Diablo IV

[Baron Dupek]

also reminds me of dis

 

[Cyberarmy]

D4 s current situtation and OW2 hilarious Steam release are the last nails on Blizzorts coffin. Wonder if there will be any major changes to staff after M$ taking over.

 

[abija]

There were major changes recently for sure. Look at how many people from D4 team worked on OW2 last year.

I don't get it what you mean by D4 situation. I'm sure management is perfectly happy and will try to replicate with the first expansion.

 

[Morgoth]

Fuck Blizzard.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Two Blizzard dungeon designer developers playing a dungeon. Please watch to understand why the game turned out the way it did.



Also, that ratio with the downvotes.

This video seems like a setup to try and deflect criticism from the actual game. You send those two out there, people on the Internet are going to make fun of them, and Blizzard will just hope it can be spun into some bullshit toxic gamer narrative.

 

[ArchAngel]

Look at you cockroaches skittering out from under the furniture now that SDG isn't here to defend his lady's honor.

Lady? You mean his Tranny's honor?!

 

[0wca]

also reminds me of dis

Holy shit, this is a series I never knew I needed!

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

finally finished the story. I must say it's very good compared to D3. I really wish there was an option to choose in the end I wanted to go with Lilith instead . This is the best looking isometric game to date (except for Arcanum2 mockup), the voice acting is lackluster if not for the main characters. But overall I did enoy it.
Don't really care about the endgame since I will only play it rarely. There seem to be a lot more to do, didn't even tried the season 1 , but then again I'm only interested in more lore.

 

[Zlaja]

I really wish there was an option to choose in the end I wanted to go with Lilith instead

You should've focused more on her actions rather than her words.

but then again I'm only interested in more lore

If you care about the lore than I would advise you to explore the world proper, because there's a decent amount of sidequests and people to talk to all over the map that expand on the lore. One of the better things about the game, but this genre's fans don't really care much about that, and all the focus (negative such) has shifted towards the game's lackluster endgame experience.

 

[lycanwarrior]

 

[lycanwarrior]

The old Blizzard we all knew and loved is just a rotting carcass at this point.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

Season 2 to start on October 17th. Season of Blood
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo4/23989476/season-of-blood-is-dripping-into-sanctuary

Spoiler

Look, there's no need to fix broken resistances, or some more QoL fixes that are sorely needed right now. Don't worry it's going to be a prime feature of our seasonal content two months away, so be sure to check back in S2 cause it'll be fixed! Until the next broken bug that shows up in S2... don't worry, wait 3 months as that fix will be advertised as a feature for S3.

 

[ADL]

I'm not saying Blizzard should double-down on bad ideas but between the renown system and the way they've completely trivialized the open world they spent the majority of their resources developing, it seems to be a trend. Everything is up in the air and nothing is sacred.

What's the point in playing a game without a cohesive vision?

 

[Hobknobling]

I'm not saying Blizzard should double-down on bad ideas but between the renown system and the way they've completely trivialized the open world they spent the majority of their resources developing, it seems to be a trend. Everything is up in the air and nothing is sacred.

What's the point in playing a game without a cohesive vision?

It's not a game, it's a live service. Stop using terms that refer to any sort of artistic endeavor.

 

[Zlaja]

Having 9 potions and 10 extra skill points from the get go is just shit and makes the early game too trivial. And then 20 paragon points to spend as soon as you hit Lv.50 is also retarded. All those fucking mongrels and their constant whining about the renown are to blame.

Should just scrap the renown system now and give you all those points and potions as rewards for simply reaching a certain level. Otherwise, they're gonna have to rebalance the whole damn game.

 

[abija]

I noticed something in BG3 patch notes: "In the meantime, did you know that collectively you’ve played over 200,000,000 hours of Baldur's Gate 3 since launch?"

I found it interesting for comparison because recently D4's producer said 1.3 billion hours for D4. Sure it's a longer period but D4 campaign is less than 20h. It should at least give some context to all the "game is dead/failure" youtube analysts clickbaiters.

 

[Ismaul]

I found it interesting for comparison because recently D4's producer said 1.3 billion hours for D4. Sure it's a longer period but D4 campaign is less than 20h.

D4 is a grinding game, people play those types for wayyy longer. Contrarily to campaign-centric RPGs, that end when the campaign ends, aRPGs typically are just starting when you finish the campaign.

 

[abija]

I'd love to see some numbers but my bet is people who do that, actual fans of the genre are a very small number compared to D4's (D2, D3 too) sales.

 

[Hobknobling]

Activision-Blizzard has a long history of cooking the books. World of Warcraft subscription numbers were inflated by different promotions and also some creative accounting in East Asia.

For Diablo 4 I know that they gave codes away with graphics cards and you bet all the people sitting in a queue were counted as actively playing the game the whole time.

 

[Ismaul]

I'd love to see some numbers but my bet is people who do that, actual fans of the genre are a very small number compared to D4's (D2, D3 too) sales.

I don't know man, if you look at Path of Exile, you have at least 150K peak players the months a season is released, and that's only on Steam. Those aren't casuals, casuals get filtered fast in PoE.

