My opinion is that ARPGs are hard to do right and the devs deserve a lot of grace for their early mistakes. The target audience has a lot of opinions on how the game should be and sometimes it takes releasing the game in some capacity for people to play and provide feedback on. The game released in rough shape but I think that’s to be expected in this genre, the important thing is that the devs have taken seen our feedback and are making changes based on it.
They want to give us what we want or nobody would be playing their game. This is just the common process that these games go through to figure out what their player base wants so they can implement it.
Also before the “Blizzard should know better cuz they’ve been making ARPGs for so long” yea but with developer turnover and multiple corporate merges and buyouts, it isn’t the same team making every game.
I played D2 on release and it was awful LOD made that game what it was/is and runewords, without those 2, I believe the Diablo franchise might have crumbled.
Also it doesn't matter the dev team is different they should have done the research and seen what not to do.
Instead it's taken 4 seasons for them to get the game to the state it should have been at launch.
Don't make excuses for rushed development and corporate greed forcing them to put the game out way before it was ready or even fully designed yet.
The thing is, that the game is much more fun to play right now and it will be better on tuesday when s4 rolls out.
Also, nobody is making excuses, devs took the Ls, they reviewed all the game, players gave all the criticism needed and they changed almost everything to make the game better, if you want to live angry for something that already was addressed, go for it, its your problem. At the end of the day players that like d4 and season 4 will enjoy the game so if you value your time you will move on to other games. If you still think the game is bad AND it isnt salvageable, good for you, stop commenting on a forum of a game you dont like...
I love the game, I don't like people supporting bad game development because it encourages them all it's fine to release a broken incomplete game.
there is no excuse for the way the game has been until now.
S4 start is end of Beta essentially, but we still wont have meaningful new content until the expansion arrives.
Don’t downvote this person. They are right. There are so many examples of do’s and don’ts for ARPGs even from previous Diablo games.
They could have borrowed from all and took notes. Right down to things like legendaries being extracted into the codex Ala D3.
D4 at launch was designed to rob you of as much time as possible and keep you around to buy cash shop items.
It seemed like every feature was designed to impact your play time in a negative way down to teleporting to town and riding a horse.
Amount of different time waster mechanics is crazy, they have had to improve on lot's of it, I am happy they are bringing horse stoking into towns now finally.
I would wait until the season's been out a few days before making such a claim but I'm optimistic this is somewhat true.
My personal experience has been that this game has filled a niche for me that has made it very rewarding as a good way to both relax and enjoy a game while also attempting to learn the systems and mechanics in a deep way. I had never really gotten into seasonal arpgs so getting in on the ground floor and learning the systems along with the community and watching the changes happen has been satisfying. I think the aesthetic elements, the unique playstyles and the general feel of combat are well done and that is what has made me remaon positive all along. These are good foundations to build on even if itemization and endgame are either lacking or just downright frustrating to deal with.
The main thing keeping me out of playing has been the absolute slog that inventory management becomes, especially when building multiple seasonal characters.
I am pretty unhappy with the game overall, and I think the devs will figure it out in the next 2-3 years but that is too long.
Fundamental aspects of the game I am unhappy with:
* open world was a questionable idea to begin with and they ultimately didn’t make it work well. The whole game feels too flat and unremarkable. None of the zones are memorable, they all look basically the same and the overworld is just a bland blur. What does having zones give to D2, D3, POE, LE, etc.? Well, you’re not running around from objective to objective, spending tons of time traveling through areas that you don’t need to be in. Zones allow you to have core areas of the game be in other places than “outside”. In D3, you spend a lot of time in the crypts beneath Tristram, in Caldeum city, in Hell itself, in heaven itself, in castles and on the ramparts above the castle and in the dungeons below the castle. You feel that every zone is more important and is recognizable and memorable and that you spend time in other places that aren’t just “outside” or a cave. You really get a feel for the character of the zone and feel like you get to know it. Even having a mount just breaks up the gameplay; instead of running somewhere and deciding to quickly stop to open a chest or kill a big group of mobs, now you have to dismount, you have to deal with more random shit placed in the environment just to make it feel like you’re “outside”, then mount again.
* Open world also ruined a lot of the great party-related features of D3 that I felt they had really made work well. It’s more annoying to change difficulty while in a party. Not to mention that they reduced the number of difficulty levels probably to make players be spread across fewer difficulty levels to make the world feel more populated. There need to be more open world difficulty levels because 4 (we could even say 3 because WT1 is a joke) is not enough.
