Diablo IV - The Real Official Thread

sethk said:
Unlike prior diablo games this one has monetization baked into the seasonal model - i.e. they are strongly incentivized to bring you back in with seasonal content (and DLCs/expansions annually I expect).
I expect a lot of updates- changes to the meta each season and smaller game modes but something big at least annually.
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Well if it's like previous Diablo titles, the next expansion will be a new Act and probably ~2 years after release.
 
The monster density is fucking awesome. I'm getting about 400 cinders every 10 minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less. If you really want to rock the hell out of farming helltides then forget the horse and get movement speed on your boots and ammy. The distance between mobs is reduced considerably and engaging one usually means two or three more mobs will aggro.

Also cleared my first NMD in the 50s. Bone spear Necro is hilarious and surprisingly easy on the skill rotation. Too bad it did absolutely nothing on my first Uber Lilith encounter, lol
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
He's trolling at this point.

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Seemed reasonable to me, battle pass is horrible. Itemization is close to killing the game to me.

I started an Ice Sorc for the season and I'm actually having fun but I'm about to be finished. I'm playing hard-core, level 68. There's just not much to do here or any real end game goals, and the gear isn't interesting enough for me to care. Blizzard is a husk of what it used to be, hoping D2R gets a new season, its so much better IMO.

It's a check list of chores, that's basically all of the game systems. The only thing keeping me going is how fun freezing stuff is with a sorc. I made my own freeze build with blizzard and ice shards and I'm crushing monsters. I quit so fast last time because I picked the wrong classes I guess. Barbarian absolutely sucks, it's so bad by comparison it's not funny. Even the whirling blades build for rogue isn't close to sorc in terms of fun or power IMO. Both barb and rogue bored me to tears. Sorc is a well made class. Even still, there's nothing to do, I'm a chore merchant or I just endlessly run nightmare dungeons with no objective in mind.
 
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socK said:
I feel like this actually explains a lot about the state of the game...

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headache-migraine.gif
 
They gotta be playing there's a few parts where they take a hand off the controller, it would be a PITA to edit this video and sync all that stuff.
Also doubt they would risk a shit storm getting caught with fake gameplay.
 
I don't see what's wrong with the video aside from Blizzard putting some feminist lesbians to show off the diversity. The dungeon does seem nicely designed and it's good to know what a dungeon is just not designed by one team, but other designers play and evaluate it.
The girls(?) will however be put on a stake by the community. Like "don't you guys have phones?" guy.
Meanwhile some high ranked executive is sitting safe while the people on the floor are getting grilled.

The team that made the game sure made it look great. The decision making part is the one that fucked up.
The game is dead to me for the rest of 2023. I will wait on next year and see if it improves.
 
Nebell said:
I don't see what's wrong with the video aside from Blizzard putting some feminist lesbians to show off the diversity. The dungeon does seem nicely designed and it's good to know what a dungeon is just not designed by one team, but other designers play and evaluate it.
The girls(?) will however be put on a stake by the community. Like "don't you guys have phones?" guy.
Meanwhile some high ranked executive is sitting safe while the people on the floor are getting grilled.

The team that made the game sure made it look great. The decision making part is the one that fucked up.
The game is dead to me for the rest of 2023. I will wait on next year and see if it improves.
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As a gamer, you want someone who's talking about the game, to know something about the game. Forget what they look like for a second. It was either in the above Hawg video, or a video by ChoseN I was watching, which brought up the comparison between PoE2 and Diablo 4. The PoE2 dev talk, the developer clearly understood and expressed how PoE1 worked, and why it worked that way, and how PoE2 would address these issues. In other words, it targeted the gaming audience. The Diablo 4 video, it becomes obvious that these 2 people never even played the game. Sure, they worked on the game, but the complaints about Diablo 4 aren't about art assets. "Diablo 4 would be such a great game, if only not for the ugly art!" No, it's about gameplay. And you need to play the game and understand the gamers' mindsets.

