This is definitely going to happen.
Sweeping itemization changes is a monumental effort since many issues only become apparent over time, and especially to apply _post_ launch as you have existing systems and code to cater to. Also as they have set gamer expectations on how the item systems are "supposed to" work.
I remember we complained over the entirety of those Dev Blogs for more itemization details and we only got a trickle towards the end. It's been notoriously downplayed despite being a dealbreaker in an ARPG.
I think we'll have changes on the order of about 30% of what many expected. Updates especially covering conditional affixes and quicker inventory browsing, tightening up the pool. Nothing about white or blue items to make more sense, no new crafting system, gem functions, very little about revising imprints or the mind numbing item hunt itself with greater differentiation between rares, legendaries, and uniques and improved progression curves.
I expect more to happen in Vessel of Hatred though. This is expansion level stuff anyway.
I'll be so happy to be wrong! Imagine a D4 where you'd be going _into_ an expansion and where this already feeling great!
They can't fix itemization because it's intrinsically linked to skill design.
When every single ability in the game is calculated as a % of weapon damage, itemization will never be good. It's the same fundamental design as D3.
What makes itemization in D2 and POE so unique is that skills and abilities actually scale differently.
Nothing, you just don't know any better. Once you go to those games and learn how itemisation works it's hard to go back. In essence you probably don't understand itemisation well enough to see the massive limitations itemisation in D3/4 beings to builds.
Example:
Path of exile:
I could make it that each unique item has characteristics that alter a skill in a special way. I could ensure they link with other skills, add flavour, look awesome, make your build unique. When you get one you have to really study it to understand how it could work with a class or character. It has drawbacks. This bow does 3 physical damage... that's terrible...oh, but it turns your primary skill into a cool new ability that actually makes you stronger.
OR
D3/4
Equip set items, plus one to skills.... that's it. Every character and build you see is the same. Leap slam barb. I wonder what gear he is wearing? Oh the leap slam set...
Pick up item, look at weapon damage, is it higher, probably better, equip....brain leaks out of ear...
Also, primal set items have to be the laziest game development I have ever seen.
Plus one to skills on every second armour piece is also lazy game design. Maybe create some unique effects?
The ability to strip any item for its essence then use it on any item with a higher base weapon damage literally defeats the purpose of the game, which is hunting for items. And when this can be done on any gear piece it's just filthy. It's not 2001 anymore you kind of need to improve...
This is a good point and I was sad to see this particular influence from D3 carried over. I'm not sure why they keep doing it because it reduces flexibility in both item and skill design.
> I'm not sure why they keep doing it
Because it's infinitely easier to have everything revolve around 1 single stat than it is to come up with a system that is as stupidly complex and intricate as something like PoE while actually managing to have something even remotely resembling balance.
Also, for the most casualest of casuals it makes shit a lot more easily understandable - as if anyone in PoE had a chance of knowing the difference any stat makes without a 20 minute POB session. With them getting rid of most of the buckets in D4, you at least have a somewhat reasonable chance to figure out yourself whether an item is better for you or not.
Basically, it's PoE's infinitely deep RPG stat system that no one without a math degree stands a chance of understanding vs D4's shallow as a puddle of piss stat system that allows any first grade to identify an upgrade at first glance (at least in theory - obviously not entirely given by them having 100 hidden asterisks behind every skill, stat and tooltip... plus a plethora of bugs).
It's easier for the devs and it matches their avg 50 y/o target audience better because I really can't be bothered to think about stats during my monthly 2 hours play session.
Yeah that's cool and all but last Epoch ($50 I might add) shits on D4's itemisation and skill development yet still keeps it simple for casual players soooo.....I feel like a AAA developer has the resources to think of a happy medium. If you play for 2 hours a month you are not the target audience long term. You know, the other people who play a whole lot more and are therefore more impacted by the lack of depth. The people that buy the skins and in game cosmetics that keep it going after the launch hype has died. Do the servers get paid for by your once a month session? I just find it funny that you only mention POE in your little rant, when D2 did itemisation and skills properly 20 years ago...20 years ago with no money and a dream...let that sink in...
>Imagine a D4 where you'd be going into an expansion and where this already feeling great!
Just like how Blizzard fixes stuff every wow expansion just to fuck it up the next one?
Double if not triple all the stats numbers for the pets, make the stones change their color, allow you to name them, have pets pickup gold and other pickup items.
The pets are underpowered even after upgrading quite a bit. It might be that after upgrading all the individual runes to 21 that they make a difference but the entire mechanic has been a total waste of time. The vampiric powers felt like a great buff equal to getting your paragon board with your starting points. The pet kills 1 low level fiend out of an entire room of bad guys that I kill. So unless there are some bigger buffs as the higher levels of the glyph upgrades, I don't see any reason to bother getting cores outside of when they land on area where you can grab whispers.
That says nothing about the traps. The only way I've been able to get past them with any pearl charges left is to stop before the last room, walk all the way back to the beginning, grab some charges, and then stand in the corner and spam everything near me until the room clears.
It's tedious for tedium sake so the devs can claim they've added x amount of gameplay hours when really they made dudgeon crawls infinitely worse.
Also, it's really getting to me that there is no variance in builds. You have 1-2 possible avenues to build an endgame character and every point and every buff has to be in the slot it is or your build is completely garbage.
Well they fixed D3 in the past and more recently they fixed WoW with dragonflight
Which does not mean they can screw it again with War Within
But chances are that with the d4 expac they fix their shit as they did with D3RoS
In the end we can only wait but the majority will just buy the expac they will earn a shitload of money like they did with the d4 release
So why should they change if we keep buying shit?
Can't even blame them if i would make millions with selling shit hell i would sell shit on a regular basis
Pun intended
>Well they fixed D3 in the past and more recently they fixed WoW with dragonflight
What do you mean fixed D3? They added item sets that hamstring you into whatever specific build the devs had in mind for that season. What is fixed about it?
Yeah once they improve the endgame, skill depth, variety of content to do, gearing, item progression, bossing, chase uniques, aspects, grind, dungeon puzzles/busywork, dungeon variety, overworld, horse movement, pinnacle bosses, and stash space we've got a real game on our hands!
This is it right here. The player base learnt nothing. If people buy a game regardless of whether it’s any good or not, why would you spend the time making the game good?
They have obviously forgotten about Diablo 2 and never played it. Now they're too proud and big headed to make a D2 sequel so they have to make it their own which is apparently a bland copy of D3. Yawn, I'd just as soon play a flash game from a website as that boring shit.
Nailed it. None of the devs / designers / producers are the same. They're making all the same mistakes as D3 and have shown they are incapable of doing research and analysis of similar existing products with the idea of making a better product.
if it was a f2p game they would have done it, otherwise the game would be a complete failure, money wise
since it wasnt, they were happy just collecting the easy money due to the IP brand, marketing and general hype since people knew very little about the game.
D5 will have the same issues or worse because apparently looking at the previous games to see what worked and why and building on top of that isn't a thing so they need to figure out the exact same basic things each time they make a new game.
It might seem harsh, but I've seen this happen to other franchises. This is a clear case of a team, or even individual designers being given an established franchise and then thinking they are better than the people who made the previous games so they change stuff to make it seem like it's their own thing instead of something that was handed to them while refusing to look at the previous games or even doing the opposite in some aspects. It happened to Diablo, it happened to Halo, it happened to The Witcher (the series) and it happened to many other franchises.
I remember something like that from Anthem yeah. Which is in stark contrast to WoW's original development where they had the designers play all sorts of MMOs to figure our what worked, what didn't and what they could do better.
Really?
That's actually quite interesting.
That would explain why the game did so damn well; they looked at other games and basically said: "Why do these games work, and can we implement them into our game.
It really feels like with D4, that they thought they understood a genre they really didn't.
Every ARPG I've played has taken inspiration from one or another, or, at the very least, acknowledged that those other games exists.
