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.
