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Diablo IV

RobotSquirrel

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Aug 9, 2020
Messages
2,060
Location
Adelaide
hahaha The launch boss didn't even spawn. Wow great job there Blizzard. That made my whole night.
 

Tacgnol

Shitlord
Patron
Joined
Oct 12, 2010
Messages
1,871,855
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Do NOT play Diablo 4, people's GPUs are getting fried. Apparently Vsync is broken or something and the menu runs at like 5000 FPS until your computer dies

EDIT: Apparently someone mentioned it already. Blizzard is such an embarrassment

They've had that bug in almost every major release since wow back in 04.

Happened in the wow char select screen, the StarCraft 2 login screen and IIRC D3 had a similar issue.

Blizz apparently hasn't considered capping FPS to refresh rate in menus.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
7,414
I've found startling evidence of true incline in Diablo 4:

4r76hz8ijgoa1.png
 

RobotSquirrel

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Aug 9, 2020
Messages
2,060
Location
Adelaide
hahaha The launch boss didn't even spawn. Wow great job there Blizzard. That made my whole night.
context please
Blizzard had planned an event at a certain time. When they went to push the "spawn boss" button, it didn't work, Blizzard panicked and issued a statement

that were looking into why the world boss hadn't arrived yet.
Was watching it, lot of people just walking around shrugging and saying "what the hell is going on". Its minor the boss is now spawning apparently so it appears fixed. But very embarrassing when you hype something like this up and it blows up in your face.
 

mediocrepoet

Philosoraptor in Residence
Patron
Joined
Sep 30, 2009
Messages
13,158
Location
Combatfag: Gold box / Pathfinder
Codex 2012 Codex+ Now Streaming! MCA Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2

Turn_BASED

Educated
Joined
Jul 2, 2022
Messages
242
stopped reading at
Controller support feels great on PC
Username: Turn_BASED

tUrN_bAsEd
"Controller Support feels great on PC"


The jokes write themselves these days
I never said that. How dare you say I said that. Read my post again, from top to bottom!
Whatever console fag.
Jesus, too, was hated for telling the truth


also you are brown
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
16,350
Location
Frostfell
Does magical skills scale with your weapon in D4?

As I've said, how an caster becomes better at throwing fireballs :
Diablo 1 - Reading tomes
Diablo 2 - Investing skill points
Diablo 3 - Finding a bigger and sharper axe which he dimaterializes before casting
Diablo 4 - ????
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
7,414
Do you remember Blizzard's golden decade when one could buy their new games on release without even bothering to read reviews?

This ended more than 20 years ago. Diablo 2 is probably what I consider blizzard's last good game.

What about Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne?

Eeeeh, my personal opinion is that WC3 is what started Blizzard's long and tumultuous decline.

Everything from the aesthetics, to what ultimately ended up being WoW, to Blizzard's growth as a massive business entity.

You can see pieces of WC3's DNA thoroughly embedded in all of Blizzard's games in the past two decades. Blizzard is Warcraft.

Meanwhile Diablo and Starcraft? Those have been left behind.
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
16,071
Minireview after reaching max lvl (25) and end of beta (act finish). Finished it with Barb. Finishing act 1 took me around 12 hours while finishing about 70% of content of that map.

The good:

- itemization is great. I did not play much with base stat stacking but in my theorycrafting you should be able to stack interesting things. In comparison to D2 it is still worse but not by much. While base stat handling is worse than D2 the legendary powers bring it back to "good" level.
- arpg with actual hard combat. Played as barb and there were plenty of times when i had to redo boss or smaller fight. Some outright i couldn't do before i revised my build and geared up. Frankly outside of Grim Dawn in Veteran mode i don't remember any other arpg that had hard combat from start.
- monsters character, animations, behavior and ai is pretty much at the top of genre. Same with encounter design. You rarely meet one type of mob. Usually they are mix of stronger and weaker ones each having their own special attacks and character. Mages try to freeze you and stay away from you, while small mobs swarm you, bigger mobs try to stun/knockdown you. Aside from that there are plenty of monster types in that map. IDK about later but here even those small regions can have different kinds of monsters.
- gold seems to be really useful. You can actually buy upgrade in shop (rare/magic items), socket creation, legendary power extraction, converting smaller gem into bigger one, upgrade weapon etc. etc. etc. All require gold and quite a lot of it. In all 14 hours i was barely scraping by. Usually when i had some gold i would instantly use it for something. I don't know if they aim at reducing inflation but so far it is much better than any of previous diablo games.
- skills are pretty good (barb). Mix of D2 and D3s skills. I quite like idea of barb using 4 weapons at once. I played mostly as frenzy barb and it was pretty fun. "Kick" is my favorite skill with passive that makes every mob on path of kicked one get knocked down, it just feels fun to kick stuff. Shouts are also great. Everytime you use them it feels great with enemies visually getting pushed back a bit from shock. As for systems in place at first i thought it was pretty simple tree but once you start playing you quickly realize there is much depth in it with synergies hidden everywhere. Should you start berserk from shout or maybe from brawl skill ? How will you continue berserk ? Add points to stricte berserk or maybe add passive to dual swing that extends berserk ? And since dual swing uses rage resource then maybe shout that will cause you to generate rage on getting hit ? Then you combine it with items as well. Like when i found unique which causes 30% chance to stun on bleed. My double swing can do extra damage to to stunned enemies so where i can get bleed... etc.
- potions. Pretty much the best iteration of potions in arpg. They are gained much like in D2 as a drop and you can store say 4-5 of them with healer replacing them in town. On other hand non healing potions are stored in inventory in separate tab and all of them are super long like 30 minutes each and give you certain benefits like gives you thorns, increased fire resistance. So you only care about health potions as resource and you use other potion strategically depending on situation without need to play piano or something like in POE.
- quests. It's essentially D3 adventure mode but with unique design instead of being randomized. That is how it feels to play. It fits really well arpg nature. As for quest story design they are more akin to RPG quests than arpg ones. They are pretty varied: finding someone something, escort, multistage investigations etc. Obviously it is ARPG so 90% of time you smash but at least design isn't boring with kill 10/10 wolves non stop.
- main story. It's pretty interesting to follow it. Story is much more serious like in D2 rather than magical fairy bullshit D3.
- theme. Much darker theme than even D2. More akin to D1 theme. Gore everywhere, pentagrams, entrails, skinned bodies, cannibals, demons possesing people etc etc etc. you get the idea. Even church in that region is portrayed more like hardcore fanatics rather than do good warm priests.
- open world. Expected much worse. Overall it's pretty good. More standard ubisoft style stuff fits arpg where it wouldn't fit rpg. So getting some town freed from freeze curse is just a reason to smash.
- music. Pretty good. After entirely forgettable D3 score, POE going into generic epic orchestra it was nice to listen to those tunes. It isn't anything amazing though.
- boss health reset on death and TP takes a while to use. Yeah. It kills town spamming.

The bad:

- main story. Following Lilith is cool but some of the supporting characters are either boring or bad. There are only handful that were interesting. One being guard and first village peasants who wanted to eat you. The Deckart Cain replacer also seems to be interesting but he fucks off quickly outside of beta map. The worst was the girl. I mean i feel deja vu from D3 where you were supposed to care about that little shit and worst part is that it seems that after act1 she will be one of key npcs... ehh. So main story itself is interesting but presentation of some of supporting cast is wonky.
- ingredients galore. Outside of gold you have to use ingredients. Essentially D3 ingredients.
- area scaling. When you go out of town area scales to your level. There are only few locations with set level and usually it is higher than yours like fort i tried to conquer. I did notice though some crafting items to increase/decrease levels. I assume that eventually scalling will stop at 50 and you will need those items to increase level of those dungeons you want to do.
- limited weapons. Due to how classes are build weapons pretty much are only for certain classes. So as a barb you can't use shield. This naturally limits builds.
- bugs. It's beta duh. Various different bugs from not being able to TP for some reason to my character model not spawning, characters appearing out of nowhere when switching maps etc.
- graphics. Graphics aren't necessary bad but coming from Diablo 2 Remastered this is huge step back. HDR implementation sucks. Sure it works giving you more range but only a bit.