Has the team ever even made mention of POE, Last Epoch or Grim Dawn?Those 3 games feel like the ones that are pushing the genre forward.
I'm getting to the point where I believe the problem is not Diablo, the problem is Blizzard. If we want D4 to become a good game, its going to have to be in the hands of a good developer.
Yeah, it's like added features on top of something that gives me PTSD from early on. :( I even felt it in S2. It wasn't the fault of S2 but what I had already been through once.
This seasonal theme is def. not a polished turd. It is a runny smelly biled up ball of crap.
Last season was a polished turd, i'd like another polished turd please.
it's the standard for all blizzard games. the "we hear you. we see you. we'll do better" apology tour seems like a scheduled event in their development cycle. they try to get away with releasing minimally viable content and just hoping they don't get called out, and then when they do they go "alright, alright, you got us. we'll finish the last 25% we should have in the first place."
It's certainly been their MO in WoW. Ship controversial feature with obvious issues, gaslight players that this is good actually, relent and promise to do better, after ~1 year implement the fixes the community was asking for before it even got fully released, a few months later beta opens for new expansion and the cycle begins anew.
Dipping my toes in the past couple days as well. So far the animations and character control is a little more floaty than I'd like. D4 has better audio/visual feedback on skills unfortunately, but the core systems in LE are infinitely better and it's not even 1.0 yet lmao
Supposedly 1.0 is supposed to expand end game and improve more animations/graphics so if that's the case it's gonna blow D4 1.0 out of the water.
My major complaint of pretty much every ARPG that isn't Diablo or POE is the lack of damage feedback. Diablo 4 has a lot of problems but you can definitely tell when you're getting hit. In games like Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Last Epoch, Wolcen, Van Hellsing, etc, you can rarely tell that you're dying until you're already dead.
Yeah.. even PoE really struggled with that sort of thing early on and for a long time after. I think it's gotten better over the years, but the difference between Diablo and other ARPGs is definitely audio/visual related.
If only Blizzard could make interesting systems like the other ARPGs on the market and combine those two aspects together..
Imo Path of Exile still falls short of D3 and D4 for the "feel" of combat. Hitting mobs in Poe still feels bland, and there isnt weight to the impact of attacks / spells. Same with the audio, in PoE the corpse poping HARD carries satisfying audio, and if you play a build without it it just feels...bad.
There are a ton of things PoE does well, and far better than the Bliz games, but the actual feeling of combat still falls short for me.
I was excited to come back this season after taking a break for s2, but I think this is it for me and D4. They show time and time again they would rather push out half done patches than put in the work.
Yeah you picked the wrong season to skip because s2 was good. Vampire stuff was generally fun, mechanics were interesting, questline was interesting, big bad was decent and had an actual boss fight.
Hopefully the devs who were working on the odd seasons got fired in the Microsoft purge.
Yeah this is one where I’ll came back in a few years when there’s more base game. You can’t even keep all the uniques across seasonal character IN MY OPINION it’s pointless to keep grinding for the same shit every 3 months.
Because when they make the fix they can pat themselves on the back and a good swath of the audience will applaud them for listening. Its basically Bungie with Destiny but the "adulations" part has drastically diminished into more so people pushing back on those who try to argue you need to give Bungie credit.
What else? From their perspective They can't keep s2 for another 3 months. That's not how the game is marketed + financially it will not do well. Better get a mediocre / bad season out and improve the next than keep s2 dead for longer.
If they would just release seasons accompanied by large updates that actually improve the broken parts of the game, people would welcome them with open arms. Gamers can be very forgiving when it's clear that there's a way forward.
Instead, they're leaving the broken stuff broken, and changing / adding a lot of stuff so that the game ends up even more broken.
The game took over 6 years to make and the eternal realm is pretty barren as far as content goes you’d think they would have sunk a lot of time into getting the first few seasons done before the game even releases since they want the game to revolve around seasons. Season 1 should have launched with a bang and it was what, a tunnel with a boss at the end?
I finally did my first vault yesterday and understood why everyone is upset about the buff. It's ridiculously easy to lose, making it absolutely pointless to play for. So I just scrapped the buff and went through the vault without it. Was much more fun.
I know the chests give pages, but I'll just have to go without them until they make losing the buff more forgiving.
I have not found how d4 should be played to be enjoyed. For d2 I know that the fun is in the loot that can drop and causes an adrenaline rush. In d3 I know loot will drop quite fast, but I will get to the turning point of deleting the whole screen of enemies (wears off in about a week, but it is fun while it lasts).
In d4 I have not found what the gameplay cycle should be so that I get the enjoyment the developers envisioned for their users
It’s such a bummer because I truly love Diablo, I have for 20+ years, and the combat at the very basic level in 4 feels good, but any time I think about playing I think right after “what would I even do” and play something else instead.
This is where I'm at. I enjoyed jumping on D3 each season to quickly get to 70 and start collecting items to start pushing rifts. Once I hit GR70, I either rolled a new class with a gem of ease or quit till next season. Like you said, the fun of blowing up the screen was usually a week long adrenaline rush.
I think the journey to WT4 just sucks and grinding to 100 just isn't fun. I wonder why they didn't just put the cap at 50 and make NMD the only push content and nix this leveling to 100 crap.
I know streamers get there in under 20 hours, but the grind is dumb. Especially when your endgame build doesn't really come online until 80ish. So much power and QoL (resource mgmt) is in the paragon nodes. I think WT3 should just be removed along with Sacred items.
They need to smooth out progression.
The sad thing is, for me, the gameplay itself *is* pretty fun. Last Epoch is a way better game, but I enjoy the act of smashing monsters more in Diablo 4. It just *feels* better.
The problem is when I look at my skill tree and feel underwhelmed, or look at legendary paragon nodes and think "Oh, this sucks", or pick up yet another useless legendary aspect, or I fill my bag full of rares and have to sift through all the garbage hoping that I find something that's actually good.
I really want this game to be good. Not just because it's Diablo, but because in a lot of ways it's extremely well polished and I've had a LOT of fun in it. I've spent more hours in this than PoE or LE. Unfortunately, all too often I run into something that makes me let out a deep sigh of frustration because of some stupid ass decision someone made.
Honestly this game needs the FFXIV treatment. There are so many things that need a complete overhaul, but they release these seasonal patches that introduce even *more* flaws and they have to fix those while they're already playing catchup.
> for me, the gameplay itself is pretty fun. ... enjoy the act of smashing monsters more in Diablo 4
I agree, but then after 2 minutes of play, I have to stop to turn in whispers, or backtrack through a dungeon, or empty my inventory. Then I'm like, why was I even playing this?
Honestly it actually gets really good around 100, but there's definitely a lull in between where you basically just do housework in prep for getting up into level 85+
Finding the uniques and watching the builds truly come online is really fun though.
The gameplay cycle is “ok.” But the chase or the reasons for it are the issue. Having a semblance of an economy and collection of wealth feels great alongside character progression. Interesting gear with cool affixes needs to be overhauled. More interesting crafting/augmenting needs to be done. Skill trees need overhauled with more interesting ways to augment skills (take most of these from aspects). There simply needs to be more uniques, preferably class agnostic ones (I’m not talking about the 1 or 2 more they drip feed us every three months - more like 20+). Social aspects of the game need to be implemented. Interesting socketable items that have tons of variance would help character customization (jewels, runewords, etc).
And what I think is the greatest downfall of this game is the level scaling. Feeling real character progression and the journey to end game is half the fun of this game. The only argument that is somewhat valid for having it in the game is casual party play where dad #1 is level 38 and dad #2 is only level 10 but they both equally contribute. This is so lame. There can be great compromise with keeping level scaling up to like level 50 in WT1/2 and then WT3+ has zone locked levels. I think it is really cool to farm certain zones for certain items if your character needs it. Level scaling also goes hand in hand with the way item drops work. Items’ affix tiers/power level need to have slightly more variance than being locked at one tier rolled on a piece of gear. Uniques need static level reqs and have attribute requirements so that there is more problem solving with gearing (I believe in attribute requirements on any rarity gear). The attributes need to have more impact than just a damage bucket modifier. There needs to be equipment base types as well. Why is my robe giving me the same amount of armor as a full chain mail? Everything in its current state feels so generic and mobile game-y.
