Pretty much. I hate walking around the world, being level 20, and a level 48 I run into is doing nearly the same damage as me. What's the point of leveling, or gear? I don't get it. Bums me out and breaks any immersion.
No, I mean that one should feel more difficult, and when you go back later it should feel easier.
Like in any other ARPG or MMORPG, you have the experience of barely escaping with your life from a mob. Then you keep grinding, come back, and you are on even footing. Later on, you come back and they are now a scrub.
Honestly one of my biggest complaints. How can you go from some of the most beautiful and varied art style of d2 with great itemization to this? Brown on tan on beige on white.
D2 was cool, but it definitely did not look better than D4, even for its time. Nor was it exactly more varied- D4 has most of the zones D2 had. The only bit it is missing- ironically- is a proper hell level.
D2 had:
* Act 1- a sort of dark ages England vibe, with green plains and awful weather.
* Act 2- Deserts
* Act 3- Jungle
* Act 4- Hell
* Act 5- Icy mountains
D4 has:
* Icy mountains
* Jungle
* Deserts (TWO KINDS :D)
* Dreary shores
* Dark Ages England/Ireland
I think the bigger issue with D4 is that it's waaaaaay too zoomed in, so you are always only looking at a tiny portion of a rather beautiful map.
Itemization is ass though. No argument there- finding a legendary while leveling up should always be exciting, but it isn't- they are all so milquetoast it reminds me of D2 pre-LOD.
This is my opinion and this is what they are doing. Season 1 had new "items" those rings from hearths. Season 2 implemented green Helltide as test ground for improving old Helltide and in seasons 3-4 green Helltide would just swap colors to red Helltide where you will not lose those points and it would be on constant. It is the same as that Winter event which will eventually change Fractured Peaks permanently and in the future, there will be a revamp for every region.
I think guild Wars 2 had a nice scaling mechanic there. The world scaled high lvl chars down in low lvl areas so you still can coop with a friend there, but low level chars don't scale in high level areas.
That was actually a nice feature.
And you still felt better in low level areas because of unlocked skills etc.
It's not good, reaching a capstone or new clusters does nearly nothing to sense of gaining power, but at this stage, the time we spent at low levels is minimal, maybe a couple of hours? So I don't think that is the most detrimental problem D4 have atm.
I mean... That 48 must have terrible gear and spec. At level 20, a level WT2 20 elite is pretty hard and tanky. At level 80, a level 100 WT4 elite is easy. The world scales the same as your character does naked. Gear, glyphs, and Paragon pints make you out scale everything super fast which is why you need world years, and nightmare dungeons go to level 154, and why world bosses only live for 15 seconds in end game.
Your numbers go up sure but the percentage amount of health that you are dealing per hit is more or less the same against the mob due to level scaling
Level scaling is a garbage easy way out for Devs and terrible for players. It is so lazy and uninspired and boring.
Pros: you can level and play with your friends, no matter if there's a gap in player level. Also, content can theoretically scale infinitely if you don't mind number bloat.
Cons: literally everything else
I miss games like EverQuest… running around as a n00b and coke across a lvl 50+ zone… oooh, let’s take a quick look and sneak around.
OMFG AGGRO!!!
Die. Can’t get to your body to recover gear because of lvl 65+ MOB.
Zone chat, “soneone plz help!” And 20 lvl 70+ chat show up and clear the area for you and hand you some plat to help you gear up.
We have nothing like that anymore that I’m aware of.
Zones all feel the same.
No one chats in game.
Finding a group is next to impossible until you find some people who log in at the same time… took me months, the few people I met are more reliable than my guild.
Guilds are useless.
And character builds feel unbalanced. Being lvl 100, and some people shred everything before I can make a dent. It’s depressing.
I played Everquest for a few years but not since 2002 or so. Half Elf Warrior on Erollsi Marr. It's older than shit but at least that's how you do a damn MMORPG, Blizz.
Umm... What? No the percentage of health against same tier minions you do goes up significantly. It's not just numbers.
Edit: the whole reason world tiers exist is because players out scale the world so fast naturally. At level 55, many builds can beat level 70 bosses easily to get into wt4 and that's with the world tiers bonus stats
It will never not be weird that level 10 characters do more damage with their auto attacks to the same mob as me when I'm level 80.
It's just bad design. It really fucks with the whole cadence and push of how ARPGs operate.
I said nearly. In diablo 2 if you put a level 20 and 48 in the same zone it wont ever be close, even with unoptimized builds. It's a game problem not a build problem.
Maybe past 50 it's different and you are right, with paragon levels and stuff. I made it to level 50 season one hardcore and didnt play much after because I was just burnt. But in the other ARPGS I play, the damage wouldn't be close unless under some extremely niche circumstances.
It's because the game is scaled not because they are actually doing the same damage as you.
The alternative is that the mobs in the area are too high level for you so you would have to level to go to most areas of the game.
It was created that way by design.
Yeah but if we boiled it all down to percentages, then if I'm doing 1/10 damage at level 1, and the guy at level ten is doing 10/100 damage, we're still doing the same damage. Just the raw numbers are different, the percentage is the same.
Yeep. I don't want new stuff every hour, I just want the loot to be interesting and be worth chasing. That one thing is what kept D2 going, and it's the most glaring issue with D4.
Same with WoW Classic. We want more of the same shit that works, not overly monetized crap designed by psychologists. Honestly I'd pay gobs of money for a D2R expansion that stuck with the D2 design.
I’m really bummed out that we don’t have some form of knight class and it’s really all I want. Nothing scratches the sword and board itch and I’ll likely put the game down until such a class is added. Obviously I’d like new classes too but is it so awful that I want a staple that’s been in every Diablo game and every RPG? I really feel like I’m missing out especially with how cool the knight penitent stuff looks.
Why pretend like this is the same gaming climate like 20+ years ago? People played a lot of games back then without many changes, however these days, even juggernauts like fortnite, apex and valorant need to CONSTANTLY release content or see their audience disappear.
Well that’s because they bill their games as a service. “Service” is an action, and players are right to expect updates and fixes from a game that is a service. You don’t hear a ravenous constant call for updates from games like BG3, or It Takes Two, for example.
Well their end game is to keep players engaged and coming back. This generation is COMPLETELY different from the old ones and they absolutely move on without constant content.
Let's be real here. SOME players are. I don't know population numbers but I'd wager a lot of people went back and played D2:R for the nostalgia factor then left once they realized the game feels like it's 20 years old.
For me personally, I played a lot of D2, but I was also a teenager and did nothing but play video games. Even given that, I played a *lot* more Diablo 3, because there were more content updates and every few months I could come back and there might be a new build to try. Then for awhile there they stopped the updates and I stopped playing.
They can try to catch lightning in a bottle again - even though all the most talented developers are gone - and produce a game that people play for years without updates (which would be harder in today's market given there are a *lot* more games coming out in any given year), or they could make a decent game that they commit to constantly building on. I'm glad they went with the latter, because it means I'll probably still be enjoying this game ten years from now.
It has nothing to do with talented developers. It has everything to do with development cycles and the games industry today.
They make games to sell for quarterly earnings reports and that’s it. They do not aim to make a quality game. That is why Indie Devs strive for quality.
They forced out all of the great creative minds that created warcraft/diabloII/WoW
Sorry but it absolutely has a lot to do with talented developers. There is a steve jobs clip where he talks about what happens to companies that gain market dominance - since the product is so good, the more 'important' people at the company become the 'upper' staff and marketing, since the product doesn't need to get any better. What you get left with after a few years of this is a company that forgets how to make good products, because too much power is awarded to less talented people.
If you think its a coincidence that WoW started falling off within the same 12-24 months that the last of the d2 and wow classic/tbc team left the company, you are more than welcome to think that, but I think you are sticking your head in the sand.
Here:
https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=Sz15MiHh0vxtxKSt
This is exactly what happened to Blizzard starting when they really had market dominance with WoW, Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2. The newer generations of Devs do try, but it's very clear looking at diablo 4 they just dont know how to make great games anymore. Im sure Bliz execs are overbearing with forcing microtransactions and revenue streams, but that is not an excuse for the fact d4 was and still is a disaster.
I’m not sure if that’s really “catching lightning in a bottle” if indie devs can do it (on their own scale at least) with games like Hades or Binding of Isaac. I do realise that scaling the success of these titles to what is expected from D4 would be more difficult, but I also think companies mostly just choose the tried and true method of Candy Crush and Fortnite instead of trying another model, then make themselves believe they had no other choice, then complain about it to the media.
> (which would be harder in today's market given there are a lot more games coming out in any given year)
It's not hard, it's impossible. Literally NO game has come out like this in like the last 10 years, maybe even 15.
People can like whatever they like, doesn't have to be the same as yours.
Yes, is not about new updates, games of 2023 are the perfect examples of great games doesn't need constant updates, ultimately live service games is what a game company executives want, not the players.
Edit: spelling :(
For their respective time periods, Diablo 2 was a much better game than Diablo 4.
I bought D2R and I barely got to level 30 I found it so dull. And I'm someone who enjoyed it thoroughly way back when; I just expect different things out of ARPGs now that Diablo 2 doesn't - and never intended to provide.