That's a problem with a lot of media lately. You have people making creative decisions, whether its TV shows (e.g. The Witcher), or video games (e.g. Diablo 4), where the people making crucial decisions about what the property should be about, actively don't care about said property, or actively despise the property they're working on. And this is why old Blizzard was great. It use to be, when you were interviewed for a job, regardless of the position, you were a fan of their games. Because while, even as a fan, you might not be able to please 100% of the community, you'll at least please a few, because you're probably not alone, whereas if you just don't care about the property at all, at best you'll please a few.
 
Nytegard said:
As a gamer, you want someone who's talking about the game, to know something about the game. Forget what they look like for a second. It was either in the above Hawg video, or a video by ChoseN I was watching, which brought up the comparison between PoE2 and Diablo 4. The PoE2 dev talk, the developer clearly understood and expressed how PoE1 worked, and why it worked that way, and how PoE2 would address these issues. In other words, it targeted the gaming audience. The Diablo 4 video, it becomes obvious that these 2 people never even played the game. Sure, they worked on the game, but the complaints about Diablo 4 aren't about art assets. "Diablo 4 would be such a great game, if only not for the ugly art!" No, it's about gameplay. And you need to play the game and understand the gamers' mindsets.

That's a problem with a lot of media lately. You have people making creative decisions, whether its TV shows (e.g. The Witcher), or video games (e.g. Diablo 4), where the people making crucial decisions about what the property should be about, actively don't care about said property, or actively despise the property they're working on. And this is why old Blizzard was great. It use to be, when you were interviewed for a job, regardless of the position, you were a fan of their games. Because while, even as a fan, you might not be able to please 100% of the community, you'll at least please a few, because you're probably not alone, whereas if you just don't care about the property at all, at best you'll please a few.
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We can see this, but companies march out these people as a shield against criticism. As soon as people start calling them out for it the company can then call the fanbase toxic and cry racism/sexism/whateverism.
 
I'm just going to interject here, but new league of Path of Exile comes out this Friday.

jus' sayin'
 
Nebell said:
I don't see what's wrong with the video aside from Blizzard putting some feminist lesbians to show off the diversity. The dungeon does seem nicely designed and it's good to know what a dungeon is just not designed by one team, but other designers play and evaluate it.
The girls(?) will however be put on a stake by the community. Like "don't you guys have phones?" guy.
Meanwhile some high ranked executive is sitting safe while the people on the floor are getting grilled.

The team that made the game sure made it look great. The decision making part is the one that fucked up.
The game is dead to me for the rest of 2023. I will wait on next year and see if it improves.
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I mean, who they are is irrelevant. Who gives a fuck if they're lesbians or whatever. It's an 11 minute video of designers being bizarrely terrible at the game, and somehow everyone magnetizes to LESBIANS.

They're straight up shit at the game - that's the singular point. They play like they've never played the game in their life but they're making design decisions. It's doubly suspicious because they even make a point somewhere along the line that they tried to "minimize backtracking"... but the game possibly has the most annoying and egregious backtracking in all of Diablo because you can miss one fucking thing and need to walk across the entire map and back again.

I don't need them to be clearing dungeons like they're about to submit this video to the speed run archives, but this seems to help connect the dots for how and why certain things play the way they do when they're internally played the way they are.
 
socK said:
I mean, who they are is irrelevant. Who gives a fuck if they're lesbians or whatever. It's an 11 minute video of designers being bizarrely terrible at the game, and somehow everyone magnetizes to LESBIANS.

They're straight up shit at the game - that's the singular point. They play like they've never played the game in their life but they're making design decisions. It's doubly suspicious because they even make a point somewhere along the line that they tried to "minimize backtracking"... but the game possibly has the most annoying and egregious backtracking in all of Diablo because you can miss one fucking thing and need to walk across the entire map and back again.

I don't need them to be clearing dungeons like they're about to submit this video to the speed run archives, but this seems to help connect the dots for how and why certain things play the way they do when they're internally played the way they are.
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A lot of us are focused on that because large companies these days are more focused on the lesbians making the games instead of actual gamers. This applies to shaving companies, beer brewing companies, and TV programming companies. Who cares about the quality of the product. let's prop up some alphabet soup content creators with a billion dollars of advertising.
 