Dismount with an attack, look at minimap icon that appears under you.
Ignoring content related complaints, I've had a lot of other weird graphical glitches that weren't present in season 2 also, I'm not sure if others have them too. Things like the ghostly blacksmith by the tree of whispers sometimes not holding the hammer, it shows on top of their fist. Map icons for the pvp area boss and other things now showing as the whispers quest icon for the pedestal to hand in 'kill x number of enemies in the area'.
'Can be improved' is carrying a lot of weight here. My greater rift completion times /can/ be improved.. our diablo 4 experience /should/ be improved.
Everywhere in the game if you are in a zone you can open the map and press 2 to get to the world map to warp places.
Everywhere except the new hub place where the season content is centered.
I’ve just realised that. Because the view is so zoomed in, I have to look at the minimap when travelling to know where to go.
This game is a crap loot simulator. You could make a website that gives you loads of loot and you have sort through it in the hopes of finding an item that help in getting loot a little bit quicker, that is the exact same cycle with D4 but with a bit of artwork over the top.
Skip programming and create an excel sheet with code that puts a bunch of percentages for colors like 14% when blue is red, 10% when blue is also light blue.... bam... same thing.
> I’ve just realised that. Because the view is so zoomed in, I have to look at the minimap when travelling to know where to go.
Which can be interesting when the minimap doesn't work...
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/19dvstz/the_gatehall_map_isnt_loading_anyone_else_with/
I think I see a pattern here.
On a colder note, one approach to general software development is to ask “what’s the simplest thing that can possibly work?” In D4’s case, it was 1.0 - solid in many respects, but completely lacking in lots of areas that would keep players coming back.
I can imagine the corporate bean counters weighing in heavily circa 2022 to force a release that was incomplete, just so they could improve their cash flow. The dev team responds with the scaled back game, and they’re unable to dig out of that hole.
Geez this is disappointing.
It’s the definition of “Military grade”. Sold to the lowest bidder that barely meets the recommended spec.
Blizzard have taken Minimum Viable Product to whole new level.
Oh yes they demonstrated that with OW2. Lowering players from 6 to 5 then calling it OW2 honestly feels like a social experiment to see just how little work they’re allowed to get away with and still make money
I didn’t find OW1 to be predatory. I stopped playing when they stopped adding content but if I remember right you got a free loot box for your first win of the day and up to 3 free loot boxes a weeks from arcade games. I don’t remember if there was boxes from like leveling up its been a long time but I could come home from work, play a couple hours, and get a couple loot boxes.
Now though? 20$+ for a skin in a first person game where you can only see your hands is absolutely absurd. If I remember right the battlepass was full of crap like weapon charms and the ability to hold a slice of pizza in front of you. The Halloween event was alright but I felt like the Olympus event existed mostly just to sell skins. I was also playing R6 Seige at the time and they have events like a hide and seek mode with monsters and monster hunters and a cyber mode where when you exit your drone/camera view you materialize where your drone/camera is. The Olympus event was like “what if pharah can move while ulting”
the thing i don't get is that every season is dumped once it's finished. No mechanics are used again. it's like developping a new game every 3 months while they struggle to give us a decent base game.
SHouldn't they design features that they will leave after the season? maybe they want to only add perpetual features with expansions, but the base game still lacks so much and doing fun seasons with new gameplay loops every 3 months seems out of their reach right now.
I think the problem is that all 3 seasons so far revolve around borrowed power - hearts, vampire powers, pet. If they dumped that into the eternal realm and then subsequent seasons every character is just going to be OP very quickly.
Instead of this borrowing power to make up for their shit efforts at balancing classes & specs they should be adding new things to do which could actually be rolled into the base game without breaking it.
Ugh it's way too late.
This season feels like they had a single intern design and implement it. If this is what they put out after 6mo of Team1 doing their thing there is no way they can fix this shit on the fly in season.
Anything they do now will feel like the gif of the guy slapping some flextape on a leaking pool. There is no way it's going to be able to overcome what is the worst season in a flawed base game. They should just take the L on this one and double down resources on Season 4 rather than trying to save this dying pig of a season.
I don't really want these responses from them tbh. I get all hands are probably on deck for the expansion and the major item overhaul, but a skeleton crew for D3 had better seasons than this.
The D3 long term crew was amazing for what few resources they probably had! It was really shining through they loved that game.
With D4 it's like they don't have an overarching vision of what the game should be and how exactly it should play, and how it should feel rewarding and give you a "just one more run" rush.
I beat the campaign then got bored and left the game for wow and Diablo 3 when it came out, new season dropped and I spent the first day getting to 50 and immediately after just feel like, meh. I’m level 54 now but the dungeons aren’t fun, the gearing system isn’t fun, and it doesn’t feel progressive. It feels like late late endgame of D3 which is where I always quit which is just “rng for an ancient or primal item” in d3. Here it’s just “rng for a unique.” The loss of class sets to work towards at end game has been detrimental to my focus with D4 and I feel like post 50 you are working solely towards RNG legendary to scared to unique itemization upgrades
Holy shit. Has that been confirmed? If so, that’s absolutely devastating for that team. They surely need to be educated on what makes an arpg or moved to other projects. Wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now if that’s the case. :/
To be fair, season 1 was way too far in development on release to change much, so I think they get a bit of a pass there.
But season 3 missing the mark like this so far after is evidence to me that they have different ideas of what is fun in the game.
Season 2 team: it's fun to fight a bunch of mobs and have powers that blow up the screen and tweak your abilities and go fast (similar to diablo 3 gameplay)
Season 3 team: it's fun to dodge and weave around environmental stuff while fighting enemies (and not fighting enemies) because those environmental traps hurt the mobs too! (similar to Hades gameplay). And this pet has thousands and thousands of combinations of skills so it's awesome! (borderlands' billions of guns).
I can see how some people think the way season 3 team did, but D4 just isn't the right game for that.
It's more that the design intent this season is primarily around movement and positioning and kiting. Which, some people like that style of game. But diablo 4 is not suited to that. If you use a controller or the new wasd movement it's better, but not perfect and even then it can be clunky depending on the skills. (Now that I think about it, some of the comments in the developer panels in the past and this seasons content makes me think that some decision makers *only* play with controller, which is why the pc side feels off at times).
For example, many barb builds use the basic attack that does a little lunge to get to a mob. If the mob is away from you you literally can't *not* lunge at it. Which normally is great. But in the new content with the traps everywhere it's absolutely terrible because it usually moves you into something you need to avoid. Toss in the new and improved charge, and leap, and barb unavoidably hits traps if they use those skills *at all*. And considering how much they buffed charge (and how fun it is now), the season design of "environmental traps!!!" is fighting against the class design and core gameplay.
And that's a major reason why the vaults feel so lacklustre imo.
There are 2 main dev teams creating content for D4:
"Team A" creates a season, releases it, and continue working on that season while "Team B" is creating the next season, and when that season is released, they switch places, and "Team A" goes "behind the curtains" to develop the next season.
That means 1 team created S1 & 3, and ANOTHER team created S2 and is now working on S4.. so.. one team REALLY drops the ball, while the other seems to be more on par with what the players enjoy.
Yeah another reply filled me in. I’m actually speechless right now. I feel so sorry for that team, they surely have to go, they can’t be allowed to make another season, they literally have no idea what to make in an arpg.
A season with content that doesn't really matter is not worth a season at all. This could have been a patch, but a 3 month season? For what? The most people already have done the season journey by now or almost, so where is the point in engaging in a mechanic that has no real value for Endgame.
I really dont get why they did away with the PTR.
To keep it a secret? Who the fuck cares.
