Synj
Dystopian Dreamer
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Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe
- Thread starter gshurik
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First couple years of D3 were pretty good. You could easily split your time between D3 and another game, mine was Hearthstone. Hmmm, what were they doing during that time that made the game good?
MAKING FUCKING CONTENT.
The faggots that care about lore or narrative or aesthetics are the ones that aren't going to stick around longterm anyway. Blizzard already knows what the answer is, and it's putting their nose to grindstone. That letter is just a reacharound for the community. Hopefully that's all it is and they don't listen to the multitude of posters even in this thread who care about the story. Story front and center is what you got in D3 and it was fucking horrible. Blizzard can't do story, stop asking the fat kid to land a 10 from the high dive.
MAKING FUCKING CONTENT.
The faggots that care about lore or narrative or aesthetics are the ones that aren't going to stick around longterm anyway. Blizzard already knows what the answer is, and it's putting their nose to grindstone. That letter is just a reacharound for the community. Hopefully that's all it is and they don't listen to the multitude of posters even in this thread who care about the story. Story front and center is what you got in D3 and it was fucking horrible. Blizzard can't do story, stop asking the fat kid to land a 10 from the high dive.
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I think the prime issue these days is that the main game designers are themselves not really gamers anymore. They're either old and too busy with normal life shit to keep in touch with gaming, and so they're largely clueless on top of having lost their edge due to age, or they're young and their initial exposure to gaming was garbage, and they lack the foundation that earlier designers had with the wild west style of the industry where genius work wasn't drowned out by the refined garbage.
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Coleslaw
Blackwing Lair Raider
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In the grand scheme of things, all of those zones they added during RoS patches were pointless. Rifts were the only legit way to gear up so I gave no fucks about those 2 or 3 new ones they added
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Bubbles
2022 Asshat Award Winner
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A Letter from our Game Director – BlizzCon 2019
A Letter from our Game Director – BlizzCon 2019 - Diablo IIIus.diablo3.com
sweet, so they're going to let the loudest gamer retards on the forums/media dictate the game to them. this is going to be fine
I can assure you, as long as David Kim is in there, they are not. When he was leading the SC2 team, jack shit was done about the balance. Blizzard didn't listen to pro players at all. They even had mysterious and oh so very secret Summits as they called it, around Blizzcon for a few years, where they would invite pro players and casters to discuss the balance and state of the game and for them to make suggestions. Nothing happened. They didn't listen at all. There were kneejerk moves and when something was so fucking OP that it was a joke, they said that there needs to be time for the meta to develop and players to find counters etc. They still do that today btw. Zerg has been OP as fuck for a year. Back in the day when MMM, BL/infestor, blink stalkers with 14 vision prism, archon toilet, you name it were OP, same thing, nothing was done. When something was op, nothing really was done to fix it. Same is gonna happen to Diablo. Not balance wise, because no one give a rats ass about balance in Diablo but when it comes to what game systems and features they're gonna have. They will talk a big talk but vast majority of features will be money driven. PLayers won't see it at first, because all the hype but when hype goes away, true meanings will become clearer. Then they will come out and say they will fix it but they won't. They'll apply some band-aid solution and just keep on going. All in all, fuck David Kim
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Imagine if you could loot Awesome Sword but it could also randomly roll to Awesome Sword x2 or x3. Each being rarer and harder to get.
On top of that imagine that Awesome Sword had a curse effect that negatively impacted your gameplay to the extent of randomly gibbing you with unkillable ghosts that chase you and fire that explodes beneath you that you generate and thus can't avoid.
On top of that imagine that the only way to mitigate said cursed effects is to grind grind grind for Blizbucks to advance a timegated item that makes your Awesome Sword X2 w/Curse actually usable without killing you.
Welcome to WOW 2019.
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Slaanesh69
Millie's Staff Member
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I think it is even more insidious.
The era of "prideful game designers" is gone. The iD of yesterday, even the Blizzard of the 90's, became the Activision and EA and Bethesda of today.
The meetings aren't full of people who know games anymore, they are full of suits who know business, finance, and people, and how to manipulate all three, and who work to make the most coin for the least effort from their product.
Now I am not laying judgement as to whether that is bad or good from a moral or ethical perspective, but we all know good and well that it is the very worst from a quality game-making perspective.
The worst term to come out of the gaming industry in the last 20 years has been "games as a service". That term alone has very nearly ruined quality single-player/small grouping RPG or ARPG gaming.
There will never be another Diablo or Diablo II. Too small scale, not enough room for exploitation. There will never be another original PoE, circa 2013.
To get our ARPG fix nowadays we have to deal with games as a service (modern PoE), Eastern ARPGS that are almost isometric MMOs at this point (Lost Ark), or small developers trickling out mediocre content over a decade (Wolcen, Last Epoch). I even Kickstarted Last Epoch when I still had some shred of hope that this genre would survive unscathed, but I am disappoint.