Old Blizzard has been dead for a decade at least by now, its just taking a long time for people to realize it.
 
Westwood said:
I'm just going to interject here, but new league of Path of Exile comes out this Friday.

jus' sayin'
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Looking forward to that. Looking forward to griping about POE2 when it's released.


I played the campaign in D4, started a season char. The grind just seems lacking. Maybe its all the emphasis on cosmetics as rewards..... I dunno. It's cool and all, but it's losing it's appeal. I am also in my 50's now vs D3 in 2012. So mind set may come into play.
I will at least give all the classes a sample first. I still have to start a druid and rogue.
With that said, let us all remember all the griping done about D3 when it came out. "Oh, the characters look all cartoony, and the trade sucks, and it's too hard. etc."......It took a minute before they squared all that ook away. So maybe one day.....
 
Aireoth said:
Old Blizzard has been dead for a decade at least by now, its just taking a long time for people to realize it.
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It really has to restated again that this is the same Blizz that couldn't manage a WC3 makeover.

D4 never had a chance.
 
The real Blizzard died before D3 even launched.

D3 was trash in the beginning and the same idiots that killed Blizzard and D3 moved on to destroy something else good and the people who stayed behind turned D3 into a really fun ARPG that just kept getting better from year to year.

D4 is already leaps and bounds ahead of where D3 was and will continue to improve.
I have trouble taking any adult seriously who would drop dozens, or in most of these cases, hundreds of hours into a game while at the same time continuously posting online how horrible it is and what terrible people the developers must be.

D4 is a solid game with a solid development team who will continue to improve upon it. The people who don't fit, don't care or aren't capable of making the changes needed will be weeded out over the next 18 or so months, just like with D3.

I'm having a lot of fun with D4 right now, despite my issues with it, and I can't wait to see where they take it from year to year.
 
Armenius said:
We can see this, but companies march out these people as a shield against criticism. As soon as people start calling them out for it the company can then call the fanbase toxic and cry racism/sexism/whateverism.
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The fan base was toxic, racist, sexist, etc with or without them unnecessarily parading devs as cannon fodder to a stupid mob of people that can't comprehend that the problem isn't a pair of lesbians despite what their confirmation bias is desperately telling them.
 
Eh, most game developers are shit gamers. That's not a new trend. The design of the dungeons isn't the major issue with the game either. The layouts can be a bit of a problem but it's more or less the objectives that are the problem. There's no way to avoid back tracking with the objectives. If they really want to have objectives, do the following:

1. If I have an objective like "click on 2x things to open a gate" or "Collect 2x things and bring them to 2x pedestals to open a gate", make it valuable for me to kill monsters along the way and not just run past everything like it's an obstacle to the objective.
1a. If I'm caught back tracking, flood me with valuable monsters along the way to kill so I'm not bored walking.

2. Remove the "kill all monsters" just make it a percentage and flood me with monsters as I move towards the end of the dungeon.

That's really all that needs to be done, they could do a lot more with randomizing the layouts a bit like they did in D2 and D3 to give us some more unique paths and layouts, but I don't really think that's the problem, I think the objectives are the problem.


Either way, when you're in NM dungeons they're much more fun now with how many monsters there are, and they all look amazing so I'd say these two people being dungeon designers did more than an OK job. The look of all of the dungeons is great, but they're bogged down by a crappy "quest" system that some intern could've made in a few days.

For everyone in the back, the main issue with the game is that

1. The skill system is bad, it's narrow with no real choice, you just pick a build and you do it, a build is foisted on you you're not really designing shit. There isn't enough choice to make any meaningful distinctions at the moment. It's more like "I'm an ice build, maybe I have 1 skill that's another elements" or "I'm a lightning build, I might have an ice shield or fire shield" and then I get the aspects that make my main powerful, party is over.

2. Legendary Aspects are a stupid idea, they should be part of the skill system. Make them runes like the initial D3 design was, items you can socket into skills and level. They're all tied to specific skills anyway, make the aspects part of the gear system and stop with all the legendary bull shit. Legendary Aspects that are just stat buffs should be removed from the game. Gear should be about buffing any build regardless of what build you're making. If you make the gear define you're build you're stuck with it. Sure, you can collect other items for different builds and stash them, but they whole game scales so you can store a good aspect, but the gear will be bad 10 or so levels later most likely.

