Blizzard is so out of touch with the concept of "hack and slash"

I been playing Diablo 4 for a while i didnt spend my own money on the game but my brother bought it so i play from his account anyway apparently blizzard is nerfing every single dungeon in diablo 4 where was high denisity of monsters blizzard doesnt realize that in hack and slash rpg games you are suppose to kill bunch of monsters on your screen becuz its fun and satisfying and you get loot explosion but not in diablo 4 they want you to kill 5 monsters on screen at a time and kill 1-2 rare elites per dungeon it is crazy how out of touch they are with their game and the sad part is diablo 4 will have several times more active playerbase with their sorry state of the game than PoE 2 with their 100x times more endgame content

i never played or watched any gameplay videos of it but i did see a very through review on reddit and it's a much slower paced game with cooldowns on every or most skills so having poe density wouldn't work too well

It's pretty obvious that Blizzard has been out of touch about how to make good videogames for a few years now.

It's just funny that they had 11 YEARS to make Diablo 4, learn from success and failures of other ARPGs, and the end product is THIS. Apologists saying things like - PoE was also pretty barebones at release. So you really want to compare a 10 years old game, made by a small indie company during the era when ARPG endgame wasn't even a real thing to Diablo 4?

Exactly as predicted - no depth, not enough viable builds, poor itemization, pretty much no endgame at this point. On top of other issues like level scaling, huge barren areas with low monster density, not enough stash space (no worries - I'm sure the cash shop will fix it soon).

At this point it's hard to understand what Diablo 4 tries to be. ARPG vets are finding the game pretty empty and shallow, but its target audience are casual players, right? But surprisingly they are also not too happy with the slow leveling, bossfights taking forever, level scaling that takes away the feeling of progression and your character becoming stronger since the content always keeps scaling with you, and not enough viable builds that can deal with the content.

Content creators melting, forums melting, 5.2 user score on metacritic. Still a huge commercial success for Blizzard - as always. Great for them - not so great for the actual players.

I'm also part of the problem - since I've still bought it to play with my brother who was super hyped, so more bucks for Blizzard.

Diablo 4 actually made me appreciate PoE more, and even made me a bit hyped about PoE 2. Just reinstalled PoE, since I've bought more disk space last week, and ready to play some more despite the league being a bit old now.

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esostaks wrote:

It's pretty obvious that Blizzard has been out of touch about how to make good videogames for a few years now.

It's just funny that they had 11 YEARS to make Diablo 4, learn from success and failures of other ARPGs, and the end product is THIS. Apologists saying things like - PoE was also pretty barebones at release. So you really want to compare a 10 years old game, made by a small indie company during the era when ARPG endgame wasn't even a real thing to Diablo 4?

Exactly as predicted - no depth, not enough viable builds, poor itemization, pretty much no endgame at this point. On top of other issues like level scaling, huge barren areas with low monster density, not enough stash space (no worries - I'm sure the cash shop will fix it soon).

At this point it's hard to understand what Diablo 4 tries to be. ARPG vets are finding the game pretty empty and shallow, but its target audience are casual players, right? But surprisingly they are also not too happy with the slow leveling, bossfights taking forever, level scaling that takes away the feeling of progression and your character becoming stronger since the content always keeps scaling with you, and not enough viable builds that can deal with the content.

Content creators melting, forums melting, 5.2 user score on metacritic. Still a huge commercial success for Blizzard - as always. Great for them - not so great for the actual players.

I'm also part of the problem - since I've still bought it to play with my brother who was super hyped, so more bucks for Blizzard.

Diablo 4 actually made me appreciate PoE more, and even made me a bit hyped about PoE 2. Just reinstalled PoE, since I've bought more disk space last week, and ready to play some more despite the league being a bit old now.

They werent working on D4 for 11 years thats for sure. It seems like they really didnt start working on D4 until Lost Ark came out, because that seems to be where they drew the majority of their inspiration. You can just tell the Devs were knee deep into loving Lost Ark and thought that was gonna be the next big thing when you play Diablo 4. They took Paragon boards from PoE and then the rest of the game might as well be a Lost Ark mod.

The real issue with D4 atm is there is no real direction. D3 had a niche; PoE has a niche. D4 doesnt have anything atm. Its just character progression that is marred by level scaling and in 2023 JUST character progression will not hold up. D3 was for competitive Grifting, SSF and leaderboards. It was also casual. It had its niche. PoE has economy, depth, robust end-game. Right now you pretty much just play D4 for the sake of playing D4 and if the game was a 1 and done purchase, that might be ok. But this is a game trying to be a live-service, long lasting appeal game and I dont even think the gameplay loop atm is anywhere near D3, much less PoE.

D3, for as much as people bash it here, still has a nice gameplay loop and can be fun to play a season every now and then. You would think that D4 would at least learn from his predecessor, if not its competition. Right now theres just not much reason to do anything in D4 once you farm up a bit. The boss fights are shams compared to Lost Ark, or PoE, the density in-game is bad(another weird thing considering they took inspiration from LA and PoE and both have pretty good monster density, even with LA not being an Arpg).

