I'm having a harder and harder time playing this lol. I keep telling myself "ight I'm starting this beast up and doing some grinding" and I log in, and then I just sit at the character screen for hours while I browse codex. Maybe I should go back to that Aliens game.
Did I not fucking call it? Like clockwork. Once people get to endgame they realize there is no game. It's just a hollow edifice put out to make a quarterly profit.
All ARPGs and MMOs are like that.
News at 11.
Nah, they really aren't. I'm really tired of this apologism. Diablo 4 is massively lacking by this measure; Diablo 3 was much better on release, to say nothing of games like Path of Exile. Yeah, sure, it's a new game, it will get better over time, but that really shouldn't be an excuse for having a basic end-game that lasts longer than 30-50 hours when you're in the realm of selling through 600m in profits in the first week. That's the big leagues. It's like saying it's fine for Ford to release a car where the brakes don't work because the next edition of the car will have them. You're getting graded on the competition, not what your mother thinks about you.
Additionally, from a financial perspective this is also playing with fire. It's
much easier to maintain interest in a game (and hence financial viability when we are talking a "live service game") from the get-go than to try and claw it back over time once people have already decided your game has a reputation as an empty shell. Many publishers just give up after a few months if the initial backlash is too severe, even if the game itself is a technical, spreadsheet-level success. Just look at Anthem. All that talk of we are in it for the long haul, we'll fix it, then they cut line and parachuted out at the exec level once it became clear it wasn't going to be a quick turn around. The amount of effort to make a flawed game good enough to please the audience post-launch is not 1.5x more than making it good originally, it's more like 5-10x, because you are fighting against the decisions and perception people have already committed to.