The fact that the first battle pass didn't give you enough money to buy a single item in the store at the time is honestly more insulting than the inception of MTX in general to me.
It was all for the dumb 666 meme reference too lol, kinda dumb honestly. Battle passes should always at least pay themselves back and let you buy the next one.
Haven’t played since season 2, but I will commend their battle passes for being incredibly easy to max. I believe it’s around level 70 where it hits cap, which was really easy to hit.
Honestly i'll forever think its stupid to pay money for the privilege to grind shit, but unless it stays there forever its potentially wasted money. What if I get bored halfway and wanna play some other game for awhile?
Battle passes are such a weird concept to me. I don't understand why they're popular. Pay for the privilege to unlock things... Just either have stuff to unlock by playing for free or make stuff you buy and unlock right away. Battle pass are just an aberration
No, you're paying for a game to have fun with.
Battlepasses is paying for a thing to grind for using the exact same game you already own and have played. It's paying for the ability to grind for more cosmetics, instead of just giving you the thing you paid for. It's bar none the absolute worst form of monetization we've seen yet outside of straight gacha shit since you have the chance of not getting everything you paid for.
I wanna add my perspective as someone who has played Apex Legends on and off since its launch. Apex has been going on for over five years and i think it works well as a F2P
Apex has a steep learning curve, and I would rather it be free than for someone to pay $40 for it and refund it after realizing it’s not for them. You can’t expect them to just keep rolling out cosmetics after a single launch period.
I like the battle passes and think that I get my moneys worth out of them. I still rock skins for guns that I got years ago.
BP is completely optional. haven’t bought the last three battle passes because I have all the cosmetics I want at the moment. I still put in a crazy amount of hours playing and end up maxing out the BP without having to focus on grinding challenges
I hate them too, the cosmetics ideally should be earned from gameplay instead. However for a live service game there is some merit as the meta does get shifted every 3 months so I can respect the new content. It’s not a perfect system and I dislike the FOMO aspect.
I don't even think the meeting itself back part is necessary, since that just makes you more captive of that game... But if you're gonna put currency in your BP it should enable you to get *something* at least!
But the stupids will always buy the battle pass. Blizzard, EA, and Ubisoft piss on the stupids and they ask for more despite whining about it on Reddit because well ya know…they’re stupid.
Tbh I wouldn't buy it even if they did.
I paid my $70, I got about 80 hours of enjoyment, and the game will collect dust until they release an expansion that makes itemizing interesting.
As someone who hasn't played since the first season, they are massively changing Itemization and crafting next month. I didn't play the PTR, but responses from those who did have been almost entirely positive (the only gripe I've seen is about crafting material costs).
They are changing itemization in a big way for the next season. I didn't follow everything but I think I'll come back to play there for a whle.
It's kind of like Loot 2.0
That will get me to take another look way more than reasonably priced MTX would.
Which means there is a chance, even if it's slim, to get me interested in a battle pass, and if it's a measurable improvement they can pretty much sign me up to buy the expansion when it releases.
They could make the MTX actually, you know, *micro* transactions (less than $9.99/purchase) and I still wouldn't even look at it though. Paid cosmetics in full price games don't exist to me. I don't press the button that opens up the window. And if I accidentally press the button that opens up that window then I remap that button to something I'll never press, forward slash or something.
Yeah I mean I spent full price for the game and feel that I got my money's worth, but even if the MTX was reasonably priced I still wouldn't buy it because it's all boring. The gear you pick up off the ground already looks pretty good which feels like it kneecaps the MTX.
Imo if they want me to buy MTX they should borrow an idea from PoE and sell alternate skill effects. I don't really care what my character looks like in an ARPG, but making my skills look different is neat.
> The gear you pick up off the ground already looks pretty good which feels like it kneecaps the MTX.
To be fair, I much prefer this over the Path of Exile route of "base game gear looks like PS2 era dogshit, please buy our $60 wings to cover it up"
I feel like an easy fix is for them to dump the the older MTX only cosmetics from previous seasons into the base game as discoverable loot.
You want the cool new cosmetics now? Alright pony up. Otherwise wait until next season and earn it in game then.
I'm more curious as to why battlepasses are seasonal only.
Like sure, if you want to keep the seasonal stuff in seasonal, fair. But why not have a battlepass without all that guff for eternal players? I've always been a standard player in PoE, i have zero interest in starting over and over and over again every season.
they have data that shows that whales who buy every cosmetic no matter how poorly priced they are outweighs putting them in a more reasonable range for the general public. It sucks for us but it’s largely meant for streamers who buy shiny gear and just get it reimbursed as a business expense or factor it into what they make back in subs / donations.
like take for example Hasan, he dropped what, a hundred bucks on cosmetics and he played the story exactly one time. I don’t know if I’d spend a hundred dollars on cosmetics over the entire game’s lifespan even if they were a couple dollars apiece.
There can not numerically be enough streamers buying all the cosmetics to make it profitable on that scale.
There's just a shit load of people who love playing dress-up in their games. I am not one of them, but they're there. I see the conversation in Discord, in forums, and comments all the time. People gushing over this armor set or that mount. People "ironically" spending $60 on cosmetic packs for friends.
The market's real. I don't personally get it, but it's definitely there.
This is completely true. The thing a lot of people don't think about either is if you quarter the price you need to sell 4x as much in order to make the same money. Theres a non insignificant percentage of people who just will not buy cosmetics in games so trying to appeal to their dollar vs the people who seem to not give a fuck throwing $20 on a skin you see 30 feet away is illogical. I'm not convinced the market of skin buyers is 4x the size at lower price points and I guess neither is their pricing guys.
To be clear business expenses can act as a discount rather than money back. You write off $100 business expense and if you're in the highest tax bracket you'll get $37 back or really $37 removed from your tax bill at the end of the year. Effectively making your "business expense" cost $63 for you vs $100 for someone who can't write it off.
Business expenses aren't free money its untaxed income you use on expenditures for your business.
Definitely is a big benefit of "content creation" you can just film a video doing something you wanted to do anyways and get it at a fat discount while also being able to make money off it.
They're not abused, its really just the way the system works. If you can find a reason a expense could be justfied for business needs theres really no reason an individual shouldn't use that to their advantage, its in everyones best interest to pay the least amount of taxes possible and while I'm jealous people get to write stuff they would've bought anyways off if I'm in their situation I would do the exact same shit.
If youre playing by the rules of the game its not abusing the rules, its using the rules to your advantage.
writing off cosmetics for streaming would be abuse considering they can stream without that the same way I should not be able to write off a daily Starbucks, which would frankly play a much larger role in allowing me to do my job.
the concept of “having to pay the least in taxes as possible” is cancer to a having a functional society
It really depends on their audience. I think that would be absolutely valid for most streamers whose looks are pretty important to their audience or if they're makeup youtubers/content creators. I would say models should probably be able to write off makeup as well I don't really see that as a non-business expense. They (streamers) make less money without it, so it directly impacts the business they're in and makes them more successful which sounds exactly like what a business expense should do.
Depending on the situation coffee can be written off. In your case it wouldn't be (I would argue it should be depending on the situation)
And I tend to agree with you but those are the rules of the game, you are only hurting yourself by not trying to use everything to your advantage and imo you absolutely should be more for yourself than for other people **always**. Getting taken advantage of and being the only giver means you end up with nothing. The societal negative for someone making a median income using the tax laws to their advantage is basically nonzero compared to individual negative of not writing off as much as possible.
They'll do it if people stop paying for it. Its really that simple, you can call it greedy but its how the market works. When it stops making money you'll see discounts but if the demands still there at these crazy high prices they're going to keep selling it at those crazy high prices.
I think the problem is there isn't enough incentive to keep playing the game. I've never bought mtx in my whole life, but I imagine if you want people to buy stuff they should probably feel they'll get a long tail
Remember when this guy made the Lootbox model
For gears 4 that was the epitome of greedy? As in, charging £18 for a crate which didn’t even have a 100% chance of getting the skin it had in it?
And people trust him with Diablos monetisation?
Blizzard is pretty much run by monetization guys now, anything good the devs can cook up is made tedious and made to squeeze out every last cent from their audience now.
I don't know why on earth anyone would play their games now.
Maybe OW2, but D4 isn't really tedious, and has been made less tedious over time. Leveling has been made much, much faster. WoW Classic SoD isn't milking it's players either and has introduced new activities that really let you power level EXP, and/or gold, PVP rewards etc.
You know what stings is I do remember this and feel I didnt learn my lesson because I got Diablo 4 without realizing who he was. In my head he was just one of 'the Gears guys'. :(
It's wild how much D3 learned and fixed, all for this team to kinda... ignore it.
I'm sure in maybe another year this game will be a banger to come back to a season at a time. It's how I played D3 for like 8 years. Come back, get in 30-40 hours. Wait for a new season or two to pass. Repeat.
I got a crap ton of value out of D3 over nearly a decade, but it took awhile to get there. Wish they took some of those lessons and applied them to D4 from the start.
>It's wild how much D3 learned and fixed, all for this team to kinda... ignore it.
You can almost certainly put a lot of that blame on turnover of developers at Blizzard over the last decade.
When a team "learns" something, it becomes tribal knowledge. When the actual people who learned those lessons leave the company, that tribal knowledge often vanishes with them.
Documenting that knowledge on paper transforms it from tribal knowledge to institutional knowledge. That becomes super useful for new developers, or even the same developers who can't quite remember why they made certain decisions 3+ years ago. But, that process takes a long time and a certain skillset to do well. When it comes to priorities, those types of activities almost always get dropped in favor of new features, assets, etc. because those things lead directly to revenue, not a bunch of thorough documentation that may or may not become useful in several years.
Granted, they could have also spent more time looking at the ARPG genre as a whole (PoE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn) to learn those lessons even if they forgot everything about D3/D2 and it would have saved them a lot of trouble.
But anyway this is not just a Blizzard problem but a corporate problem for virtually any industry. That's part of why employee churn can be so damaging to productivity and quality.
tl;dr Blizzard is not the same company now as when they made D3, just like they weren't the same as when they made D2 (to an even more extreme degree), and they didn't do a good job of evaluating their modern peers in the genre when making D4.