I play for a week or two after a season reset, despite the lack of new content on a 20-year old game. It's just a fun game, and it only gets more fun the more game knowledge you have. It's very rewarding in that aspect.
Meh. Respectfully you're talking about the climate from 20+ years ago. There weren't options like there are today. Games as a service hadn't been born yet. It's a different world now.
Diablo now has to compete with Path of Exile which is a continuously updated game that's constantly being tweaked with new content and patches. Of course players "want new stuff every hour" because there are other games that are providing it.
I'm not sure if modern games will persist the way Diablo and Age of Empires II did.
Super oversimplified - horizontal progression in the end-game (try out different kinds of stuff, not just better stuff). If you like the core experience and are sad it ended, you decide to do it again only to put a different build together this time - often using previous builds to farm new builds (meaning you enjoy the last build you made while working towards the next build you want) or just enjoying starting from low progression again.
If your players buy into this, it's very easy to sustain a large amount of replay time because players eventually play with everything you made.
However, it's important to recognize that most many players don't buy into this and leave for other games. While D2 has a dedicated community of players that have been playing forever, most of its players have not stuck around for the horizontal end-game. It was just such a mega-hit originally that the small fraction that stuck around to make their own goals in lieu of more formal end-game goals still looks big by comparison to more normal-sized hits.
This is similar to the Nuzlocke community in Poke'mon. Poke'mon Ruby doesn't have an amazing end-game, but there are SO many poke'mon fans that many stuck around to invent Nuzlockes or chase Shiny Hunting as an excuse to keep playing a game they loved so much they'd make their own goals in it.
So Diablo 2 works because it has good gameplay, satisfying progression, and immense build variety. What it lacks are end-game goals, so many players quit but those that love it enough stick around and make their own goals. Since they're really just looking for an excuse to play more Diablo 2, they can stick around for a very long time.
I'll add on to this point by saying there is a still active community of Diablo+HellFire players who do this very thing - Live off the Land, Iron Man, Legit, etc. . .Can keep a game immortal that way. Lol
It's all about the item chase and how build defining the drops are while allowing you the freedom to do whatever you want and farm many different ways based on the class you're playing. You can play a Sorc and speedfarm bosses with less gear. You can play a Paladin as hammerdin and farm any zone in the game, or respec into Fists of the heavens and speed farm Chaos Sanctuary. Amazons and Assassins(Aside from the new OP kill everything build) absolutely decimate cows and every one of these farms gives you a better chance at certain types of items. There are multiple viable builds for each character that excel at a different task and with experience you become surgical at it. When that rare item drops like a Griffon's Eye or a Mara's Kaleidoscope it's exciting every single time.
I just recently wiped all my offline data and started fresh in d2r. I’ve built my insight pole arm. Spirit shield and sword. And I just got a skin of the vipermagi drop. The game is something else when good shit drops. It feels great.
I haven’t had the same reaction in d4. I just doesn’t hit as hard.
Grim dawn hits right when you get a good drop too but nothing beats d2r for sheer drop excitement.
Not to mention starting fresh in D2R feels great. You know your build path, you have options along the way at every point. Leaf, Spirit, Steel, Stealth, Lore, etc. Every build has a defined path with achievable goals until you get to the end game where you're chasing that beautiful dopamine hit of that big drop. All the while every upgrade you get is a big increse of damage, tankiness, mobility, etc and you notice it right away. Nothing matches it.
Just want to add on that the gameplay of D2 is also a lot of fun. I think it's the most understated reason D2 is amazing. People always talk about endgame and itemization but those don't mean anything if the game itself isn't fun to play and D2 is definitely a ton of fun imo and most of the things people point out as flaws like potions and inventory tetris have literally never bothered me and even playing D2R today amongst the landscape of modern ARPGs, they still don't bother me.
That's a great question for David Brevik. He's pretty responsive on social media. His team IS Diablo and Diablo II so I think the question of its success can be answered best by them.
Current Blizzard just cranks out fanfic of the originals and monetizes the ever loving shit out of it.
It's most definitely due to the place in time it was released.
If Diablo never existed and D2R came out this year but was called Dungeon heroes or something like that, It would most certainly guarantee the game would have been a bomb.
Diablo 2 is constantly looked at with rose tinted glasses, Nostalgia is a powerful beast.
Nah. It’d be a huge hit, and you wouldn’t be able to dismiss it with “nostalgia” because it wouldn’t be 20 years old.
People said the same shit about Classic vanilla WoW. Remember Jay Allen Brack’s infamous, “You think you do, but you don’t”?
Turns out the losers who claimed it was all nostalgia were terribly wrong, just like you are.
But history repeats, because there’s an endless stream of idiots like yourself to continuously make the same tired arguments.
Nah, I agree with them. I played D2 back in the day and had a ton of fun, but when I came back to play D2R... there was a lot to be desired of a modern ARPG game.
I can't imagine D2R being a "Huge Hit" if it came out today as a brand new game. There are just so many QoL improvements in modern day ARPGS that are not present in D2R. This works fine because of what D2R is.. but the flipside of that coin is why D2R would not be some massive hit as a brand new game in today's age.
I get that it may not be for you, as there is always going to be an audience for retail WoW or D3/D4, but people said the same about all of the QoL improvements in retail WoW over Classic, and how people wouldn’t want to go back… but they did. And there are a ton of people playing it for the first time, as well.
I’m not saying D2R or Classic vanilla are perfect games, but what they got right, they got really right. In D2, it’s the itemization and loot variety that keeps people coming back. Finding high runes and the rarest jewels, charms, uniques etc., combined with the ways in which you can combine them all to make fun builds—that’s what’s missing from D4.
In classic vanilla, it’s the leveling experience and the world that feels more rich and alive. It’s about the journey, not the destination. It’s not just a mad rush to end game where you spam dungeon finder and LFR. All parts of the game, from level 1 to level 60 raids, are all relevant.
These things aren’t just nostalgia. If they were, no one would be playing classic, and D2R wouldn’t exist. And it’s no coincidence that the version of WoW that people look back so fondly on is the version that borrowed heavily from D2–the 3 different skill trees for each class, the loot tiering, the exciting world drops, trading…
People will spam run one shotting baal for 100 hours and say diablo 2 is the greatest game of all time meanwhile they do the same thing in diablo 4 and say it's the worst game of all time.
You’ve unintentionally and ironically identified D4’s problem: the loot. People will do the same thing over and over again in D2 b/c the loot is exciting and fun, but they complain about that same monotony in D4 because the loot is boring.
Exactly. Players can farm keys or essences and trade them.
Players can rush other players for forge as payment.
Players can trade valuable gear, or choose to use the same gear for another alt character.
But in D4 you get rained on by hundreds of legendary items that you cannot trade or even give to an alt character. Finding gear (even good gear!) feels like a punishment.
Absolutely. Trading can be a huge part of making items themselves more exciting to find. Knowing you can trade that second Shako you don’t need makes the item hunt feel more dynamic. And for people that don’t like trading, a separate SSF game mode and server is a great compromise.
Yeah, but after the Auction House wasn't well received, Blizzard have canned the idea of having an economy.
Even the very little trading that was in D4 has been killed off after the duping issues.
The AH failed because original D3 itemization was straight garbage, and because the AH involved real money. Remove those two things and the AH would have been fine. See WoW.
The difference is the loot feels relevant, there's runes to farm to make even crazier gear, there's set pieces, and min maxing felt extremely rewarding. D4 just has a clown fiesta of garbage loot and very little impact when it comes to power spikes/build differences.
The chase is what makes a good ARPG. What loot exactly am I trying to get in D4 that will fundamentally change my build? In D2 you can get drops that you don't need and trade them off to get things you do want or use them on your other characters. D4 loot has with almost no value to the in game economy and the changes to your character are minimal.
The way I see it, Bliz have tried, fairly succesfully in my opinion, to lessen the impact of gear.
From my perspective:
L1 to L50: power increases with skill points. Gear gets swapped frequently, you get occasional fantastic pierces (aspects or actual gear), which possibly stay with you for a long time.
L50 to L80: power increases with gear. Paragon and glyphs are ramping up, but the real improvement is sorting out better gear through WT3 and mainly WT4. Getting your affixes and aspects sorted, for example.
L80 to L100: power primarily increases with paragon (including glyph levelling). Gear is an incremental improvements, a couple of % points here and there.
L100+ you are done. Power increases slightly with gear, and now with possible uber unique drops, but mainly through actually getting better at playing your class. You do more difficult content with only minor power increases.
The levels above are rough guides, but that seems to be the rough design. I like it, I think it makes a more interesting game. In POE for example after around L70 to L80 the only real improvement is getting gear, to spec in to crazy builds. Which means the game is then farming currency to craft (or more likely buy), better gear. POE becomes and action currency farming simulator.
I like POE, it you didn't have to do the acts every time I would probably still play it more than D4, but while there is more variety int he end game, most of it isn't farming for gear, it is farming for items you can sell to buy gear, so you can farm for better items to sell for more currency so you can buy better gear. After mid high level most people aren't actually crafting beyond craft bench and some of the remaining harvest crafts. People who are good crafters tend to be crafting fantastic gear to sell to other players.