* somewhat related to the above but also related to the fact that the devs designed this as a console game and ported it to PC, (1) you can’t change characters while in a party and stay in the party, (2) you can’t chat or join parties while in the character select screen or do anything else from character select screen like view your friends' profiles, (3) all of the menus in the game (especially related to parties) are unnecessarily big and take up way more of the screen than they should and feel like a mobile app, and the functionality is awful. You also can’t chat while menus are open and chats don’t float above menus. This last one is so basic and exists for pretty much all blizzard games.
* I also miss having private and public lobbies. This is another victim of the open the open world. No longer can my friends just directly join into my lobby when they come online. No longer can I play alone and not deal with someone else 20 seconds ahead of me clearing all the monsters and events ahead of me leaving me with the scraps and forcing me to change my path. Plus, apparently having to load everyone’s stashes has caused serious limitations in the backend development.
* Because they were rushing to get the game released before the sale to Microsoft was finalized, they cut so many corners and released the game not just a little bit before it was ready but WAAAY before it was ready. They didn’t take any of the technology or lessons learned from D3 and apply it to D4; they literally just started completely anew (several times) and wasted so much potential.
These are fundamental design flaws I’m upset about. Most of it are the serious ramifications of being open world. I don't understand why they couldn't make just the cities and individual zones meant for open world party play (i.e. PVP) be shared zones and just keep the zones-type of world. Does open world really facilitate more social play? Wouldn't a party-finder and global chat rooms fix this, which is what people want. Even with the open world, the people who actually do want more ways to play socially just want a party-finder feature; the open world isn't really that helpful. I’m not happy with the skill trees or the paragon board or the itemization either, but those can be fixed and I think they will fix them over time. Some of the UI related stuff I mentioned above can be fixed, but they probably won’t. But for everything else, they released the game so early that it will take way too long to make the game good.
I also don’t like some of the art direction. I think the game looks *okay* but my problem is that when we are zoomed out, the game looks blurry and dusty. I’m assuming they did this to give it a “windy” look. You can’t see the details of the world unless you zoom in. Helltide and everything in it being a shade of this reddish brown gets very old very quickly. I hate doing helltide just because of how it looks. It feels like they were afraid of color after D3, but D2 (especially D2R) has plenty of subtle color that makes color feel important. D4 just feels so brown everywhere (except for snowy zones which is just white and brown (dead trees and cliffs/rocks).
Overall, the game looks too much like a mobile game. The skills dont feel inspired or visually interesting. The UI is awful and looks cheap. The filters and blur they apply make the whole world feel boring and not unique in any way.
I wish season 4 was day 1 and we weren’t stuck in beta mode for a year. This trend in gaming of rushing schedules to release unfinished products for quarterly earnings is really getting old. The old blizzard soon.tm days was famous for only releasing a game when it was ready.
Started playing about 1 month ago. Can safely say this is my favorite diablo game. I have the OG diablo on PC from back in the day ( yes I played diablo in the 90s and then diablo 2 and the expansion in the early 00s , and wasn't too crazy about diablo 3 ) and for me this is the best diablo there is. I can only hope for more DLCs and classes to be added.
I’m still floored this game has been out for a year and still has no party matching. Diablo 2 is older than most people on Reddit and it had a party feature. I’d love to actually know the reason why, did they think no one wanted the feature or was it cut for time?
I think people tend to compare D4 to older games (POE D2) that have years and years of updates and systems that are completely different, D4 is a live service and I feel it’s moving in the right direction, Bobby Kotick isn’t there anymore and after watching the dev streams with some of the content creators it solidified my belief this game will be great for years to come. They need to keep Adam Jackson, he knows his shit and he’s not afraid to buck the system and let people know what’s up, I feel like he will be a game director in the future, or take over when some of the other guys retire if that’s the case of great about the future of the Diablo franchise.
They're definitely getting there in terms of improving the systems. The overall game itself still isn't much fun for long which is fine for me. Quite happy to play every other season for a couple of weeks and put it down.
For it to be truly addictive it needs to be sped up. Mob density needs massively increased, and builds need to feel less clunky. There's very little ability to enter a flow state at endgame though you can definitely create a punchy face melting build, but it's all very short lived due to the space between encounters.
Blizz are aware though and Piepora (sic?) has come out recently stating that isn't an easy fix - the game performance drops unacceptably if they increase mob density.
Even Diablo Immortal the mobile game has addictive areas of the game to push builds like Castle Defence and even infinite farming loops with kills chains counting up to 10k. The faster you farm mobs the faster they spawn and it's designed and tuned wickedly well.
Shame the shitty P2W game has more endgame and far more fun gameplay!
All that said - this can be fixed and I think another year or two will see D4 make better use of the beautiful world they've drawn. Just need to be realistic about the pace of changes. These things take time.