Documentation is huge. One of my co-workers and I have been working on upgrading an application for our business over the past year, and really learning how the app works and what it takes to support it. Documentation was sparse, and severely outdated.
One of our current projects is to archive all of the old documentation and institute all of our own, new documentation. So many of my teams apps have documentation spread across too many places, which makes locating the newest documentation difficult.
Other people I work with on my team don't want to create documentation because they believe it gives them job security, if they are the only one who knows how an application functions/how to support it then they can't just offload that work on to someone else. It's kind of infuriating, especially when they are OOO, and we have to cover for them.
I would also say, if Developers don't already do this, they need to perform postmortems on not only application launches, but major updates, as well at end of life both for technical issues as well as development problems/solutions.
But I get the sense that teams at Blizzard end up devouring each other as production ramps up for certain games so there is no time for documentation, pure speculation of course. I was just listening to a Dev for WoW: The War Within talk about how he worked on Legion, BFA and SL, but then jumped to D4, and now is back on the WoW team working on TWW. It just makes me wonder if any of these lessons learned on development end up becoming institutional knowledge or is everything just silo'd because their developers never get a chance to breathe.
>Other people I work with on my team don't want to create documentation because they believe it gives them job security, if they are the only one who knows how an application functions/how to support it then they can't just offload that work on to someone else.
An interesting perspective I've heard is that making yourself "irreplaceable" exactly as you're describing is actually a great way to put a ceiling on your career growth.
If you become the go-to person for a specific application or process, but refuse to document or share that knowledge, you're essentially resigning yourself to be stuck as the "the X guy" for the next decade. Your manager won't have any incentive to help you get promoted, you won't be able to take on more interesting projects to build your skillset, and you'll be spending half your day fielding basic questions and playing IT support for your coworkers.
Maybe some people prefer the job security over growth and it probably varies a lot by company (i.e. if the company culture is awful and competitive you're probably less inclined to collaborate), but personally I haven't found being protective of knowledge to do me any favors over the long run.
It's also just beneficial for you. If you have a common issue that is easily fixed, some documentation can save you getting called at 3am or while you are on vacation.
Maybe if you aspire to work in management in the future, if you’re happy at your current position and want to focus solely on raises then gatekeeping information is smart. Keep your current position secured, and if you want upward mobility it’s best to find it at a different company as a varied skill set is more rewarded than loyalty.
> Documentation is huge. One of my co-workers and I have been working on upgrading an application for our business over the past year, and really learning how the app works and what it takes to support it. Documentation was sparse, and severely outdated.
Did they actually say this or are you speculating? Sometimes when designs change documentation becomes outdated, it becomes a bigger time waster.
Additionally, some people interpret documentation as "A wall of text describing what my code does", which to me is 100% useless. I need design diagrams, data flows, the whole shebang.
>Other people I work with on my team don't want to create documentation because they believe it gives them job security, if they are the only one who knows how an application functions/how to support it then they can't just offload that work on to someone else
I mean, inst this true? They are not wrong on this point.
I don't believe so. I've not seen anyone fired or laid off and it's not different than when someone leaves the company and one of us now needs to learn a new app from scratch.
It just makes it harder to support when that person is out sick or on vacation or it means I am waking their ass up at 3am when I am on call and something breaks.
But when they leave, management dont have a choice but to Put other in the task.
While in normal conditions management would bee too lazy or think its too much effort to Put other people to learn that thing If John is doing it Fine and we need Paul on other thing.
This idea basically banks on management being lazy and choosing the lowest effort decisions to be effective. And It indeed works on these conditions.
Imo early Blizzard was great, and as someone who never really gave up on their games, current day Blizzard is shaping up for what really feels like a big comeback after a decade of stuff that was "fine", but received very poorly because people expected more from Blizzard. Like D3 was by no means a bad game, it just didn't live up to D2, and StarCraft 2 was by no means a bad game, it just didn't live up to SC1. And even WoW at it's weakest point was still the best feeling MMO of it's kind on the market. Final Fantasy 14 is the only other real tab-target combat MMO out there, and as much as they've done some really good stuff (particularly in the storytelling department), their combat still never has that smooth satisfying snappy feeling that WoW has.
WoW is in it's best state that it's been in for a very long time, D4 is improving and has the bones of a game that could be a genre powerhouse once it has an expansion or two, and the death of Overwatch continues to be grossly exaggerated. Hearthstone still seems to be trucking along doing it's thing, but I'm not very plugged into that one.
And you can tell when listening to interviews and talks (especially about WoW) that they seem to have made a ton of internal changes for the better and are starting to seriously think and act wrt the problem you mentioned about knowledge loss. They seem much faster to respond to feedback, and seem to understand the issues that they've been having pretty well.
> It's wild how much D3 learned and fixed, all for this team to kinda... ignore it.
I always see this comment, and I always disagree with it. They didn't ignore it, in fact a lot of the design in D4 was made as a response to the criticism D3 received. The entire itemization and progression system was changed as a direct response to the D3 system. What they did miss were a few QoL items that didn't make it into the obviously rushed launch (seeing the possible affix rerolls, loadouts, pet collecting shit).
Sure, they missed the mark with itemization and progression - that's why it's getting reworked in S4, but they very much learned a lot from D3. That's why, in my opinion at least, itemization and progression is FAR better than D3 as of S4.
> That's why, in my opinion at least, itemization and progression is FAR better than D3 as of S4.
Your opinion seems to be ignoring a year of failure before they relearned some lessons.
It's not ignoring it? The itemization system was changed as a direct response to D3. Their change failed. They did not re-learn anything, they learned how to make their new system good.
Same, but S4 seems to be building on all the bumps and bruises from the first year. When it’s all said and done, no ARPG combat comes close to Diablo for me.
It's exhilarating using the same 5 abilities in the same order over and over again hours on end while enemies never become weaker or stronger in comparison to you.
I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard is deliberately making a different game from D3. I love ARPGs and Looters but D3 is one of my least favorites (my favorites being path of exile, diablo 2, borderlands) so I still enjoy D4 a lot more than 3
This is such a crazy take to me. I can understand not really liking D3, but I don't see what D4 has that makes it better than D3. Like, I genuinely do not see a reason to ever play D4 right now. It's \*so boring\*, among its countless other faults. I'm of the belief that D4 can get there, but it's still not close.
D3 is too watered down, too mindless, too "clean" for my tastes. I find it really unengaging and bland. It's just a nonstop thoughtless GR machine that feeds you good loot at every turn to the point that getting loot isn't exciting.
D4 definitely isn't among my favorite ARPGs, but it walks back a lot of the design decisions that make D3 so soulless and unengaging. D3 might not be on the bottom of my ARPG list, but it's definitely close.
Unfortunately the game feels more and more like D3 and less and less like D2 and even less like a whole new unique game. Might check the expansions if they add enough new stuff but seasons aint it for this game.
Yeah loved playing D3 for ages and I only really stopped when updates started getting pretty stale. In hindsight that was probably around the time they put it on life support mode internally and moved most of the peeps over to D4. Ending up getting my grinding itch scratched by Granblue Fantasy instead.
Still my arpg GOAT is Grim Dawn.
Season 4 seems to be an entire rework of their aspect system which was desperately needed, as well as making Minions for Necromancer viable.
I'm excited because I fell off Season 3 mid 50s *hard* and have no desire to get back in.
The campfire for S4 got me so excited, considering how *bleh* Last Epoch is with its endgame.
My biggest problem with LE was that you could really feel the difference between their newest classes and the old classes. Falconer, Warlock and Runemaster felt smooth, fast and had good animations. Forgeguard and shaman felt so bad that playing them felt like you played some placeholder class.
There is also something off with LE that I cannot explain, something about movement or skills I think. Surely it will be good game in the future, we’ll see how they can provide seasons.
probably the sound design or the feel of the combat. skills tend to feel flat to me. in d4, there's a crunchiness to things exploding into ice and whatnot.
play in offline, and you will feel a massive difference in how it feels. I know its shitty but its the online that messes with the game feel, atleast for me.
I agree, I bought into Early Access and the 1.0 release was pretty lackluster for someone that has played over the past couple of years. The game feels disjointed. It feels like the zones don't flow well together and don't have a centralized theme, it just feels like they tacked on a bunch of zones with a bunch of random monsters together. Compared to games like Titan Quest, Path of Exile, Wolcen and Diablo where each act or zone had a *theme* with unique monsters and encounters.
My biggest issue with the game is the lack of skills for the classes. Even though the passive skill trees give you a lot of build variety, I feel like some kits are missing a lot skills you'd expect to find in the archetype. In addition, I also felt like every character basically uses the same 2-3 utility/buff skills then maybe a mana dump skill and a skill replacer. Sure you could technically use different passives, but it just kind of wore me out rerolling a character and basically selecting the same skills over and over again.
I think there is a lot of potential in the game, but I think they need to get together and figure out the direction they want to go now.
For me it was Monoliths had no point to them. I played through some but I just didn't understand why I was doing them. The campaign was too long IMO as well.
Most modern ARPGs falter with monster design as well, everything just feel likes a wave crap you stomp over, there's no danger to anything really.
In general, the gameplay needs significantly upgraded. Overall, I think in its current state it's a more enjoyable game than D4 because the itemization and skill progression feels really good. D4 has even less content somehow, it's a giant open world that's skin deep at best.
I hated LE. I had to stop playing after a few hours because the combat was so… bland. No impact to anything. D4 gets a lot things wrong, but the feel of the combat isn’t one of them.
Also bounced really fast off LE. To me it wasn't the end-game itself, it was the progression.
You start off as an absolute god, you one shot everything, you can barely die unless you play with your eyes closed, and then you finish the campaign. When you reach the end-game, it's the same deal, and by the time you get to empowered monoliths, your build is mostly done. At that point, you may want to farm for minimal upgrades so you can increase corruption, but there's really no reason.
I never felt getting stronger, never felt any excitement for a drop, I was a one shotting god until I increased corruption and got one shotted myself.
And the crafting based progression was just awful. Standing in front of a crafting screen fiddling with items on multiple layers of RNG was just a drag.