3. Level scaling - I don't think this would be a problem if gear didn't necessarily scale with level like in Diablo 2. If you could get decent uniques that carry you to higher level and are used as budget items that are very cool to find early on it would work. The problem is building everything around scaling, not the world scaling. Items should be divorced from level scaling. Sure you can find higher item level items as you level, but everything you find shouldn't be garbage just because you leveled a little bit. This is kind of the case with rings and amulets if you hit the right rolls.

4. Too many meaningless stats - This game doesn't respect your time, it wants you to sift through dozens upon dozens of meaningless stats until you get the right rolls on a rare or legendary. I spend most of my time looking at trash rares and legendaries than I do playing sometimes but the stat system has too many affixes.(Damange to close, Damage to distance, flat damage, frozen damage, cold damage, frost damage). Just remove like 80 percent of them and the game would be better.

5. Leveling process at the lower levels takes too long. You should be able to hit like 70ish pretty quickly like in D2 and D3, experience should scale when you get close to max level. Hitting level 80 in Diablo 2 wasn't hard, but hitting 99 basically didn't happen unless you were insane. If you're going to throw most of your items away in the end game, let us get there and not toil in the middle of the game for hours upon hours. Make leveling up late much harder, and leveling up earlier much easier so we can get more characters to the end game. I have no desire to make more than one character per season because of how slow and tedious the leveling process is currently, it's just not worth my time and the game isn't fun until you hit around level 55-60 which takes way too long. PoE, D2, D3 are all much faster to level 70 for a reason.
 
Decko87 said:
Eh, most game developers are shit gamers. That's not a new trend. The design of the dungeons isn't the major issue with the game either. The layouts can be a bit of a problem but it's more or less the objectives that are the problem. There's no way to avoid back tracking with the objectives. If they really want to have objectives, do the following:

1. If I have an objective like "click on 2x things to open a gate" or "Collect 2x things and bring them to 2x pedestals to open a gate", make it valuable for me to kill monsters along the way and not just run past everything like it's an obstacle to the objective.
1a. If I'm caught back tracking, flood me with valuable monsters along the way to kill so I'm not bored walking.

2. Remove the "kill all monsters" just make it a percentage and flood me with monsters as I move towards the end of the dungeon.

That's really all that needs to be done, they could do a lot more with randomizing the layouts a bit like they did in D2 and D3 to give us some more unique paths and layouts, but I don't really think that's the problem, I think the objectives are the problem.


Either way, when you're in NM dungeons they're much more fun now with how many monsters there are, and they all look amazing so I'd say these two people being dungeon designers did more than an OK job. The look of all of the dungeons is great, but they're bogged down by a crappy "quest" system that some intern could've made in a few days.

For everyone in the back, the main issue with the game is that

1. The skill system is bad, it's narrow with no real choice, you just pick a build and you do it, a build is foisted on you you're not really designing shit. There isn't enough choice to make any meaningful distinctions at the moment. It's more like "I'm an ice build, maybe I have 1 skill that's another elements" or "I'm a lightning build, I might have an ice shield or fire shield" and then I get the aspects that make my main powerful, party is over.

2. Legendary Aspects are a stupid idea, they should be part of the skill system. Make them runes like the initial D3 design was, items you can socket into skills and level. They're all tied to specific skills anyway, make the aspects part of the gear system and stop with all the legendary bull shit. Legendary Aspects that are just stat buffs should be removed from the game. Gear should be about buffing any build regardless of what build you're making. If you make the gear define you're build you're stuck with it. Sure, you can collect other items for different builds and stash them, but they whole game scales so you can store a good aspect, but the gear will be bad 10 or so levels later most likely.