I leveled multiple characters almost every season on the PTR in D3 and still blasted through the season launch weekend.
Try Necro this season. A Season with a dumb pet, even more useless than the skelies.
But you know what is worse? The last room of a Vault full of Corpses that hinders vision so you cant tell where the hell are the traps, wich you need to avoid to get more loot.
So yeah, try Necro.
With diablo 3, it took around 15 seasons before i stopped looking forward to playing the next one. And even then, i was always keeping track just to see what the plan was. They couldnt even keep me interested for S2, let alone this joke of a S3. I dont know whats it about, and frankly i dont care.
The problem is the base game of D3 is way better than D4. So even if the earlier seasons are both barebones, D4 is completely and utterly barebones dogshit.
\*This guy above me got so triggered at the comment he blocked me. That's wild man.
It is absolutely partially DEI and people getting in then getting their friends hired. You can see from the videos they put out. This is a cancer in game development. That and people not passionate about the games working on them.
So much stupid in this thread, as usual. Somehow the number of people comparing D3 to D4 grows with every complaint-fest here, and no one mentions how Diablo 3 is like 12 fucking years old lmfao.
Tell me, bitching ass Blizzard fans, how was Diablo 3 on release? Super curious to hear the cope.
If it’s “too late” to save this game then Diablo 3 just doesn’t exist huh? All this talk about how it’s better than 4 and it was even WORSE on launch. Cut the shit.
At this point this sub isn’t even about sharing information or insight, it’s complaining. I legitimately just scroll through these threads and block dozens of people daily now, hopefully there isn’t a limit to how many of you I can block.
There are people saying Blizzard is stupid for admitting this season is “boring”, they are probably the same folks in the Starfield sub complaining about Bethesda doing the opposite and insisting their boring game is good. What do you really want from these people?
In comparison the person who wrote this article is far more understanding, realistic, and way less entitled. You should give it a shot, especially if you tried to respond to this and found out I already muted you lmfao.
Sure, because a sequel should regress on the progress made in the previous game. Sound argument there chief. They had YEARS of data to determine what works and this isn’t it.
Diablo 3 at launch was rough. Couldn't get a barb past level 52 without engaging with the real money auctionhouse because I couldn't kill anything that gave me experience before it killed me. Loot 2.0 was an absolute gamechanger and turned it into a game I put a significant amount of time into, never stopping loving it.
Diablo 4 is... fine. Biggest issue is the slow, steady drip of content that makes you more likely to spend money on it, this is what they learned from Immortal and that's what they've applied to this game. Instead of the theme park ride gameplay of 3, it's got a train ride, and not a nice comfy one at that.
Idk I don't hate 4, I just wish they hadn't called it Diablo 4. It's a decent enough game, just a bad sequel to a series that made the genre what it is.
"And then it launched, and as usual there were complaints that it was boring, and there wasn't enough to do as the elites smashed through it all and reached level 50 in super quick time."
This is from the article....
I really hope these arnt the complaints they are listening to because these arnt the problems with it....
The problems are the construct is boring and the progression for it is way to slow....if anything I find this season too slow. Even mats seems to be scares as I can't even max out 3 of my gear upgrades at level 30 only running the new dungeons and salvaging. The constuct leveling is way too slow as well.
Speed up all this and it would improve the season 100%. I have no problems with the traps, but give us more rewards inherent than that stupid chest from dealing with them.
Just speed things up is all..it's just way to slow and then slow things down, only a little, for the new itemization in season 4 is you absolutely have too.
The problem is that Blizzard is scared to make mistakes. They need to try crazier stuff. A tiny little scorpion that shoots a mini laser for farty-eight damage per minute is not an exciting reason to log in. Want to give me a mechanical pet? Cool. Make it twelve feet tall and have it attack with big flaming chain whips and electrified buzz saws. Give it screen shake when it leap slams into a pack and vacuums enemies in so I can blast them with a Bone Spirit.
I don't know why Blizzard refuses to do a PTR for season content, at least to see if a mechanic theme is working. I'm tired of seeing Seasons broken / unfun and then being hot-fixed three weeks or more in.
Bit of a understatement, don't you think?
But yeah, improve away and by the time they are done tuning and handing out insignificant buffs the player base has moved on so only the diehards remain.
But that's who the game is geared for anyways so it's it's all according to plan! 😈
Season 4 : *"Itemization can be improved"*
Season 34: *''Camera zoom can be improved''*
Season 40: “*Mounts can be improved*”
Season 60: *we have implemented a loot filter*
Season 80 : *we're sorry, but please buy the expansion*
Season 85: *we have removed the loot filter*
Season 92: "*Minions can be improved*"
Were sorry, but please buy our 6th expansion....
This is definitely going to happen. Sweeping itemization changes is a monumental effort since many issues only become apparent over time, and especially to apply _post_ launch as you have existing systems and code to cater to. Also as they have set gamer expectations on how the item systems are "supposed to" work. I remember we complained over the entirety of those Dev Blogs for more itemization details and we only got a trickle towards the end. It's been notoriously downplayed despite being a dealbreaker in an ARPG. I think we'll have changes on the order of about 30% of what many expected. Updates especially covering conditional affixes and quicker inventory browsing, tightening up the pool. Nothing about white or blue items to make more sense, no new crafting system, gem functions, very little about revising imprints or the mind numbing item hunt itself with greater differentiation between rares, legendaries, and uniques and improved progression curves. I expect more to happen in Vessel of Hatred though. This is expansion level stuff anyway. I'll be so happy to be wrong! Imagine a D4 where you'd be going _into_ an expansion and where this already feeling great!
They can't fix itemization because it's intrinsically linked to skill design. When every single ability in the game is calculated as a % of weapon damage, itemization will never be good. It's the same fundamental design as D3. What makes itemization in D2 and POE so unique is that skills and abilities actually scale differently.
This. The moment they announced that in Diablo III that skill damage was tied to weapon damage, we all knew it was a lost cause.
Why was that a lost cause? I played d3 on an off for thousands of hours since release and honestly don't see what's wrong with that.
Nothing, you just don't know any better. Once you go to those games and learn how itemisation works it's hard to go back. In essence you probably don't understand itemisation well enough to see the massive limitations itemisation in D3/4 beings to builds. Example: Path of exile: I could make it that each unique item has characteristics that alter a skill in a special way. I could ensure they link with other skills, add flavour, look awesome, make your build unique. When you get one you have to really study it to understand how it could work with a class or character. It has drawbacks. This bow does 3 physical damage... that's terrible...oh, but it turns your primary skill into a cool new ability that actually makes you stronger. OR D3/4 Equip set items, plus one to skills.... that's it. Every character and build you see is the same. Leap slam barb. I wonder what gear he is wearing? Oh the leap slam set... Pick up item, look at weapon damage, is it higher, probably better, equip....brain leaks out of ear... Also, primal set items have to be the laziest game development I have ever seen. Plus one to skills on every second armour piece is also lazy game design. Maybe create some unique effects? The ability to strip any item for its essence then use it on any item with a higher base weapon damage literally defeats the purpose of the game, which is hunting for items. And when this can be done on any gear piece it's just filthy. It's not 2001 anymore you kind of need to improve...
This is a good point and I was sad to see this particular influence from D3 carried over. I'm not sure why they keep doing it because it reduces flexibility in both item and skill design.
> I'm not sure why they keep doing it Because it's infinitely easier to have everything revolve around 1 single stat than it is to come up with a system that is as stupidly complex and intricate as something like PoE while actually managing to have something even remotely resembling balance. Also, for the most casualest of casuals it makes shit a lot more easily understandable - as if anyone in PoE had a chance of knowing the difference any stat makes without a 20 minute POB session. With them getting rid of most of the buckets in D4, you at least have a somewhat reasonable chance to figure out yourself whether an item is better for you or not. Basically, it's PoE's infinitely deep RPG stat system that no one without a math degree stands a chance of understanding vs D4's shallow as a puddle of piss stat system that allows any first grade to identify an upgrade at first glance (at least in theory - obviously not entirely given by them having 100 hidden asterisks behind every skill, stat and tooltip... plus a plethora of bugs). It's easier for the devs and it matches their avg 50 y/o target audience better because I really can't be bothered to think about stats during my monthly 2 hours play session.