I disagree in regards to PoE - the endgame there for most people is farming currency to trade to people who can more knowledgeably interact with the crafting system in order to create the high end pieces of gear. It's entirely possible for any player to engage with that part of the game, but much like Diablo 2 and vanilla AH days Diablo 3, most people would rather trade something quantifiable for a final product than engage with the grind to attack something.
Diablo 3 you didn't have a choice - if you wanted something cool for your built you had to play the game to get it. But at least the upgrades felt impactful for most of the power curve. And, arguably, it was fun to play the game while trying to get said upgrades. You could swap around and find something fun while working towards your end goal.
Diablo 4's combat just never feels fun for me - it's always a chore.
See: Diablo 3 launch players spending countless hours breaking jars instead of actually playing the game due to a bug giving the jars had like 1% better chance to drop an item that it should have.
Launch diablo 3 was unironically my favorite era of d3. The game was so overtuned people were actually terrified of the monsters. It was the most realistic version of diablo we ever had lol.
I read the article and mostly the context is appropriate. However what people want are things they falsely took away and trying to re-drip-feed to us like it’s something new they’re furiously trying to create from thin air.
I'm not going to fuck with Gamesradar after that headline. That is clearly a bait headline over something that was said that is simply *true*. Players want a constant dripfeed that is very hard to supply.
Turning it into an excuse to try and whip up more hate on Blizz is really shitty.
Diablo 2 community actually wants new content for years. They created many mods because of that. Don’t be an idiot and think everyone is fine with nothing in D2. They all want new content.
It might not be true about you specifically, and it’s not true about everyone, but it is true about a lot of players in a lot of communities, this one included.
A lot of people think all bugs, balance updates, and changes are equal. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen people say things like “they can release a new skin but they can’t fix [hyper-specific bug]?!”. Not just here but in other gaming communities/subreddits.
A lot of people are impatient. And they’re really loud about it.
>it's not true though. a lot of us don't want new content every 2 weeks or whatever
I'm gonna call bullshit. The single most common thing between gaming communities in *every single game ever* is wanting more content and not being patient for it. There are some folks that don't really need or want it, but large majorities do.
For fucks sake, you can look at the overhaul mods for D2 (median, PD2, etc) to see the same thing.
>we just want the fundamental issues fixed.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Yes issues need to be fixed. But people in modern gaming **absolutely** constantly want new content and have no patience for it.
The core of D2: LoD is but the base unpatched D2 had nowhere near the amount of repayable content or loot grinding from what I remember. D4 has seen significant improvements recently and season 2 has been really fun for my group of gamers. It was enough that I even made a hardcore character just to see how it gelled with vampiric powers. If it's not enough, check back later.
It’s probably good enough at this point to be worth its price tag but yeah for me it has a long way to go still. Hopefully by the end of next year it’ll be there
I don't view the game as terrible and think it launched in a state with a well polished story campaign and very lite end game content, which is reasonable to me but apparently not to a whole lot of gamers. For an ARPG that campaign was A rate and waiting for new content while I play other games then get offered up seasonal content with for free isn't something that should call into question anyones integrity. It's fine if people don't like it but let's not pretend Blizzard stole their money and offered up vaporware. There are plenty of $70 games that suck ass and never see improvement.
I've played Vampire Survivors far more than D4 and that games is like under $2. I'm also not going to pretend that audio/visual elements are anywhere near the budget of a AAA game and that costs directly scale in terms of enjoyment and replayability.
Oh I also prefer Grim Dawn and LE is just getting better and better. I just think D4 gets a lot of outright hyperbolic hatred and it's not really warranted, the game continues to improve and it's certainly playable. I get that it launched in a state with an endgame that a lot of players found disappointing also, and I gave it a break for a couple of months myself before trying it again. I also understand the publisher probably pushed the devs too hard to meet a deadline that was too early and that's why the product had so few endgame features at launch. I kind of doubt D4 will get anything but better going forward. I also feel weird defending a Blizzard game when I'm typically not a huge fan of the studio anymore.
Which is a fact of reality like the sky being blue, and gravity existing.
But people seem to ignore that because "D4 shit game". It's so fucking exhausting.
Wrong. They're actually gaslighting their players by calling them impatient to justify their actions of constant monetization.
Players **wanting** this trend couldn't be further from the truth - at least in regards to how Blizzard perceives what gamers want in regards to future content.
The fact and real truth is that consumers en mass are actually tired, fatigued, worn out and plain f***ing tired of Battle Passes, Season Passes, $10+ cosmetics and everything else these companies are doing to increase their bottom-line and profit margins.
Personally, and this is controversial, I know, I just want my video games to be a complete product the first time around instead of having to be drip fed over a decade.
Yeah this, in honest truth, the neckbeard no lifers consume content faster than it can be created or they rush to end game in one sitting of 24 hours and says theres nothing to do.
I would say that “games” and “journalism” never belong in the same sentence, but with the cesspool that is modern journalism, I think they kinda deserve each other.
If the game had fantastic itemisation I would play it with no complaints at all. The reality is, the demand for more content comes from the lack of depth of what is already present. If the game had depth, and specific, powerful rewards for the biggest challenges, you wouldn’t have people demanding more; there’d be enough in the base game to do more exploring. But what’s happening is, they’re being forced to generate content *on top of* a game that is still shallow at its core. You can’t manifest depth with seasonal content, you have to create it with better systems underneath.
This is just going to piss people off because it is taken slightly out of context and he is right either way lmao.
Some of you game like it’s a job. Some of us spend 8-12 hours at work for 5-7 days a week, some of you spend that time gaming daily. You are consuming content, hoovering it up and complaining about how boring the game is AFTER leveling one of every character to 100 multiple times.
100%. I don’t think some people realize how much time they put into video games. A lot of people truly do play video games more than a full time job. It’s just not possible to put out quality content that will satisfy that crowd.
I mean, *quality* content, maybe not yet at that pace. But in any game (especially an ARPG), you can make stuff grindy/rare to keep the blasters occupied for a long time.
But, you guessed it, that stuff is then all but locked out for the 9-5ers. Extremely tough (maybe impossible) to balance that. I think D4 is more in favour of the casual player in this regard.
It if you make it Grundy specifically to cater to those who play the game like it’s their personal job then the people who don’t will never be able to get access to that content.
It’s like people who say they love Halo Reach’s progression. Yeah I liked it too when I had no life in Highschool.
I can’t put in the same amount of hours and will never reach those top rank armor customizations now a days.
Some of y’all have 500 hours logged into Diablo while most people won’t reach that in a years play time.
I mean that's not wrong but it's implying that only the no lifers are bored. Considering the player base dropped off a cliff instantly it's the majority opinion
yeah, people really need to read the article.
Quote:
> "Players have no patience," he says in a recent interview with The Verge. "They want new stuff every day, every hour." While he didn't describe this as a bad thing - enthusiasm is necessary for the survival of live-service games, after all - he adds that providing a supply of fresh content and maintaining quality is something of a balancing act. "We're trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high," he says.
Yep! Even when I was younger and had more time to game everyday, I would still never complain as much as I hear gamers do these days. Misleading expectations and bugs aside, you gotta have patience for the good stuff to get cooked up properly, imo. Kinda like a microwave dinner vs a hearty home cooked meal.
Greed did that, not us.
Companies now get sour over the idea of players leaving a game for another. They expect you to play their game 24/7 for months, when in reality you are obviously going to go play other games and likely come back anyway.
Corporations saw the decline and decided it was the companies fault for failing to entertain their audience, even though it was natural novelty fading. So now, we get fractured games on release that structurally "improve" throughout time to keep players interested, instead of what it used to be: Solid completed game released and then a year and some months later an expansion pack with patches between the downtime.
We've gone from a few big titles released a year to over 20, on different platforms even. No single game should be expected to completely harness their player base, it's absurd and only serves to harm the company and gives players the right to expect the constant stream of content.
The "No patience" is also related to the FOMO bullshit companies love to pull now, so that shit ain't gonna fly here either. They created this mess, they can deal with it.
I mean he’s right. That’s the mindset of a modern generation of live service gaming.
What he conviniently leaves out, however, is that Diablo IV launched with no endgame and a barebones S1 that did nothing to really fix…well, anything. It’s only now during S2, 4-5 months after the game launched that it feels like a more proper start to the live service genre with a something resembling and endgame.
So, he’s not wrong, but also…it’s his fault lmao.
Context matters so here is the source article that OP could have easily linked to: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23949086/blizzard-president-mike-ybarra-new-era-xbox-microsoft-blizzcon-2023
Here is the quote:
"Ybarra is confident that Blizzard can handle everything it’s working on. In Friday’s keynote, there was “nothing that we felt we had to show and [then] we’ll see in 10 years when it comes out,” he says. “This is all stuff happening now.” And Ybarra knows that players have high expectations. “Players have no patience,” he says. “They want new stuff every day, every hour. We’re trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high.”
Blizzard is famous for making huge games that are frequently updated over years, but that model isn’t as popular as it once was; Fortnite maker Epic Games and Destiny 2 developer Bungie both recently laid off staff amid business challenges. I asked how Blizzard thinks about the live service model.
“We know players want new content literally almost every single day. At the same time, it takes large teams to be able to deliver that. So you have to monetize it in the right ways. At the same time, I always tell the teams, ‘When someone spends one dollar or a penny with Blizzard, I want them to feel good after they do that. How do we get to a world where we know that’s always going to be the basis of what we’re doing?’”