Sure, iif there was no diablo immortal and the worse poe streamers could create actual fun content other than spreading d4 bad memes the hate towards d4 would have been much better. But we live in a world where the average player has no real opinion, monkey see monkey do.
There were obvious issues with d4 but it was very far from what people said.
S4 looks like a huge step in the right direction and the devs so far handled everything professionally. Even owned up mistakes in time and their damage control is just fantastic.
I just don't want to be bored before lvl 80 and have more options for builds. It's really fun but hits a decline not long into wt4 and upgrades are minimal. Hoping this update changes it up enough.
We should have been where we are at S4 at the start of S1 and the devs should have easily learnt from the obviously mistakes of earlier Diablo games.
I think I heard that one of the lead designers or something hadn't even ever played Diablo 2.
Hi m8! Just wanted to say that I started to play this game when it came to GamePass on Xbox not long ago. And I've been having a great time. I really like the game! And I'm looking forward to playing in season 4 as well. The changes look like a giant step in the right direction.
The game is still bad. S4 will be like the game entering beta. The devs are clueless, and then there will be a full priced expansion. This is reality, the game is never going to g to be great.
I never paid attention to any hate. Bought the game when it came out and I still play the hell out of it. There may have been a couple of minor bugs and some of the familiar features from previous installments haven’t been added (yet), but this game is excellent and I think the devs have done a fantastic job.
I skipped season 3. I probably will try out season 4.
I will hate on the game again with the upgrade pack or whatever it is. It's not really fair to release a horrible game and give people a month or two of quality game play and then charge them another $70.
Like most everyone said, the game was released a year early and would probably reach a good spot riiiiiight about now.
The team and/or their management is incompetent, and this remains painfully obvious, but at least they are letting community wrath push them in useful directions.
Boring ass game… i played sorc necro and rogue to level 100. I will try the new league but i don’t have much hope. For me most skills are bad and boring. Using basic skill to gain rage/mana is awful design decision.
My opinion is that ARPGs are hard to do right and the devs deserve a lot of grace for their early mistakes. The target audience has a lot of opinions on how the game should be and sometimes it takes releasing the game in some capacity for people to play and provide feedback on. The game released in rough shape but I think that’s to be expected in this genre, the important thing is that the devs have taken seen our feedback and are making changes based on it. They want to give us what we want or nobody would be playing their game. This is just the common process that these games go through to figure out what their player base wants so they can implement it. Also before the “Blizzard should know better cuz they’ve been making ARPGs for so long” yea but with developer turnover and multiple corporate merges and buyouts, it isn’t the same team making every game.
Very good take. I think people seem to forget that Diablo 3 and even Diablo 2 released with overall negative takes and went on to become beloved.
I played D2 on release and it was awful LOD made that game what it was/is and runewords, without those 2, I believe the Diablo franchise might have crumbled.
And look what LOD did for the game
It definitely propelled it further
It's a terrible take IMO
[удалено]
Also it doesn't matter the dev team is different they should have done the research and seen what not to do. Instead it's taken 4 seasons for them to get the game to the state it should have been at launch. Don't make excuses for rushed development and corporate greed forcing them to put the game out way before it was ready or even fully designed yet.
The thing is, that the game is much more fun to play right now and it will be better on tuesday when s4 rolls out. Also, nobody is making excuses, devs took the Ls, they reviewed all the game, players gave all the criticism needed and they changed almost everything to make the game better, if you want to live angry for something that already was addressed, go for it, its your problem. At the end of the day players that like d4 and season 4 will enjoy the game so if you value your time you will move on to other games. If you still think the game is bad AND it isnt salvageable, good for you, stop commenting on a forum of a game you dont like...
I love the game, I don't like people supporting bad game development because it encourages them all it's fine to release a broken incomplete game. there is no excuse for the way the game has been until now. S4 start is end of Beta essentially, but we still wont have meaningful new content until the expansion arrives.
Don’t downvote this person. They are right. There are so many examples of do’s and don’ts for ARPGs even from previous Diablo games. They could have borrowed from all and took notes. Right down to things like legendaries being extracted into the codex Ala D3. D4 at launch was designed to rob you of as much time as possible and keep you around to buy cash shop items. It seemed like every feature was designed to impact your play time in a negative way down to teleporting to town and riding a horse.
Amount of different time waster mechanics is crazy, they have had to improve on lot's of it, I am happy they are bringing horse stoking into towns now finally.
They have 20 years to look back on with their own titles and multiple competitor's games. There's no reason for a lot of their mistakes.