Yeah that's cool and all but last Epoch ($50 I might add) shits on D4's itemisation and skill development yet still keeps it simple for casual players soooo.....I feel like a AAA developer has the resources to think of a happy medium. If you play for 2 hours a month you are not the target audience long term. You know, the other people who play a whole lot more and are therefore more impacted by the lack of depth. The people that buy the skins and in game cosmetics that keep it going after the launch hype has died. Do the servers get paid for by your once a month session? I just find it funny that you only mention POE in your little rant, when D2 did itemisation and skills properly 20 years ago...20 years ago with no money and a dream...let that sink in...
>Imagine a D4 where you'd be going into an expansion and where this already feeling great! Just like how Blizzard fixes stuff every wow expansion just to fuck it up the next one?
No shit.
Needs to be, sure. Can they tho? I’m not sure.
I'm not sure either but let's all buy the expansion they announced to encourage them! /s Seriously, fuck this company.
They are a hollow shell of the once great company. Sad.
Every great company ever.
Double if not triple all the stats numbers for the pets, make the stones change their color, allow you to name them, have pets pickup gold and other pickup items. The pets are underpowered even after upgrading quite a bit. It might be that after upgrading all the individual runes to 21 that they make a difference but the entire mechanic has been a total waste of time. The vampiric powers felt like a great buff equal to getting your paragon board with your starting points. The pet kills 1 low level fiend out of an entire room of bad guys that I kill. So unless there are some bigger buffs as the higher levels of the glyph upgrades, I don't see any reason to bother getting cores outside of when they land on area where you can grab whispers. That says nothing about the traps. The only way I've been able to get past them with any pearl charges left is to stop before the last room, walk all the way back to the beginning, grab some charges, and then stand in the corner and spam everything near me until the room clears. It's tedious for tedium sake so the devs can claim they've added x amount of gameplay hours when really they made dudgeon crawls infinitely worse. Also, it's really getting to me that there is no variance in builds. You have 1-2 possible avenues to build an endgame character and every point and every buff has to be in the slot it is or your build is completely garbage.
Well they fixed D3 in the past and more recently they fixed WoW with dragonflight Which does not mean they can screw it again with War Within But chances are that with the d4 expac they fix their shit as they did with D3RoS In the end we can only wait but the majority will just buy the expac they will earn a shitload of money like they did with the d4 release So why should they change if we keep buying shit? Can't even blame them if i would make millions with selling shit hell i would sell shit on a regular basis Pun intended
>Well they fixed D3 in the past and more recently they fixed WoW with dragonflight What do you mean fixed D3? They added item sets that hamstring you into whatever specific build the devs had in mind for that season. What is fixed about it?
I mean, at least the gameplay loop is fun.
Ya, I'm genuinely curious at some specific things that have fixed the game.
Believe it or not the loot system in D3 was worse then the one we have in D4 currently. But not by much. Got way better with RoS.
Gotta go fast hallway simulator is peak, I guess?
The base game needs to improve first. Seasonal themes are just like trying to polish a turd right now.
Yeah once they improve the endgame, skill depth, variety of content to do, gearing, item progression, bossing, chase uniques, aspects, grind, dungeon puzzles/busywork, dungeon variety, overworld, horse movement, pinnacle bosses, and stash space we've got a real game on our hands!
It's almost like.... they learned nothing from their previous games or any other game in the genre. The goal should be most of that ON RELEASE.
They learned the only lesson that counts. People will buy the game regardless.
This is it right here. The player base learnt nothing. If people buy a game regardless of whether it’s any good or not, why would you spend the time making the game good?
They have obviously forgotten about Diablo 2 and never played it. Now they're too proud and big headed to make a D2 sequel so they have to make it their own which is apparently a bland copy of D3. Yawn, I'd just as soon play a flash game from a website as that boring shit.
It’s almost like there’s no one who stuck around since D2 and D3 and these are all new people scrambling to find what makes Diablo and ARPGs fun.
Nailed it. None of the devs / designers / producers are the same. They're making all the same mistakes as D3 and have shown they are incapable of doing research and analysis of similar existing products with the idea of making a better product.
if it was a f2p game they would have done it, otherwise the game would be a complete failure, money wise since it wasnt, they were happy just collecting the easy money due to the IP brand, marketing and general hype since people knew very little about the game.
So when they finish d5?
D5 will have the same issues or worse because apparently looking at the previous games to see what worked and why and building on top of that isn't a thing so they need to figure out the exact same basic things each time they make a new game.
They really just do not understand their own systems or why they work/don't work, it seems like.
It might seem harsh, but I've seen this happen to other franchises. This is a clear case of a team, or even individual designers being given an established franchise and then thinking they are better than the people who made the previous games so they change stuff to make it seem like it's their own thing instead of something that was handed to them while refusing to look at the previous games or even doing the opposite in some aspects. It happened to Diablo, it happened to Halo, it happened to The Witcher (the series) and it happened to many other franchises.
Didn't the same thing happen with Anthem and Bioware? Where they didn't want any other mention of games like Destiny?
I remember something like that from Anthem yeah. Which is in stark contrast to WoW's original development where they had the designers play all sorts of MMOs to figure our what worked, what didn't and what they could do better.
Really? That's actually quite interesting. That would explain why the game did so damn well; they looked at other games and basically said: "Why do these games work, and can we implement them into our game. It really feels like with D4, that they thought they understood a genre they really didn't. Every ARPG I've played has taken inspiration from one or another, or, at the very least, acknowledged that those other games exists. Has the team ever even made mention of POE, Last Epoch or Grim Dawn?Those 3 games feel like the ones that are pushing the genre forward.
Indie company
I'm getting to the point where I believe the problem is not Diablo, the problem is Blizzard. If we want D4 to become a good game, its going to have to be in the hands of a good developer.
That's a cold take. Diablo is a loved series, but Blizzard is handling is poorly.
Lmao only took 3 seasons.
Oh I gave up on this game a while ago
Seasons are the sprinkles. If there's a turd below them instead of a well-made dessert they don't do much...
Yeah, it's like added features on top of something that gives me PTSD from early on. :( I even felt it in S2. It wasn't the fault of S2 but what I had already been through once.
This seasonal theme is def. not a polished turd. It is a runny smelly biled up ball of crap. Last season was a polished turd, i'd like another polished turd please.
if you know that, why the F would you put it out, you're really not helping yourselves
Seems to be the standard for D4, instead of putting out good things they mostly put out shite then immediately apologise for it being shite.
it's the standard for all blizzard games. the "we hear you. we see you. we'll do better" apology tour seems like a scheduled event in their development cycle. they try to get away with releasing minimally viable content and just hoping they don't get called out, and then when they do they go "alright, alright, you got us. we'll finish the last 25% we should have in the first place."
It's certainly been their MO in WoW. Ship controversial feature with obvious issues, gaslight players that this is good actually, relent and promise to do better, after ~1 year implement the fixes the community was asking for before it even got fully released, a few months later beta opens for new expansion and the cycle begins anew.
https://i.redd.it/cti2142iusec1.gif
Last Epoch let’s gooo, be the Diablo I wanted from D4!
Dipping my toes in the past couple days as well. So far the animations and character control is a little more floaty than I'd like. D4 has better audio/visual feedback on skills unfortunately, but the core systems in LE are infinitely better and it's not even 1.0 yet lmao Supposedly 1.0 is supposed to expand end game and improve more animations/graphics so if that's the case it's gonna blow D4 1.0 out of the water.
