Just saw this and thought to myself um… what?
Joe over at D4 says this is the soul of Diablo 4. The systems are the soul.
I’m not sure what game he’s looking at. Nobody says the systems of Elden Ring are what make for the soulsborne experience.
In fact the systems are serviceable at best. Nobody adores the menu, the itemization, the camera which has been legendary bad in every soulsborne experience.
Rather it is the entire package, the ambience, the sound, the graphics and the simple approach to a complex challenge that drive the experience.
I feel like this is the problem ultimately with WoW too. Systems are important but each is really only worth considering in the entire package. You can spend months working on a system you think is amazing and the product can still suck. Maybe this explains why so many systems end up isolated from the game. With each new thing either part of an instance (dungeons and raids) or locked entirely to a different playstyle (M+, arena, etc).
All of these years the thing that got left behind was the entire package. The world is dreadfully boring. The story lacking. The P2P experience bad.