It’s really sad that Blizzard has no idea what makes D2 a great game, especially considering they just released D2R so we can relive the glory for ourselves. D4 on release was nowhere close to D2, it was more like a toddler trying to make an MMO.
In D2, you can feel your character become more powerful with levels alone. In fact, gearing basically doesn’t matter for most of normal difficulty, it’s almost entirely level focused. D4 scales content to your players level, meaning every level you gained made you weaker. No shit people didn’t want to go for a long XP grind, who wants to continually grind to do less damage?
Weirdly enough the D4 skill tree is even worse than the one (I know not really a tree) in D3. The first abilities almost don’t matter and are just “filler” for your resource regen or cooldowns and the main abilities are just a handful, most of them kinda meh and with barely any progression & variety behind them.
As for D2R I wish they would’ve gone a bit farther with it, like an item filter feels like a must have with how much it spams loot onto your screen to the point where it does not display everything. This can cause you to literally not see something like a high rune on the ground because of some trash items taking up the tooltip space. Or things like the vanity system from D3 and D4 (minus the micro transactions).
Whatever… They lost touch with their base in favor of a new one that they can milk. Their profits and shareholders will love it though. I’m done with them.
I agree that an item-filter would have been a nice addition, but with Blizzard you have to take a hardline #NoChanges approach. Otherwise you’ll get something like the WC3 remaster, or every Classic WoW expansion. They did add a few small additions after the remaster was released, like Helltides and some new Runewords, but they’re all thankfully ignorable if you want to.
I agree, it feels very artificial and it breaks my perception of the game almost immediately.
In path of exile, you kind do the same thing. You want to fight stronger enemies because you are stronger and by doing it, you can get more and better rewards. But it’s ultimately your decision when you want to face harder content. Not some algorithm that is tied to your precieved gear level.
They adjusted the level scaling for S3, with different thresholds depending on the world tier you’re in. As you approach the monster level cap for a given world tier, the scaling slows down so that it’s outpaced by the player level.
I agree it shouldn’t have scaled 1:1 all the way to max level on launch, but people are super quick to forget how well D4 was generally received on launch. It was literally used as a counterexample to games that launched badly, “it was more like a toddler trying to make an MMO” seems like a dishonest characterisation to me. What complaints do you have that aren’t long since resolved?
I mean, releasing one of the worst ARPGs of all time isn’t exactly a triumphant launch. I think D4 is fine now that it’s effectively become a sequel to D3, which is why I tried to use the past-tense as much as I could, but D4 was only received well by casuals. Every ARPG fan I know and every content creator I watched played it for like 2 days, realized there were deep systemic issues, and dipped.
That’s just not consistent with the reality that Diablo 4 was released to wide acclaim. Wolcen was far worse than D4 in almost every area. I think you just got farmed for engagement, because contrarianism is trendy.
There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.
I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers
people were literally criticising the game so much on all the Diablo-related r/'s that i had to unsub from each one. like, yeah, it got good ratings, but if anything, that only served to further incense the ones displeased.
there was a lot of stupid, toxic bs, for sure, but there were also players dipping out before the first season even began – myself included. like, this is just me, obviously, but D4 at launch was straight up the most let down i’ve ever been by a game.
for brevity’s sake, i gotta say that season 4 made me wanna give D4 another shot. & you know, it’s fun now, but there are still elements to it that make me want to scream & that’s not gonna change, because it’s all a part of their vision for the core experience of the game.
Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.
I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.
yeah, okay. all i’m saying is, parts of the internet were practically incandescent with negativity towards the game, a not insignificant amount of which had to do with the base mechanics. like, there are content creators currently reporting on how season 4 is turning things around, which wouldn’t be noteworthy if the game hadn’t been hemorrhaging players almost immediately after launch.
D4 released to “wide acclaim” where the critics are concerned, yes, but a sizable portion of the audience clearly didn’t agree. like, the game was practically a meme until recently.
Isn’t that the point of him saying about “the consumptive nature”? They couldn’t do what they wanted to, because they were doing a live service (that a large portion of people do want) so concessions had to be made.
I don’t think they are saying they tried doing it, it’s just the two ideas couldn’t coexist.
Eh, it sounds to me like they’re saying “we tried to imitate D2 exactly, but people don’t want it anymore.” That’s just flat out a lie though, because they didn’t imitate D2 at all. In the article, the mention that a player could conceivably take years to drop specific “uber uniques.” While true that it would take a lot of time to drop it naturally, D2 had a pretty robust trading economy in it’s later years. Unless you were specifically going solo, you had the option to save up. It took time, but it was a goal that was accomplishable on ladder.
Unless they changed it when I wasn’t looking, uber uniques are not tradable in D4 at all. I’m not necessarily going to argue for or against that, it’s a game design choice, but it’s specifically not the choice made by D2. Obviously players aren’t going to want to grind for years for a specific item, but they never had to in the past.
