Diablo IV

[whydoibother]

I wouldn't call him a Blizzard shill so much as a shill in general

That used to be called "enthusiastic". Can't really accuse him of being a shill, if he "shills" competing products.
Hate merchants get to be called critics, why can't hype merchants be called enthusiasts? It might be genuine. Not everyone is a bitter grognard.

Anyways, I'm not buying Diablo on release, maybe never? The level 20 demo I played didn't get me hooked, and my wrists are begging me to stay away from the genre.

 

[Reinhardt]

I wouldn't call him a Blizzard shill so much as a shill in general

That used to be called "enthusiastic". Can't really accuse him of being a shill, if he "shills" competing products.
Hate merchants get to be called critics, why can't hype merchants be called enthusiasts? It might be genuine. Not everyone is a bitter grognard.

Anyways, I'm not buying Diablo on release, maybe never? The level 20 demo I played didn't get me hooked, and my wrists are begging me to stay away from the genre.

if you take bribes you are not "enthusiast"

 

[Jimeh]

"Accessible" is just a euphemism for "braindead", so, yes. Everything you say is correct. Diablo 4 is the next step in modern Blizzard dumbing down their dumb shit even more.

That's Diablo for you. They're probably not even allowed to design it any other way. AAA investment requires a AAA return on investment. Of course there will be modern monetization. Imagine thinking otherwise! Battlepass, item mall; it's all pretty much required. To have security for this sort of thing of course it will require you to be online. Gamers pretty much demand updates and content to be added. Of course it's a service! Nothing here should be surprising at all. We've come a long way since buying horse armour in Oblivion demonstrated clearly players actually want this sort of thing. 2023 is way too late to be complaining about modern business models.

I think it's a good sign that these are the major complaints people have. What's important; good gameplay, good sound, good graphics, etc, are mostly ignored by the haters because there's no real angle there. The closest to a legit complaint is that there's level scaling, but, as I think I said before, that just means you can farm the whole world at endgame instead of relying on a sorc with map hacks to portal you to bhaals room.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo4/23954932/combatting-demons-with-accessibility-in-diablo-iv

Here's a little news bit they put up discussing just how much effort they put into accessibility for the "insert word that aligns with your agenda".

Anyway, reviews are out and look overwhelmingly positive. 37 hours to go!

I'm gonna have a shot at being one of those first 1000 to level100 hardcore.

edit - Oh, and the last thing I want to deal with is the loot-tetris inventory and "fill your whole bag with potions" systems from d1 and 2. Just having better systems for these two err systems is enough reason to upgrade, for me.

 

[whydoibother]

I wouldn't call him a Blizzard shill so much as a shill in general

That used to be called "enthusiastic". Can't really accuse him of being a shill, if he "shills" competing products.
Hate merchants get to be called critics, why can't hype merchants be called enthusiasts? It might be genuine. Not everyone is a bitter grognard.

Anyways, I'm not buying Diablo on release, maybe never? The level 20 demo I played didn't get me hooked, and my wrists are begging me to stay away from the genre.

if you take bribes you are not "enthusiast"

If you take bribes, one of the clauses is not unfavorably comparing the product to competing products.
You are very unwise, and have no clue, and are just shooting from the hip, posting feels, thinking you are profound. Childish. I hope you are in your early teens physically too, and not just mentally.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I wouldn't call him a Blizzard shill so much as a shill in general

That used to be called "enthusiastic". Can't really accuse him of being a shill, if he "shills" competing products.
Hate merchants get to be called critics, why can't hype merchants be called enthusiasts? It might be genuine. Not everyone is a bitter grognard.

Anyways, I'm not buying Diablo on release, maybe never? The level 20 demo I played didn't get me hooked, and my wrists are begging me to stay away from the genre.

if you take bribes you are not "enthusiast"

You don't get to call yourself an enthusiast if you are intentionally misleading people for payment. This is a pretty clear case of being a shill to me. I'm not super savvy when it comes to consumer laws concerning advertisement, but if a person gets paid to advertise a product then 1) I think you have to disclose this and 2) omitting the technical issues that makes it a flat out broken product is definitely against consumer laws as well as that would be false advertising.

Just because you are a youtuber / streamer doesn't mean that laws and taxes don't apply to you. Context changes with the transfer of money. I think it's still fair to call someone an enthusiast if you get paid to advertise a game, but for mercy's sake don't do it like that motherfucker did. People bought Wolcen because they trusted him only to get burned. Make it clear to the viewer that it's paid content and don't lie to them about the state of the product.