3. Level scaling - I don't think this would be a problem if gear didn't necessarily scale with level like in Diablo 2. If you could get decent uniques that carry you to higher level and are used as budget items that are very cool to find early on it would work. The problem is building everything around scaling, not the world scaling. Items should be divorced from level scaling. Sure you can find higher item level items as you level, but everything you find shouldn't be garbage just because you leveled a little bit. This is kind of the case with rings and amulets if you hit the right rolls.

4. Too many meaningless stats - This game doesn't respect your time, it wants you to sift through dozens upon dozens of meaningless stats until you get the right rolls on a rare or legendary. I spend most of my time looking at trash rares and legendaries than I do playing sometimes but the stat system has too many affixes.(Damange to close, Damage to distance, flat damage, frozen damage, cold damage, frost damage). Just remove like 80 percent of them and the game would be better.

5. Leveling process at the lower levels takes too long. You should be able to hit like 70ish pretty quickly like in D2 and D3, experience should scale when you get close to max level. Hitting level 80 in Diablo 2 wasn't hard, but hitting 99 basically didn't happen unless you were insane. If you're going to throw most of your items away in the end game, let us get there and not toil in the middle of the game for hours upon hours. Make leveling up late much harder, and leveling up earlier much easier so we can get more characters to the end game. I have no desire to make more than one character per season because of how slow and tedious the leveling process is currently, it's just not worth my time and the game isn't fun until you hit around level 55-60 which takes way too long. PoE, D2, D3 are all much faster to level 70 for a reason.
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D3 didn't have randomized dungeons or levels. I think the only random thing on some levels was where the exit was located and what mini dungeons, chosen from a small list, popped.

I agree with 4 and 5 100%. 1 doesn't feel much different to me than D3 and while I don't have a problem with 2 I like the idea of maybe having secondary passive abilities being part of the leveling system while while build specific abilities be tied to both gems and aspects. Aspects can be the core abilities while gems can be broader but simple modifiers. If they really want to kill it in the customization category they could add leveling to the gems ss well.
 
grifter_66 said:
D3 didn't have randomized dungeons or levels. I think the only random thing on some levels was where the exit was located and what mini dungeons, chosen from a small list, popped.

I agree with 4 and 5 100%. 1 doesn't feel much different to me than D3 and while I don't have a problem with 2 I like the idea of maybe having secondary passive abilities being part of the leveling system while while build specific abilities be tied to both gems and aspects. Aspects can be the core abilities while gems can be broader but simple modifiers. If they really want to kill it in the customization category they could add leveling to the gems ss well.
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D3 has random dungeons/levels. It's just not random on a microscale. That is, not every wall, passage, etc. is random. But the level can by one of X types of layouts, and each layout has a series of different sectors, and each sector can be one of Y different tile sets. That's still random. Especially compared to D4 which seems to have minimal randomness in the dungeons.
 
Well, trading has been temporarily suspended now as the developers look to fix a gold & dupe exploit.
 
Nytegard said:
As a gamer, you want someone who's talking about the game, to know something about the game. Forget what they look like for a second. It was either in the above Hawg video, or a video by ChoseN I was watching, which brought up the comparison between PoE2 and Diablo 4. The PoE2 dev talk, the developer clearly understood and expressed how PoE1 worked, and why it worked that way, and how PoE2 would address these issues. In other words, it targeted the gaming audience. The Diablo 4 video, it becomes obvious that these 2 people never even played the game. Sure, they worked on the game, but the complaints about Diablo 4 aren't about art assets. "Diablo 4 would be such a great game, if only not for the ugly art!" No, it's about gameplay. And you need to play the game and understand the gamers' mindsets.

That's a problem with a lot of media lately. You have people making creative decisions, whether its TV shows (e.g. The Witcher), or video games (e.g. Diablo 4), where the people making crucial decisions about what the property should be about, actively don't care about said property, or actively despise the property they're working on. And this is why old Blizzard was great. It use to be, when you were interviewed for a job, regardless of the position, you were a fan of their games. Because while, even as a fan, you might not be able to please 100% of the community, you'll at least please a few, because you're probably not alone, whereas if you just don't care about the property at all, at best you'll please a few.
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socK said:
I mean, who they are is irrelevant. Who gives a fuck if they're lesbians or whatever. It's an 11 minute video of designers being bizarrely terrible at the game, and somehow everyone magnetizes to LESBIANS.

