefits from over the course of every game release thereafter.

I definitely think D4 will get much better, but I’m afraid it’ll simply be in the form of gimmicks rather than truly dialing in the core fundamentals that make an ARPG an excellent ARPG. For example, they’ll give us a slew of new unique items every season, but it’ll be like 2-3 per class, and none of them will be usable. Or they’ll “support” pvp by giving us double currency weekends, lol. Or they’ll give us tier 5 with new versions of the current capstone dungeons, and claim that’s a new end game feature.

3 Likes
14

Not only that, but D2 Uniques are a lot more interesting (at least LoD ones) and are all pretty good. Sure some are stepping stone ones, but if you get one while leveling you get that dopamine hit of excitement. In D4 Uniques are basically legendries, with mostly the same modifiers and small % gains. They don’t feel good at all.

4 Likes
15

They do make the existing games better, via patches, or the recent d2 remaster.

But d4 isn’t going to expect to kill the d2 playerbase, nor will it kill the d3 playerbase.

16

It’s an updated D3 engine.

1 Like
17

Bro, Blizzard wouldn’t even have to pay me I’ll literally give insight for free and I’ll do it from home so they don’t need to worry about covid either. It’s a win win, really.

2 Likes
18

20 characters required

19

Rod recently tweeted out a picture of the entire D4 team, and I don’t want to knock on them necessarily as they don’t really make the decision in this game, but it was all a bunch of kids. It looked like this was their first year of their first job out of college. Blizzard is the starter job now. They pay crap, and you go there before moving onto a serious company, where creativity can flourish. It’s sad what happened.

5 Likes
20

Totally agree. Before the Blizzard kool-aid drinkers ruined D2 with 1.10 (after the original team left), the itemization was absolutely perfect. Look at 1.08 items like Shako, Grandfather, Windforce, Arkaine’s, etc. – they’re interesting, have lore behind them, and provide massively impactful bonuses.

Unique items in D4 aren’t even usable because they’re so bad. On top of that, even something that has an interesting effect, like Shadowgrasp giving a 20-30% lucky hit to summon a shadow for a single attack, the damned effect is so extremely unlikely, that double damage for a single attack is absolutely nothing compared to the attack speed, crit chance, and +4 skills I get from my normal gauntlets.

Taking lucky hit into account, I might get that stupid shadow clone 1/8 of my attacks, which is nothing in terms of damage when you compare it to legendary gauntlets with ideal stats and an effective imprint.

Even the amazing unique items (no one will ever find) just crank up the effects/stats to the point of absurdity, so of course they’re good, lol. 4 to all skills on Shako when nothing else does that. Yay… we have more skills… wow, so creative.

They really don’t seem to know how to create effective itemization, and it’s hilarious, because they could have simply copy/pasted D2’s itemization from 1.09 and it’d be perfect.

2 Likes