Blizzard Declares That Diablo IV Has Gone Gold, Releases Gameplay Guide Video Series

erek

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Looking forward to it, but have an epic Raised Eyebrow of Skepticism, based upon recent Blizzard works.
 
Historically considering how much hours people that played those did put in those crack like experience, feel OK to be one of those $70 title at launch.
Same, i put so many hours into previous versions, i dont mind the price especially if they continue the seasons trend. That said, probably not gonna pick it up until after summer, more gaming for me when its cold.
 
Looking forward to it, but have an epic Raised Eyebrow of Skepticism, based upon recent Blizzard works.
The beta was pretty sweet. We played the shit out of it. I couldn't find anything that really stood out as a political message or any kind of identity anything. Graphics were amazing, it ran incredibly well on nearly all systems. It was 100% playable on an intel i5 7000 series laptop with a GTX 1050 2 Gig in it and it was doing between 20-30+ FPS at stock graphics settings. Looked good at 1080P too. It never dropped below 60 FPS on my rig, at 4K with everything turned on. It was like a drug the entire time.

I totally shelled out the cash for the max tier. It was like 90-100 bucks. Worth it, gonna get a shitload of play time in with my friends and family. It will be a blast.
 
They need to give me Diablo iv for free for playing wow like they did with part 3
 
The beta was pretty sweet. We played the shit out of it. I couldn't find anything that really stood out as a political message or any kind of identity anything. Graphics were amazing, it ran incredibly well on nearly all systems. It was 100% playable on an intel i5 7000 series laptop with a GTX 1050 2 Gig in it and it was doing between 20-30+ FPS at stock graphics settings. Looked good at 1080P too. It never dropped below 60 FPS on my rig, at 4K with everything turned on. It was like a drug the entire time.

I totally shelled out the cash for the max tier. It was like 90-100 bucks. Worth it, gonna get a shitload of play time in with my friends and family. It will be a blast.
I had to do some tweaking to get it running on a colleague's kids' PC, it is an older Omen running a 1660s and it made me work to get it running, but that was more because the teenager had clicked one too many popup boxes, replaced the 1TB SSD with a 1TB NVME drive I had kicking around in the drawer, I actually needed an SSD to fix up an old laptop so win-win, but that really improved how the game ran after that.
Not gonna lie, I've pre-ordered, I violated my "I don't pre-order" rule for that one because who am I kidding, I played the shit out of Diablo 1, I played the shit out of Diablo 2, and even with all the crap Diablo 3 pulled with its real money auction hall I played the shit out of that too, Diablo 4 will be no different, other than I hope my Daughter plays it too if Mom allows... which I mean she won't but I can dream.
 
I had stability issues with the beta (and no other program), and assume that's because beta.

The game seemed very Diablo 1-esque in story and visuals, and a refined version of that in feel and gameplay.

Which are good things.
 
Historically considering how much hours people that played those did put in those crack like experience, feel OK to be one of those $70 title at launch.
eh... depends on the person, I was more than content to finish the SP campaign and largely be done with the game as a result. Purpose of grinding for better gear? So I can waste more of my life and beat a harder version of the game I just beat? No offense for those who do love to do that, but for me that's a hard pass.
 
I'd be more okay with this being 70 dollars if it didn't have any microtransactions. I'm going to wait for a discount personally.
 
I'll be with those waiting for a sale/discount, but once D4 is installed on my PC I'll play the hell out of it. (y)
 
There is a forum member who typically gives a discount on Battle.net titles, something like 20% but not exactly sure?. I recently bought a copy from him. Sometimes he has credit, other times he doesn't.
 
eh... depends on the person, I was more than content to finish the SP campaign and largely be done with the game as a result. Purpose of grinding for better gear? So I can waste more of my life and beat a harder version of the game I just beat? No offense for those who do love to do that, but for me that's a hard pass.
Blizzard loves you. You'll likely be able to clear the entire SP campaign in <20 hours. By all means, play the game however you like, but the Diablo franchise has never had a good story or really been about the story. MMO's and aRPG's share that particular characteristic. It's about the gear and clearing 'difficult' content gameplay loop.*** Playing Diablo for story is a bit like playing WoW for story. I guess you can, but it's kinda missing the point. Blizzard gets your money either way so they don't really care.

But knowing and saying all this, I can definitely see why you'd rather only pay (as an example) $30, rather than $70, considering you're not going to get that much out of this. You'll be waiting for a while for 50% off though. Blizzard is always slow to discount and will never hit a Steam-like $4.99, etc price point.