So you can imagine D4, being more mainstream and having the Blizzard name and PR, can easily attract 200K actual aRPG fans, if not more. Those are people for whom putting 100 hours in an aRPG is nothing.

Now I do think the game looks too shit to keep these people playing long term (it looks too shit for me to even try it lol). The game is just too shallow to sustain interest. They're trying to retain fans now by announcing long-demanded fixes for season 2 that should've been done before launch, and people are strung along with such hopium, but if Blizzard doesn't deliver, especially if season 3 is just as barebones as the two others, then I think they'll have lost a lot of those players for good.

 

[spectre]

Not sure where's the recent trend to wank to concurrent player counts coming from. It's literally "billions of flies can't be wrong about shit" once again.
Sure, it gets the marketing departments all hard, but are these people to look up to?

Looking it up, Shadow Gambit peaked at 3,184 and I had more fun with that thing than many other recent releases.

That said, I do believe D4 is held to some impossible standard. Was it supposed to compete with the 10-year content buildup of PoE? In what world.
As far as I'm concerned, it was something different to play exactly because I cannot stomach looking at PoE anymore and I wasn't really looking for
a game I'd be married to for the next 10 years of my life.
Arguably, all it did was push the boundaries with presentation, and in a sense it was successful. All the shitty ersatz games in the genre were put in its place
and PoE2 now has to work really hard to compete when it's released.
That said, Season 1 was a letdown for me and I am putting it on hiatus until Blizzard gets its shit together. I they don't, I'm moving on with no hard feelings.

 

[Ismaul]

Not sure where's the recent trend to wank to concurrent player counts coming from. It's literally "billions of flies can't be wrong about shit" once again.

Investors, man. This is all about earnings.

And since the number of concurrent players puts a quantifiable value on the game and dev team, it is a way for devs/publishers to compare their dick sizes. And fanboys all join in the comparison and sucking of said dicks.

 

[spectre]

Yeah... thankfully, I have more sense than to buy Blizzard stock (also, not having that much money to toss around helps).
As far as I am concerned, the only way a hack and slash can be consider an investment is the amount of money spent vs. the number of time wasted clicking away.
So far, Diablo 4 wasn't the best deal in this regard, but I've done worse.

 

[Zlaja]

That said, I do believe D4 is held to some impossible standard. Was it supposed to compete with the 10-year content buildup of PoE? In what world

Good point. I think many people are just desperate to hate the game, because it's made by nu-Blizzard. And I can totally understand that hate, but D4 isn't really a totally soulless cash grab, as some people claim.

There's a good foundation here and the action feels good, but the game only really holds up proper for one playthrough. The game is let down by there not being enough cool shit to hunt for during end-game. In D2 you would spend countless hours grinding after beating hell mode, because there were a lot of powerful unique gear in the game that was hard to get. In D4, the number of unique gear to hunt for is tiny in comparacy. This can be fixed, but people's patience is limited.

Also, while the setting in D4 is well made and the world was fun to explore the first time around, I still think it was a mistake to go open world for this type of game. Simply because this type of game needs to be easily replayable, and the open world approach doesn't work well for that.

 

[spectre]

There's a good foundation here and the action feels good, but the game only really holds up proper for one playthrough. The game is let down by there not being enough cool shit to hunt for during end-game. In D2 you would spend countless hours grinding after beating hell mode, because there were a lot of powerful unique gear in the game that was hard to get. In D4, the number of unique gear to hunt for is tiny in comparacy. This can be fixed, but people's patience is limited.

Yep, itemization is easily the worst part (but not necessarily a deal-breaker), but they really shat the bed with uniques, not being able to trade them (though from what I hear they managed to fix this),
and worst offence of all, making some of this shit mathematically impossible obtain (looking at you Shako and Grandfather). As you say, it's fixable, remains to be seen if there's a will to do it.

Also, while the setting in D4 is well made and the world was fun to explore the first time around, I still think it was a mistake to go open world for this type of game. Simply because this type of game needs to be easily replayable, and the open world approach doesn't work well for that.

IMO, easily replayable only works for games that are short and snappy, I'm thinking something like Hades.
Diablo 2 used to be like this, but with LoD it has grown too much. A lot of the new areas are just obvious filler.

With D4, the problem is the real game only really starts at WT3, until you get there, it's grind you want to get past asap.

I think open world actually turned out okay, cause you can always focus on two different regions in a given playthrough and the experience is much more varied.
The problem is, the campaign and the quests are only really good for one or two goes. I literally opened up Season 1, saw all the quests reset and just closed the game.
That's it. I'm not doing this shit again. Maybe next season.
When it comes to more linear games... well let me just say that I recoil at the very thought of doing one more Trial of Ascension or having another go at the Kurast Jungles.
What this genre desperately needs IMO is procedural generation that actually shits out decent content.

Good point. I think many people are just desperate to hate the game, because it's made by nu-Blizzard. And I can totally understand that hate, but D4 isn't really a totally soulless cash grab, as some people claim.

I was there when D3 dropped, so yeah, I understand this. Felt literally cheated out of my money with nowhere to appeal.
This time my expectations were appropriately low, but it also shows a lot of lessons learned.

Also, a good bunch of this is reeeeee that the game is in general RPG. Not where I've put it myself, but not the first thing that doesn't belong here.