The ugly.

- sorc skills look like trash. Worse than mobile game. Seriously. Every single spell looks like a fucking joke. Incernate from D2 looks and behaves like some kind of laser rather than firefluid with some momentum. Frozen orb isn't orb + ice bolts like in D2 but just ball with some particles spinning as one jpeg or something.
- there will be in game store for micro. They say it will be like POE but this is still 70$ fucking bucks game not F2P.

Overall: Pretty awesome.

I followed development of it and i am not that surprised that it plays great. I think their motto D1 theme, D2 mechanics and D3 gameplay feel is something that can be seen through D4 and it works as intended. What i didn't expect was that they will actually try delivering arpg with hard combat and it's pretty fair hard combat with fails mostly coming from your inability to read situation and respond to combat flow not in GD veteran mode "sorry we decided to spam aether damage" now kind of way. It's hard to tell from this part how rest of game will work but if it will be like that till the end then i would be satisfied.
 
Last edited:

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,869
Do you remember Blizzard's golden decade when one could buy their new games on release without even bothering to read reviews?

This ended more than 20 years ago. Diablo 2 is probably what I consider blizzard's last good game.

What about Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne?

Eeeeh, my personal opinion is that WC3 is what started Blizzard's long and tumultuous decline.

Everything from the aesthetics, to what ultimately ended up being WoW, to Blizzard's growth as a massive business entity.

You can see pieces of WC3's DNA thoroughly embedded in all of Blizzard's games in the past two decades. Blizzard is Warcraft.

Meanwhile Diablo and Starcraft? Those have been left behind.

Yeah, I saw this happening back at the end of vanilla WoW. It was clear, at that point in time, that they were reorganizing the company to be entirely based around WoW, which made sense financially. But it meant that the company had no future outside of that franchise. And every game they've made since... it's not literally WoW/Warcraft, but because all of their employees were hired for the "Warcraft thing", that became their brand and style for everything. There was no longer anything outside of that, no alternative art style or brand. Diablo 3 was an attempt to make a new Diablo game through the lens of Warcraft.
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
16,071
Diablo 3 was an attempt to make a new Diablo game through the lens of Warcraft.

Ehh. Blizzard North wasn't able to deliver D3 they promised Blizz so after a while completely new team which was mostly consisting off WOW people took over. You can blame BN for their incompetence.

Also all leads of BN always wanted "always online" including micro. They saw it as the future of gaming back then. If internet was better when D2 released they probably wouldn't even include singleplayer and lan mode.
 

Storyfag

Perfidious Pole
Patron
Joined
Feb 17, 2011
Messages
17,272
Location
Stealth Orbital Nuke Control Centre
Do you remember Blizzard's golden decade when one could buy their new games on release without even bothering to read reviews?

This ended more than 20 years ago. Diablo 2 is probably what I consider blizzard's last good game.

What about Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne?

Eeeeh, my personal opinion is that WC3 is what started Blizzard's long and tumultuous decline.

Everything from the aesthetics, to what ultimately ended up being WoW, to Blizzard's growth as a massive business entity.

You can see pieces of WC3's DNA thoroughly embedded in all of Blizzard's games in the past two decades. Blizzard is Warcraft.

Meanwhile Diablo and Starcraft? Those have been left behind.
All true. Still, in itself, WC3 was a good game.
 

Takamori

Learned
Joined
Apr 17, 2020
Messages
899
To be fair Barbarian is under tuned rogue and sorc they are taking a fat shit over the game. But the good old melee being the underdog in ARPGS...
 

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