They're straight up shit at the game - that's the singular point. They play like they've never played the game in their life but they're making design decisions. It's doubly suspicious because they even make a point somewhere along the line that they tried to "minimize backtracking"... but the game possibly has the most annoying and egregious backtracking in all of Diablo because you can miss one fucking thing and need to walk across the entire map and back again.

I don't need them to be clearing dungeons like they're about to submit this video to the speed run archives, but this seems to help connect the dots for how and why certain things play the way they do when they're internally played the way they are.
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I think you people are trying hard to find someone to blame. Level designers are not responsible for the fuckup called Diablo 4.
They might be part of the problem, but they are not the problem. Animators and graphical designers actually did a fantastic job. Level designers did an ok job, but let's not forget that even they messed up with dungeons back in the beta, so it was changed.

And I will argue that who they are is relevant. Hiring someone for diversity instead of qualification is wrong.
Now, based on the video you've seen, let's assume (and we're not far off) that quite a lot more designers are hired based on their race/belief/sexual orientation instead of how capable they are to produce a fan loved game, wouldn't you agree that's the reason the game is not received well by its fans?
 
Those people could have played almost exclusively with mouse-keyboard and now on Xbox controller because it is more convenient for filming, while trying to say lines not used to it at all at the same time.

Not sure how relevant for them to be actually good at the game with the design role they have and cannot judge, but I can easily much worst than usual in that type of scenario.
 
LukeTbk said:
Not sure how relevant for them to be actually good at the game
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That's why the video was ratioed. Because how good they are is relevant. Sure, who they are certainly didn't help the situation, but that's only minor here.

As socK said, when you bring out them as "designers", it becomes indicative of how the game ended up being what it was. Because in general, you want people designing your game to be fans of that game, so they have similar interests, and find similar things that you find to be fun, or at the very least understand the game.

They played on the easiest difficulty, still ended up dying, while using random skills, and stuck primarily to only using the basic attack. People understand that it's not easy to talk and play at the same time, but at least have a build that makes sense. What Blizzard did is come across as tone deaf, that the "designers" are people who know nothing about their own game.
 
KickAssCop said:
Got bored of the season stuff. Uninstalled.
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After buying this game I'm really careful of buying anything see I trusted Blizzard this game actually looked really fun. It can be in short burts but when you try too hard the game is just a beady eye fest that gives you glacoma.
 
Comixbooks said:
After buying this game I'm really careful of buying anything see I trusted Blizzard this game actually looked really fun. It can be in short burts but when you try too hard the game is just a beady eye fest that gives you glacoma.
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World of Warcraft is like that for me. I'll resub for a month, level a new healer, and by week two the M+ chase just kills it for me. I do it like twice a year.
 
So everyone finally figured out how to get speed running going good. Ran the first stage of Donhomme tunnels for about an hour last night, got nearly 2 levels.

And now blizz is going to prevent dungeons from resetting.

Because screw having fun, right?

It's wild to me, because i think a lot of complaints could be avoided if they encouraged speed levelling. Instead of not havinf a clear goal after finishing the story, there could be a clear progression:

Story->renown->helltides/basic mid level gear->rush levels to 100->glyphs->gear hunt and push

Like they should be encouraging everyone to hit level 100 easily as part of the mid-end game. That's a pretty similar game loop as D2 and D3.

And it makes sense, because you'll have your full paragon board, and can then focus on the gear and aspect hunt for killing Uner bosses and nm dungeon pushing as a real endgame, again similar to d2 and D3.
 
I uninstalled after getting 100% on map exploration, altars, and strongholds. End game feels like a major drag and I don't see any objective goals really. The quests, main and side, are the ultimate fetch simulation. I've never been so aggravated going back and forth across the map to go find someone's head or medicine or whatever. Every side quest is literally the same exact formula, just given different fetch items. The only part of the game I REALLY enjoyed was the path towards Lilith, once you got into the cathedral and all that. That was dark and fun, no pointless wandering around in circles.
 
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