The target audience of AAA studios has changed. Gaming is extremely popular and has to compete with other forms of media like streaming for people’s free time and money.
You can’t make a super hard old school AAA game in the current environment. Development costs are too high and most people don’t want to play a game where you can fail to progress past the first level.
You need to start differentiating between old school games and modern games. D2 is an old school Diablo-like ARPG. D4 is a Diablo-like experience. D4 makes you feel like you are playing an ARPG and achieving something without any of the challenges of an old school ARPG.
The same goes for the MTX shop. You are paying for the experience of having cool-looking gear in a video game.
Modern games are essentially interactive media. A bit more challenging than watching Netflix, but not by much. If you want 90s and 00s style games, look into indie and AA game dev instead of AAA.
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How did BG3 do it then? IT has old school turn based combat. How did Elden Ring do it with its punishing boss fights and combat? The answer is because they are great games. These studios pushed for something past “good enough”.
You can do it but you have to aim for something past “good enough”. D4 has not done this.
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For every BG3 and Elden Ring, you have dozens of unknown games that tried to do the old school formula and barely sold any copies.
Blizzard has a consistent formula that brings in billions in sales and even more billions in MTX. They are not going to abandon it to make a more D2-like game.
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Good I dont want D2 infecting D4.
Look at stardew valley. Meh graphics. Old School. Made by 1 guy. Its one of the best selling games of all time. Quality is what matters. The games that dint sell probably sucked. It had nothing to do with the game being too hard or too old school. If you make a great game ppl will buy it. Its that simple.
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Stardew Valley valley made millions. Modern games like Genshin Impact and Diablo Immortal bring in billions. Blizzard is up to 4 sloppy WoW expansions in a row and yet they are still printing money.
You don’t need to make a good video game to make money. You need to make a video game with great monetization.
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I agree with Urza on this one. If you build a great game, people will come. If you build a crappy game people will avoid it like the plague. Simple as that. It can come from a well known studio, an indie dev, or somewhere in between.
Oh sure there’s thousands of games out there that never hit their mark. You can chalk it up to any number of reasons, but when a good game comes out, and people realize it’s good, it flourishes.
This isn’t to say games that don’t meet our personal standards don’t do well financially. I mean look at the mobile game industry. All we can do is give our feedback, hope it gets listened to and the game changes for the better.
If not, well there’s no shortage of good games out there currently, and there’s plenty more to come.
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KCD, BG3, Death Stranding, Elden Ring…
And all Pvp game try hard like Valorant, LoL, CS…
But right now you have D3 heavilly infecting D4…
If D4 had grown up like a D2 big brother, it would be way better than it is now…
If they already have a “modern AAA” game, why bring another?
It’s like why they create WoW when there was already D?
Leave W be W and D be D…
They want to harvest every penny from us, and in the process, mess everything up…
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Thank you for answering a question noone asked.
Also thank you for explaining why modern games suck
I honestly don’t know what that means. 
The market is too complex. What makes a game ‘good’ or ‘crappy’ tends to be post-facto rationalization. Often (and we see this argued VERY LOUDLY here on the forum) sales figures are cited as proof of a game’s high quality. Viewer counts too - until it’s inconvenient, and then 
. When, as you say, many other factors can account for success. Like marketing, peer influence, accessibility, lack of gaming experience, etc.
Humans aren’t rational. Very malleable. Seek validation. Defend their choices because to do otherwise means self-diminishment. Also (again) if you play with friends, a piece of 
can actually be fun.
A ‘good’ game, like any other product, is “that which fits a consumer’s needs”. Under this rubric, it can be made of proverbial , be incoherent, leave the user exhausted & confused & resentful, and still persuade them to keep using it. To maybe buy an expansion. And a cool skin - since playing the game isn’t even necessary to enjoying a skin, and my buddy has one.
Coke is gross, unless the syrup is mixed just right, and the carbonation is just so, and the temperature is ideal, and you’re thirsty. So 99% of the time it’s gross. But the day Coke goes out of business is the day after the nukes fly. And then we’ll use the bottlecaps as currency.
D3 is superior to D2. I really hope they develop D4 more into the D3 direction than D2.
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That’s bad games then. What’s the point to watch movie in a game? Actors and story are pretty bad in a video-game, except some titles, and once you’ve seen it you don’t want to see it again.
What I like in a game is to have some progress in the form of skills, and I like when a game has good replayability.
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I have already explained it, it’s because gaming has become extremely popular and competitive with other popular media. AAA studios are selling an on-rails experience of playing a video game.
The target audience is people with cash who will buy MTX cosmetics. You can’t convince an NFL quarterback or a corporate executive to spend dozens of hours “getting good” at a video game.
Why did D&D dumb down Game of Thrones? It’s because the general audience has cash but can’t handle complicated themes or anything too strange.
Jebus…
If they make this game any more casual it will be an AFK game.
There is NOTHING difficult about this game currently.
Nothing.
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I hope you’re wrong. I never bought any MTX cosmetics, and I bet most players haven’t either. I guess players who buy cosmetics are a minority. A lot of modern games don’t have MTX cosmetics but are still good games, like Skyrim, Fallout 4, Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Dishonored… In fact, a good game doesn’t need cosmetics to sell.
Furthermore, if a game is too easy or relies heavily on MTX, it will be review-bombed very fast. Players don’t like to buy in-game stuff anymore, especially when they’ve already bought the main game at a high price.
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Bro, all these are single player game with no multiplayer aspects.
Can you name 1 successful multiplayer online game that doesn’t have any element of MTX?
Starcraft 2 ^^’ Probably the best title of Blizzard 
Just for the nostalgia… watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9hQx-SJ5Y
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anything from this decade i mean… and SC2 is not always online.
try again.
Wait. You’re telling me D4 is NOT an AFK experience right now?
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I actually level my necro AFK using minion…just standing there and it got to paragon 100+