Today I say goodbye to diablo 4

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xPiranha wrote:

hoho this won't be the last time you touch D4.

Until the next league with regular loot hits in hoho

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DoubleU wrote:

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Jerle wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Goodbye Diablo 4. Hello... Shit, which game were we meant to be playing this week?

Clearly Last Epoch ;)

+1

Console shitbag here, friends. So no, not that clear. Also I iterated my issues with the game elsewhere. Possibly herewhere.

Probably Mechanicus for me. Once I have the arpg altoholism itch scratched by Inquisitor I want to dive into my first Xcom/squad type game and it was like 10 bucks on psn.

Would I be a console shitbag had my vid card not died? Maybe. I have unhealthy feelings towards my dualsense controller. Not quite Hitachi Wand level but it just feels *right* in my hands. I know, I am a PC masterrace traitor. Sorry. :(

diablo 4 is such a trash game it hurts my brain to think that people actually spent all that time and money developing it.

i said this in season 2, it was amazing how the things they added in season 2 made such an awful, awful game vaguely playable for 50 hours, but at the end of the season it will all disappear and the game will return to being absolute shit tier. they dont get it, they just dont understand how to make an arpg, even when they manage add a feature that isnt terrible they then remove it 3 months later.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

D4 is aimed squarely at the first generation of life-long gamers, who were roughly college age when Diablo 1 came out and pushing towards Unsupervised Adult Life when D2 was all the rage.

i dunno man, i think it was barely aimed at anyone really? its a bad game made by people who dont play arpgs, dont really like arpgs and are fumbling around in the dark trying to make what they think an arpg player wants to play with a complete absence of any personal frame of reference for what that even means.




the lead dev was asked about playing arpgs like the diablo games and path of exile, he said he had never played path of exile but got a demon hunter to paragon 600 in d3.

any competent player in d3 can get to paragon 600 from a new league start in 10 hours. its the equiv of ggg hiring a new lead dev for poe2 who boasts in an interview "ive never played the diablo games but ive played poe and i got a templar to lvl55". can you imagine? and this guy said this like he was proud of it xD hes so completely clueless he didnt even know that wasnt an achievement, lolol, wtf are we dealing with? how are these real people? this guy actually exists




he doesnt play action rpgs, if he liked action arpgs and played them he would have 1000s of hours played in arpgs, hes a game dev, games are his entire life and his sum total of experience in action rpgs is the equiv of playing for 10 hours? really?



he doesnt know what an action rpg is. the resist system they added didnt even work, they gutted it out after launch when players told him it was trash and they added a new system... that works exactly the way resists in poe and d2 work... jesus, imagine if he had actually played those games before he made d4? you know, even just out of a sense of professionalism in the absence of caring at all about arpgs?

they didnt realise players would need more stash space than 4 tabs so they coded the game in a way where giving us more than 4 or 5 tabs would lag out the game. they didnt even realise that would be a problem.

they released the new league mid day on a tuesday... because you know, ladder pushing at league start isnt a thing. it doesnt matter when the league launches right? its not like people want to be there at the start surely?

you cant even make this level of incompetence up.


we could go on and on

game mechanics = trash
crafting = trash
item system = trash
endgame grinding systems = trash
skill system = trash
stash = trash
monster combat = trash
bosses = trash

its got some nice environment graphics and that is the only thing that is done well in the game.


i dont think it was a game aimed and tailored at specific groups within arpgs players etc. its not that smart, its a trash game made by completely clueless devs who arnt even capable of putting together a competent arpg in the most basic fashion, never mind cleverly directing it at a particular part of that player base. its devs with no idea what to do making blind decisions and then trying desperately to redesign their game on the fly based on the outraged feedback theyre getting.

its a game that wasnt even aware enough of the genre to aim at anything in particular that is now aiming to do whatever the can to appease the fans who have played the game and are telling them en mass that their game is utter shit.

i think it really is as shambolic and directionless as that.







their system for uber uniques, they made them like 10x more rare than a mirror drop in poe, then people said that was stupid so they added them as a 0.5% drop chance off 1 endgame boss. people complained because the boss is trash content that is not fun to farm, never mind farming it 600 times to maybe get the specific uber unique you wanted.

so their new system is you farm the boss about 250 times, vendor all the items you get from him then you can go to an npc and press a button that just gives you the best unique in the entire game.

because thats a really fun way to get an item in an arpg, the best item ever, farm a badly designed boss 250 times, get nothing you wanted from it and then just get given the item by an npc as an apology.


thats the game? thats the vision? thats how this loot hunt game wants players to experience the most exciting loot in the game?





how is it even possible for this amount of money and heritage to be handed to a dev team this incompetent?







god bless anyone with enough cope in their cup for this game. i tried to play this season, i have friends who were playing it, i got to level 80 and i just cant, for all the love in the world this game is just awful.

item revamp in s4, fking hell m8s this revamp better stick the landing.