D4, unlike previous titles has an open world, so the end game won't simply be just killing the final boss over and over. D3 expanded into Rifts and Greater Rifts, bounties, Echoing Nightmares and a few other pieces of end game content. I should hope Blizzard has learned from those end game lessons and has a more complete end game loop. I expect that they do. Likely with killing elites bosses or doing mini puzzles. I suspect travel will also be a bigger part of clearing end game content. Though none of us know for sure what Blizzard has planned here, since the beta only covered the first 25 levels and none of the end game content.

Same, i put so many hours into previous versions, i dont mind the price especially if they continue the seasons trend. That said, probably not gonna pick it up until after summer, more gaming for me when its cold.
I won't spend a cent on this until we know what the end-game gameplay loop is like and what effect season passes will have. Right now it's all "just" cosmetics, but considering that's an important part of the game (the gear and how you look "is the game"), I fully expect Blizzard will press on people's fomo and the idea of 'haves and have nots'.

We also don't know if the end game will be a miserable grind fest like D3 was designed at launch. So there are a lot of touch points on why I think it's wise to wait and see.
 
why would anyone play this crap after D3 and DI. The only thing that made D3 ok was the social media hardcore race
 
I had stability issues with the beta (and no other program), and assume that's because beta.

The game seemed very Diablo 1-esque in story and visuals, and a refined version of that in feel and gameplay.

Which are good things.
I think we all had stability issues in one form or another. I suspect it will be pretty stable when it launches but I would expect them to have some big issues to iron out even after release as the game gets truly hammered by all of us.

I especially enjoyed the violent death sequences boss battles would have when the boss bit the dust. Some were downright gruesome with all the crunching and bone twisting noises I would expect as all the magic holding an undead being together rips free of it. I was impressed by the audio fidelity overall and the level of detail that went into it all.
 
I had to do some tweaking to get it running on a colleague's kids' PC, it is an older Omen running a 1660s and it made me work to get it running, but that was more because the teenager had clicked one too many popup boxes, replaced the 1TB SSD with a 1TB NVME drive I had kicking around in the drawer, I actually needed an SSD to fix up an old laptop so win-win, but that really improved how the game ran after that.
Not gonna lie, I've pre-ordered, I violated my "I don't pre-order" rule for that one because who am I kidding, I played the shit out of Diablo 1, I played the shit out of Diablo 2, and even with all the crap Diablo 3 pulled with its real money auction hall I played the shit out of that too, Diablo 4 will be no different, other than I hope my Daughter plays it too if Mom allows... which I mean she won't but I can dream.
Yeah, the laptop I gave my cousin's kiddo had a old generation NVME Western digital black in it, something like 800m/s but it's still light years ahead of a normal SATA SSD. We just ran it with whatever the game detected the settings should be on initial setup. If I had to guess it was probably set to medium, still ran pretty damn good for an older laptop with lower end specs. We didn't let him touch any other the buttons other than the ones that killed bad guys. I forgot to mention its got 16 GB and I have a secondary HDD in there where the temp file sits at around 32 Gigs. So it's loaded and pretty darn good for free.
 
The only beta issue I had was long queues to log in. Kinda expected though.

Ran smooth, @ 4k, everything maxed, with no issues. Some game mechanics could be better explained and I would love to see an old school user Manuel.

Can use some polishing/balancing for sure and no doubt many new bugs will come to light as tons of old and unique hardware configurations are thrown at the code.

I'm looking forward to playing through it.
 
Blizzard loves you.
No they don't, see below
You'll likely be able to clear the entire SP campaign in <20 hours. By all means, play the game however you like, but the Diablo franchise has never had a good story or really been about the story.
I wouldn't say it was the story I was after but there was a goal, it was to "stop Diablo" (or any of his brothers or whatever) and that was always good enough for me, sure you could do it multiple times with different characters so you had different play styles but...

It's about the gear and clearing 'difficult' content gameplay loop.
See this is what I just don't get/like, you get more shiny stuff to make numbers become bigger, and then monsters do bigger numbers, rinse and repeat... and sure as you say play the game (any game) however you like, but to me it seems kind of pointless. I find there is a goal in a game and for me that goal most definitely isn't make the biggest number possible.
Blizzard gets your money either way so they don't really care.

But knowing and saying all this, I can definitely see why you'd rather only pay (as an example) $30, rather than $70, considering you're not going to get that much out of this. You'll be waiting for a while for 50% off though. Blizzard is always slow to discount and will never hit a Steam-like $4.99, etc price point.
It's funny that you say this, because I just happened to be in a Walmart in Maui picking up sunscreen or something, and I happened to see boxes of Diablo 3, and the expansion on clearance for $5 each, so I snatched them up while on vacation and played some time later. Yeah this was maybe 6 months after the expansion was released so obviously wasn't a day one purchase, but to be honest I was done with Diablo when it was announced the always connected requirement sucked since I had a somewhat sketchy DSL line at the time, but it was the whole real money auction house that made me not want to give in to their greed because who knows how the game would scale, would drops of good stuff be abnormally rare because they had a financial incentive to make it that way? And even though that largely didn't matter the way I played it still left a bad taste in my mouth... yeah they eventually did get my money. But bottom line is I don't need this game "now", much like GTA5, I am more than happy playing the game a year after release when it hits a heavy discount, I get the same game play as others... hell if anything it's better because a lot of the game breaking bugs are fixed.
 