I wouldn't say "ruined", but I do feel like modern games pay some cost for the lack of editing and coherency that comes from being able to revise continually after release. PoE is a fun game but it's pretty clearly a stack of ideas developed over years, some of which don't particularly relate to each other.
(Bug fixes and removing stupid ideas are the obvious counter-cases.)
Fyff
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Slaanesh69
Millie's Staff Member
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Yeah, I know you would marry PoE if you could, and Fyff would kill it and leave it in a dumpster, but it is specifically not the game that I loved in 2013, as I said, and has evolved farther and farther from a game I loved exclusive to all others, to today and a game I like okay, I guess. Nowhere did I say it was ruined, but it has definitely changed to cater to a different audience than that for which it was originally designed.
Listen, the point is not a debate about the specifics of what game you or I do or do not like, I meant to focus on the generalities of how game design has evolved. Because it has.
And, as we all know and have seen, it can get all bitchy and retarded up in here when debating the whole Diablo vs PoE thing.
Edit - if you want specifics, I would have to say heavy cycling of the meta and target marketing MTX to that meta. It is a smart business model that clearly works and remains successful. Good on them, the suits have found a winning formula. But I don't particularly care for stuff I enjoy playing being cycled in and then out of power. Edit 2 - And constant introduction of new/moar item types coupled with purchasable (but not necessary) storage tabs for convenience in storage and use of said items.
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Malakriss
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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D3 reduced the game down to three activities: rift, greater rift, bounties. If you got lucky with a goblin portal or a puzzle ring dropped along the way, great. But you should always be doing one of those 3 activities, and honestly the regular rifts only exist so you can do more greaters.
Differences in enemies still come down to: is this shit density and/or a linear tunnel floor? Cause that just wastes your time. Design something better.
Differences in enemies still come down to: is this shit density and/or a linear tunnel floor? Cause that just wastes your time. Design something better.
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You just needed the edit, nothing more
I'm not nonobjective of PoE's faults just because I play it a lot. Forced meta is definitely an issue with the game.Note I have a post in this very thread about how meta change can count as content. So, I'm not necessarily sure I agree that "games as service" will always give rise to bad forced metas, thus "games as service" is bad. PoE has definitely been very transparent about their motivation and it's disappointing.
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Cabales
Trakanon Raider
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I personally like the idea of "games as a service", but more often than not the execution has been poor. IMO the shining examples of GAAS done right are POE and Warframe. i love those games. i play them a lot, I leave them for extended periods of time, I come back after a while and there's a bunch of new stuff to dig into. Those games have kept me playing off and on for years as a result of their development cycle. There are other examples for me too. I think Crusader Kings 2 could arguably fit that description and I've dropped a crazy amount of time into that game as well. I do understand why this might not appeal to others, but I'd actually like to see more of it in certain genres if the quality was high.
Gaming nirvana for me would be a high quality D&D or Pathfinder game with a base game purchase and then regular content being released in the form of modules, races, classes, etc... I still can't understand how nobody has done this yet. Years of content has already been developed and is just waiting to be converted to a digital experience.
The key is quality though, and that's always been an issue in games (I suppose this applies to all mediums of entertainment though). I have to wade through a ton of shit games in order tof ind the next POE, Warframe, CK2, etc.. I prefer the experience those games deliver over a new entry in a series every 3 years or so.
Gaming nirvana for me would be a high quality D&D or Pathfinder game with a base game purchase and then regular content being released in the form of modules, races, classes, etc... I still can't understand how nobody has done this yet. Years of content has already been developed and is just waiting to be converted to a digital experience.
The key is quality though, and that's always been an issue in games (I suppose this applies to all mediums of entertainment though). I have to wade through a ton of shit games in order tof ind the next POE, Warframe, CK2, etc.. I prefer the experience those games deliver over a new entry in a series every 3 years or so.
Caeden
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Better. Reads a lot like “oh shit, poe2 announcement pushed our shit in so we better do something!”
Banishing sets needs to happen entirely imo.
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Malakriss
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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2-piece sets with options on slots i don't mind, but in D3's current implementation it's actually 3-piece with RoRG mandatory. They should have stopped at 4-piece and never done RoRG, but as soon as that damn ring was introduced they had to maintain higher #s.
Leadsalad
Cis-XYite-Nationalist
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They're the designers though, and this is a AAA studio. This design by audience participation thing is a huge "wtf are you even doing over there? Have you fired all of the worthless dead weight so you can pay your actual devs some money and give them design freedom to stick around?"
These kinds of posts are things actual small studios should be doing. Blizzard should have enough actual gamers on staff that they don't need to crowd source and poll test their own game systems in a pre-alpha game. This is utterly ridiculous how unfleshed out everything they have is.
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Caeden
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I’m more cynical. I think they see the goodwill smaller indie studios get doing this so they’re paying lip service to try to get us to forget they’re a greedy money-grubbing corporation that does shit like remove mounts to drive their own RMT gold shit.
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