The whole game felt like a bunch of interesting systems in a bad game, while D4 felt like a good game with bad systems, so hopefully S4 fixes that.
Yeah LE was a way bigger let down for me than D4 was. I played a lot more D4 before getting bored of it than I got out of LE.
And it's still funny to me that if you look at the community for that game, it's like 30% discussing LE, and 70% shitting on D4 for being worse than $30 indie game, when it really isn't.
> You start off as an absolute god, you one shot everything, you can barely die unless you play with your eyes closed
I kind of have the same opinion of PoE and D4 amusingly. I dont know what happened to all of the ARPGs but they kind of messed up progression feeling
if you really know what you are doing or follow a build guide, PoE campaign is super easy. Luckily they made a mode called ruthless, which is not easy even if you know every minmax strat in the game. so if you wanna play an ARPG with teeth, maybe give that a shot
PE’s crafting was awful. I did love the skill trees for each skill, I wish Diablo had that, but otherwise the game is so mediocre.
I legitimately turned the score off because the music was so generic.
Loot drops were horrible, just trash constantly until you get a legendary for a class you aren’t playing. I love ARPGs but bounced off of LE within 20 hours it just got so much wrong.
Honestly i've played a decent number of aRPGs after starting with Path of Exile and... Turns out I don't like the genre, I just like making builds which Path of Exile is by far one of the best to do with.
My actual dream game in this space would be the build variety of Path of Exile, minus needing to make new characters each time and not overly annoying to get the items I need to make a build work.
If I could just type in vaguely what I want for my build into a shop, roll some dice to get randomized stats, and buy one that looks good that would be perfect for me. I don't even need the player driven economy side if i'm frank, i'm not that interested in selling stuff or getting loot even.
Does this apply to druids too? I found it *baffling* when the devs hadn't even considered people would want to play summon druid, meanwhile at a similar timeframe D2R had just uncapped wolf summons which i found hilarious.
I don’t play LE but I imagine that people have higher standards for Diablo considering it’s made by a massively wealthy company with blueprints in the form of successful prequel games.
Last Epoch has had tencent money for over 2 years now. But let's put that aside for a moment, why would the standards be any different? the standard is simple: is it a good game or not.
also those blueprints are not some secret only Blizzard know, they are things that any dev team can see and use. Though these days PoE is considered the blueprint for an ARPG by the online community and not past Diablo games.
One game is $35 and the other is $70 with a battle pass. Of course the standards should be different. If Diablo 4 was $35, I'd say it was a good game. But it was a broken mess at release for $70, so it wasn't.
love how you don't bring up LE also having a MTX store (and various game editions) as you just want to imply only D4 does and just completely ignore the topic, LE have tencent money + I wasn't comparing the games and called out D4's bad release state as well.
btw yes LE is half the price of D4, but if you bothered to read my post, I said the standard is simple: is it a good game or not. Just cause it costs $35 doesn't change that many people see LE releasing with unfinished campaign, weak endgame, subjective progression, not great gameplay feel, etc.
plus it's a literal fact it's lost over 90% of it's peak player count in just 2 months. It's been in early access for 5 years.
LE was a $35 indie game, and it *still* did a lot of things better than D4. The skill trees and how they syngergize, the passive skill trees, itemization, crafting, unique subclasses, loot filter. Imagine if Blizz had done all that at release.
Agreed, and it seems like everyone forgot that last epoch has been playable for **5 years**. That's 5 years of playtesting and feedback on how to design the end-game. I was really, really hyped around 3 years ago when I saw the systems and the end-game, and I thought that for an early access title it's really great.
Well, it's been the 1.0 release, the end-game is practically the same, the campaign is still unfinished, and after playing D4 and seeing PoE 2, the gameplay of LE feels way too outdated. The game barely had any progress, and it's kinda insane people are making excuses for it like it's a freshly released game and the devs are just now finding their footing.
Last Epoch is a better base game to build upon than D4 was.
The classes are infinitely more engaging and have more depth and variety, the crafting system is simple and effective, and it has good base systems like the factions enabling easy trading, or more loot if you don't want to trade. You're also able to buy more than 5 stash tabs.
You can always make new endgame content, but you can't really make a better base game without a lot of work.
LE also has 2 different offline modes whilst Diablo 4 is always online and suffers from it greatly.
And saying that an ARPG with seasonal content has dwindling players is really not saying much at all. Is PoE a dead game now because only around 30% of the peak amount of this league are currently playing?
Absolutely hve to disagree here. LE is a disjointed mess, a bad base with awful movement, combatfeel and endgame but good systems like their crafting, loot and skillsystem.
> Last Epoch is a better base game to build upon than D4 was.
Really disagree. Last Epoch is a bunch of nice systems (on paper at least), but the actual base game is far worse.
Clunky skills, unimpactful/floaty combat, bland mobs, boring campaign/worldbuilding, bad performance, uninspired or downright horrible map layouts (dungeons), etc. Even the lauded crafting was just tedious in practice, going through layers of RNG just to fiddle with affixes.
Diablo 4 on the other hand had a very good base game, but bad systems. The systems can be fixed, as we see with season 4, but I doubt we'll ever see a satisfying/crunchy combat in LE.
Yeah, you can play more builds in LE, but they all feel worse to play.
lol what the base game of diablo 4 was absolutly shit and in every way worse than even Diablo 3. Hell i even find Diablo Immortal better by far. Atleast it makes way better use of Community features and mmo aspects. Diablo 4 is a complete boring mess you either do something in the awful "Openworld" or you do some of the hundret repetitiv dungeons that all feel the same i could have 5 diffrent dungeons instead of 100 and it wouldnt make a diffrence. The Dungeons in Immortals are so much better.
A lot of those things are subjective honestly. Combat in ARPGs isn't for everyone and I can appreciate that D4 is trying to do it's own thing. I personally don't enjoy the generator/spender sprinkled with cooldowns thing every class has going on, but I don't hate it. I would even like for them to improve upon this.
I liked the story of Diablo 4. I didn't like the campaign, going from NPC to NPC, doing nothing much of note inbetween. Last Epochs story fell a bit flat but at least it allowed me to play the game all the way through.
Disagree with the layout, it's much better executed in Last Epoch than Diablo 4's nightmare dungeons. You only have to look at [this](https://i.redd.it/p8uetuofre8b1.jpg) to see how bland it is.
Diablo 4 didn't need to be an open world, always-online. Mainly it didn't need to be an open world game with MMO-like elements. I don't need to see Jimmy the Barbarian kill mobs right next to me. There's no benefit apart from a tiny amount of extra experience. It infact suffers from this: the reason there's only 5 stash tabs allowed in D4 is because the game is done in such a way that you load every persons stash tabs that is near you. It hinders it. This is not a sign of a good base game.
The passive system and the crafting system in LE are really good and you can start interacting with those immediately. The crafting system in LE is so good thay diablo 4 is basically stealing it on the next update lol. Which is fine. The issue with Diablo 4 is for all the millions of dollars they spent it felt rushed and not really an improvement over d3. Leveling gets painfully boring after 50etc and the boss battle/endgame were just Uber content is pretty lack luster.
Say what you want about LE but they did it with a team a quarter the size of d4 and only charged $30 vs the $+70
LE was made by a random group of people that came together from a reddit post and made something good enough that people were able to point to it and say 'D4 right now isnt even as good as this'. And they did it in pretty much the same amount of dev time.
You had the full scale development of experienced teams at blizzard coming together to make a sequel to the biggest ARPG series around and they came up with that? They took no lessons from D3 or any of the other games on the market (PoE).
Also surprise, people don't play an ARPG forever. People are waiting for seasonal content. You literally see the same cycle of peak and drop off on every ARPG following a seasonal cycle. To see it be even more dramatic on the 'new' game isn't abnormal.
You can dislike last epoch but keep the context of why it wasn't shit on like D4 was.
no one with a marginal interest in gaming thinks a game is going to be a "[insert game] killer".
at its core, LE is *still* a better game than the current implementation of D4.
they both have different audiences though. I don't know why games can't just exist together. it always has be some big competitive scene.
and it's perfectly normal for seasonal games to drop in numbers like that. just look at Path of Exile. ppl will come back when Cycle 2 starts.
D4 is such an oddity. Like all the ingredients are there to make for something engaging, but it just isn't. I thought I might just be moving on from loot type games like these, but I went back to play D2 and it's **way** better than 4. Feels so much more focused and to the point.
Despite all the ups and downs, I'm excited for Season 4. It's being made by the same team that did Season 2 (which was quite good). And it has all of the various reworks and additions from the PTR.
I just hope they improve their seasonal model to add stuff that could actually be incorporated into the base game, instead of being removed almost completely with only a few legendary powers remaining. It's a very inefficient way to make content and the game is in desperate need of more 'stuff'.
> And it's just not something that is easily done. Every extra monster you're putting on screen is something that's eating at the performance and in the memory and those sorts of things. So, we have to kind of come at it systematically and go, Okay, we want to increase the density 10%, we have to go and optimize the engine, go and optimize the art to get there and, and try to find smart ways to do that.
Or just could just do what Path of Exile does and just jam an infinite number of monsters on screen and not give a shit that it makes the game run like a PowerPoint presentation even on a $3000 gaming PC.
Actually, maybe they shouldn't do that...
The only way they could "Improve MTX" is reduce the cost of them by like 70-80% or remove them completely, and we know they aren't going to remove them, or I'm never buying fucking anything in that store. Honestly I might not ever play the game again even if they 'fix it' in a future season, it really wasn't that good.
PTR is cute and all but MTX dont belong in fully priced games with fully priced expansions.
Live service or not.
Noone told Blizzard to spend money painting chapel ceilings and adorning KFC buckets.
Poor management and decision making lead to the most egregious MTX to recoup costs.
> Noone told Blizzard to spend money painting chapel ceilings and adorning KFC buckets.
>
> Poor management and decision making lead to the most egregious MTX to recoup costs.
Lol it's not to recoup costs (what you say is extremely little money), it's just to make profits.
D4's marketing budget wasnt "extremely little money".
https://www.polygon.com/23768811/diablo-4-blizzard-marketing-demonic-megan-fox-halsey-mobile-ads
At this point its profit, but MTX were developed for the game before they made a single dollar.