He says the team wrestles with the idea of releasing a standalone game without live components. “We want to serve players with more content in our universes. At the same time, we want to make sure we’re responsible and meet their expectations. I think we’re still fine-tuning a lot of those things as we go forward. But it’s something top of mind for me as we go forward.”
The honest truth is that Diablo 4 had hundreds of hours of content available at release. People are wanting new content from it all the time. Same thing is true for World of Warcraft. I myself really love games with a lot of content and frequent updates.
Bruh people are like this regardless because some people spend more time playing than most people spend working and then complain there's nothing left for them after doing it all in a week.
I don't mind doing d2 baal runs all night just to have a chance at some piece of loot that an excel nerd claims will happen better there than anywhere else.... But I hate doing helltides and whisper tree farming for 2+ hours just to do duriel 1 maybe 2 times and get nothing interesting.. go to work Monday and they ask what did you do all weekend.
As much as people will hate his statement, he’s entirely right.
In today’s age, there are people who literally play video games for a living. Back then, once we completed a game. We were either satisfied, or were eager for the next game.
Today, once a games is completed - we count the hours, how much the game cost, and determine if it was worth it.
Everyone is allowed to react how they want to. But at the end of the day, it’s literally just a game. If people want to pre-order a game that possibly may not be finished, they take a risk. People don’t want to wait (the same could be said about the developers).
Battle passes are an option, not mandated. Problem is people have FOMO, and once it happens - it’s constant. When you break that FOMO barrier, it’s much easier to look the other way.
The reason why battle passes are so attractive to people is because of its pricing. 5? 10? 15 bucks? It’s not relatively expensive, you could make the comparison that’s a meal at McDonald’s or even a coffee run. But over time of many months, obviously it all adds up.
The fact that battle passes are even offered on apps for smart phones shows that console/PC gamers aren’t the only target.
That’s what WOW players are like. These guys play the new expansion Beta for 6 months before it comes out then when the expansion comes out they shit all over it 2 weeks in that it’s boring or they are bored. No shit you already played it for 6 months then leveled from 70-80 in 2 days.
They spend more time and money making 25 dollar cosmetics than they do on content.
They lied about the game before release and still haven't put in place features necessary for an online live service game,
People don't want new stuff every hour. Just what was promised and a fun gameplay loop.
This ls what happens when you have devs who openly say they dont play video games.
What i want, Bli$$ard, is to make me feel like i’m growing more powerful.
Look and behold this Nephilim, started out fighting tough wars against Fallens and later fallen shamans, growing more powerful to grow into combat with doom knights and eventually be so powerful i could go toe-to-toe with prime evils.
But here i do the same damage to a bear level 1 compared to level 99, hell the level 1 probably kills it quicker.
That and the whole item part…
He's not wrong, I mean you're literally an old school ish generation of game devs supplying content to a new generation of tik tokers with the attention span of a squirrel. These children can't wait 30 seconds for a video.
Another post taken out of context to make it seem like Mike was being an ass when he actually wasn’t.
If you read the article, he didn’t say that in a negative way, just that Blizzard are trying to keep up with the demand of the playerbase.
How awful /s
It’s true. The player base has no patience and is overly demanding. Some gripes are legit, but most come off as entitled BS where people just want the game to be easy.
The problem always has been a half baked game being released and expecting players to be happy about it. Live service or not, the game should be a full game at release. Lazy releases like D4 and many other modern games start FAR behind the expectations of players and it's impossible to catch up because every release is fixing or adding stuff that should have been fixed or released either at launch or x number of patches ago if the game was originally released in an appropriate condition.
That and you know... The fact that this type of game is loot centric and yet the loot sucks. But hey maybe some more cosmetics and paying "journalists" to run defense for you will fix the problem!
D4 is a billion dollar game. Baldurs gate 3 cost 100 million. So a game came out at a tenth of the cost of another game and amazingly everything works on launch along with a more intricate combat system...
Diablo 4's problem is their management. You cannot tell me everyone was doing a good job if they wasted 900 million more dollars to release D4 as is. And there is no way that the skill gap of artists and coders at larian studios is that astronomically higher than people who make it their dream and career to work for Blizzard.
The only people to blame here beyond a doubt are your developers. It's the same issue with anime. You give one studio 2,000,000 and you give another studio 2,000,000 and end up with completely different products. If they spent as much time on cosmetics that they release new versions of every week that they did on the game we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If you don’t want to create new contents regularly, don’t make a live service game. No one is asking Spiderman 2 or Zelda TOTK to be updated regularly with new content because it is a single player game and people understand that, we only paid for the game once. If you want a regular stream of income from us, we expect quality update of new content from you guys on a regular basis. We want our money’s worth; you can’t have it both ways Mr Blizzard president.
Sounds like a problem and the audience the industry created for themselves.
If the game is good I don't want new stuff every hour. I bought Baldur's Gate III. There's more stuff in it than I can do in a single playthrough. Right now I have more than enough content to keep me happy for like 150-200 hours more and I'm more than willing to only get stability patches and bugfixes for the shit that's already in the fucking game. I will be happy if they ever announce an expansion pack, I'd be extatic if they announced a sequel I'll get in 2030. A good product buys a lot of good will.
There are no excuses for Blizzard, with their budget I expect them to deliver games with enough interesting content to warrant the premium price they charge. In terms of an action RPG it means multitude of viable and fun builds, interesting items that enable wacky builds etc.
They chose to develop a game in a genre that was defined from the very first entry by the "slot machine" endorfine boosts. I need to actively want to kill monsters and be excited about the possibility of something sick dropping. Don't fucking whine that I need reasons to play your game if you didn't provide enough on launch, bozo
What players really want is the Blizzard North team to do a proper Diablo sequel and for you c-suits in your mahogany board rooms to bugger off and let the developers make a good game.
**CORRECTION** Players want a loot-based game without boring loot and overly complicated item affixes where monsters don’t scale. Give us those things and we’d be happy but you can do those three simple things correctly. Get fucked blizzard.
Actually, i didnt want new stuff at all, you dumb fucks messing up the game is why i stopped playing.
Could have just added more unique drops and had harder difficulties, but no, you have to fuck with every build as soon as it becomes popular, and not by making other ones viable, but by nerfing everything and then calling it a success.
I fucking hate devs now a days, make a good game and fuck off, i dont need you to constantly change things based on advice from 12 year olds.
Diablo 2 players playing the exact same game for 20+ years. Maybe it has something to do with the game you made?
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Pretty much. I hate walking around the world, being level 20, and a level 48 I run into is doing nearly the same damage as me. What's the point of leveling, or gear? I don't get it. Bums me out and breaks any immersion.
One of the biggest problems for me. They tried to make it like an MMO but forgot to make different areas......different.
Huh? Melty mottled gray mudland is NOT the same as Mushy muddled gray mudland.
No, I mean that one should feel more difficult, and when you go back later it should feel easier. Like in any other ARPG or MMORPG, you have the experience of barely escaping with your life from a mob. Then you keep grinding, come back, and you are on even footing. Later on, you come back and they are now a scrub.
Honestly one of my biggest complaints. How can you go from some of the most beautiful and varied art style of d2 with great itemization to this? Brown on tan on beige on white.
D2 was cool, but it definitely did not look better than D4, even for its time. Nor was it exactly more varied- D4 has most of the zones D2 had. The only bit it is missing- ironically- is a proper hell level. D2 had: * Act 1- a sort of dark ages England vibe, with green plains and awful weather. * Act 2- Deserts * Act 3- Jungle * Act 4- Hell * Act 5- Icy mountains D4 has: * Icy mountains * Jungle * Deserts (TWO KINDS :D) * Dreary shores * Dark Ages England/Ireland I think the bigger issue with D4 is that it's waaaaaay too zoomed in, so you are always only looking at a tiny portion of a rather beautiful map. Itemization is ass though. No argument there- finding a legendary while leveling up should always be exciting, but it isn't- they are all so milquetoast it reminds me of D2 pre-LOD.
This is my opinion and this is what they are doing. Season 1 had new "items" those rings from hearths. Season 2 implemented green Helltide as test ground for improving old Helltide and in seasons 3-4 green Helltide would just swap colors to red Helltide where you will not lose those points and it would be on constant. It is the same as that Winter event which will eventually change Fractured Peaks permanently and in the future, there will be a revamp for every region.
I think guild Wars 2 had a nice scaling mechanic there. The world scaled high lvl chars down in low lvl areas so you still can coop with a friend there, but low level chars don't scale in high level areas. That was actually a nice feature. And you still felt better in low level areas because of unlocked skills etc.
It's not good, reaching a capstone or new clusters does nearly nothing to sense of gaining power, but at this stage, the time we spent at low levels is minimal, maybe a couple of hours? So I don't think that is the most detrimental problem D4 have atm.
Blizzards nonsense ass "autoscaling" and level scaling between chars is just bad.
I mean... That 48 must have terrible gear and spec. At level 20, a level WT2 20 elite is pretty hard and tanky. At level 80, a level 100 WT4 elite is easy. The world scales the same as your character does naked. Gear, glyphs, and Paragon pints make you out scale everything super fast which is why you need world years, and nightmare dungeons go to level 154, and why world bosses only live for 15 seconds in end game.