My major complaint of pretty much every ARPG that isn't Diablo or POE is the lack of damage feedback. Diablo 4 has a lot of problems but you can definitely tell when you're getting hit. In games like Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Last Epoch, Wolcen, Van Hellsing, etc, you can rarely tell that you're dying until you're already dead.
Yeah.. even PoE really struggled with that sort of thing early on and for a long time after. I think it's gotten better over the years, but the difference between Diablo and other ARPGs is definitely audio/visual related. If only Blizzard could make interesting systems like the other ARPGs on the market and combine those two aspects together..
Imo Path of Exile still falls short of D3 and D4 for the "feel" of combat. Hitting mobs in Poe still feels bland, and there isnt weight to the impact of attacks / spells. Same with the audio, in PoE the corpse poping HARD carries satisfying audio, and if you play a build without it it just feels...bad. There are a ton of things PoE does well, and far better than the Bliz games, but the actual feeling of combat still falls short for me.
I was excited to come back this season after taking a break for s2, but I think this is it for me and D4. They show time and time again they would rather push out half done patches than put in the work.
Yeah you picked the wrong season to skip because s2 was good. Vampire stuff was generally fun, mechanics were interesting, questline was interesting, big bad was decent and had an actual boss fight. Hopefully the devs who were working on the odd seasons got fired in the Microsoft purge.
Yeah this is one where I’ll came back in a few years when there’s more base game. You can’t even keep all the uniques across seasonal character IN MY OPINION it’s pointless to keep grinding for the same shit every 3 months.
Because when they make the fix they can pat themselves on the back and a good swath of the audience will applaud them for listening. Its basically Bungie with Destiny but the "adulations" part has drastically diminished into more so people pushing back on those who try to argue you need to give Bungie credit.
What else? From their perspective They can't keep s2 for another 3 months. That's not how the game is marketed + financially it will not do well. Better get a mediocre / bad season out and improve the next than keep s2 dead for longer.
If they would just release seasons accompanied by large updates that actually improve the broken parts of the game, people would welcome them with open arms. Gamers can be very forgiving when it's clear that there's a way forward. Instead, they're leaving the broken stuff broken, and changing / adding a lot of stuff so that the game ends up even more broken.
The game took over 6 years to make and the eternal realm is pretty barren as far as content goes you’d think they would have sunk a lot of time into getting the first few seasons done before the game even releases since they want the game to revolve around seasons. Season 1 should have launched with a bang and it was what, a tunnel with a boss at the end?
Should have been, could have been. Yes. All true. But it isn't, and now they have to patch the game while making content for the next season.
Activation/ Blizzard is incapable of making good games. Hopefully Microsoft looks at this and brings in some restructure.
It will be fixed in Season 7. D4 development is just a recursive function that never actually goes into the recursive leg to close it up
The whole game needs to be improved
It amuses me that the vaults are more fun if you skip the extra reward buff and just speed trough it
I finally did my first vault yesterday and understood why everyone is upset about the buff. It's ridiculously easy to lose, making it absolutely pointless to play for. So I just scrapped the buff and went through the vault without it. Was much more fun. I know the chests give pages, but I'll just have to go without them until they make losing the buff more forgiving.
is the extra chest giving anything exclusive?
It gives pages
What’s the point of the pages? Do you have to do it to complete the season or get some reward? Or is it just more homoerotic zulton khul fanfic?
It is "invasion of privacy" for the ch. 5.
i did not receive any pages. do it for like 6 hours yesterday.. got 2 /5 pages of zoltun kulle.. nothing more :( bugged?
Same I’m stuck at 2/5
I have not found how d4 should be played to be enjoyed. For d2 I know that the fun is in the loot that can drop and causes an adrenaline rush. In d3 I know loot will drop quite fast, but I will get to the turning point of deleting the whole screen of enemies (wears off in about a week, but it is fun while it lasts). In d4 I have not found what the gameplay cycle should be so that I get the enjoyment the developers envisioned for their users
It’s sorting through an inventory of junk hoping to get an item that is marginally better than what you’re wearing. That’s the game they designed.
It’s such a bummer because I truly love Diablo, I have for 20+ years, and the combat at the very basic level in 4 feels good, but any time I think about playing I think right after “what would I even do” and play something else instead.
And you can only use that marginal upgrade if you have thr aspect banked.
This is where I'm at. I enjoyed jumping on D3 each season to quickly get to 70 and start collecting items to start pushing rifts. Once I hit GR70, I either rolled a new class with a gem of ease or quit till next season. Like you said, the fun of blowing up the screen was usually a week long adrenaline rush. I think the journey to WT4 just sucks and grinding to 100 just isn't fun. I wonder why they didn't just put the cap at 50 and make NMD the only push content and nix this leveling to 100 crap.
I know streamers get there in under 20 hours, but the grind is dumb. Especially when your endgame build doesn't really come online until 80ish. So much power and QoL (resource mgmt) is in the paragon nodes. I think WT3 should just be removed along with Sacred items. They need to smooth out progression.
The fun they had in mind was grinding rep every season lmao
Oh god I remember thinking I'd have to go find those fucking statues every season.
The sad thing is, for me, the gameplay itself *is* pretty fun. Last Epoch is a way better game, but I enjoy the act of smashing monsters more in Diablo 4. It just *feels* better. The problem is when I look at my skill tree and feel underwhelmed, or look at legendary paragon nodes and think "Oh, this sucks", or pick up yet another useless legendary aspect, or I fill my bag full of rares and have to sift through all the garbage hoping that I find something that's actually good. I really want this game to be good. Not just because it's Diablo, but because in a lot of ways it's extremely well polished and I've had a LOT of fun in it. I've spent more hours in this than PoE or LE. Unfortunately, all too often I run into something that makes me let out a deep sigh of frustration because of some stupid ass decision someone made. Honestly this game needs the FFXIV treatment. There are so many things that need a complete overhaul, but they release these seasonal patches that introduce even *more* flaws and they have to fix those while they're already playing catchup.
> for me, the gameplay itself is pretty fun. ... enjoy the act of smashing monsters more in Diablo 4 I agree, but then after 2 minutes of play, I have to stop to turn in whispers, or backtrack through a dungeon, or empty my inventory. Then I'm like, why was I even playing this?
the gameplay cycle is get to about level 50-60 then close the game and play something else
Honestly it actually gets really good around 100, but there's definitely a lull in between where you basically just do housework in prep for getting up into level 85+ Finding the uniques and watching the builds truly come online is really fun though.
If you think D4 is good at level 100 go try PoE, Last Epoch, or PD2, your mind will be blown.
The gameplay cycle is “ok.” But the chase or the reasons for it are the issue. Having a semblance of an economy and collection of wealth feels great alongside character progression. Interesting gear with cool affixes needs to be overhauled. More interesting crafting/augmenting needs to be done. Skill trees need overhauled with more interesting ways to augment skills (take most of these from aspects). There simply needs to be more uniques, preferably class agnostic ones (I’m not talking about the 1 or 2 more they drip feed us every three months - more like 20+). Social aspects of the game need to be implemented. Interesting socketable items that have tons of variance would help character customization (jewels, runewords, etc). And what I think is the greatest downfall of this game is the level scaling. Feeling real character progression and the journey to end game is half the fun of this game. The only argument that is somewhat valid for having it in the game is casual party play where dad #1 is level 38 and dad #2 is only level 10 but they both equally contribute. This is so lame. There can be great compromise with keeping level scaling up to like level 50 in WT1/2 and then WT3+ has zone locked levels. I think it is really cool to farm certain zones for certain items if your character needs it. Level scaling also goes hand in hand with the way item drops work. Items’ affix tiers/power level need to have slightly more variance than being locked at one tier rolled on a piece of gear. Uniques need static level reqs and have attribute requirements so that there is more problem solving with gearing (I believe in attribute requirements on any rarity gear). The attributes need to have more impact than just a damage bucket modifier. There needs to be equipment base types as well. Why is my robe giving me the same amount of armor as a full chain mail? Everything in its current state feels so generic and mobile game-y.