Tldr after that first sentence tbf. But i may later. See signature for details.

Did a chunk of the last third of d4 last night with my havealife friends and they both seriously loved the way it barrels towards its climax. Ashava shook em and that amazing cutscene remains a highlight - - the game earns it through measured story beats and regular reinforcement of the stakes. The inevitable reunion had narrative weight; Prava's role felt both awe inspiring and justified, but after Vigo you kinda want to see her get hers...

I don't expect arpg junkies to engage with an arpg story after they have been force fed so many middling ones, so I am equally unsurprised when they fail to realise they have been offered a good one.

hoho havealife friends. that's cute.

People who keep their gaming to one or two sessions a week, a few hours per, because they... Well, have a life? They do exist. Hell, they're the top of the gaming bell curve. And this may just blow your mind: there are people who have a life and *don't* game at all! Preposterous.

Again, the notion that not all gamers nolife a game is not a perspective I would ever expect an arpg junkie to grasp. Saganian Flatlanders gonna flatland.

---

Diablo 4 survived baldurs gate 3. It survived Last Epoch. It will certainly survive Dragons Dogma 2 and Shadow of the Erdtree. Assuming it hasn't tanked itself by 2026, it will probably survive PoE 2.

Are these better games? Almost to the last. But Diablo endures. For whatever reason, it just keeps going. I was sure PoE was gonna eat D3 alive but they are still doing seasons and people still play them. Same with D4. I can't explain it. I don't think any Exile could or more aptly would care to try.

They say some movies are critic proof due to a perceived and committed target audience, and I think it's something similar here, only reversed. Critics quite liked D4 (rightfully so given which portion of it they reviewed) but the apparent target audience, ARPG players, very vocally loathe it. Their criticisms are fair for the most part. And yet people keep playing. Its subreddit is a frantic yoyo of Blizzard hate and love. Players post screenshots of their premium mtxes and get slews of upvotes and even more mocking responses. Blizzard share videos of D4 art/dungeon design devs failing to play a basic dungeon, as though they didn't anticipate the backlash (especially considering said devs were not, in fact, neckbearded mumblebutts). The game is full price and looks fine as is but people are buying really overpriced skins. The endgame is pointless even in the very slender definition of any endgame having a point, but people farm The Other D relentlessly.

Nothing about D4 makes sense to anyone but Blizzard at this point. And as long as it remains a success financially that likely won't change. Transparency is pandering; explanations are just excuses without the "sorry". One thing GGG learned the hard way is don't sell yourself short by mistaking compromise with players for ceding to their demands. Cause and effect: profits drop, THEN you go into damage control mode. Cold? Absolutely. But somehow it works for Blizzard because good lord their PR for D4 is bad and their damage control is non-existent. Players seem on the verge of rioting (see s3 release state), expecting an emergency campfire full of contrition... And just get a fairly basic patch addressing only some of the issues instead.

And somehow that worked. Players still bitched but they definitely played more than before that patch.

My gut says it's a basic psychological game of keeping the bar so low any twitch upwards is enough to appease the people. Very nice place to be businesswise if you can pull it off.

For me the ongoing question is how the fuck is Blizzard pulling it off?

I have never and would never buy a single costume from the shop. The in game ones suffice. If this is a case of fomo then people are actively looking at the shop... Which to this day is very unobtrusive conpared to a lot of games with cash shops. I am a former whale baffled by today's whales.

Otoh I just learned about TikTok live battles so yknow what? Fuck it. Back to murdering the heretics, the mutants, and the xenos all by my happily lonesome. When it comes to people, Slipknot were right.

Mainstream stuff in general tends to be "failure-proof"
Brands after a certain treshold tend to be sucessfull almost no matter what, especially on digital entertainment, it takes a real dumpster fire of a product for it to really fail, even the freaking emoji movie was a sucess!!!

Many, many, MANY people right here on this forum went for D4 knowing full well the game was gonna be mediocre, but went and bough the damn thing anyway. Its sort of a FOMO, diablo WAS the gold standard for dungeon crawlers for more than a decade, so many people still have that hope in the back of their minds that MAYBE the product wont suck...(kinda like that wife of the abusive husband that keeps coming back. Many people have a strong tendency to keep on familiar stuff no matter how it sucks because its a weird confort zone) brand history and weight matters a lot, and blizzard WAS THE most beloved developer on the market for more than a decade. The history of the company is super enviable

Also what i think is the most important factor: the videogame market in general feels super stagnant