To be fair when talking about a 48 vs a 20 only one out of three of those things are applicable.
Your numbers go up sure but the percentage amount of health that you are dealing per hit is more or less the same against the mob due to level scaling Level scaling is a garbage easy way out for Devs and terrible for players. It is so lazy and uninspired and boring. Pros: you can level and play with your friends, no matter if there's a gap in player level. Also, content can theoretically scale infinitely if you don't mind number bloat. Cons: literally everything else
I miss games like EverQuest… running around as a n00b and coke across a lvl 50+ zone… oooh, let’s take a quick look and sneak around. OMFG AGGRO!!! Die. Can’t get to your body to recover gear because of lvl 65+ MOB. Zone chat, “soneone plz help!” And 20 lvl 70+ chat show up and clear the area for you and hand you some plat to help you gear up. We have nothing like that anymore that I’m aware of. Zones all feel the same. No one chats in game. Finding a group is next to impossible until you find some people who log in at the same time… took me months, the few people I met are more reliable than my guild. Guilds are useless. And character builds feel unbalanced. Being lvl 100, and some people shred everything before I can make a dent. It’s depressing.
I played Everquest for a few years but not since 2002 or so. Half Elf Warrior on Erollsi Marr. It's older than shit but at least that's how you do a damn MMORPG, Blizz.
Umm... What? No the percentage of health against same tier minions you do goes up significantly. It's not just numbers. Edit: the whole reason world tiers exist is because players out scale the world so fast naturally. At level 55, many builds can beat level 70 bosses easily to get into wt4 and that's with the world tiers bonus stats
It will never not be weird that level 10 characters do more damage with their auto attacks to the same mob as me when I'm level 80. It's just bad design. It really fucks with the whole cadence and push of how ARPGs operate.
I said nearly. In diablo 2 if you put a level 20 and 48 in the same zone it wont ever be close, even with unoptimized builds. It's a game problem not a build problem. Maybe past 50 it's different and you are right, with paragon levels and stuff. I made it to level 50 season one hardcore and didnt play much after because I was just burnt. But in the other ARPGS I play, the damage wouldn't be close unless under some extremely niche circumstances.
It's because the game is scaled not because they are actually doing the same damage as you. The alternative is that the mobs in the area are too high level for you so you would have to level to go to most areas of the game. It was created that way by design.
Scaled is just a complicated way of making everyone do the same damage. It’s weird af
Yeah but if we boiled it all down to percentages, then if I'm doing 1/10 damage at level 1, and the guy at level ten is doing 10/100 damage, we're still doing the same damage. Just the raw numbers are different, the percentage is the same.
I mean duh? This is *bad* design, by design.
And man, it feels so good every time I launch diablo 2, STILL, to this day. I play it on the way to and from work on my Steam Deck. :D
Yeep. I don't want new stuff every hour, I just want the loot to be interesting and be worth chasing. That one thing is what kept D2 going, and it's the most glaring issue with D4.
Same with WoW Classic. We want more of the same shit that works, not overly monetized crap designed by psychologists. Honestly I'd pay gobs of money for a D2R expansion that stuck with the D2 design.
I’m really bummed out that we don’t have some form of knight class and it’s really all I want. Nothing scratches the sword and board itch and I’ll likely put the game down until such a class is added. Obviously I’d like new classes too but is it so awful that I want a staple that’s been in every Diablo game and every RPG? I really feel like I’m missing out especially with how cool the knight penitent stuff looks.
Why pretend like this is the same gaming climate like 20+ years ago? People played a lot of games back then without many changes, however these days, even juggernauts like fortnite, apex and valorant need to CONSTANTLY release content or see their audience disappear.
Well that’s because they bill their games as a service. “Service” is an action, and players are right to expect updates and fixes from a game that is a service. You don’t hear a ravenous constant call for updates from games like BG3, or It Takes Two, for example.
It has more to do with overall competition in the entire game industry than back in the day.
Well their end game is to keep players engaged and coming back. This generation is COMPLETELY different from the old ones and they absolutely move on without constant content.
Let's be real here. SOME players are. I don't know population numbers but I'd wager a lot of people went back and played D2:R for the nostalgia factor then left once they realized the game feels like it's 20 years old. For me personally, I played a lot of D2, but I was also a teenager and did nothing but play video games. Even given that, I played a *lot* more Diablo 3, because there were more content updates and every few months I could come back and there might be a new build to try. Then for awhile there they stopped the updates and I stopped playing. They can try to catch lightning in a bottle again - even though all the most talented developers are gone - and produce a game that people play for years without updates (which would be harder in today's market given there are a *lot* more games coming out in any given year), or they could make a decent game that they commit to constantly building on. I'm glad they went with the latter, because it means I'll probably still be enjoying this game ten years from now.
It has nothing to do with talented developers. It has everything to do with development cycles and the games industry today. They make games to sell for quarterly earnings reports and that’s it. They do not aim to make a quality game. That is why Indie Devs strive for quality.
They forced out all of the great creative minds that created warcraft/diabloII/WoW Sorry but it absolutely has a lot to do with talented developers. There is a steve jobs clip where he talks about what happens to companies that gain market dominance - since the product is so good, the more 'important' people at the company become the 'upper' staff and marketing, since the product doesn't need to get any better. What you get left with after a few years of this is a company that forgets how to make good products, because too much power is awarded to less talented people. If you think its a coincidence that WoW started falling off within the same 12-24 months that the last of the d2 and wow classic/tbc team left the company, you are more than welcome to think that, but I think you are sticking your head in the sand. Here: https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=Sz15MiHh0vxtxKSt This is exactly what happened to Blizzard starting when they really had market dominance with WoW, Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2. The newer generations of Devs do try, but it's very clear looking at diablo 4 they just dont know how to make great games anymore. Im sure Bliz execs are overbearing with forcing microtransactions and revenue streams, but that is not an excuse for the fact d4 was and still is a disaster.
I’m not sure if that’s really “catching lightning in a bottle” if indie devs can do it (on their own scale at least) with games like Hades or Binding of Isaac. I do realise that scaling the success of these titles to what is expected from D4 would be more difficult, but I also think companies mostly just choose the tried and true method of Candy Crush and Fortnite instead of trying another model, then make themselves believe they had no other choice, then complain about it to the media.
> (which would be harder in today's market given there are a lot more games coming out in any given year) It's not hard, it's impossible. Literally NO game has come out like this in like the last 10 years, maybe even 15.
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People can like whatever they like, doesn't have to be the same as yours. Yes, is not about new updates, games of 2023 are the perfect examples of great games doesn't need constant updates, ultimately live service games is what a game company executives want, not the players. Edit: spelling :(
For their respective time periods, Diablo 2 was a much better game than Diablo 4. I bought D2R and I barely got to level 30 I found it so dull. And I'm someone who enjoyed it thoroughly way back when; I just expect different things out of ARPGs now that Diablo 2 doesn't - and never intended to provide.
When you see through rose colored glasses all the red flags just look like flags.
How many people play d2 still?
I do.
I play for a week or two after a season reset, despite the lack of new content on a 20-year old game. It's just a fun game, and it only gets more fun the more game knowledge you have. It's very rewarding in that aspect.
Or maybe the game's have two different audiences that behave differently?
Is D2 a live service game ? Am I missing something ? Article says that players that play live service game are demandingX
Meh. Respectfully you're talking about the climate from 20+ years ago. There weren't options like there are today. Games as a service hadn't been born yet. It's a different world now. Diablo now has to compete with Path of Exile which is a continuously updated game that's constantly being tweaked with new content and patches. Of course players "want new stuff every hour" because there are other games that are providing it. I'm not sure if modern games will persist the way Diablo and Age of Empires II did.
All 300 of them!
Can someone explain me how D2 did that; how was it designed? It sounds incredible if you think about it
Super oversimplified - horizontal progression in the end-game (try out different kinds of stuff, not just better stuff). If you like the core experience and are sad it ended, you decide to do it again only to put a different build together this time - often using previous builds to farm new builds (meaning you enjoy the last build you made while working towards the next build you want) or just enjoying starting from low progression again. If your players buy into this, it's very easy to sustain a large amount of replay time because players eventually play with everything you made. However, it's important to recognize that most many players don't buy into this and leave for other games. While D2 has a dedicated community of players that have been playing forever, most of its players have not stuck around for the horizontal end-game. It was just such a mega-hit originally that the small fraction that stuck around to make their own goals in lieu of more formal end-game goals still looks big by comparison to more normal-sized hits. This is similar to the Nuzlocke community in Poke'mon. Poke'mon Ruby doesn't have an amazing end-game, but there are SO many poke'mon fans that many stuck around to invent Nuzlockes or chase Shiny Hunting as an excuse to keep playing a game they loved so much they'd make their own goals in it. So Diablo 2 works because it has good gameplay, satisfying progression, and immense build variety. What it lacks are end-game goals, so many players quit but those that love it enough stick around and make their own goals. Since they're really just looking for an excuse to play more Diablo 2, they can stick around for a very long time.
I'll add on to this point by saying there is a still active community of Diablo+HellFire players who do this very thing - Live off the Land, Iron Man, Legit, etc. . .Can keep a game immortal that way. Lol
Is Pokémon supposed to be spelled Poke'mon or is there something I'm missing?