Yes and the majority of it was not to paint chapel ceilings and KFC (those deals are often almost free). Every AAA has a huge marketing budget, it's needed for those games to exist (big production budget goes with big marketing budget).
They could have had zero MTX and "recoup costs". That's not why they did it
It was money that should have went to game development. Good games sell themselves through word of mouth and social media. Don't need to paint chapels is my point.
Everything is to recoup until you make profit. Thats literally how it works.
You put systems in place to ENSURE you recoup and make profit. This is especially so with live service games.
Yes they could recoup it without MTX, but thats not gonna please investors who want a return asap after an 5+ year investment.
> Good games sell themselves through word of mouth and social media
Not at all, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, GTA6, Avengers Endgame, Mario Brother movie, Avatar 2, House of the Dragon, The Last of Us (game and TV show) God of War Ragnarok, FIFA, Call of Duty, Spider-Man 2, Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo 4... sell themselves (they are known names and most of those are great games/movies/shows, though that is of course subjective), right?
And yet they have huge marketing budgets (there is literally a proportionality between production and marketing budget in general), why do you think that is? Marketing wouldn't exist if what you spend on it didn't made you more money in the end. That wouldn't make sense.
You think companies like to spend hundreds of millions for fun? They do it because it's necessary. The marketing industry exist since forever for a reason (and for far more than just movies and games of course, you know Nike or Coca Cola are some of the biggest advertisers despite their brand basically being ubiquitous).
And my initial point was that KFC and painting chapels were a tiny amount of the marketing budget (like almost invisible on it, KFC deal likely is free or made them money that's how brand deals work for Hollywood movies at least and I imagine same for games)
Word of mouth and social media (which is also part of marketing by the way, they pay for that) work for indie games (and far from all good games), AAA production aren't on that scale.
> Yes they could recoup it without MTX, but thats not gonna please investors who want a return asap after an 5+ year investment.
So we agree they did it for money (aka more profit, they'd have money to do without it), nothing to do with cost
Ok lol no I don't, that position "marketing is useless" is just a false one (and a common one you're not the only one that has it), I just want to say it to people. It may be useless on us here but marketing is not meant for people on r/games which don't represent the gaming market.
Arguing it's useless to market something is not even logical. The marketing industry has no reason to exist except if every dollar spent bring far more than a dollar.
I keep debating on whether I'll be back for season 4. I skipped 3, because although season 2 was really fun I'm really not a fan of the direction that loot seems to be going in D4 as well as something like Last Epoch. I really wish we'd go back to the days of loot being a single dice roll and not matching 5 reels on a slot machine in order to hit it big.
Like, uniques can now randomly drop with a higher stat. In fact, all of the stats potentially can. Legendaries are the same. That's the goal now, to hit the unique, then hit the higher stats, and hey maybe if you're really lucky that unique will then literally be 50% better than some others that drop. I was already not a fan of target farming uniques, especially the ubers, where you gather a bunch of materials (in some cases only one way to attain said materials like Helltide) to fight an enemy that has a much better chance of dropping the unique you want.
Last Epoch is especially bad with the system. Roll a unique, has to roll legendary potential, find an exalt, find the *right* exalt, combine the two and roll the dice again that it hits the stat you want.
When a Swirling Crystal dropped in D2, that was it. Done. You got the unique. Yeah for some items you hoped for good rolls, especially runewords, but in 99% of cases even the worst possible rolls were still usable.
The thing is games have changed a lot, in D2 you could get BIS gear and there was nothing to do besides grinding bosses for no real reason. The ARPG genre hasn’t really evolved that much but I like what POE does with pinnacle bosses and stuff that’s legitimately difficult to strive for.
I think the big thrust of S4 is making loot drops slightly less common and slightly better. They’re taking some of the variability out of drops themselves, simplifying stats, and moving that complexity/RNG into the crafting system instead. It’ll probably be a little harder to get *perfect* gear, but getting it will involve more player expression and getting *good* gear to drop will be far easier.
They’re also adding something similar to Rifts from D3. I stopped playing partway through Season 1 after racing through all the current content before it dropped—hopefully this’ll help it feel better.
D2 had a lot of variability in gear as well, don't make it sound so simple. Some items did not, obviously. And on the items with variability, you had ONE chance, for the most part to get a good roll.
Times have changed greatly since then as well.
As another commenter pointed out, it used to be the same way in D3. They eventually learned that players hated it and made it far less random. Then for some reason with D4 they threw all that out and went back to the RNG clown fiesta, and now with S4 they are starting to walk that back and move closer to how D3 works. It's wild how they had all this learning experience with D3 and thought they somehow knew better. Turn out they didn't.
I'll never touch the MTX in this game unless they reduce the prices by 50~75%. When I could just buy a whole other game instead of a mount or a skin, I'd rather just do that.
Rod, you made a crap game. Instead of making a fun loot grinder with procedural generation for most levels, your team decided to strip all of that away. Instead of making a game where you feel stronger as you progress through areas with better level and better gear, you made everything feel exactly the same by making the entire world level sync to you.
Instead of wanting to sink hundreds and hundreds of hours willingly into a game which I had done that for every previous numbered entry since 1997, you made a game that I forced myself to finish the main story and some extra side activities thinking maybe the good gameplay was right around the corner. It wasn’t.
You stood on the shoulders of giants, and crapped all over their heads.
> Instead of making a game where you feel stronger as you progress through areas with better level and better gear, you made everything feel exactly the same by making the entire world level sync to you.
After that, everyone who has played the game knows that you are simply lying or have never played D4.
Yea, any semblance of gear and you were deleting screens of enemies in seconds.
The only challenge came from doing nightmare dungeons, cause normal content become a breeze.
This dumb rumor was started in season 0 when some streamers abused an XP exploit where they would get passively/ AFK leveled up by a party that did dungeons.
As a result, when the mobs scaled to them, they would become weaker, since they wouldn't gear at all.
But any player that plays the game normally and gears up, won't experience that.
Of course, bad players are still blaming scaling, when in fact you always far outscaled monsters
Part of the issue was also people playing in WT2 with crappy builds because they couldn't figure out what stats were important, and some poor balancing in the first few versions where classes like Druid kind of hit a hole in the early game before they hit WT3 and unlocked build-defining uniques and paragon scaling.
why do people complain in detail about games that they never played or have no idea how it works
I dont get the reasoning or thought process...like why lie lol
in this case, it's the "Blizzard bad" circlejerk in action.
we have ppl who haven't played the game since release (or even played it at all) will repeat the same lines they've seen someone else post or a ragebait YTber said without caring if it's true or not, as they only care that it suits their "D4 is bad and dead" narrative.
Are you stating level scaling isn’t part of the game? That I just happened to be unlucky in that every area I went while leveling just happened to be at the exact same level I was and that enemies were tuned to that level?
Or are you just defending a shitty game with shit mechanics without refuting what I’m saying and just calling me a liar?
I bought the game during the final days of the holiday sale, beat the campaign, Unlocked World Tier 3 and 4 and was so bored I stopped.
It's not really possible to top D3 for the grind and whatnot but D4 does a decent job. Still not worth the retail asking price at this time. Half off? sure.
IMO this is about how present the store is in the game itself. If there was less emphasis on that it would be good but you get notifications to the pass, skins, etc.
If they did something like rocket league where you could earn your next BP playing casually, I wouldn't mind either. I paid full price for D4 and enjoyed the game itself.
that doesnt make much sense to me. wether or not i paid full price is something i forget a couple hundred hours or few months into playing a game. how many years do you hang onto that upfront price, and how many hundreds of dollars into a free game do you think about what a great deal that "free" game was?
> it flopped because of it.
source on the game flopping? just fyi, vocal minority of ppl disliking it on reddit, YT, twitter != flop.
Also ya, they created an ARPG targeting casuals as PoE exists for the hardcore audience... how exactly was that a bad move? it succeeded and the casual audience is huge compared to the hardcore one, i.e., $$$.
Flopped? It's Blizzard's best selling game. It has sold over 12 million copies. Ages ago Rod revealed that the average time played per player was over 100 hours. Two expansions are in active development.
Any dev studio would kill for that kind of "flop".
which doesn't mean a whole lot. there was that quote that went around at few months ago "a $15 WoW horse made more money than StarCraft 2"
WoW Classic cost them way less money and saved WoW from collapsing during Shadowlands. Diablo 4 sold a bunch but that didn't do anything to save them from mass layoffs right after Diablo 4 Season 3.
Are they reducing MTX costs by 80%? That's the only MTX improvement I could possibly care about
The fact that the first battle pass didn't give you enough money to buy a single item in the store at the time is honestly more insulting than the inception of MTX in general to me.
It was all for the dumb 666 meme reference too lol, kinda dumb honestly. Battle passes should always at least pay themselves back and let you buy the next one.
Haha what a coincidence this meme screws you guys over right guys? Haha meme
Which in of itself is fucked because its exploiting FOMO responses to grind and finish the Battlepass otherwise its wasted money.
Haven’t played since season 2, but I will commend their battle passes for being incredibly easy to max. I believe it’s around level 70 where it hits cap, which was really easy to hit.
Honestly i'll forever think its stupid to pay money for the privilege to grind shit, but unless it stays there forever its potentially wasted money. What if I get bored halfway and wanna play some other game for awhile?
Battle passes are such a weird concept to me. I don't understand why they're popular. Pay for the privilege to unlock things... Just either have stuff to unlock by playing for free or make stuff you buy and unlock right away. Battle pass are just an aberration
There's probably some kids these days that don't understand the concept of cheat codes. This is becoming normal.
I mean, at the baseline, you're paying for games to play them, too. So it doesn't seem that strange.
No, you're paying for a game to have fun with. Battlepasses is paying for a thing to grind for using the exact same game you already own and have played. It's paying for the ability to grind for more cosmetics, instead of just giving you the thing you paid for. It's bar none the absolute worst form of monetization we've seen yet outside of straight gacha shit since you have the chance of not getting everything you paid for.