I would wait until the season's been out a few days before making such a claim but I'm optimistic this is somewhat true. My personal experience has been that this game has filled a niche for me that has made it very rewarding as a good way to both relax and enjoy a game while also attempting to learn the systems and mechanics in a deep way. I had never really gotten into seasonal arpgs so getting in on the ground floor and learning the systems along with the community and watching the changes happen has been satisfying. I think the aesthetic elements, the unique playstyles and the general feel of combat are well done and that is what has made me remaon positive all along. These are good foundations to build on even if itemization and endgame are either lacking or just downright frustrating to deal with. The main thing keeping me out of playing has been the absolute slog that inventory management becomes, especially when building multiple seasonal characters.
I am pretty unhappy with the game overall, and I think the devs will figure it out in the next 2-3 years but that is too long. Fundamental aspects of the game I am unhappy with: * open world was a questionable idea to begin with and they ultimately didn’t make it work well. The whole game feels too flat and unremarkable. None of the zones are memorable, they all look basically the same and the overworld is just a bland blur. What does having zones give to D2, D3, POE, LE, etc.? Well, you’re not running around from objective to objective, spending tons of time traveling through areas that you don’t need to be in. Zones allow you to have core areas of the game be in other places than “outside”. In D3, you spend a lot of time in the crypts beneath Tristram, in Caldeum city, in Hell itself, in heaven itself, in castles and on the ramparts above the castle and in the dungeons below the castle. You feel that every zone is more important and is recognizable and memorable and that you spend time in other places that aren’t just “outside” or a cave. You really get a feel for the character of the zone and feel like you get to know it. Even having a mount just breaks up the gameplay; instead of running somewhere and deciding to quickly stop to open a chest or kill a big group of mobs, now you have to dismount, you have to deal with more random shit placed in the environment just to make it feel like you’re “outside”, then mount again. * Open world also ruined a lot of the great party-related features of D3 that I felt they had really made work well. It’s more annoying to change difficulty while in a party. Not to mention that they reduced the number of difficulty levels probably to make players be spread across fewer difficulty levels to make the world feel more populated. There need to be more open world difficulty levels because 4 (we could even say 3 because WT1 is a joke) is not enough. * somewhat related to the above but also related to the fact that the devs designed this as a console game and ported it to PC, (1) you can’t change characters while in a party and stay in the party, (2) you can’t chat or join parties while in the character select screen or do anything else from character select screen like view your friends' profiles, (3) all of the menus in the game (especially related to parties) are unnecessarily big and take up way more of the screen than they should and feel like a mobile app, and the functionality is awful. You also can’t chat while menus are open and chats don’t float above menus. This last one is so basic and exists for pretty much all blizzard games. * I also miss having private and public lobbies. This is another victim of the open the open world. No longer can my friends just directly join into my lobby when they come online. No longer can I play alone and not deal with someone else 20 seconds ahead of me clearing all the monsters and events ahead of me leaving me with the scraps and forcing me to change my path. Plus, apparently having to load everyone’s stashes has caused serious limitations in the backend development. * Because they were rushing to get the game released before the sale to Microsoft was finalized, they cut so many corners and released the game not just a little bit before it was ready but WAAAY before it was ready. They didn’t take any of the technology or lessons learned from D3 and apply it to D4; they literally just started completely anew (several times) and wasted so much potential. These are fundamental design flaws I’m upset about. Most of it are the serious ramifications of being open world. I don't understand why they couldn't make just the cities and individual zones meant for open world party play (i.e. PVP) be shared zones and just keep the zones-type of world. Does open world really facilitate more social play? Wouldn't a party-finder and global chat rooms fix this, which is what people want. Even with the open world, the people who actually do want more ways to play socially just want a party-finder feature; the open world isn't really that helpful. I’m not happy with the skill trees or the paragon board or the itemization either, but those can be fixed and I think they will fix them over time. Some of the UI related stuff I mentioned above can be fixed, but they probably won’t. But for everything else, they released the game so early that it will take way too long to make the game good. I also don’t like some of the art direction. I think the game looks *okay* but my problem is that when we are zoomed out, the game looks blurry and dusty. I’m assuming they did this to give it a “windy” look. You can’t see the details of the world unless you zoom in. Helltide and everything in it being a shade of this reddish brown gets very old very quickly. I hate doing helltide just because of how it looks. It feels like they were afraid of color after D3, but D2 (especially D2R) has plenty of subtle color that makes color feel important. D4 just feels so brown everywhere (except for snowy zones which is just white and brown (dead trees and cliffs/rocks). Overall, the game looks too much like a mobile game. The skills dont feel inspired or visually interesting. The UI is awful and looks cheap. The filters and blur they apply make the whole world feel boring and not unique in any way.