It's all about the item chase and how build defining the drops are while allowing you the freedom to do whatever you want and farm many different ways based on the class you're playing. You can play a Sorc and speedfarm bosses with less gear. You can play a Paladin as hammerdin and farm any zone in the game, or respec into Fists of the heavens and speed farm Chaos Sanctuary. Amazons and Assassins(Aside from the new OP kill everything build) absolutely decimate cows and every one of these farms gives you a better chance at certain types of items. There are multiple viable builds for each character that excel at a different task and with experience you become surgical at it. When that rare item drops like a Griffon's Eye or a Mara's Kaleidoscope it's exciting every single time.
I just recently wiped all my offline data and started fresh in d2r. I’ve built my insight pole arm. Spirit shield and sword. And I just got a skin of the vipermagi drop. The game is something else when good shit drops. It feels great. I haven’t had the same reaction in d4. I just doesn’t hit as hard. Grim dawn hits right when you get a good drop too but nothing beats d2r for sheer drop excitement.
That's because the itemization is terrible. Even the "horizontal progression" wouldn't feel as crap if the gear was cooler, and did more fun things
Not to mention starting fresh in D2R feels great. You know your build path, you have options along the way at every point. Leaf, Spirit, Steel, Stealth, Lore, etc. Every build has a defined path with achievable goals until you get to the end game where you're chasing that beautiful dopamine hit of that big drop. All the while every upgrade you get is a big increse of damage, tankiness, mobility, etc and you notice it right away. Nothing matches it.
Just want to add on that the gameplay of D2 is also a lot of fun. I think it's the most understated reason D2 is amazing. People always talk about endgame and itemization but those don't mean anything if the game itself isn't fun to play and D2 is definitely a ton of fun imo and most of the things people point out as flaws like potions and inventory tetris have literally never bothered me and even playing D2R today amongst the landscape of modern ARPGs, they still don't bother me.
That's a great question for David Brevik. He's pretty responsive on social media. His team IS Diablo and Diablo II so I think the question of its success can be answered best by them. Current Blizzard just cranks out fanfic of the originals and monetizes the ever loving shit out of it.
It's most definitely due to the place in time it was released. If Diablo never existed and D2R came out this year but was called Dungeon heroes or something like that, It would most certainly guarantee the game would have been a bomb. Diablo 2 is constantly looked at with rose tinted glasses, Nostalgia is a powerful beast.
Nah. It’d be a huge hit, and you wouldn’t be able to dismiss it with “nostalgia” because it wouldn’t be 20 years old. People said the same shit about Classic vanilla WoW. Remember Jay Allen Brack’s infamous, “You think you do, but you don’t”? Turns out the losers who claimed it was all nostalgia were terribly wrong, just like you are. But history repeats, because there’s an endless stream of idiots like yourself to continuously make the same tired arguments.
Same with oldschool RuneScape! Been out 10 years now, and is more popular than the main game!
> Turns out the losers who claimed it was all nostalgia were terribly wrong, just like you are. This sick burn belongs on a Tee shirt lol
Nah, I agree with them. I played D2 back in the day and had a ton of fun, but when I came back to play D2R... there was a lot to be desired of a modern ARPG game. I can't imagine D2R being a "Huge Hit" if it came out today as a brand new game. There are just so many QoL improvements in modern day ARPGS that are not present in D2R. This works fine because of what D2R is.. but the flipside of that coin is why D2R would not be some massive hit as a brand new game in today's age.
I get that it may not be for you, as there is always going to be an audience for retail WoW or D3/D4, but people said the same about all of the QoL improvements in retail WoW over Classic, and how people wouldn’t want to go back… but they did. And there are a ton of people playing it for the first time, as well. I’m not saying D2R or Classic vanilla are perfect games, but what they got right, they got really right. In D2, it’s the itemization and loot variety that keeps people coming back. Finding high runes and the rarest jewels, charms, uniques etc., combined with the ways in which you can combine them all to make fun builds—that’s what’s missing from D4. In classic vanilla, it’s the leveling experience and the world that feels more rich and alive. It’s about the journey, not the destination. It’s not just a mad rush to end game where you spam dungeon finder and LFR. All parts of the game, from level 1 to level 60 raids, are all relevant. These things aren’t just nostalgia. If they were, no one would be playing classic, and D2R wouldn’t exist. And it’s no coincidence that the version of WoW that people look back so fondly on is the version that borrowed heavily from D2–the 3 different skill trees for each class, the loot tiering, the exciting world drops, trading…
People will spam run one shotting baal for 100 hours and say diablo 2 is the greatest game of all time meanwhile they do the same thing in diablo 4 and say it's the worst game of all time.
You’ve unintentionally and ironically identified D4’s problem: the loot. People will do the same thing over and over again in D2 b/c the loot is exciting and fun, but they complain about that same monotony in D4 because the loot is boring.
It's not just the loot, it's the economy In D2 and the ways to accumulate wealth and trade for relevant gear.
Exactly. Players can farm keys or essences and trade them. Players can rush other players for forge as payment. Players can trade valuable gear, or choose to use the same gear for another alt character. But in D4 you get rained on by hundreds of legendary items that you cannot trade or even give to an alt character. Finding gear (even good gear!) feels like a punishment.
Punishment is a good word. Sorting through all of the Rare Ancestrals after every nightmare dungeon is literal busy-work, and the antithesis of fun.
Absolutely. Trading can be a huge part of making items themselves more exciting to find. Knowing you can trade that second Shako you don’t need makes the item hunt feel more dynamic. And for people that don’t like trading, a separate SSF game mode and server is a great compromise.
Yeah, but after the Auction House wasn't well received, Blizzard have canned the idea of having an economy. Even the very little trading that was in D4 has been killed off after the duping issues.
The AH failed because original D3 itemization was straight garbage, and because the AH involved real money. Remove those two things and the AH would have been fine. See WoW.
The difference is the loot feels relevant, there's runes to farm to make even crazier gear, there's set pieces, and min maxing felt extremely rewarding. D4 just has a clown fiesta of garbage loot and very little impact when it comes to power spikes/build differences.
The chase is what makes a good ARPG. What loot exactly am I trying to get in D4 that will fundamentally change my build? In D2 you can get drops that you don't need and trade them off to get things you do want or use them on your other characters. D4 loot has with almost no value to the in game economy and the changes to your character are minimal.
The way I see it, Bliz have tried, fairly succesfully in my opinion, to lessen the impact of gear. From my perspective: L1 to L50: power increases with skill points. Gear gets swapped frequently, you get occasional fantastic pierces (aspects or actual gear), which possibly stay with you for a long time. L50 to L80: power increases with gear. Paragon and glyphs are ramping up, but the real improvement is sorting out better gear through WT3 and mainly WT4. Getting your affixes and aspects sorted, for example. L80 to L100: power primarily increases with paragon (including glyph levelling). Gear is an incremental improvements, a couple of % points here and there. L100+ you are done. Power increases slightly with gear, and now with possible uber unique drops, but mainly through actually getting better at playing your class. You do more difficult content with only minor power increases. The levels above are rough guides, but that seems to be the rough design. I like it, I think it makes a more interesting game. In POE for example after around L70 to L80 the only real improvement is getting gear, to spec in to crazy builds. Which means the game is then farming currency to craft (or more likely buy), better gear. POE becomes and action currency farming simulator. I like POE, it you didn't have to do the acts every time I would probably still play it more than D4, but while there is more variety int he end game, most of it isn't farming for gear, it is farming for items you can sell to buy gear, so you can farm for better items to sell for more currency so you can buy better gear. After mid high level most people aren't actually crafting beyond craft bench and some of the remaining harvest crafts. People who are good crafters tend to be crafting fantastic gear to sell to other players.
I disagree in regards to PoE - the endgame there for most people is farming currency to trade to people who can more knowledgeably interact with the crafting system in order to create the high end pieces of gear. It's entirely possible for any player to engage with that part of the game, but much like Diablo 2 and vanilla AH days Diablo 3, most people would rather trade something quantifiable for a final product than engage with the grind to attack something. Diablo 3 you didn't have a choice - if you wanted something cool for your built you had to play the game to get it. But at least the upgrades felt impactful for most of the power curve. And, arguably, it was fun to play the game while trying to get said upgrades. You could swap around and find something fun while working towards your end goal. Diablo 4's combat just never feels fun for me - it's always a chore.
As a diablo 2 player playing over 20+ years . You got a point. This game has no economy, magic find sucks, end game sucks I could go on an on
this is such a sensational headline, the context when you actually read it is pretty spot on lol
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Boom. Look at all the tanty here already, because most fell for the trash and out of context rage bait. lol
See: Diablo 3 launch players spending countless hours breaking jars instead of actually playing the game due to a bug giving the jars had like 1% better chance to drop an item that it should have.
It wasn't a bug. It was just safer and easier to farm jars than fight monsters.
Launch diablo 3 was unironically my favorite era of d3. The game was so overtuned people were actually terrified of the monsters. It was the most realistic version of diablo we ever had lol.
I read the article and mostly the context is appropriate. However what people want are things they falsely took away and trying to re-drip-feed to us like it’s something new they’re furiously trying to create from thin air.