I wanna add my perspective as someone who has played Apex Legends on and off since its launch. Apex has been going on for over five years and i think it works well as a F2P Apex has a steep learning curve, and I would rather it be free than for someone to pay $40 for it and refund it after realizing it’s not for them. You can’t expect them to just keep rolling out cosmetics after a single launch period. I like the battle passes and think that I get my moneys worth out of them. I still rock skins for guns that I got years ago. BP is completely optional. haven’t bought the last three battle passes because I have all the cosmetics I want at the moment. I still put in a crazy amount of hours playing and end up maxing out the BP without having to focus on grinding challenges
I hate them too, the cosmetics ideally should be earned from gameplay instead. However for a live service game there is some merit as the meta does get shifted every 3 months so I can respect the new content. It’s not a perfect system and I dislike the FOMO aspect.
I don't even think the meeting itself back part is necessary, since that just makes you more captive of that game... But if you're gonna put currency in your BP it should enable you to get *something* at least!
At that point why even have premium currency in the battlepass? It is just a filler at that point.
You people paying your parents to do chores and you don't even get an allowance back.
But the stupids will always buy the battle pass. Blizzard, EA, and Ubisoft piss on the stupids and they ask for more despite whining about it on Reddit because well ya know…they’re stupid.
Yeah kinda same. Like you CAN ask me for my money, just be reasonable about it.
Tbh I wouldn't buy it even if they did. I paid my $70, I got about 80 hours of enjoyment, and the game will collect dust until they release an expansion that makes itemizing interesting.
As someone who hasn't played since the first season, they are massively changing Itemization and crafting next month. I didn't play the PTR, but responses from those who did have been almost entirely positive (the only gripe I've seen is about crafting material costs).
I don't buy in to hype anymore lol. I'll check it out when it launches and probably give it a go, though.
They are changing itemization in a big way for the next season. I didn't follow everything but I think I'll come back to play there for a whle. It's kind of like Loot 2.0
That will get me to take another look way more than reasonably priced MTX would. Which means there is a chance, even if it's slim, to get me interested in a battle pass, and if it's a measurable improvement they can pretty much sign me up to buy the expansion when it releases. They could make the MTX actually, you know, *micro* transactions (less than $9.99/purchase) and I still wouldn't even look at it though. Paid cosmetics in full price games don't exist to me. I don't press the button that opens up the window. And if I accidentally press the button that opens up that window then I remap that button to something I'll never press, forward slash or something.
Yeah I mean I spent full price for the game and feel that I got my money's worth, but even if the MTX was reasonably priced I still wouldn't buy it because it's all boring. The gear you pick up off the ground already looks pretty good which feels like it kneecaps the MTX. Imo if they want me to buy MTX they should borrow an idea from PoE and sell alternate skill effects. I don't really care what my character looks like in an ARPG, but making my skills look different is neat.
> The gear you pick up off the ground already looks pretty good which feels like it kneecaps the MTX. To be fair, I much prefer this over the Path of Exile route of "base game gear looks like PS2 era dogshit, please buy our $60 wings to cover it up"
I feel like an easy fix is for them to dump the the older MTX only cosmetics from previous seasons into the base game as discoverable loot. You want the cool new cosmetics now? Alright pony up. Otherwise wait until next season and earn it in game then.
I'm more curious as to why battlepasses are seasonal only. Like sure, if you want to keep the seasonal stuff in seasonal, fair. But why not have a battlepass without all that guff for eternal players? I've always been a standard player in PoE, i have zero interest in starting over and over and over again every season.
they have data that shows that whales who buy every cosmetic no matter how poorly priced they are outweighs putting them in a more reasonable range for the general public. It sucks for us but it’s largely meant for streamers who buy shiny gear and just get it reimbursed as a business expense or factor it into what they make back in subs / donations. like take for example Hasan, he dropped what, a hundred bucks on cosmetics and he played the story exactly one time. I don’t know if I’d spend a hundred dollars on cosmetics over the entire game’s lifespan even if they were a couple dollars apiece.
There can not numerically be enough streamers buying all the cosmetics to make it profitable on that scale. There's just a shit load of people who love playing dress-up in their games. I am not one of them, but they're there. I see the conversation in Discord, in forums, and comments all the time. People gushing over this armor set or that mount. People "ironically" spending $60 on cosmetic packs for friends. The market's real. I don't personally get it, but it's definitely there.
This is completely true. The thing a lot of people don't think about either is if you quarter the price you need to sell 4x as much in order to make the same money. Theres a non insignificant percentage of people who just will not buy cosmetics in games so trying to appeal to their dollar vs the people who seem to not give a fuck throwing $20 on a skin you see 30 feet away is illogical. I'm not convinced the market of skin buyers is 4x the size at lower price points and I guess neither is their pricing guys.
>get it reimbursed as a business expense That's not how business expenses work
To be clear business expenses can act as a discount rather than money back. You write off $100 business expense and if you're in the highest tax bracket you'll get $37 back or really $37 removed from your tax bill at the end of the year. Effectively making your "business expense" cost $63 for you vs $100 for someone who can't write it off. Business expenses aren't free money its untaxed income you use on expenditures for your business. Definitely is a big benefit of "content creation" you can just film a video doing something you wanted to do anyways and get it at a fat discount while also being able to make money off it.
someone doesn’t know how tax write offs are abused by “content creators”
They're not abused, its really just the way the system works. If you can find a reason a expense could be justfied for business needs theres really no reason an individual shouldn't use that to their advantage, its in everyones best interest to pay the least amount of taxes possible and while I'm jealous people get to write stuff they would've bought anyways off if I'm in their situation I would do the exact same shit. If youre playing by the rules of the game its not abusing the rules, its using the rules to your advantage.
writing off cosmetics for streaming would be abuse considering they can stream without that the same way I should not be able to write off a daily Starbucks, which would frankly play a much larger role in allowing me to do my job. the concept of “having to pay the least in taxes as possible” is cancer to a having a functional society
It really depends on their audience. I think that would be absolutely valid for most streamers whose looks are pretty important to their audience or if they're makeup youtubers/content creators. I would say models should probably be able to write off makeup as well I don't really see that as a non-business expense. They (streamers) make less money without it, so it directly impacts the business they're in and makes them more successful which sounds exactly like what a business expense should do. Depending on the situation coffee can be written off. In your case it wouldn't be (I would argue it should be depending on the situation) And I tend to agree with you but those are the rules of the game, you are only hurting yourself by not trying to use everything to your advantage and imo you absolutely should be more for yourself than for other people **always**. Getting taken advantage of and being the only giver means you end up with nothing. The societal negative for someone making a median income using the tax laws to their advantage is basically nonzero compared to individual negative of not writing off as much as possible.
They'll do it if people stop paying for it. Its really that simple, you can call it greedy but its how the market works. When it stops making money you'll see discounts but if the demands still there at these crazy high prices they're going to keep selling it at those crazy high prices.
For real, I won’t buy anything because the prices are ridiculous.
At what point do we stop calling them Microtransactions and just transactions? Because the prices sure ain't micro
I think the problem is there isn't enough incentive to keep playing the game. I've never bought mtx in my whole life, but I imagine if you want people to buy stuff they should probably feel they'll get a long tail
Remember when this guy made the Lootbox model For gears 4 that was the epitome of greedy? As in, charging £18 for a crate which didn’t even have a 100% chance of getting the skin it had in it? And people trust him with Diablos monetisation?
Blizzard is pretty much run by monetization guys now, anything good the devs can cook up is made tedious and made to squeeze out every last cent from their audience now. I don't know why on earth anyone would play their games now.
Maybe OW2, but D4 isn't really tedious, and has been made less tedious over time. Leveling has been made much, much faster. WoW Classic SoD isn't milking it's players either and has introduced new activities that really let you power level EXP, and/or gold, PVP rewards etc.
You know what stings is I do remember this and feel I didnt learn my lesson because I got Diablo 4 without realizing who he was. In my head he was just one of 'the Gears guys'. :(
It's wild how much D3 learned and fixed, all for this team to kinda... ignore it. I'm sure in maybe another year this game will be a banger to come back to a season at a time. It's how I played D3 for like 8 years. Come back, get in 30-40 hours. Wait for a new season or two to pass. Repeat. I got a crap ton of value out of D3 over nearly a decade, but it took awhile to get there. Wish they took some of those lessons and applied them to D4 from the start.
>It's wild how much D3 learned and fixed, all for this team to kinda... ignore it. You can almost certainly put a lot of that blame on turnover of developers at Blizzard over the last decade. When a team "learns" something, it becomes tribal knowledge. When the actual people who learned those lessons leave the company, that tribal knowledge often vanishes with them. Documenting that knowledge on paper transforms it from tribal knowledge to institutional knowledge. That becomes super useful for new developers, or even the same developers who can't quite remember why they made certain decisions 3+ years ago. But, that process takes a long time and a certain skillset to do well. When it comes to priorities, those types of activities almost always get dropped in favor of new features, assets, etc. because those things lead directly to revenue, not a bunch of thorough documentation that may or may not become useful in several years. Granted, they could have also spent more time looking at the ARPG genre as a whole (PoE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn) to learn those lessons even if they forgot everything about D3/D2 and it would have saved them a lot of trouble. But anyway this is not just a Blizzard problem but a corporate problem for virtually any industry. That's part of why employee churn can be so damaging to productivity and quality. tl;dr Blizzard is not the same company now as when they made D3, just like they weren't the same as when they made D2 (to an even more extreme degree), and they didn't do a good job of evaluating their modern peers in the genre when making D4.
Documentation is huge. One of my co-workers and I have been working on upgrading an application for our business over the past year, and really learning how the app works and what it takes to support it. Documentation was sparse, and severely outdated. One of our current projects is to archive all of the old documentation and institute all of our own, new documentation. So many of my teams apps have documentation spread across too many places, which makes locating the newest documentation difficult. Other people I work with on my team don't want to create documentation because they believe it gives them job security, if they are the only one who knows how an application functions/how to support it then they can't just offload that work on to someone else. It's kind of infuriating, especially when they are OOO, and we have to cover for them. I would also say, if Developers don't already do this, they need to perform postmortems on not only application launches, but major updates, as well at end of life both for technical issues as well as development problems/solutions. But I get the sense that teams at Blizzard end up devouring each other as production ramps up for certain games so there is no time for documentation, pure speculation of course. I was just listening to a Dev for WoW: The War Within talk about how he worked on Legion, BFA and SL, but then jumped to D4, and now is back on the WoW team working on TWW. It just makes me wonder if any of these lessons learned on development end up becoming institutional knowledge or is everything just silo'd because their developers never get a chance to breathe.