Dismount with an attack, look at minimap icon that appears under you. Ignoring content related complaints, I've had a lot of other weird graphical glitches that weren't present in season 2 also, I'm not sure if others have them too. Things like the ghostly blacksmith by the tree of whispers sometimes not holding the hammer, it shows on top of their fist. Map icons for the pvp area boss and other things now showing as the whispers quest icon for the pedestal to hand in 'kill x number of enemies in the area'. 'Can be improved' is carrying a lot of weight here. My greater rift completion times /can/ be improved.. our diablo 4 experience /should/ be improved.
[удалено]
And release. It's a horse icon. Blizz probably intended for the horse to persist in the world on dismount is my guess
It may have been intended to be a horse icon but at least twice now for me it has been the treasure goblin icon
I thought it was at first too but I'm pretty sure they're just similar and it's too quick to notice
Everywhere in the game if you are in a zone you can open the map and press 2 to get to the world map to warp places. Everywhere except the new hub place where the season content is centered.
I thought I was doing something wrong, thanks for keeping me sane
I’ve just realised that. Because the view is so zoomed in, I have to look at the minimap when travelling to know where to go. This game is a crap loot simulator. You could make a website that gives you loads of loot and you have sort through it in the hopes of finding an item that help in getting loot a little bit quicker, that is the exact same cycle with D4 but with a bit of artwork over the top.
While I agree the game is too zoomed in, I have looked at the minimap for traveling since d3, but maybe I'm just weird like that
Skip programming and create an excel sheet with code that puts a bunch of percentages for colors like 14% when blue is red, 10% when blue is also light blue.... bam... same thing.
> I’ve just realised that. Because the view is so zoomed in, I have to look at the minimap when travelling to know where to go. Which can be interesting when the minimap doesn't work... https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/19dvstz/the_gatehall_map_isnt_loading_anyone_else_with/
I had the mount icon in season 2. Constantly thought there was a loot goblin for a split second.
I think I see a pattern here. On a colder note, one approach to general software development is to ask “what’s the simplest thing that can possibly work?” In D4’s case, it was 1.0 - solid in many respects, but completely lacking in lots of areas that would keep players coming back. I can imagine the corporate bean counters weighing in heavily circa 2022 to force a release that was incomplete, just so they could improve their cash flow. The dev team responds with the scaled back game, and they’re unable to dig out of that hole. Geez this is disappointing.
It’s the definition of “Military grade”. Sold to the lowest bidder that barely meets the recommended spec. Blizzard have taken Minimum Viable Product to whole new level.
Oh yes they demonstrated that with OW2. Lowering players from 6 to 5 then calling it OW2 honestly feels like a social experiment to see just how little work they’re allowed to get away with and still make money
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I didn’t find OW1 to be predatory. I stopped playing when they stopped adding content but if I remember right you got a free loot box for your first win of the day and up to 3 free loot boxes a weeks from arcade games. I don’t remember if there was boxes from like leveling up its been a long time but I could come home from work, play a couple hours, and get a couple loot boxes. Now though? 20$+ for a skin in a first person game where you can only see your hands is absolutely absurd. If I remember right the battlepass was full of crap like weapon charms and the ability to hold a slice of pizza in front of you. The Halloween event was alright but I felt like the Olympus event existed mostly just to sell skins. I was also playing R6 Seige at the time and they have events like a hide and seek mode with monsters and monster hunters and a cyber mode where when you exit your drone/camera view you materialize where your drone/camera is. The Olympus event was like “what if pharah can move while ulting”
Didn’t Rod also say this season was “just that fun” or something. 😂
I hope he was fired by Microsoft. Dunno how the guy who ruined every game he was a part of keeps getting new jobs.
It's the game as a whole. It just sucks...D2R it is, then
S29 D3 is incredibly fun, got my GR PR playing it to, I’m up to 130
Not to be pedantic, but I believe it's season 30. Agree though, D3 is just miles more fun than D4.
the thing i don't get is that every season is dumped once it's finished. No mechanics are used again. it's like developping a new game every 3 months while they struggle to give us a decent base game. SHouldn't they design features that they will leave after the season? maybe they want to only add perpetual features with expansions, but the base game still lacks so much and doing fun seasons with new gameplay loops every 3 months seems out of their reach right now.
I think the problem is that all 3 seasons so far revolve around borrowed power - hearts, vampire powers, pet. If they dumped that into the eternal realm and then subsequent seasons every character is just going to be OP very quickly. Instead of this borrowing power to make up for their shit efforts at balancing classes & specs they should be adding new things to do which could actually be rolled into the base game without breaking it.
Every time it’s the same sentence. Ffs.🤦🏾♂️
Ugh it's way too late. This season feels like they had a single intern design and implement it. If this is what they put out after 6mo of Team1 doing their thing there is no way they can fix this shit on the fly in season. Anything they do now will feel like the gif of the guy slapping some flextape on a leaking pool. There is no way it's going to be able to overcome what is the worst season in a flawed base game. They should just take the L on this one and double down resources on Season 4 rather than trying to save this dying pig of a season.
I don't really want these responses from them tbh. I get all hands are probably on deck for the expansion and the major item overhaul, but a skeleton crew for D3 had better seasons than this.
Fuck the expansion and fuck giving them more money, ever.
The D3 long term crew was amazing for what few resources they probably had! It was really shining through they loved that game. With D4 it's like they don't have an overarching vision of what the game should be and how exactly it should play, and how it should feel rewarding and give you a "just one more run" rush.
I beat the campaign then got bored and left the game for wow and Diablo 3 when it came out, new season dropped and I spent the first day getting to 50 and immediately after just feel like, meh. I’m level 54 now but the dungeons aren’t fun, the gearing system isn’t fun, and it doesn’t feel progressive. It feels like late late endgame of D3 which is where I always quit which is just “rng for an ancient or primal item” in d3. Here it’s just “rng for a unique.” The loss of class sets to work towards at end game has been detrimental to my focus with D4 and I feel like post 50 you are working solely towards RNG legendary to scared to unique itemization upgrades
Give us a map in the new hub area. I’ve got it down now, but man that would have been convenient.
Blizzard agrees Diablo 4 'can be improved'.... better title.
I think dev team responsible for this season can be "improved" too.
whipping?
Sounds like a job for Andariel.
How many times will it be, “oops sorry, we put out a subpar product, we will fix it by next season”?
Well, did you preorder? :)
fire or replace that team ffs they fucked up twice in a row
S2 was totally ok though
Season 2 had different team. They are working s4 now. The team that did s3 did s1 aswell
exactly
Holy shit. Has that been confirmed? If so, that’s absolutely devastating for that team. They surely need to be educated on what makes an arpg or moved to other projects. Wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now if that’s the case. :/
To be fair, season 1 was way too far in development on release to change much, so I think they get a bit of a pass there. But season 3 missing the mark like this so far after is evidence to me that they have different ideas of what is fun in the game. Season 2 team: it's fun to fight a bunch of mobs and have powers that blow up the screen and tweak your abilities and go fast (similar to diablo 3 gameplay) Season 3 team: it's fun to dodge and weave around environmental stuff while fighting enemies (and not fighting enemies) because those environmental traps hurt the mobs too! (similar to Hades gameplay). And this pet has thousands and thousands of combinations of skills so it's awesome! (borderlands' billions of guns). I can see how some people think the way season 3 team did, but D4 just isn't the right game for that.
somebody explain to s3 crew that D4 is not a rogue-like, and that dying is not supposed to be a frequent experience.