I will never give Activision another dollar. They are just an abjectly bad company. hard pass.
It is funny I remember people swearing off Blizzard/Activision a year ago. Now they jumping all over their dick. I don't care how good Diablo 4 is. They not getting any of my money. I don't trust them to not screw it up either.
 
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Not gonna lie, I played the beta, some good some bad but will buy D4. I've been playing D3 since launch. The high price kinda sucks but for hundreds+ hours of entertainment the cost is worth it. No hate I just like Diablo games.
 
I don't trust them to not screw it up either.
Which brings us full circle to the mantra of "never pre-order" and "don't be an early adopter" (aka day 1 purchase). I wouldn't trust them not to screw it up either, which is why I would never buy early, let reviews come out, let the plethora of patches to fix issues come out, plenty of shit to play and you're not missing anything by not playing day 1 (or in the case of D3... trying to play on day 1).
 
... you're not missing anything by not playing day 1 (or in the case of D3... trying to play on day 1).
Well if you plan to play with friends you would miss out on leveling and being able to contribute in a group. Not sure what you mean about D3. Three friends and I started at midnight at the D3 launch and played for about 20 hours straight. Was a fun time and a great memory.

Will they screw it up? Probably. Will it be something that's a show stopped? Probably not.
 
Well if you plan to play with friends you would miss out on leveling and being able to contribute in a group. Not sure what you mean about D3. Three friends and I started at midnight at the D3 launch and played for about 20 hours straight. Was a fun time and a great memory.

Will they screw it up? Probably. Will it be something that's a show stopped? Probably not.

well you were luckier than me and my 10 friends that tried to play together at D3 launch. we all got stuck with the dreaded error 37, and a couple gave up after trying for hours to log in. I gave up after 5 hours, and went to bed.
 
if you have any self respect you don't pay money to these scumbags
 
They're gonna happen. Either that or mega wait queues like the Beta. They'll get it dialed in eventually
Community manager, "This past weekend helped us to forecast the capacity we expect this weekend, and we will be using that capacity to intentionally stress our systems in preparation for launch. In summary, while we know it can be frustrating, we need queues to properly stress test our services and we are designing to ensure we have them some of the time."
Hopefully no day 1 server / queue crashes and/or long wait.
 
if you have any self respect you don't pay money to these scumbags

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if you have any self respect you don't pay money to these scumbags
And Activision/Blizzard is scummier than everyone else? Worse than EA? Worse than Microsoft?

I don't think taking a stand here is gonna do shit, now if we could get everyone to refuse to buy video cards from Nvidia that might actually do something. Paying 60-99 bucks for a game is childs play. Thankfully they made the game accessible and it runs on older hardware at decent FPS. Because the cost of upgrading to run games is generally more painful than the cost of the games themselves.
 
I hear game is going to be micro transaction pay 2 win hell

Let's hope that was all just fud
 
I hear game is going to be micro transaction pay 2 win hell

Let's hope that was all just fud
Microtransactions work and I don't care if people want to dump assloads of money into a video game.... As long as you can grind to win as well. If it was PvP I would have an issue with it. However, it's PvE so, who cares if someone's got better gear faster than me. If they paywall sections of the game then, I will have an issue. If I am not mistaken the 100 bucks I paid for the game gives me season pass or some shit, so I guess I'm paying to win? I could give a shit about all the cosmetic stuff. But the free horses and stuff for world traversal seemed like a sweet deal. Worst case I paid 30 bucks or so too much.

Looks like I paid 10 bucks too much. Deluxe would have been enough, not a big deal though:

(20) Tier Skips for Ultimate Edition​

To get tier skips in Diablo 4, players can purchase the Ultimate Edition of the game, which includes an accelerated seasonal battle pass and 20-tier skips. However, it is important to note that tier skips only provide cosmetic rewards and do not offer any in-game advantages or boosts. Players can still access the free season pass and its in-game boosts without purchasing skip tiers. Additionally, spending money on tier skips or in-game currency will not speed up the unlocking of free tier pass rewards, as these rewards can only be obtained by playing the game. Ultimately, tier skips are a way for players to progress through battle passes faster and unlock cosmetic rewards, but they are not necessary for gameplay progression or success.

Tier Skips just let you access harder difficulty gameplay faster. Nothing more.
 
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