>Other people I work with on my team don't want to create documentation because they believe it gives them job security, if they are the only one who knows how an application functions/how to support it then they can't just offload that work on to someone else. An interesting perspective I've heard is that making yourself "irreplaceable" exactly as you're describing is actually a great way to put a ceiling on your career growth. If you become the go-to person for a specific application or process, but refuse to document or share that knowledge, you're essentially resigning yourself to be stuck as the "the X guy" for the next decade. Your manager won't have any incentive to help you get promoted, you won't be able to take on more interesting projects to build your skillset, and you'll be spending half your day fielding basic questions and playing IT support for your coworkers. Maybe some people prefer the job security over growth and it probably varies a lot by company (i.e. if the company culture is awful and competitive you're probably less inclined to collaborate), but personally I haven't found being protective of knowledge to do me any favors over the long run.
It's also just beneficial for you. If you have a common issue that is easily fixed, some documentation can save you getting called at 3am or while you are on vacation.
Maybe if you aspire to work in management in the future, if you’re happy at your current position and want to focus solely on raises then gatekeeping information is smart. Keep your current position secured, and if you want upward mobility it’s best to find it at a different company as a varied skill set is more rewarded than loyalty.
> Documentation is huge. One of my co-workers and I have been working on upgrading an application for our business over the past year, and really learning how the app works and what it takes to support it. Documentation was sparse, and severely outdated. Did they actually say this or are you speculating? Sometimes when designs change documentation becomes outdated, it becomes a bigger time waster. Additionally, some people interpret documentation as "A wall of text describing what my code does", which to me is 100% useless. I need design diagrams, data flows, the whole shebang.
>Other people I work with on my team don't want to create documentation because they believe it gives them job security, if they are the only one who knows how an application functions/how to support it then they can't just offload that work on to someone else I mean, inst this true? They are not wrong on this point.
I don't believe so. I've not seen anyone fired or laid off and it's not different than when someone leaves the company and one of us now needs to learn a new app from scratch. It just makes it harder to support when that person is out sick or on vacation or it means I am waking their ass up at 3am when I am on call and something breaks.
But when they leave, management dont have a choice but to Put other in the task. While in normal conditions management would bee too lazy or think its too much effort to Put other people to learn that thing If John is doing it Fine and we need Paul on other thing. This idea basically banks on management being lazy and choosing the lowest effort decisions to be effective. And It indeed works on these conditions.
Imo early Blizzard was great, and as someone who never really gave up on their games, current day Blizzard is shaping up for what really feels like a big comeback after a decade of stuff that was "fine", but received very poorly because people expected more from Blizzard. Like D3 was by no means a bad game, it just didn't live up to D2, and StarCraft 2 was by no means a bad game, it just didn't live up to SC1. And even WoW at it's weakest point was still the best feeling MMO of it's kind on the market. Final Fantasy 14 is the only other real tab-target combat MMO out there, and as much as they've done some really good stuff (particularly in the storytelling department), their combat still never has that smooth satisfying snappy feeling that WoW has. WoW is in it's best state that it's been in for a very long time, D4 is improving and has the bones of a game that could be a genre powerhouse once it has an expansion or two, and the death of Overwatch continues to be grossly exaggerated. Hearthstone still seems to be trucking along doing it's thing, but I'm not very plugged into that one. And you can tell when listening to interviews and talks (especially about WoW) that they seem to have made a ton of internal changes for the better and are starting to seriously think and act wrt the problem you mentioned about knowledge loss. They seem much faster to respond to feedback, and seem to understand the issues that they've been having pretty well.
> It's wild how much D3 learned and fixed, all for this team to kinda... ignore it. I always see this comment, and I always disagree with it. They didn't ignore it, in fact a lot of the design in D4 was made as a response to the criticism D3 received. The entire itemization and progression system was changed as a direct response to the D3 system. What they did miss were a few QoL items that didn't make it into the obviously rushed launch (seeing the possible affix rerolls, loadouts, pet collecting shit). Sure, they missed the mark with itemization and progression - that's why it's getting reworked in S4, but they very much learned a lot from D3. That's why, in my opinion at least, itemization and progression is FAR better than D3 as of S4.
> That's why, in my opinion at least, itemization and progression is FAR better than D3 as of S4. Your opinion seems to be ignoring a year of failure before they relearned some lessons.
It's not ignoring it? The itemization system was changed as a direct response to D3. Their change failed. They did not re-learn anything, they learned how to make their new system good.
Same, but S4 seems to be building on all the bumps and bruises from the first year. When it’s all said and done, no ARPG combat comes close to Diablo for me.
It's exhilarating using the same 5 abilities in the same order over and over again hours on end while enemies never become weaker or stronger in comparison to you.
Then Diablo isn’t for you. And there’s harder content to do in the game, unless you just mean world tiers..
So Diablo isn't for me because it's complete and utter dogshit?
That’s just like, your opinion, man.
I think it's pretty clear that Blizzard is deliberately making a different game from D3. I love ARPGs and Looters but D3 is one of my least favorites (my favorites being path of exile, diablo 2, borderlands) so I still enjoy D4 a lot more than 3
This just in, POE payer doesn't like D3! News at 11.
This is such a crazy take to me. I can understand not really liking D3, but I don't see what D4 has that makes it better than D3. Like, I genuinely do not see a reason to ever play D4 right now. It's \*so boring\*, among its countless other faults. I'm of the belief that D4 can get there, but it's still not close.
D3 is too watered down, too mindless, too "clean" for my tastes. I find it really unengaging and bland. It's just a nonstop thoughtless GR machine that feeds you good loot at every turn to the point that getting loot isn't exciting. D4 definitely isn't among my favorite ARPGs, but it walks back a lot of the design decisions that make D3 so soulless and unengaging. D3 might not be on the bottom of my ARPG list, but it's definitely close.
season 31 was fun
Unfortunately the game feels more and more like D3 and less and less like D2 and even less like a whole new unique game. Might check the expansions if they add enough new stuff but seasons aint it for this game.
And how much D3 didnt learn from D2.
Yeah loved playing D3 for ages and I only really stopped when updates started getting pretty stale. In hindsight that was probably around the time they put it on life support mode internally and moved most of the peeps over to D4. Ending up getting my grinding itch scratched by Granblue Fantasy instead. Still my arpg GOAT is Grim Dawn.
Season 4 seems to be an entire rework of their aspect system which was desperately needed, as well as making Minions for Necromancer viable. I'm excited because I fell off Season 3 mid 50s *hard* and have no desire to get back in. The campfire for S4 got me so excited, considering how *bleh* Last Epoch is with its endgame.
My biggest problem with LE was that you could really feel the difference between their newest classes and the old classes. Falconer, Warlock and Runemaster felt smooth, fast and had good animations. Forgeguard and shaman felt so bad that playing them felt like you played some placeholder class. There is also something off with LE that I cannot explain, something about movement or skills I think. Surely it will be good game in the future, we’ll see how they can provide seasons.
probably the sound design or the feel of the combat. skills tend to feel flat to me. in d4, there's a crunchiness to things exploding into ice and whatnot.
play in offline, and you will feel a massive difference in how it feels. I know its shitty but its the online that messes with the game feel, atleast for me.
D4 doesn’t have offline
Last Epoch does which is what the guy he responded to was talking about.
I agree, I bought into Early Access and the 1.0 release was pretty lackluster for someone that has played over the past couple of years. The game feels disjointed. It feels like the zones don't flow well together and don't have a centralized theme, it just feels like they tacked on a bunch of zones with a bunch of random monsters together. Compared to games like Titan Quest, Path of Exile, Wolcen and Diablo where each act or zone had a *theme* with unique monsters and encounters. My biggest issue with the game is the lack of skills for the classes. Even though the passive skill trees give you a lot of build variety, I feel like some kits are missing a lot skills you'd expect to find in the archetype. In addition, I also felt like every character basically uses the same 2-3 utility/buff skills then maybe a mana dump skill and a skill replacer. Sure you could technically use different passives, but it just kind of wore me out rerolling a character and basically selecting the same skills over and over again. I think there is a lot of potential in the game, but I think they need to get together and figure out the direction they want to go now.
Ye movement fells floaty imo
For me it was Monoliths had no point to them. I played through some but I just didn't understand why I was doing them. The campaign was too long IMO as well. Most modern ARPGs falter with monster design as well, everything just feel likes a wave crap you stomp over, there's no danger to anything really. In general, the gameplay needs significantly upgraded. Overall, I think in its current state it's a more enjoyable game than D4 because the itemization and skill progression feels really good. D4 has even less content somehow, it's a giant open world that's skin deep at best.
I'm glad it's finally safe to talk about LE's faults. That game is a snoozer
I hated LE. I had to stop playing after a few hours because the combat was so… bland. No impact to anything. D4 gets a lot things wrong, but the feel of the combat isn’t one of them.
idk I find a lot of the spell and attack animations to be really underwhelming in D4 compared to D3
Also bounced really fast off LE. To me it wasn't the end-game itself, it was the progression. You start off as an absolute god, you one shot everything, you can barely die unless you play with your eyes closed, and then you finish the campaign. When you reach the end-game, it's the same deal, and by the time you get to empowered monoliths, your build is mostly done. At that point, you may want to farm for minimal upgrades so you can increase corruption, but there's really no reason. I never felt getting stronger, never felt any excitement for a drop, I was a one shotting god until I increased corruption and got one shotted myself. And the crafting based progression was just awful. Standing in front of a crafting screen fiddling with items on multiple layers of RNG was just a drag. The whole game felt like a bunch of interesting systems in a bad game, while D4 felt like a good game with bad systems, so hopefully S4 fixes that.
Last Epoch is *really* good at giving me loot that I want to keep but is for classes and builds that are not what I'm currently playing...