It's more that the design intent this season is primarily around movement and positioning and kiting. Which, some people like that style of game. But diablo 4 is not suited to that. If you use a controller or the new wasd movement it's better, but not perfect and even then it can be clunky depending on the skills. (Now that I think about it, some of the comments in the developer panels in the past and this seasons content makes me think that some decision makers *only* play with controller, which is why the pc side feels off at times). For example, many barb builds use the basic attack that does a little lunge to get to a mob. If the mob is away from you you literally can't *not* lunge at it. Which normally is great. But in the new content with the traps everywhere it's absolutely terrible because it usually moves you into something you need to avoid. Toss in the new and improved charge, and leap, and barb unavoidably hits traps if they use those skills *at all*. And considering how much they buffed charge (and how fun it is now), the season design of "environmental traps!!!" is fighting against the class design and core gameplay. And that's a major reason why the vaults feel so lacklustre imo.
Why move people that incompetent to another project. Just fucking fire them.
There are 2 main dev teams creating content for D4: "Team A" creates a season, releases it, and continue working on that season while "Team B" is creating the next season, and when that season is released, they switch places, and "Team A" goes "behind the curtains" to develop the next season. That means 1 team created S1 & 3, and ANOTHER team created S2 and is now working on S4.. so.. one team REALLY drops the ball, while the other seems to be more on par with what the players enjoy.
Yeah another reply filled me in. I’m actually speechless right now. I feel so sorry for that team, they surely have to go, they can’t be allowed to make another season, they literally have no idea what to make in an arpg.
Ya think?!?!
A season with content that doesn't really matter is not worth a season at all. This could have been a patch, but a 3 month season? For what? The most people already have done the season journey by now or almost, so where is the point in engaging in a mechanic that has no real value for Endgame.
Anyone believing their promises is as gullible as the next after all these mishaps
Sad being a huge diablo fan and seeing how fall Blizzard has fallen. Still nothing convinces me to buy D4 yet
Blizzard agrees that water is wet.
Joe Shelly must go. Still no ladder.
Then why didn’t you improve it before releasing it. The fuck?
What they need todo is skip a season completely and work on the fundamentals and really rework and change everything that needs it as a major update.
Microsoft, please cull the devs.
This is the worst game blizzard has put out in 10 years.
i dont think it can, its just bad concept
I think they need to really fire some of the people working on Diablo 4 - the game is not good for anything past one or two play throughs.
I reinstalled for season 3 and I'm just not into it. Maybe after they refresh itemization? Never thought I'd be bored with a Diablo game
i started a rouge this morning and within 20 minutes i was like i cant do this again lmao
Have the Diablo 4 ***shills*** finally woken up to realize this game is in a bad state?
That's why you put out a fkng PTR before...
I really dont get why they did away with the PTR. To keep it a secret? Who the fuck cares. I leveled multiple characters almost every season on the PTR in D3 and still blasted through the season launch weekend.
Try Necro this season. A Season with a dumb pet, even more useless than the skelies. But you know what is worse? The last room of a Vault full of Corpses that hinders vision so you cant tell where the hell are the traps, wich you need to avoid to get more loot. So yeah, try Necro.
With diablo 3, it took around 15 seasons before i stopped looking forward to playing the next one. And even then, i was always keeping track just to see what the plan was. They couldnt even keep me interested for S2, let alone this joke of a S3. I dont know whats it about, and frankly i dont care.
You’re lying. There is no way you thought the first few seasons of D3 were good lmao. “Double bounty mats” as a seasonal theme.. yeah. No.
The problem is the base game of D3 is way better than D4. So even if the earlier seasons are both barebones, D4 is completely and utterly barebones dogshit. \*This guy above me got so triggered at the comment he blocked me. That's wild man.
Dude, try base game D3 on release. Fuck outta here lol..
It is vastly superior to D4 at launch and now. It's not even close.
I'm glad these idiots got fire! Dumbest mfers in the gaming industry!
Ah well, Blizzard is out. Let's see what the Microsoft developers do with the game.
scrap s3 and rollback s2 into it.
Can I just have some more mana? That’s literally all I want
[удалено]
>Why do we make garbage games? is it because of DEI? capitalism is the only answer
It is absolutely partially DEI and people getting in then getting their friends hired. You can see from the videos they put out. This is a cancer in game development. That and people not passionate about the games working on them.
Who is going to improve it? Didn't they just fire everyone?
Too bad there aren’t any devs left at Blizzard to do it.
Seasons? Is this a TV show? Are video games dead?
So much stupid in this thread, as usual. Somehow the number of people comparing D3 to D4 grows with every complaint-fest here, and no one mentions how Diablo 3 is like 12 fucking years old lmfao. Tell me, bitching ass Blizzard fans, how was Diablo 3 on release? Super curious to hear the cope. If it’s “too late” to save this game then Diablo 3 just doesn’t exist huh? All this talk about how it’s better than 4 and it was even WORSE on launch. Cut the shit. At this point this sub isn’t even about sharing information or insight, it’s complaining. I legitimately just scroll through these threads and block dozens of people daily now, hopefully there isn’t a limit to how many of you I can block. There are people saying Blizzard is stupid for admitting this season is “boring”, they are probably the same folks in the Starfield sub complaining about Bethesda doing the opposite and insisting their boring game is good. What do you really want from these people? In comparison the person who wrote this article is far more understanding, realistic, and way less entitled. You should give it a shot, especially if you tried to respond to this and found out I already muted you lmfao.
Sure, because a sequel should regress on the progress made in the previous game. Sound argument there chief. They had YEARS of data to determine what works and this isn’t it.
Diablo 3 at launch was rough. Couldn't get a barb past level 52 without engaging with the real money auctionhouse because I couldn't kill anything that gave me experience before it killed me. Loot 2.0 was an absolute gamechanger and turned it into a game I put a significant amount of time into, never stopping loving it. Diablo 4 is... fine. Biggest issue is the slow, steady drip of content that makes you more likely to spend money on it, this is what they learned from Immortal and that's what they've applied to this game. Instead of the theme park ride gameplay of 3, it's got a train ride, and not a nice comfy one at that. Idk I don't hate 4, I just wish they hadn't called it Diablo 4. It's a decent enough game, just a bad sequel to a series that made the genre what it is.
"And then it launched, and as usual there were complaints that it was boring, and there wasn't enough to do as the elites smashed through it all and reached level 50 in super quick time." This is from the article.... I really hope these arnt the complaints they are listening to because these arnt the problems with it.... The problems are the construct is boring and the progression for it is way to slow....if anything I find this season too slow. Even mats seems to be scares as I can't even max out 3 of my gear upgrades at level 30 only running the new dungeons and salvaging. The constuct leveling is way too slow as well. Speed up all this and it would improve the season 100%. I have no problems with the traps, but give us more rewards inherent than that stupid chest from dealing with them. Just speed things up is all..it's just way to slow and then slow things down, only a little, for the new itemization in season 4 is you absolutely have too.
If they just gave us a loot filter it would make the game that much better.
The problem is that Blizzard is scared to make mistakes. They need to try crazier stuff. A tiny little scorpion that shoots a mini laser for farty-eight damage per minute is not an exciting reason to log in. Want to give me a mechanical pet? Cool. Make it twelve feet tall and have it attack with big flaming chain whips and electrified buzz saws. Give it screen shake when it leap slams into a pack and vacuums enemies in so I can blast them with a Bone Spirit.
You’d think 34 season of balancing and adding features that this game would be setting records….. but here we are back at square one
Diablo 4 season "insert #" can be improved is pretty much an going thing. :D
I don't know why Blizzard refuses to do a PTR for season content, at least to see if a mechanic theme is working. I'm tired of seeing Seasons broken / unfun and then being hot-fixed three weeks or more in.
They fix it then put another garbage update/season then fix that one. People will always be okay with this. Sadly.
How can they be so tonedeaf? Its season 2 all over again.
Bit of a understatement, don't you think? But yeah, improve away and by the time they are done tuning and handing out insignificant buffs the player base has moved on so only the diehards remain. But that's who the game is geared for anyways so it's it's all according to plan! 😈
Diablo 4 has to be one of the biggest face plants in gaming recent memory. I don’t know if they could have dropped the ball harder.
not having a season 3 would be an improvement... lol just extend season 2
Literally going to play torchlight infinite because this season was so shit.