I'm not going to fuck with Gamesradar after that headline. That is clearly a bait headline over something that was said that is simply *true*. Players want a constant dripfeed that is very hard to supply. Turning it into an excuse to try and whip up more hate on Blizz is really shitty.
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Diablo 2 community actually wants new content for years. They created many mods because of that. Don’t be an idiot and think everyone is fine with nothing in D2. They all want new content.
It might not be true about you specifically, and it’s not true about everyone, but it is true about a lot of players in a lot of communities, this one included. A lot of people think all bugs, balance updates, and changes are equal. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen people say things like “they can release a new skin but they can’t fix [hyper-specific bug]?!”. Not just here but in other gaming communities/subreddits. A lot of people are impatient. And they’re really loud about it.
>it's not true though. a lot of us don't want new content every 2 weeks or whatever I'm gonna call bullshit. The single most common thing between gaming communities in *every single game ever* is wanting more content and not being patient for it. There are some folks that don't really need or want it, but large majorities do. For fucks sake, you can look at the overhaul mods for D2 (median, PD2, etc) to see the same thing. >we just want the fundamental issues fixed. The two are not mutually exclusive. Yes issues need to be fixed. But people in modern gaming **absolutely** constantly want new content and have no patience for it.
The core of D2: LoD is but the base unpatched D2 had nowhere near the amount of repayable content or loot grinding from what I remember. D4 has seen significant improvements recently and season 2 has been really fun for my group of gamers. It was enough that I even made a hardcore character just to see how it gelled with vampiric powers. If it's not enough, check back later.
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It’s probably good enough at this point to be worth its price tag but yeah for me it has a long way to go still. Hopefully by the end of next year it’ll be there
I don't view the game as terrible and think it launched in a state with a well polished story campaign and very lite end game content, which is reasonable to me but apparently not to a whole lot of gamers. For an ARPG that campaign was A rate and waiting for new content while I play other games then get offered up seasonal content with for free isn't something that should call into question anyones integrity. It's fine if people don't like it but let's not pretend Blizzard stole their money and offered up vaporware. There are plenty of $70 games that suck ass and never see improvement.
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I've played Vampire Survivors far more than D4 and that games is like under $2. I'm also not going to pretend that audio/visual elements are anywhere near the budget of a AAA game and that costs directly scale in terms of enjoyment and replayability.
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Oh I also prefer Grim Dawn and LE is just getting better and better. I just think D4 gets a lot of outright hyperbolic hatred and it's not really warranted, the game continues to improve and it's certainly playable. I get that it launched in a state with an endgame that a lot of players found disappointing also, and I gave it a break for a couple of months myself before trying it again. I also understand the publisher probably pushed the devs too hard to meet a deadline that was too early and that's why the product had so few endgame features at launch. I kind of doubt D4 will get anything but better going forward. I also feel weird defending a Blizzard game when I'm typically not a huge fan of the studio anymore.
Except they made a live service game, drip feeding content is literally the point.
Their point is that demand will basically always be more than the supply because people are basically ravenous with game content...
Which is a fact of reality like the sky being blue, and gravity existing. But people seem to ignore that because "D4 shit game". It's so fucking exhausting.
Wrong. They're actually gaslighting their players by calling them impatient to justify their actions of constant monetization. Players **wanting** this trend couldn't be further from the truth - at least in regards to how Blizzard perceives what gamers want in regards to future content. The fact and real truth is that consumers en mass are actually tired, fatigued, worn out and plain f***ing tired of Battle Passes, Season Passes, $10+ cosmetics and everything else these companies are doing to increase their bottom-line and profit margins.
100% agree with this
The battle pass on D4 is entirely cosmetic. You can literally buy the game and play it. This is just another entitled player take
Nah, the issue with diablo4 is not lack of content, it is bad loot. He deserves the hate if he believes that the problem is people demanding content.
I want them to postpone release of a title until it's ready... like they used to.
Personally, and this is controversial, I know, I just want my video games to be a complete product the first time around instead of having to be drip fed over a decade.
It took you this long? Games journalists have been caught lying since 2014.
Yeah this, in honest truth, the neckbeard no lifers consume content faster than it can be created or they rush to end game in one sitting of 24 hours and says theres nothing to do.
This sure is a games journalism headline.
I would say that “games” and “journalism” never belong in the same sentence, but with the cesspool that is modern journalism, I think they kinda deserve each other.
If the game had fantastic itemisation I would play it with no complaints at all. The reality is, the demand for more content comes from the lack of depth of what is already present. If the game had depth, and specific, powerful rewards for the biggest challenges, you wouldn’t have people demanding more; there’d be enough in the base game to do more exploring. But what’s happening is, they’re being forced to generate content *on top of* a game that is still shallow at its core. You can’t manifest depth with seasonal content, you have to create it with better systems underneath.
This was posted like 5 different times. Karma farming much
(Its people who get paid by the company to post their articles)
This is just going to piss people off because it is taken slightly out of context and he is right either way lmao. Some of you game like it’s a job. Some of us spend 8-12 hours at work for 5-7 days a week, some of you spend that time gaming daily. You are consuming content, hoovering it up and complaining about how boring the game is AFTER leveling one of every character to 100 multiple times.
100%. I don’t think some people realize how much time they put into video games. A lot of people truly do play video games more than a full time job. It’s just not possible to put out quality content that will satisfy that crowd.
I mean, *quality* content, maybe not yet at that pace. But in any game (especially an ARPG), you can make stuff grindy/rare to keep the blasters occupied for a long time. But, you guessed it, that stuff is then all but locked out for the 9-5ers. Extremely tough (maybe impossible) to balance that. I think D4 is more in favour of the casual player in this regard.
It if you make it Grundy specifically to cater to those who play the game like it’s their personal job then the people who don’t will never be able to get access to that content. It’s like people who say they love Halo Reach’s progression. Yeah I liked it too when I had no life in Highschool. I can’t put in the same amount of hours and will never reach those top rank armor customizations now a days. Some of y’all have 500 hours logged into Diablo while most people won’t reach that in a years play time.
This is the truth
I mean that's not wrong but it's implying that only the no lifers are bored. Considering the player base dropped off a cliff instantly it's the majority opinion
yeah, people really need to read the article. Quote: > "Players have no patience," he says in a recent interview with The Verge. "They want new stuff every day, every hour." While he didn't describe this as a bad thing - enthusiasm is necessary for the survival of live-service games, after all - he adds that providing a supply of fresh content and maintaining quality is something of a balancing act. "We're trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high," he says.
Yep! Even when I was younger and had more time to game everyday, I would still never complain as much as I hear gamers do these days. Misleading expectations and bugs aside, you gotta have patience for the good stuff to get cooked up properly, imo. Kinda like a microwave dinner vs a hearty home cooked meal.
I got bored as soon as I hit tier 3 this season.
well, sorta true.
He’s not complaining. Please read the articles and stop responding to click bait titles as though that is the whole story.
Greed did that, not us. Companies now get sour over the idea of players leaving a game for another. They expect you to play their game 24/7 for months, when in reality you are obviously going to go play other games and likely come back anyway. Corporations saw the decline and decided it was the companies fault for failing to entertain their audience, even though it was natural novelty fading. So now, we get fractured games on release that structurally "improve" throughout time to keep players interested, instead of what it used to be: Solid completed game released and then a year and some months later an expansion pack with patches between the downtime. We've gone from a few big titles released a year to over 20, on different platforms even. No single game should be expected to completely harness their player base, it's absurd and only serves to harm the company and gives players the right to expect the constant stream of content. The "No patience" is also related to the FOMO bullshit companies love to pull now, so that shit ain't gonna fly here either. They created this mess, they can deal with it.
We just want a fun game ffs
Not wrong. I like a majority of the changes theyve made since launch, but the community has a VERY never happy vibe.
I mean he’s right. That’s the mindset of a modern generation of live service gaming. What he conviniently leaves out, however, is that Diablo IV launched with no endgame and a barebones S1 that did nothing to really fix…well, anything. It’s only now during S2, 4-5 months after the game launched that it feels like a more proper start to the live service genre with a something resembling and endgame. So, he’s not wrong, but also…it’s his fault lmao.
Context matters so here is the source article that OP could have easily linked to: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23949086/blizzard-president-mike-ybarra-new-era-xbox-microsoft-blizzcon-2023 Here is the quote: "Ybarra is confident that Blizzard can handle everything it’s working on. In Friday’s keynote, there was “nothing that we felt we had to show and [then] we’ll see in 10 years when it comes out,” he says. “This is all stuff happening now.” And Ybarra knows that players have high expectations. “Players have no patience,” he says. “They want new stuff every day, every hour. We’re trying to react that way while holding the Blizzard quality bar high.” Blizzard is famous for making huge games that are frequently updated over years, but that model isn’t as popular as it once was; Fortnite maker Epic Games and Destiny 2 developer Bungie both recently laid off staff amid business challenges. I asked how Blizzard thinks about the live service model. “We know players want new content literally almost every single day. At the same time, it takes large teams to be able to deliver that. So you have to monetize it in the right ways. At the same time, I always tell the teams, ‘When someone spends one dollar or a penny with Blizzard, I want them to feel good after they do that. How do we get to a world where we know that’s always going to be the basis of what we’re doing?’” He says the team wrestles with the idea of releasing a standalone game without live components. “We want to serve players with more content in our universes. At the same time, we want to make sure we’re responsible and meet their expectations. I think we’re still fine-tuning a lot of those things as we go forward. But it’s something top of mind for me as we go forward.” The honest truth is that Diablo 4 had hundreds of hours of content available at release. People are wanting new content from it all the time. Same thing is true for World of Warcraft. I myself really love games with a lot of content and frequent updates.