 

[Reinhardt]

Just because you are a youtuber / streamer doesn't mean that laws and taxes don't apply to you.

come on, it was just a prank!

 

[ArchAngel]

I wouldn't call him a Blizzard shill so much as a shill in general

That used to be called "enthusiastic". Can't really accuse him of being a shill, if he "shills" competing products.
Hate merchants get to be called critics, why can't hype merchants be called enthusiasts? It might be genuine. Not everyone is a bitter grognard.

Anyways, I'm not buying Diablo on release, maybe never? The level 20 demo I played didn't get me hooked, and my wrists are begging me to stay away from the genre.

if you take bribes you are not "enthusiast"

He is not even a shill, he is a common plant. He got flown to Blizzard HQ to be part of the official promotion videos for D4...

 

[abija]

Are all his videos stamped/begin with: "I took $$$ from blizzard/I work for blizzard PR" ? If not, he's a shill. Why downplay it?

 

[whydoibother]

Are all his videos stamped/begin with: "I took $$$ from blizzard/I work for blizzard PR" ? If not, he's a shill. Why downplay it?

Is he taking $$$ from Blizzard, or is that just feels?
I've seen exactly 1 video of his, and I'm just seeing he praises Blizzard competitors too. These games are full time, if he were a Blizzard shill he wouldn't be praising Path of Exile, its money out of Blizzard's pocket.

 

[abija]

He starts talking about combat saying D4 ads a tactical element on top of D3's fluidity. That's PR lines barely filtered (or Perkel writes his materials). Nobody with his "pedegree" in the diablo clones genre would go there.

"Enemies are designed in a way that requires to prioritize targets on the battlefield". Cmon... that's absolutely basics of this genre. Presenting this as some D4 achievement is 100% PR talk.

Anecdotal how a dev tried first time gamepad then never looked back...

If you don't realize this is pure shill in 5 mins...\


You do realize that someone shitting on PoE is not a very effective Blizzard shill right? You want to convince some of those players not to skip over your thumbnail (as they should).

 

[whydoibother]

He starts talking about combat saying D4 ads a tactical element on top of D3's fluidity. That's PR lines barely filtered (or Perkel writes his materials). Nobody with his "pedegree" in the diablo clones genre would go there.

Your post reads "i disagree with him, therefore he is paid to say what he says". Reconsider your views here. I think the simpler explanation for the discrepancy is that he likes different things. Or that he just played himself out of optimism, and is bargaining with his inner self on how well the game will end up.
"Shill" shouldn't ever be the null hypothesis. Enthusiast is the null hypothesis. Genuine hype. Shill is the alternative hypothesis, which requires proof.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Horse armor DLC is back lads, with a fitting name indeed, we've come full circle!

 

[Jimeh]

Anecdotal how a dev tried first time gamepad then never looked back...

I'm the same. I thought I'd give controller a try, I have one from Dark Souls back when kb+m was unplayable, and it's just like WASD movement on a twin-stick. Plus, the small amount of spells you can have on the bar suddenly makes sense since it's better to keep it simple and not have to start using LT+x and all that. But the secret best feature of controller is having a button replace left-click attack. Imagine you want to replace your basic attack with a buff. Do you want to click to move? Then you have to click on an enemy to cast a buff? Having a movement stick and a unique button for basic attack is vastly superior. The downside is it's harder to aim ranged abilities on controller but it's not too bad. Barbarian is especially comfy on controller.

Oh, and inventory, GUI shit is much worse on controller so I swap to mouse for that stuff. I guess I use both.

 

[abija]

Have you ever played D3 with controller? We got a cute story about a feature that's taken from their 10+ year old game.

 

[Bloodlust]

Horse armor DLC is back lads, with a fitting name indeed, we've come full circle!

Let those that don't value money spend it on crap. It's their choice. I am more worried about the "Add-ons" tab in the shop and if that includes more than the battle pass, such as extra character slots, extra inventory space etc. Blizzard has stated on multiple occasions no to those things, but they have a habit of lying and misleading lately.

Apparently shop was disabled in the streamer/reviewer build and no real images of the shop exist.

They said that battle pass will cost 1000 platinum or 10 $ so that stupid armor is 16$.

