Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe

You should use the restroom within an hour so you won't shit your pant

What are the systems in D4?

D2 had gear and skill tree.
D3 had gear, skills, paragon and cube.

So just watched this video. Is this just the graphics for the console version?
Looks very D3 which I hated. If this is how its going to look on PC I will be taking a hard pass with this one.

D4 will have microtransaction so you can win big.

Chris said:

What are the systems in D4?

D2 had gear and skill tree.
D3 had gear, skills, paragon and cube.

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D4 adds Altars of Lilith (account-wide bonuses for fully exploring the maps) and Renown (like achievements that give the remaining skill points you are still missing once level-capped). Cube seems to mostly be about ripping orange affixes off legendaries and slapping them onto the perfect rare you'll never find.

Edit: Also, paragon is a series of boards you fill in the particular nodes that you want, and it's hard-capped on points rather than being designed for autistic streamers (one of the few positive things I've seen in the new systems).

yeah kind of surprised at how poor the game looks. hopefully the gameplay makes up for it!

Vorph said:

There's almost no correlation between resources spent and actual game quality these days. If anything, the more resources put in, the more likely a game is to have a bunch of predatory and/or anti-consumer systems in it because the investment must be made back no matter what it takes.

And just to throw it out there -- Forspoken was recently revealed to have cost $100M+ to make (which like Hollywood budgets probably doesn't include advertising).

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They’re spending millions on these games - they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s literally their job and responsibility to make as much money as possible. If the market doesn’t appreciate their monetization then they fail.

As far as indie games goes. I think this is kind of disingenuous because we’re only seeing the best of the best out of millions of shitty games. The median indie game is a dumpster fire whereas the median AAA title is just a meh game.

Chersk said:

I do not agree. Games are being developed with more resources devoted to them than ever.

While I have very fond memories of old games there is very little about them that I want carried over to what is currently being produced.

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You don't want amazing game design and solid QA carried over to today? Thank God marketing and DEI departments took over cause I'd hate for the quality shit we used to get ruin the new great and improved muddled shit of Twitter opinions we have now.

Resources don't mean jack shit. The gaming industry is likely 100 - 200 % bigger then the pre 2009 era. The best games have been indie studios and out of 100 triple a titles maybe 4 are good these days.

Sevens said:

So just watched this video. Is this just the graphics for the console version?
Looks very D3 which I hated. If this is how its going to look on PC I will be taking a hard pass with this one.

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I haven't been paying a ton of attention and just noticed couch co-op. Do I read correctly that it's not a feature for PC? Bummer, that'd be handy to play with my kids.

Penance said:

You don't want amazing game design and solid QA carried over to today? Thank God marketing and DEI departments took over cause I'd hate for the quality shit we used to get ruin the new great and improved muddled shit of Twitter opinions we have now.

Resources don't mean jack shit. The gaming industry is likely 100 - 200 % bigger than the pre 2009 era. The best games have been indie studios and out of 100 triple a titles maybe 4 are good these days.

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What was good game design 15 years ago is pretty shitty today IMO. I’m not interested in many of the game systems that were typical then.

Resources absolutely mean something. Hogwarts, while nothing amazing or ground breaking, was a very competently made video game that featured great art assets, animations, sounds, music, voice acting, etc.

Again people go back to indie games like it means shit. It’s like claiming the lottery is a good source of income because people win sometimes.

Crashed after 10 mins, login queue is about 5 mins

Vorph said:

D4 adds Altars of Lilith (account-wide bonuses for fully exploring the maps) and Renown (like achievements that give the remaining skill points you are still missing once level-capped). Cube seems to mostly be about ripping orange affixes off legendaries and slapping them onto the perfect rare you'll never find.

Edit: Also, paragon is a series of boards you fill in the particular nodes that you want, and it's hard-capped on points rather than being designed for autistic streamers (one of the few positive things I've seen in the new systems).

Click to expand...

Is this sarcasm or true? It's hard to tell these days. Because a lot of that sounds interesting to me, depending on implementation I guess. The paragon change sounds great, endless cap for +more main stat, was boring and dumb.

Altar sounds like the recent thing they just did for d3 season(using it as a testbed?) and that was amazing, with all kinds of QoL in it. Can only hope that carries over.

Chersk said:

What was good game design 15 years ago is pretty shitty today IMO. I’m not interested in many of the game systems that were typical then.

Resources absolutely mean something. Hogwarts, while nothing amazing or ground breaking, was a very competently made video game that featured great art assets, animations, sounds, music, voice acting, etc.

Again people go back to indie games like it means shit. It’s like claiming the lottery is a good source of income because people win sometimes.

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What game design do you think has improved since 15 years ago? We're still playing the same archetypes, and most design has gone backwards as more investors have gotten their stake in companies they demand more return and game design suffers for it.

FPS archetype has become absolute shit. Valorant is a reskin of Counterstrike. Call of Duty hasn't changed shit, neither has Battlefield. We've actually gone backwards from Tribes/Unreal/Quake era.

MMO archetype is pretty much dead. Hasn't changed since 04. Design wise action MMOs have kinda been a thing, but GW2 was the originator there, around 15 years ago. Very little new and interesting stuff here.

RTS archetype, dead

4x/Strategy has some what imrpoved by the likes of Paradox/Creative Assembly. I think design has improved here.

ARPG, has been controlled by GGG who was an indie dev and Diablo who well, we know how that turned out. GGG are the only people to improve on the design with leagues and staggering item design, again this was an Indie dev at the start.

Third Person RPGs this is probably the one thing that has improved over the last 15 years and its 90% Fromsoft leading the way.

New archetypes such as Roguelites, Bullethell/heavens and Mobas are all new within the last 15 years and besides Mobas most are indie companies leading the way.

Fighting Games - Stale, not much improved here. I'd take MvC2 or even 3 over most of the shit. GG:Strive was pretty good.

The bottom line though is because the market has balooned so much in the past 15 or 20 years, the investors have started getting their tendrils deeper and deeper. Games, like any other form of art are passion projects. Once you have the overlords tugging the puppet strings the design/creative process suffers.

Anyway I digress. I'm more interested to hear how Kentucky Fried Diablo is.

Aaaaaaand it's offline.

How have they not figured out game launches yet. It's been fucking 25 years lol

I got in and did the first boss then got disconnected, 30 min queue. Damn, seems I have to face the reality of the snow storm outside instead and start shovewling the white gold.

Blizzard vs blizzard...

Bullet hell games aren't new... what?

I'd guess that almost nobody even knew what PoE was until well after D3 and Reaper of Souls had many years under their belts and there hasn't been a single ARPG in between to compete with PoE that I know of, other than Grim Dawn which I don't even really consider to be competition. I personally lump my ARPGs into TQ/GD/Last Epoch and then PoE/Diablo.

Is RTS being dead because of bad design or is it because nobody likes that game type these days? Are MMOs dead because nobody is doing anything new or is it because any time someone does something new the MMO dies within a couple months, because nobody actually wants new stuff in their MMOs?

How many people these days do you think would play a modern copy of the games from the 90s or even early 00s? I'd bet it's nowhere near as many as you're thinking, but since you have fond memories of them (don't we all?) it's hard to grasp that everybody in the world might not feel the same.

lmao watching lirik play.
Goes to create a clan, game has the eg Lilith's Choosen, with the space, he goes to use it, says can't use space.
Then he puts HELL and his twitch link in the clan description, tells him he can't use profanity.
He puts ell instead and then deletes www from the link and it tells him name taken.
Gets in game, chat says everyone crashing, lirik says not him, yet, 2sec later crashes, logs back in character wiped.