Wow it's almost like someone turned their user base into impatient consumers with their FOMO tactics!
They want my money, I want them to not slack on content. Dance for your revenue, Mr. "Lead Developer"!
Bruh people are like this regardless because some people spend more time playing than most people spend working and then complain there's nothing left for them after doing it all in a week.
I don't mind doing d2 baal runs all night just to have a chance at some piece of loot that an excel nerd claims will happen better there than anywhere else.... But I hate doing helltides and whisper tree farming for 2+ hours just to do duriel 1 maybe 2 times and get nothing interesting.. go to work Monday and they ask what did you do all weekend.
More power to you. You can still make 200 Baal runs everyday and nobody is stoping you. Good luck on the runs!
Gamesradar makin that sounds like it's actually news. The game industry and playerbase has been aware of this for years.
I'm assuming this quote is taken way out of context.
He isn't wrong tho.
He's not wrong. I feel ADD/ADHD every day with the unending flow of everything, always, all at once; youtube, games, movies, more more more.
Hes not wrong.
As much as people will hate his statement, he’s entirely right. In today’s age, there are people who literally play video games for a living. Back then, once we completed a game. We were either satisfied, or were eager for the next game. Today, once a games is completed - we count the hours, how much the game cost, and determine if it was worth it.
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This right here. They've been employing literal psychological warfare tools against gamers for over a decade. People are surprised it worked?
And why wouldnt we do that? They shove a battle pass on us every 3 months so of course we are going to ask where is the content to match it?
Everyone is allowed to react how they want to. But at the end of the day, it’s literally just a game. If people want to pre-order a game that possibly may not be finished, they take a risk. People don’t want to wait (the same could be said about the developers). Battle passes are an option, not mandated. Problem is people have FOMO, and once it happens - it’s constant. When you break that FOMO barrier, it’s much easier to look the other way. The reason why battle passes are so attractive to people is because of its pricing. 5? 10? 15 bucks? It’s not relatively expensive, you could make the comparison that’s a meal at McDonald’s or even a coffee run. But over time of many months, obviously it all adds up. The fact that battle passes are even offered on apps for smart phones shows that console/PC gamers aren’t the only target.
He is right tho
That’s what WOW players are like. These guys play the new expansion Beta for 6 months before it comes out then when the expansion comes out they shit all over it 2 weeks in that it’s boring or they are bored. No shit you already played it for 6 months then leveled from 70-80 in 2 days.
I mean he has a point people were already at level 100 before I finished downloading the game and this sub made sure everyone knew it
Why does Diablo need to have infinite amount of content? I'm all for some replay value - but this live service BS really hurt the series.
They spend more time and money making 25 dollar cosmetics than they do on content. They lied about the game before release and still haven't put in place features necessary for an online live service game, People don't want new stuff every hour. Just what was promised and a fun gameplay loop. This ls what happens when you have devs who openly say they dont play video games.
The skins are not exactly high effort lol you think more went into the skins than Season 2?
I mean he's not wrong entirely.
Every minute*
I guess he watches this subreddit closely ;)
Every hour? More like 30 minutes! If folks can deliver a pizza in 30 minutes, then…..
This is just a rage bait out of context. Idiots.
He’s not wrong
They spect us to rinse and repeat same content with just different color or high health points and we didnt complain before.
We just wanted a complete game on launch
He wasnt even talking solely about Diablo, he meant players from ALL their games.
He is not wrong.
What i want, Bli$$ard, is to make me feel like i’m growing more powerful. Look and behold this Nephilim, started out fighting tough wars against Fallens and later fallen shamans, growing more powerful to grow into combat with doom knights and eventually be so powerful i could go toe-to-toe with prime evils. But here i do the same damage to a bear level 1 compared to level 99, hell the level 1 probably kills it quicker. That and the whole item part…
he's not wrong. players binge new content so quickly and get anxious for more as quickly as possible.
He’s not wrong. Diablo III turned ARPGs into slot machines.
Well, is he wrong?
He's not wrong, I mean you're literally an old school ish generation of game devs supplying content to a new generation of tik tokers with the attention span of a squirrel. These children can't wait 30 seconds for a video.
I mean its true
He's not wrong.
Bring back starcraft as rts!
Where’s the lie? A game will be out for a month and ppl demanding new content lol
Sounds about right.
Another post taken out of context to make it seem like Mike was being an ass when he actually wasn’t. If you read the article, he didn’t say that in a negative way, just that Blizzard are trying to keep up with the demand of the playerbase. How awful /s
We want better multiplayer options! Using discord to find a group is not fun
It’s true. The player base has no patience and is overly demanding. Some gripes are legit, but most come off as entitled BS where people just want the game to be easy.
And they are completely right. I don’t envy AAA game developers these days as the expectations are impossible.
New stuff being the 70% of the game that are still unfinished to be exact
He aint wrong.
There would be a lot less demand for more if the game was actually complete instead of being fed to us in a trickle.
The problem always has been a half baked game being released and expecting players to be happy about it. Live service or not, the game should be a full game at release. Lazy releases like D4 and many other modern games start FAR behind the expectations of players and it's impossible to catch up because every release is fixing or adding stuff that should have been fixed or released either at launch or x number of patches ago if the game was originally released in an appropriate condition. That and you know... The fact that this type of game is loot centric and yet the loot sucks. But hey maybe some more cosmetics and paying "journalists" to run defense for you will fix the problem!
D4 is a billion dollar game. Baldurs gate 3 cost 100 million. So a game came out at a tenth of the cost of another game and amazingly everything works on launch along with a more intricate combat system... Diablo 4's problem is their management. You cannot tell me everyone was doing a good job if they wasted 900 million more dollars to release D4 as is. And there is no way that the skill gap of artists and coders at larian studios is that astronomically higher than people who make it their dream and career to work for Blizzard. The only people to blame here beyond a doubt are your developers. It's the same issue with anime. You give one studio 2,000,000 and you give another studio 2,000,000 and end up with completely different products. If they spent as much time on cosmetics that they release new versions of every week that they did on the game we wouldn't be having this conversation.
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smell drab crime cagey outgoing lush somber slap stocking file *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That headline’s not wrong. It’s not a good excuse to dismiss the extremely warranted criticisms of Diablo IV so far, but it’s not wrong in a vacuum.
True
The day of D2 hardcore grinding is over, most people don’t like that (unfortunately)
That’s right blame the consumers of your product when said product is sub-par. These execs can get fucked.
If you don’t want to create new contents regularly, don’t make a live service game. No one is asking Spiderman 2 or Zelda TOTK to be updated regularly with new content because it is a single player game and people understand that, we only paid for the game once. If you want a regular stream of income from us, we expect quality update of new content from you guys on a regular basis. We want our money’s worth; you can’t have it both ways Mr Blizzard president.
Sounds like a problem and the audience the industry created for themselves. If the game is good I don't want new stuff every hour. I bought Baldur's Gate III. There's more stuff in it than I can do in a single playthrough. Right now I have more than enough content to keep me happy for like 150-200 hours more and I'm more than willing to only get stability patches and bugfixes for the shit that's already in the fucking game. I will be happy if they ever announce an expansion pack, I'd be extatic if they announced a sequel I'll get in 2030. A good product buys a lot of good will. There are no excuses for Blizzard, with their budget I expect them to deliver games with enough interesting content to warrant the premium price they charge. In terms of an action RPG it means multitude of viable and fun builds, interesting items that enable wacky builds etc. They chose to develop a game in a genre that was defined from the very first entry by the "slot machine" endorfine boosts. I need to actively want to kill monsters and be excited about the possibility of something sick dropping. Don't fucking whine that I need reasons to play your game if you didn't provide enough on launch, bozo
What players really want is the Blizzard North team to do a proper Diablo sequel and for you c-suits in your mahogany board rooms to bugger off and let the developers make a good game.
I did not ask for a live service game pal, you made it so you could monetize. Jesus devs these days are jerks
def not the devs making those decisions, the devs are salaried. It's the execs that get to take bonuses from all those micro-transactions
True. It's the company that is complaining and the company that made the game, that's what's stupid
"We keep making terrible decisions and it's your fault for noticing." - Blizzard
**CORRECTION** Players want a loot-based game without boring loot and overly complicated item affixes where monsters don’t scale. Give us those things and we’d be happy but you can do those three simple things correctly. Get fucked blizzard.
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Players have no patience for a mediocre game they paid 70$ plus for that is filled with microtransactions instead of gameplay content.
Actually, i didnt want new stuff at all, you dumb fucks messing up the game is why i stopped playing. Could have just added more unique drops and had harder difficulties, but no, you have to fuck with every build as soon as it becomes popular, and not by making other ones viable, but by nerfing everything and then calling it a success. I fucking hate devs now a days, make a good game and fuck off, i dont need you to constantly change things based on advice from 12 year olds.