this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I still haven’t had the chance to play D4, but played a lot of D2 and some D3. Anyone here with some insight on what they fucked up with D4?
Endgame sucks.
Scaling content means there's little power scaling variety, viable builds are very narrow so there's not much build variety, the leveling curve is punishingly slow because they are trying to live service it, and seasons have lame rewards and boring features so far. Dungeon variety is nearly non-existent and poorly randomized with time wasting objective design.
Also it's a Diablo game where none of the endgame content takes place in Hell.
TL;DR: Designing games as a live service means designing around time wasting and anti-player choices.
Agreed. It's a solid game that just gets boring. I enjoyed the campaign and the co-op play. I liked the variety of play of the classes.
But since the launch they've just made the game boring. The first big patch just nerfed every build. It's not a competitive game - they just decided you should have less fun I guess.
Gems are super boring - instead of being excited for them to drop, inactively ignore them. And the first seasons only mechanic is.... fancy gems.
The towns are designed to make you run around a ton. The mount mechanics are actively hostile (maps have areas where you need to dismount to progress, then there's a 10s cool down before you can mount again). Inventory management kinda sucks. The whole loot management part of the game is kinda flat and that's a major component of this series.
It's weird because this was the smoothest launch of a Diablo and the game felt feature rich as you leveled. But the end game is so fucking boring. They have so many things in D3 they could have just copied but instead we'll end up with yet another patch of nerfs in a single player game.
OP builds in a live service game means you spend less time on the daily/weekly/monthly grinds. Saw constant PVE nerfs in Destiny 2.
That's the issue though, there's nothing to grind.
Damn, really disappointing to hear. I felt like D3 was ok but for some reason couldn’t quite match up to D2, and so was hoping that D4 would deliver. But now I know to at least adjust my expectations if/when I finally play.
The first playthrough is great. Open world is awesome.
Just don't expect to get to level 100 and minmax your loot, as you'll almost certainly drop off before then.
What’s a live service?
Basically a game that is designed to receive regular content updates and have revolving meta elements. It’s a game that is designed to not have an end.
Thanks for the explanation.
we are going to be sold Hell. guaranteed
and then they will sell us Heaven, and then they will sell us cow level, then they will sell us whimsyshire, then they will sell us...............
Well compared to D2, the progression was reverse linear, you started off strong at Level 1, and cleared rooms and then you became weaker as you levelled up.
To maintain your strength, you needed to have the optimal gear in every slot (head, armor, gloves, boots, etc), and have an optimal spec.
The issue was that the items were egregiously generic, and were replaced pretty much on a constant basis, anything you picked up was an upgrade until Level 50, when "Sacred" and "Artifact" became a class, and your entire inventory was outdated.
The main issue was they began by making Diablo: Immortal, a mobile game and midway through development remembered it's a PC game and not a mobile micro transaction machine, and kept the MT shop in the game regardless (which retails for $100, mind you)
I'm a Diablo 1&2 Veteran, who has meleed Uber Diablo to death with a Fury Druid in 2022, soloed Diablo in 1996 with a Warrior, and I've never been more bored playing an ARPG than Diablo 4.
My best friend is a stoner, so he got far more value out of it. To be fair, he also gets a lot of value out of staring at walls, so there's that.
Hey man there's some pretty god damned interesting walls out there.
The game industry seems to have been heavily infected with capitalistic bullshit. It’s really sad to see what was once a fun combination of art, entertainment, nerdiness, and tech turn into another soulless cash machine.
The game industry has always been deeply entrenched in capitalism...
Look at the arcades of old. They were basically just slot machines for kids without the chance for a payout.
Were they fun? I have way more fun playing arcade games than I do most Blizzard games these days (and I have more money left after).
I'm not sure if they were or not. I wasn't around during that time. I'm more commenting on this prevailing narrative that video games were this auteur-focused medium that's just now being sullied by capitalism. That's a false narrative and I think what's really happening is that we're becoming more and more aware of just how insidious unchecked capitalism can really be and we're noticing it more and more in the things that we love. Whereas in the past, we may have been less critical or interrogative of the industry as a whole.
Agree to disagree I guess, I think it's far worse and far more prevalent.
There's tons of good indie games. And you don't even need a 2000€ PC to play them.
I'm just sitting around playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon and, while id prefer something narrative driven, it's been giving me the happies for quite a while.
From my time playing it, the looting wasn't satisfying nor was the combat. In looting, the drop rate of things good or useful for your class seemed too low. For combat, it kinda felt like there were wild swings in difficulty that made level progress kinda disappointing. Some of this may have been fixed more recently; I have not played in at least two months.
Seems hard to fuck up so many game mechanics, yet here we are.
They forgot to make it fun.
The short and sweet answer is that it's just not Diablo. It does not compare with any of the previous Diablo releases in the slightest. It might as well be a generic mobile game like immortal...
In D2 finding gear felt fun. Runes were rare but powerful and sets/legendaries offered different build paths. You also had control over magic find with the ability to lower your power to increase magic find.
D3 (much later) expanded sets so that a number of builds were viable per class, making it fun to find any piece of gear. They also added rifts to challenge yourself to no end. The devs liked watching people push higher tiers and celebrated it.
D4 does not have runes or sets. Every legendary effect can to removed from the legendary and added to any yellow piece of gear. As a result, you're typically chasing random yellow items for a .1% increase that all feels very samey until you find a unique. Currently, uniques are not even close to all being viable. Also blizz activity monitors unique drop rates and decreases them/bans people for finding ways to increase drop rates. The devs do not like people pushing harder stuff because that means they spending less time looking at the intentionally shitty (free) transmogs. They want you to grind away for days to get incremental success so you tire of your looks and buy skins and battle passes. If that explanation sucks, then I have no fucking idea what they're doing. Maybe they expect us to grind because they don't know how to create more content?
I finished the campaign with my wife and we had fun do it together than after 90 hrs or so (we kept the screen a lot so I'm not sure its actually 90 hrs) I deleted it and went on, right when season 1 started. I tried to come back to it yesterday alone and it was just... Dull. The game was boring as hell playing alone, after 2 hours I deleted it again
It's just fucking boring and bland looking. It's everything that sucked about 3 and then doubled down on the suck. I may be biased as fuck, but Path of Exile is infinitely more fun than D3 and 4 combined. I dumped hundreds of hours into D2 and then a bunch more into the remaster, but D3 felt like a chore and D4 couldn't even hook me with the beta enough to buy the game.