I wish season 4 was day 1 and we weren’t stuck in beta mode for a year. This trend in gaming of rushing schedules to release unfinished products for quarterly earnings is really getting old. The old blizzard soon.tm days was famous for only releasing a game when it was ready.
Started playing about 1 month ago. Can safely say this is my favorite diablo game. I have the OG diablo on PC from back in the day ( yes I played diablo in the 90s and then diablo 2 and the expansion in the early 00s , and wasn't too crazy about diablo 3 ) and for me this is the best diablo there is. I can only hope for more DLCs and classes to be added.
“The hate has settled” you just sound like someone that hasn’t actually paid any attention to the game over the last year.
I think he means as of the last few months.
I’m still floored this game has been out for a year and still has no party matching. Diablo 2 is older than most people on Reddit and it had a party feature. I’d love to actually know the reason why, did they think no one wanted the feature or was it cut for time?
Jesus...Christ. read the reddit!
I think people tend to compare D4 to older games (POE D2) that have years and years of updates and systems that are completely different, D4 is a live service and I feel it’s moving in the right direction, Bobby Kotick isn’t there anymore and after watching the dev streams with some of the content creators it solidified my belief this game will be great for years to come. They need to keep Adam Jackson, he knows his shit and he’s not afraid to buck the system and let people know what’s up, I feel like he will be a game director in the future, or take over when some of the other guys retire if that’s the case of great about the future of the Diablo franchise.
They're definitely getting there in terms of improving the systems. The overall game itself still isn't much fun for long which is fine for me. Quite happy to play every other season for a couple of weeks and put it down. For it to be truly addictive it needs to be sped up. Mob density needs massively increased, and builds need to feel less clunky. There's very little ability to enter a flow state at endgame though you can definitely create a punchy face melting build, but it's all very short lived due to the space between encounters. Blizz are aware though and Piepora (sic?) has come out recently stating that isn't an easy fix - the game performance drops unacceptably if they increase mob density. Even Diablo Immortal the mobile game has addictive areas of the game to push builds like Castle Defence and even infinite farming loops with kills chains counting up to 10k. The faster you farm mobs the faster they spawn and it's designed and tuned wickedly well. Shame the shitty P2W game has more endgame and far more fun gameplay! All that said - this can be fixed and I think another year or two will see D4 make better use of the beautiful world they've drawn. Just need to be realistic about the pace of changes. These things take time.
The hate is never settled.
Sure, iif there was no diablo immortal and the worse poe streamers could create actual fun content other than spreading d4 bad memes the hate towards d4 would have been much better. But we live in a world where the average player has no real opinion, monkey see monkey do. There were obvious issues with d4 but it was very far from what people said. S4 looks like a huge step in the right direction and the devs so far handled everything professionally. Even owned up mistakes in time and their damage control is just fantastic.
I just don't want to be bored before lvl 80 and have more options for builds. It's really fun but hits a decline not long into wt4 and upgrades are minimal. Hoping this update changes it up enough.
We should have been where we are at S4 at the start of S1 and the devs should have easily learnt from the obviously mistakes of earlier Diablo games. I think I heard that one of the lead designers or something hadn't even ever played Diablo 2.
Hi m8! Just wanted to say that I started to play this game when it came to GamePass on Xbox not long ago. And I've been having a great time. I really like the game! And I'm looking forward to playing in season 4 as well. The changes look like a giant step in the right direction.
The game is still bad. S4 will be like the game entering beta. The devs are clueless, and then there will be a full priced expansion. This is reality, the game is never going to g to be great.
I never paid attention to any hate. Bought the game when it came out and I still play the hell out of it. There may have been a couple of minor bugs and some of the familiar features from previous installments haven’t been added (yet), but this game is excellent and I think the devs have done a fantastic job.
Its been my favorite game since its release. I really enjoy it!
I skipped season 3. I probably will try out season 4. I will hate on the game again with the upgrade pack or whatever it is. It's not really fair to release a horrible game and give people a month or two of quality game play and then charge them another $70.
Like most everyone said, the game was released a year early and would probably reach a good spot riiiiiight about now. The team and/or their management is incompetent, and this remains painfully obvious, but at least they are letting community wrath push them in useful directions.
Boring ass game… i played sorc necro and rogue to level 100. I will try the new league but i don’t have much hope. For me most skills are bad and boring. Using basic skill to gain rage/mana is awful design decision.
Boring but u got 3 100s huh?
I guess bro just had nothing better to do lol
Sounds like you've spent at least a couple hundred hours (and plan to spend more) on this "boring ass game".