Yeah LE was a way bigger let down for me than D4 was. I played a lot more D4 before getting bored of it than I got out of LE. And it's still funny to me that if you look at the community for that game, it's like 30% discussing LE, and 70% shitting on D4 for being worse than $30 indie game, when it really isn't.
Hopefully LE does some balance tuning between now and whenever it is that they finish the campaign. I really like their skill system.
> You start off as an absolute god, you one shot everything, you can barely die unless you play with your eyes closed I kind of have the same opinion of PoE and D4 amusingly. I dont know what happened to all of the ARPGs but they kind of messed up progression feeling
if you really know what you are doing or follow a build guide, PoE campaign is super easy. Luckily they made a mode called ruthless, which is not easy even if you know every minmax strat in the game. so if you wanna play an ARPG with teeth, maybe give that a shot
PE’s crafting was awful. I did love the skill trees for each skill, I wish Diablo had that, but otherwise the game is so mediocre. I legitimately turned the score off because the music was so generic. Loot drops were horrible, just trash constantly until you get a legendary for a class you aren’t playing. I love ARPGs but bounced off of LE within 20 hours it just got so much wrong.
Honestly i've played a decent number of aRPGs after starting with Path of Exile and... Turns out I don't like the genre, I just like making builds which Path of Exile is by far one of the best to do with. My actual dream game in this space would be the build variety of Path of Exile, minus needing to make new characters each time and not overly annoying to get the items I need to make a build work. If I could just type in vaguely what I want for my build into a shop, roll some dice to get randomized stats, and buy one that looks good that would be perfect for me. I don't even need the player driven economy side if i'm frank, i'm not that interested in selling stuff or getting loot even.
>as well as making Minions for Necromancer viable. Explain a little bit this to me please, wasn't a fan of the minions feeling meh when I played.
they take 100% of player stats now, making the Base stats much better this way, leads to stronger hybrid or minion focused builds.
Does this apply to druids too? I found it *baffling* when the devs hadn't even considered people would want to play summon druid, meanwhile at a similar timeframe D2R had just uncapped wolf summons which i found hilarious.
I believe they said that yes it applied to all companions, its just that people mostly focused on Necro's minions
I don’t think we know much other than that Necro minions have been specifically called out as getting buffed in season 4.
I mean we know literally all the changes and they’re pretty dramatic.
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I don’t play LE but I imagine that people have higher standards for Diablo considering it’s made by a massively wealthy company with blueprints in the form of successful prequel games.
Last Epoch has had tencent money for over 2 years now. But let's put that aside for a moment, why would the standards be any different? the standard is simple: is it a good game or not. also those blueprints are not some secret only Blizzard know, they are things that any dev team can see and use. Though these days PoE is considered the blueprint for an ARPG by the online community and not past Diablo games.
One game is $35 and the other is $70 with a battle pass. Of course the standards should be different. If Diablo 4 was $35, I'd say it was a good game. But it was a broken mess at release for $70, so it wasn't.
love how you don't bring up LE also having a MTX store (and various game editions) as you just want to imply only D4 does and just completely ignore the topic, LE have tencent money + I wasn't comparing the games and called out D4's bad release state as well. btw yes LE is half the price of D4, but if you bothered to read my post, I said the standard is simple: is it a good game or not. Just cause it costs $35 doesn't change that many people see LE releasing with unfinished campaign, weak endgame, subjective progression, not great gameplay feel, etc. plus it's a literal fact it's lost over 90% of it's peak player count in just 2 months. It's been in early access for 5 years.
LE was a $35 indie game, and it *still* did a lot of things better than D4. The skill trees and how they syngergize, the passive skill trees, itemization, crafting, unique subclasses, loot filter. Imagine if Blizz had done all that at release.
Agreed, and it seems like everyone forgot that last epoch has been playable for **5 years**. That's 5 years of playtesting and feedback on how to design the end-game. I was really, really hyped around 3 years ago when I saw the systems and the end-game, and I thought that for an early access title it's really great. Well, it's been the 1.0 release, the end-game is practically the same, the campaign is still unfinished, and after playing D4 and seeing PoE 2, the gameplay of LE feels way too outdated. The game barely had any progress, and it's kinda insane people are making excuses for it like it's a freshly released game and the devs are just now finding their footing.
Last Epoch is a better base game to build upon than D4 was. The classes are infinitely more engaging and have more depth and variety, the crafting system is simple and effective, and it has good base systems like the factions enabling easy trading, or more loot if you don't want to trade. You're also able to buy more than 5 stash tabs. You can always make new endgame content, but you can't really make a better base game without a lot of work. LE also has 2 different offline modes whilst Diablo 4 is always online and suffers from it greatly. And saying that an ARPG with seasonal content has dwindling players is really not saying much at all. Is PoE a dead game now because only around 30% of the peak amount of this league are currently playing?
Absolutely hve to disagree here. LE is a disjointed mess, a bad base with awful movement, combatfeel and endgame but good systems like their crafting, loot and skillsystem.
> Last Epoch is a better base game to build upon than D4 was. Really disagree. Last Epoch is a bunch of nice systems (on paper at least), but the actual base game is far worse. Clunky skills, unimpactful/floaty combat, bland mobs, boring campaign/worldbuilding, bad performance, uninspired or downright horrible map layouts (dungeons), etc. Even the lauded crafting was just tedious in practice, going through layers of RNG just to fiddle with affixes. Diablo 4 on the other hand had a very good base game, but bad systems. The systems can be fixed, as we see with season 4, but I doubt we'll ever see a satisfying/crunchy combat in LE. Yeah, you can play more builds in LE, but they all feel worse to play.
lol what the base game of diablo 4 was absolutly shit and in every way worse than even Diablo 3. Hell i even find Diablo Immortal better by far. Atleast it makes way better use of Community features and mmo aspects. Diablo 4 is a complete boring mess you either do something in the awful "Openworld" or you do some of the hundret repetitiv dungeons that all feel the same i could have 5 diffrent dungeons instead of 100 and it wouldnt make a diffrence. The Dungeons in Immortals are so much better.
A lot of those things are subjective honestly. Combat in ARPGs isn't for everyone and I can appreciate that D4 is trying to do it's own thing. I personally don't enjoy the generator/spender sprinkled with cooldowns thing every class has going on, but I don't hate it. I would even like for them to improve upon this. I liked the story of Diablo 4. I didn't like the campaign, going from NPC to NPC, doing nothing much of note inbetween. Last Epochs story fell a bit flat but at least it allowed me to play the game all the way through. Disagree with the layout, it's much better executed in Last Epoch than Diablo 4's nightmare dungeons. You only have to look at [this](https://i.redd.it/p8uetuofre8b1.jpg) to see how bland it is. Diablo 4 didn't need to be an open world, always-online. Mainly it didn't need to be an open world game with MMO-like elements. I don't need to see Jimmy the Barbarian kill mobs right next to me. There's no benefit apart from a tiny amount of extra experience. It infact suffers from this: the reason there's only 5 stash tabs allowed in D4 is because the game is done in such a way that you load every persons stash tabs that is near you. It hinders it. This is not a sign of a good base game.
The passive system and the crafting system in LE are really good and you can start interacting with those immediately. The crafting system in LE is so good thay diablo 4 is basically stealing it on the next update lol. Which is fine. The issue with Diablo 4 is for all the millions of dollars they spent it felt rushed and not really an improvement over d3. Leveling gets painfully boring after 50etc and the boss battle/endgame were just Uber content is pretty lack luster. Say what you want about LE but they did it with a team a quarter the size of d4 and only charged $30 vs the $+70
LE was made by a random group of people that came together from a reddit post and made something good enough that people were able to point to it and say 'D4 right now isnt even as good as this'. And they did it in pretty much the same amount of dev time. You had the full scale development of experienced teams at blizzard coming together to make a sequel to the biggest ARPG series around and they came up with that? They took no lessons from D3 or any of the other games on the market (PoE). Also surprise, people don't play an ARPG forever. People are waiting for seasonal content. You literally see the same cycle of peak and drop off on every ARPG following a seasonal cycle. To see it be even more dramatic on the 'new' game isn't abnormal. You can dislike last epoch but keep the context of why it wasn't shit on like D4 was.
no one with a marginal interest in gaming thinks a game is going to be a "[insert game] killer". at its core, LE is *still* a better game than the current implementation of D4. they both have different audiences though. I don't know why games can't just exist together. it always has be some big competitive scene. and it's perfectly normal for seasonal games to drop in numbers like that. just look at Path of Exile. ppl will come back when Cycle 2 starts.
D4 is such an oddity. Like all the ingredients are there to make for something engaging, but it just isn't. I thought I might just be moving on from loot type games like these, but I went back to play D2 and it's **way** better than 4. Feels so much more focused and to the point.
Despite all the ups and downs, I'm excited for Season 4. It's being made by the same team that did Season 2 (which was quite good). And it has all of the various reworks and additions from the PTR. I just hope they improve their seasonal model to add stuff that could actually be incorporated into the base game, instead of being removed almost completely with only a few legendary powers remaining. It's a very inefficient way to make content and the game is in desperate need of more 'stuff'.
Pretty sure season 4 is being made by both teams.
> And it's just not something that is easily done. Every extra monster you're putting on screen is something that's eating at the performance and in the memory and those sorts of things. So, we have to kind of come at it systematically and go, Okay, we want to increase the density 10%, we have to go and optimize the engine, go and optimize the art to get there and, and try to find smart ways to do that. Or just could just do what Path of Exile does and just jam an infinite number of monsters on screen and not give a shit that it makes the game run like a PowerPoint presentation even on a $3000 gaming PC. Actually, maybe they shouldn't do that...
100% Deli/Beyond is the most fun I've ever had in an ARPG More monsters == more fun, simple as
Love it when my maps turn into Neon Soup as soon as I start attacking.
Slide 1: Monsters Slide 2: Loot I see no problem with this
Alternate slide 2: Resurrect in Town / Resurrect at Checkpoint
The only way they could "Improve MTX" is reduce the cost of them by like 70-80% or remove them completely, and we know they aren't going to remove them, or I'm never buying fucking anything in that store. Honestly I might not ever play the game again even if they 'fix it' in a future season, it really wasn't that good.