It’s really sad that Blizzard has no idea what makes D2 a great game, especially considering they just released D2R so we can relive the glory for ourselves. D4 on release was nowhere close to D2, it was more like a toddler trying to make an MMO.
In D2, you can feel your character become more powerful with levels alone. In fact, gearing basically doesn’t matter for most of normal difficulty, it’s almost entirely level focused. D4 scales content to your players level, meaning every level you gained made you weaker. No shit people didn’t want to go for a long XP grind, who wants to continually grind to do less damage?
Weirdly enough the D4 skill tree is even worse than the one (I know not really a tree) in D3. The first abilities almost don’t matter and are just “filler” for your resource regen or cooldowns and the main abilities are just a handful, most of them kinda meh and with barely any progression & variety behind them.
As for D2R I wish they would’ve gone a bit farther with it, like an item filter feels like a must have with how much it spams loot onto your screen to the point where it does not display everything. This can cause you to literally not see something like a high rune on the ground because of some trash items taking up the tooltip space. Or things like the vanity system from D3 and D4 (minus the micro transactions).
Whatever… They lost touch with their base in favor of a new one that they can milk. Their profits and shareholders will love it though. I’m done with them.
I agree that an item-filter would have been a nice addition, but with Blizzard you have to take a hardline #NoChanges approach. Otherwise you’ll get something like the WC3 remaster, or every Classic WoW expansion. They did add a few small additions after the remaster was released, like Helltides and some new Runewords, but they’re all thankfully ignorable if you want to.
I agree, it feels very artificial and it breaks my perception of the game almost immediately.
In path of exile, you kind do the same thing. You want to fight stronger enemies because you are stronger and by doing it, you can get more and better rewards. But it’s ultimately your decision when you want to face harder content. Not some algorithm that is tied to your precieved gear level.
They adjusted the level scaling for S3, with different thresholds depending on the world tier you’re in. As you approach the monster level cap for a given world tier, the scaling slows down so that it’s outpaced by the player level.
I agree it shouldn’t have scaled 1:1 all the way to max level on launch, but people are super quick to forget how well D4 was generally received on launch. It was literally used as a counterexample to games that launched badly, “it was more like a toddler trying to make an MMO” seems like a dishonest characterisation to me. What complaints do you have that aren’t long since resolved?
I mean, releasing one of the worst ARPGs of all time isn’t exactly a triumphant launch. I think D4 is fine now that it’s effectively become a sequel to D3, which is why I tried to use the past-tense as much as I could, but D4 was only received well by casuals. Every ARPG fan I know and every content creator I watched played it for like 2 days, realized there were deep systemic issues, and dipped.
That’s just not consistent with the reality that Diablo 4 was released to wide acclaim. Wolcen was far worse than D4 in almost every area. I think you just got farmed for engagement, because contrarianism is trendy.
Everyone I know that played at launch when I asked if it was worth getting told me no, even more so after the first few patches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_IV#Reception
There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.
I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers
people were literally criticising the game so much on all the Diablo-related r/'s that i had to unsub from each one. like, yeah, it got good ratings, but if anything, that only served to further incense the ones displeased.
there was a lot of stupid, toxic bs, for sure, but there were also players dipping out before the first season even began – myself included. like, this is just me, obviously, but D4 at launch was straight up the most let down i’ve ever been by a game.
for brevity’s sake, i gotta say that season 4 made me wanna give D4 another shot. & you know, it’s fun now, but there are still elements to it that make me want to scream & that’s not gonna change, because it’s all a part of their vision for the core experience of the game.
Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.
I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.
yeah, okay. all i’m saying is, parts of the internet were practically incandescent with negativity towards the game, a not insignificant amount of which had to do with the base mechanics. like, there are content creators currently reporting on how season 4 is turning things around, which wouldn’t be noteworthy if the game hadn’t been hemorrhaging players almost immediately after launch.
D4 released to “wide acclaim” where the critics are concerned, yes, but a sizable portion of the audience clearly didn’t agree. like, the game was practically a meme until recently.
Isn’t that the point of him saying about “the consumptive nature”? They couldn’t do what they wanted to, because they were doing a live service (that a large portion of people do want) so concessions had to be made.
I don’t think they are saying they tried doing it, it’s just the two ideas couldn’t coexist.
Eh, it sounds to me like they’re saying “we tried to imitate D2 exactly, but people don’t want it anymore.” That’s just flat out a lie though, because they didn’t imitate D2 at all. In the article, the mention that a player could conceivably take years to drop specific “uber uniques.” While true that it would take a lot of time to drop it naturally, D2 had a pretty robust trading economy in it’s later years. Unless you were specifically going solo, you had the option to save up. It took time, but it was a goal that was accomplishable on ladder.
Unless they changed it when I wasn’t looking, uber uniques are not tradable in D4 at all. I’m not necessarily going to argue for or against that, it’s a game design choice, but it’s specifically not the choice made by D2. Obviously players aren’t going to want to grind for years for a specific item, but they never had to in the past.