 

[HeyCheckOutHowHardICanPee]

In case someone had any doubt it wouldn't be as retard as D3:



Which also means it took this guy, without prior knowledge, less than 9 days to level up to 100, gear up and clear the highest difficulty of the game.

Meanwhile "reviewers" praise the amazing amount of content...

Christ, at least Diablo 3 had the decency to shorten down the numbers to a maximum of 4 digits with a letter identifier for thousands/millions/billions instead of writing out the whole damned PI on your screen for every mob you hit.

 

[Artyoan]

I could have sworn they said they were not allowing for that by pumping up enemy armor values to keep damage numbers low.

Doesn’t matter. At $70 + battle pass this is a wait for a deep sale game for me. My prediction is that players will tear into this game regarding high level balance across specs and classes. You aren’t going to play how you want, in the end.

 

[Reinhardt]

In case someone had any doubt it wouldn't be as retard as D3:



Which also means it took this guy, without prior knowledge, less than 9 days to level up to 100, gear up and clear the highest difficulty of the game.

Meanwhile "reviewers" praise the amazing amount of content...

Christ, at least Diablo 3 had the decency to shorten down the numbers to a maximum of 4 digits with a letter identifier for thousands/millions/billions instead of writing out the whole damned PI on your screen for every mob you hit.

need more text. CRITICAL HIT! AMAZING! C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

 

[mediocrepoet]

About what you'd expect, but he expands on the stuff he was mentioning yesterday.

e.g. Too easy, not enough bosses, money grubbing nu-Blizz picks your pocket, etc.

 

[Zeriel]

The irony is that D4 is markedly more decline than D3, if you look at the mechanics.

Can you be more specific? Other than less skills available, at least on paper D4 seems to improve on all mechanics vs D3.

I haven't researched it as much as I could have, but of things I have seen that turned me off:

MMO-lite gameplay (this is present almost everywhere, but main ones are the shared world, "world bossses" whose stats are completely out of par with the players and not meant to be tackled by a single person, etc)

Dumbed down stats, "single offense stat, make big number get bigger" design. This is very mobile-esque, and it's funny to look back at D3 and see people calling that dumbed down, when it was more complicated than here.

The rune system/build specs are largely gone. Talent trees are fun and all, but if you are destroying a large amount of build customization to get there... well...

They bragged about putting game-defining abilities on legendaries. This honestly isn't good design. It sounds so at first if you think they are adding those game-changing abilities on TOP of the baseline game experience, but what they seem to have done instead is move core perks that were part of the rune system onto legendaries, so you aren't even properly playing your class until you get said legendaries. This is huge decline.

 

[Zlaja]

Enthusiast is the null hypothesis

No, the null hypothesis is that the person in question is an idiot. As is the case with this guy since he, according to his own words, gave D3 85/100 and Torchlight 2 95/100.

Speaking of the game, I have the late game Druid footage here:

Spoiler

 

[ind33d]

Enthusiast is the null hypothesis

No, the null hypothesis is that the person in question is an idiot. As is the case with this guy since he, according to his own words, gave D3 85/100 and Torchlight 2 95/100.

Speaking of the game, I have the late game Druid footage here:

Spoiler

I was there for the D3 and Torchlight fiasco. Launch D3 was worse than Torchlight 2 because of the RMAH and nonsensical difficulty. Before Reaper of Souls added rifts and crafting, Diablo 3 was trash. Reaper is arguably in the top 3 ARPGs ever made


That dev is right about controllers, though. D2 LOD is a carpal tunnel simulator. I am absolutely certain it would be more comfortable with a Steam Controller or something

 

[Late Bloomer]

How to get your very own KFC / Diablo IV crossover rewards by what appears to be a KFC enthusiast. And remember folks,

KFC Welcomes All

 

[mediocrepoet]

How to get your very own KFC / Diablo IV crossover rewards by what appears to be a KFC enthusiast. And remember folks,

KFC Welcomes All

Doritos really dropped the ball on this one. We're going to have to get a KFC bucket rating if this keeps up.

 

[ind33d]

How to get your very own KFC / Diablo IV crossover rewards by what appears to be a KFC enthusiast. And remember folks,

KFC Welcomes All

Doritos really dropped the ball on this one. We're going to have to get a KFC bucket rating if this keeps up.

Overwatch 2 should do a cross-promotion with NAMBLA