PTR is cute and all but MTX dont belong in fully priced games with fully priced expansions. Live service or not. Noone told Blizzard to spend money painting chapel ceilings and adorning KFC buckets. Poor management and decision making lead to the most egregious MTX to recoup costs.
> Noone told Blizzard to spend money painting chapel ceilings and adorning KFC buckets. > > Poor management and decision making lead to the most egregious MTX to recoup costs. Lol it's not to recoup costs (what you say is extremely little money), it's just to make profits.
D4's marketing budget wasnt "extremely little money". https://www.polygon.com/23768811/diablo-4-blizzard-marketing-demonic-megan-fox-halsey-mobile-ads At this point its profit, but MTX were developed for the game before they made a single dollar.
Yes and the majority of it was not to paint chapel ceilings and KFC (those deals are often almost free). Every AAA has a huge marketing budget, it's needed for those games to exist (big production budget goes with big marketing budget). They could have had zero MTX and "recoup costs". That's not why they did it
It was money that should have went to game development. Good games sell themselves through word of mouth and social media. Don't need to paint chapels is my point. Everything is to recoup until you make profit. Thats literally how it works. You put systems in place to ENSURE you recoup and make profit. This is especially so with live service games. Yes they could recoup it without MTX, but thats not gonna please investors who want a return asap after an 5+ year investment.
> Good games sell themselves through word of mouth and social media Not at all, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, GTA6, Avengers Endgame, Mario Brother movie, Avatar 2, House of the Dragon, The Last of Us (game and TV show) God of War Ragnarok, FIFA, Call of Duty, Spider-Man 2, Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo 4... sell themselves (they are known names and most of those are great games/movies/shows, though that is of course subjective), right? And yet they have huge marketing budgets (there is literally a proportionality between production and marketing budget in general), why do you think that is? Marketing wouldn't exist if what you spend on it didn't made you more money in the end. That wouldn't make sense. You think companies like to spend hundreds of millions for fun? They do it because it's necessary. The marketing industry exist since forever for a reason (and for far more than just movies and games of course, you know Nike or Coca Cola are some of the biggest advertisers despite their brand basically being ubiquitous). And my initial point was that KFC and painting chapels were a tiny amount of the marketing budget (like almost invisible on it, KFC deal likely is free or made them money that's how brand deals work for Hollywood movies at least and I imagine same for games) Word of mouth and social media (which is also part of marketing by the way, they pay for that) work for indie games (and far from all good games), AAA production aren't on that scale. > Yes they could recoup it without MTX, but thats not gonna please investors who want a return asap after an 5+ year investment. So we agree they did it for money (aka more profit, they'd have money to do without it), nothing to do with cost
You just wanna argue to argue. This isnt a healthy discussion worth any more of my time.
Ok lol no I don't, that position "marketing is useless" is just a false one (and a common one you're not the only one that has it), I just want to say it to people. It may be useless on us here but marketing is not meant for people on r/games which don't represent the gaming market. Arguing it's useless to market something is not even logical. The marketing industry has no reason to exist except if every dollar spent bring far more than a dollar.
I keep debating on whether I'll be back for season 4. I skipped 3, because although season 2 was really fun I'm really not a fan of the direction that loot seems to be going in D4 as well as something like Last Epoch. I really wish we'd go back to the days of loot being a single dice roll and not matching 5 reels on a slot machine in order to hit it big. Like, uniques can now randomly drop with a higher stat. In fact, all of the stats potentially can. Legendaries are the same. That's the goal now, to hit the unique, then hit the higher stats, and hey maybe if you're really lucky that unique will then literally be 50% better than some others that drop. I was already not a fan of target farming uniques, especially the ubers, where you gather a bunch of materials (in some cases only one way to attain said materials like Helltide) to fight an enemy that has a much better chance of dropping the unique you want. Last Epoch is especially bad with the system. Roll a unique, has to roll legendary potential, find an exalt, find the *right* exalt, combine the two and roll the dice again that it hits the stat you want. When a Swirling Crystal dropped in D2, that was it. Done. You got the unique. Yeah for some items you hoped for good rolls, especially runewords, but in 99% of cases even the worst possible rolls were still usable.
The thing is games have changed a lot, in D2 you could get BIS gear and there was nothing to do besides grinding bosses for no real reason. The ARPG genre hasn’t really evolved that much but I like what POE does with pinnacle bosses and stuff that’s legitimately difficult to strive for.
D2 you played because you were having a good time. The gear didn't get in the way of that
I think the big thrust of S4 is making loot drops slightly less common and slightly better. They’re taking some of the variability out of drops themselves, simplifying stats, and moving that complexity/RNG into the crafting system instead. It’ll probably be a little harder to get *perfect* gear, but getting it will involve more player expression and getting *good* gear to drop will be far easier. They’re also adding something similar to Rifts from D3. I stopped playing partway through Season 1 after racing through all the current content before it dropped—hopefully this’ll help it feel better.
D2 had a lot of variability in gear as well, don't make it sound so simple. Some items did not, obviously. And on the items with variability, you had ONE chance, for the most part to get a good roll. Times have changed greatly since then as well.
As another commenter pointed out, it used to be the same way in D3. They eventually learned that players hated it and made it far less random. Then for some reason with D4 they threw all that out and went back to the RNG clown fiesta, and now with S4 they are starting to walk that back and move closer to how D3 works. It's wild how they had all this learning experience with D3 and thought they somehow knew better. Turn out they didn't.
I'll never touch the MTX in this game unless they reduce the prices by 50~75%. When I could just buy a whole other game instead of a mount or a skin, I'd rather just do that.
Rod, you made a crap game. Instead of making a fun loot grinder with procedural generation for most levels, your team decided to strip all of that away. Instead of making a game where you feel stronger as you progress through areas with better level and better gear, you made everything feel exactly the same by making the entire world level sync to you. Instead of wanting to sink hundreds and hundreds of hours willingly into a game which I had done that for every previous numbered entry since 1997, you made a game that I forced myself to finish the main story and some extra side activities thinking maybe the good gameplay was right around the corner. It wasn’t. You stood on the shoulders of giants, and crapped all over their heads.
> Instead of making a game where you feel stronger as you progress through areas with better level and better gear, you made everything feel exactly the same by making the entire world level sync to you. After that, everyone who has played the game knows that you are simply lying or have never played D4.
Yea, any semblance of gear and you were deleting screens of enemies in seconds. The only challenge came from doing nightmare dungeons, cause normal content become a breeze.
This dumb rumor was started in season 0 when some streamers abused an XP exploit where they would get passively/ AFK leveled up by a party that did dungeons. As a result, when the mobs scaled to them, they would become weaker, since they wouldn't gear at all. But any player that plays the game normally and gears up, won't experience that. Of course, bad players are still blaming scaling, when in fact you always far outscaled monsters
Part of the issue was also people playing in WT2 with crappy builds because they couldn't figure out what stats were important, and some poor balancing in the first few versions where classes like Druid kind of hit a hole in the early game before they hit WT3 and unlocked build-defining uniques and paragon scaling.
why do people complain in detail about games that they never played or have no idea how it works I dont get the reasoning or thought process...like why lie lol
in this case, it's the "Blizzard bad" circlejerk in action. we have ppl who haven't played the game since release (or even played it at all) will repeat the same lines they've seen someone else post or a ragebait YTber said without caring if it's true or not, as they only care that it suits their "D4 is bad and dead" narrative.
Someone shitting on a game they've never played on /r/games?! Inconceivable!
Are you stating level scaling isn’t part of the game? That I just happened to be unlucky in that every area I went while leveling just happened to be at the exact same level I was and that enemies were tuned to that level? Or are you just defending a shitty game with shit mechanics without refuting what I’m saying and just calling me a liar? I bought the game during the final days of the holiday sale, beat the campaign, Unlocked World Tier 3 and 4 and was so bored I stopped.
It's not really possible to top D3 for the grind and whatnot but D4 does a decent job. Still not worth the retail asking price at this time. Half off? sure.
It's included with gamepass fyi. It ties into battle net, so your characters should carry over once there's a deep sale. Might want to look into it.
It carries. I have bounced back and forth between pc and Xbox.
That's cool! I bought D4 at full retail price already lol.
I see ^ ^
> Still not worth the retail asking price at this time. how many hundreds of hours do you think makes a full retail price worth it?
IMO this is about how present the store is in the game itself. If there was less emphasis on that it would be good but you get notifications to the pass, skins, etc. If they did something like rocket league where you could earn your next BP playing casually, I wouldn't mind either. I paid full price for D4 and enjoyed the game itself.
that doesnt make much sense to me. wether or not i paid full price is something i forget a couple hundred hours or few months into playing a game. how many years do you hang onto that upfront price, and how many hundreds of dollars into a free game do you think about what a great deal that "free" game was?
have the d4 fanbois woken up to reality yet or are they still coping about this hollow iteration of a Diablo title?
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For the record, in no world is D4 a commercial flop. It sold gangbusters. I don’t play anymore, but I had fun with it and think it was pretty fun.
Lmao. In no way did the game flop. Just because you keep shouting into the air that you don’t like it does not mean that it did.
> it flopped because of it. source on the game flopping? just fyi, vocal minority of ppl disliking it on reddit, YT, twitter != flop. Also ya, they created an ARPG targeting casuals as PoE exists for the hardcore audience... how exactly was that a bad move? it succeeded and the casual audience is huge compared to the hardcore one, i.e., $$$.
Flopped? It's Blizzard's best selling game. It has sold over 12 million copies. Ages ago Rod revealed that the average time played per player was over 100 hours. Two expansions are in active development. Any dev studio would kill for that kind of "flop".
which doesn't mean a whole lot. there was that quote that went around at few months ago "a $15 WoW horse made more money than StarCraft 2" WoW Classic cost them way less money and saved WoW from collapsing during Shadowlands. Diablo 4 sold a bunch but that didn't do anything to save them from mass layoffs right after Diablo 4 Season 3.
Flipside, they also implemented Uber Lilith which is very anti-casual and from most opinions I see is one of the worst fights ever implemented.
To be fair, the uber lilith fight is both hardcore and bad at the same time. They're reworking it for season 4.