In 2023 you need a reason to play the game. You need leaderboards, you need an economy, you need something outside of character leveling. My friends have alreayd quit until the first season and may not even play then.

I feel like D4 is probably a year or 2 off actually being a great game. Sort of like D3 wasnt very good until Reaper of Souls.

It goes well beyond just things like mob density. They designed a relatively big open world and a vast amount of dungeons only to effectively waste most of that work by just homogenizing all the mobs and loot tables on top of a homogenized itemization. It's like making a football field sized kiddie pool.

The game would be in such a better state for everyone if it could trade half its world size and number of dungeons for more aspects, more uniques, more glyphs, better affix itemization, better crafting, and all around just a more interesting itemization to discover at higher levels and world tiers.

An alternative view might be that there's plenty of time to add depth, mechanics and content in a game planned as lengthy and wiht seasons and subscriptions, rather than trying to fill it overnight.

Similarly for gear, it's nice finding upgrades on the ground and enough loot drops that this is viable, without having such ludicrously junky itemisation that it's pointless.

BUt given the game has only been out a couple of weeks, and I've only had very casual levels of play even by my standards, I'm reserving judgement for a while longer.
If the critics here have been no-lifing it, playing 10 hours a day for 10-15 days, do say - but I'm not convinced the game is meant for that anyhow, not yet.

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CAPSLOCK_ON wrote:

i never played or watched any gameplay videos of it but i did see a very through review on reddit and it's a much slower paced game with cooldowns on every or most skills so having poe density wouldn't work too well

Absolutely not true. I've played D4 decently enough, got a 70+ character in WT4, and even if I got skills in cooldowns, the mobs density in D4 are still absolutely dogshit, many skills in D4 need high mobs density to even be truly great due to lucky hit proc mechanics. It'd be like if every dungeons in D4 minus a few that is constantly being nerfed by Blizzard in their density has half the pack size of Strand map.

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Varana wrote:

An alternative view might be that there's plenty of time to add depth, mechanics and content in a game planned as lengthy and wiht seasons and subscriptions, rather than trying to fill it overnight.

They most definitely have all the time in the world to recover and improve. Especially since it's presented as a live-service game. It's just that you would somehow expect a better 'base' from such giant as Blizzard. But maybe it's just me.

According to rhykker's video from 3 days ago even whoopi goldberg plays diablo! I still don't know who that person is, but in drake & josh they always make a big deal out of her and i love watching drake & josh. (i just realized that that was oprah. sorry im not very into famous ppl, my bad. i find it very important to spread names of good things, because theres nothing good being made these days, for real and all that people know about is probably fortnite and dubstep and homosexual haircuts. star trek the next generation. that was it i think)

It is so surreal, that a non-gaming-related woman is talking about diablo lol.

I see no value in D4, but seeing ryukahr play it just makes me want to play it better xD and its on my win 10, so i can hop on it whenever i feel like. Dunno why i haven't gotten sick of watching him play it yet. Couldn't stand much of it on asmon's twitch. And he is the strongest warrior of WoW.

I've even played D4 in a group now via the official international discord. It still got boring really fast. Not even bearable for an hour. Despite us having a fun group of people. 2 Druids and 2 wiz :3. I'm still gonna try to play it a bit better than ryukahr.

Btw kripparian said that resistances are useless in d4, so if you ever play d4, even for a bit, you'll be equipped with inside knowledge. From what i remember both chris wilson and asmon have mentioned krip before so it must be true.

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It goes well beyond just things like mob density. They designed a relatively big open world and a vast amount of dungeons only to effectively waste most of that work by just homogenizing all the mobs and loot tables on top of a homogenized itemization. It's like making a football field sized kiddie pool.

That's not even the real problem. They're doing the same thing that brought many players from D3 to PoE. They focused almost exclusively on accessibility, and bringing in as many people as possible.

At the end of the day, the main focus for both Blizzard and Activision are to sell as many copies of the game as possible, followed by as much MTX as possible. They've gone as far as adjusting hitboxes in CoD in realtime solely to use players who buy MTX as walking advertisements - and patented the systems.

D4 would be alright if everything were balanced better, but they really dropped the ball there. There's no real feeling of progression because of scaling. Many builds you're having to use autoattack more often than the abilities because you still have issues with resource costs at higher levels. There are some mechanics in there that could make that less of a chore, but it depends on pack density. And pack density is nerfed because people are leveling too fast, and the goal is to keep people grinding for as long as possible. Like WoW, Blizzard is hoping that the more time people sink in, the more they'll invest, if for no other reason than because people will view the prior time and cash spent as a waste.

Honestly, the campaign is pretty good. After that it really struggles for ARPG vets, but that's because their target audience is expanded to include even braindead non-ARPG players.

It's really just the opposite side of the spectrum as PoE. Things have expanded so much since beta that the immense number of mechanic interactions make it difficult to test, balance, and even start to get a grasp on as a new player.

If D3 is any indication, they'll expand things and add a bit more depth, but everyone knows that new Diablo games will never be a true Diablo 2 successor. AAA studios only have one goal, as many players paying as much as possible. Most of the expanded player base can't even type on their keyboard, much less use it to manage a complex build they've got to theorycraft on their own.