When i look at the store page on steam baldur gate is kinda the only title that really catches the eye. Yeah, theres a bunch of good fighting games being released, but thats pretty much it. Steam store is just full of re-releases, sequels with number aproaching double-digits and remakes. And remakes that recieve the premium treatment FF7 got are super rare, most are just "same stuff, only marginally prettier graphics"

I really feel theres a darth of new good content to be found. Sure, we have alternatives to D4, grim dawn, last ep, yada yada yada... but i think tons of people already tried those. I woudnt be surprised if a substantial amount of D4 players were people who know and already played the alternatives, KNEW blizzard's new products tend towards mediocrity, but still went anyway simply because theres nowhere else to go. Like... seriously, last epoch have more than 5 years(game also dont offer great longevity unless you use mods, wich average player dont), grim dawn is about to complete a decade and both games have only very sporadic official new content, poe didnt exactly made greats efforts to kill D4 with ancestors going a bit too out of the confort zone with a mechanics that felt like a minigame being pushed to the center of the game and affliction having a mechanic prone to creating sponge enemies the average player cant handle and having bad reward/difficulty rate for alch-and-go players(most of the players)

Diablo in particular also have the advantage that the alternatives are indies. Poe is the big competition and its very obscure outside the most hardcore game circles. For average joe, diablo is likely the only game of its kind he is aware of. Dungeon crawlers simply dont have presence on the library of the big companies, so blizzard kinda sits comfortable on diablo

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Critics quite liked D4 (rightfully so given which portion of it they reviewed) but the apparent target audience, ARPG players, very vocally loathe it

This deserves adressing: critics dont play the game the same way players do it. Its why games with significant gap between professioanl reviews and users score tend to have a noticeable disparity of quality between early and end content, its a very known "exploit" on the industry that a game can get favorable reviews as long as the initial hours are great, even if the final levels are nigh umplayable because critics often dont play the game that far before reviewing and as such, companies tend to focus on initial experience(steam policy of no refunds if more than 4 hours dont help). And its apparent here: if you read the reviews, most only talk about stuff from the initial hours, most players reviews concede the initial experience on D4 is good, but falls apart after the story

And ofc, the blatant history on a great many sources of reviewers being fired after publishing negative reviews of mainstream games wich speaks volumes about the general corruption on videogame journalism

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Nothing about D4 makes sense to anyone but Blizzard at this point

My personal view is that the game cathers not to "gamers" in general, but to blizzard fans. As i mentioned, the company have a very enviable history and have a very loyal fandom. The general sales were almost certain nothing to brag about, seeing blizzard hasnt released the sales number, BUT the revenue from the game was good. Considering the model of the game, it likely means D4 is following the same model mobile gachas follow: Thriving on the back of whales. The numerous blizzard fanboys buy every skin and every microstransaction and feed the game. I quite expect the game to evolve in the following months with many more microtransactions and sporadic new real content, as is standard for the average gatcha

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feike wrote:

Mainstream stuff in general tends to be "failure-proof"
Brands after a certain treshold tend to be sucessfull almost no matter what, especially on digital entertainment, it takes a real dumpster fire of a product for it to really fail, even the freaking emoji movie was a sucess!!!

...


My personal view is that the game cathers not to "gamers" in general, but to blizzard fans.

i was thinking exactly the same thing, a lot of it is brand.



i have friends ive played D4 with who would never play poe, le, any other arpg. they wouldnt enjoy it. my ex plays wow and theyre her friends from wow and me n her play d4 with them.

even tho other arpgs would be better games for them, even as casual players, they wouldnt enjoy them because theyre not blizzard games. the blizzard brand gives the game a sort of legitimacy for them.



an equiv would be say louis vuitton release a bag that was functionally terrible, there would be people who would pay a lot for it and use it who would never even dream of using an identical bag without the vuitton branding.





another part, again as youve touched on, its got enough money behind it to reach the mainstream with its advertising so you get a set of players to buy the game and give it a go who dont rly have any other arpg in their awareness.

It's funny because 30 years ago, it was my older sis who discovered Diablo 1 in college and was hyped to show it to me. I promptly died a lot and got burned out trying to keep up with her. Never touched another ARPG until 2018 when someone said "hey try this shit, it's like diablo except free and you don't get PK'd in town".

I wouldn't call myself a blizzard fan. I played Starcraft Brood War like an addict for about 2-3 weeks, and like, 1 hour of D1. Tried Overwatch, owned but never installed Warcraft 3. Watched a bunch of my friends slowly disappear off the radar into WoW. This was before and unrelated to later finding out about Blizzard's many ethical and workplace culture woes. The games just started to slide.

Am I the least bit curious what ActiBlizz have done with the og game? Not really. It's a different company now, there will never be another OG Diablo or OG SC just as there will never be another 20yo crunkatog with 4-day weekends and LAN parties and an insatiable appetite for garlic pizza and ginseng red bull.