David brevik was the main reason both the first 2 games were so good, and his team of course but he pretty much single handedly programed both diablo and diablo 2
This is what made Diablo so special. The feeling of dread as you slowly walk through the catacombs knowing you are easily killed, the grueling atmosphere, the first time you encountered the butcher, it made you truly uneasy. Diablo II aside from having a pretty cool story had none of that and when it comes to this is a bad sequel. I still enjoy Diablo while I abandoned the Necromancer I started up in the D2 remake.
I think it was mostly designed by A.I. -- the finished game was then stripped down to the bare minimum they launched with, and they've been patching it for retention by turning features they already have added to the game back on. I think the expansion has been designed with the whole game from the beginning. They selling it to you for another 100$ for 10% of the content the first 100$ got you. This is how you ruin franchises.
Thats true, but probably kind of necessary, regarding the game cost 300 mil to develop. Thats why AAA movies and games now have no own identity anymore, except milking the heck out of their frenchise leaving just an empty shell
Maybe stop using shitter non aspected gear or using a shit build You can clear capstones at extremely low levels with the right gear and affixes if you have the know how Even if monsters didn't scale you could trivialize it easily, just like you can in any other arpg Freaking smooth brains shitting on something because their favorite edgy content creator is doing it
Its always the same. A group of people with alot of passion create Something, it works and brings Money. Then the greedy ones come, kill the passion and try to maximize Profits. Not just gaming industry. Its everywhere, for example automotive and whiskey. Its just sad
But things can't last forever, specially with the online games that are based on stories not just made to play competitively, that's why dota, cs and games like that will always last longer. Becouse you can't always make stories and new expansions and think it will not bored people. It's like every TV show that went too far with seasons amd destroyed the story becouse it has not point and end.
I mean... the old hounds are gone. They left the company. Blizzard North was killed in 2005 and during the development of D3 at Blizzard North key employees walked away. D3 then was scrapped and transferred to Blizzard after the shutdown. I'm not saying that fresh blood is unable to pick up the torch old veterans, but some people can't get the "feel" of a series or a setting.
A lot of it had to do with just how much focus they put on WoW and how little they put into anything else. And most of the post-WoW stuff has been pretty eSports and microtransaction focused.
I'm honestly convinced that Daiblo 4 didn't start development until the week of the Diablo Immortal announcement (Do you guys not have phones?!) and the massive stink that whole event caused. If they actually had D4 in development at the time, they would have at least shown something to get hype up. A trailer, a logo, anything. But no, they had literally nothing. And in that short time, they rushed whatever they could out. The corners cut, the developer responses, everything just pointed to a short and rushed 2 year dev cycle that used Diablo 3 as a base to streamline their processes.
@@Wicked-Vortex it was a rush game, they did not expected the backlash with mobile game. And it seem it worked with new d3 recycled game, same mechanic/game but darker, and was a real succesfull game from the POV of cash. Expansion incoming, alots of people are gona buy, again heroic moment on game industry how they sold milions and milions of copy, even if the game sux beyond imagination. At the end, what the point to invest hundert of millions on depth of the mechanic of the game when you can have same effect with 1/10 of the money just by hyping the game and give a good cinematic/trailer. After that, dosent matter so lang is money up front.
@@irinalucaci588 it's really sad, but thats the truth. I feel like buying the expansion myself, but im still too unsure if it's just a waste of money. I really dont play D4 that much. I quit the game at level 100 pre seasons, when i realized there wasnt anything to do and the game felt super stale. And it still has that feeling of an empty game, but with some stuff to do. I dont know how to explain it, but it lacks spirit. And i dont think the expansion is going to change that. Might never be anything that can change it.
@@hazardeur diablo 3 was in development by North before acti bought them. They didn't want a MMO diablo because it would compete with Wow so they dissolved north to start development on what was to become real money auction house. I know because I lived through it. They were making money before acti, they got greedy and ruined their company.
@@bobbymoore8030 yeah i know all that. the "On their deathbed" comment was meant in terms of creating good games, being seen as a great gaming company, not meant financially. which is a fact that i hate even more because people buying this shit are not only still making sure this company survives, they even make it thrive
The biggest mistake Blizzard ever made in relation to D3, was firing the entire team that created D1 & D2. They then brought in people that worked on WoW, and it was clear they didn't understand, nor respect the lore of the game. We now have devs that don't even play the game... sad.
@williamwagner79 of course the more it sells the better it is. By that logic diablo 4 must be such a vastly superior game to all diablo games that came before. Same goes for movies, books etc. The richer the CEOS, the better the products.
@@DefinitelANonymous Yeah I never said that D3 was vastly superior. I was just saying they made a hell a lot of money off of a game that his guy is claiming was a mistake.
@@minimaluser2132 Obviously it must be taste good to quite a few people,. That's always one of the dumbest arguments., I'm sure the billions of people that have been served by McDonald's, all think it just tastes horrible but buy it anyways.
At its core, the issue with D4 is no different than any other modern MMO game. They they half-ass a community oriented design because they just want to sell you cosmetics to show off, that's it. They have no idea what makes a game "massively multiplayer".
Go play a season of Project Diablo 2. For real. Then laugh when you realize they managed to accomplish what a massive corporation couldn't with over a hundred million dollars with a small mostly unpaid community. The fundamental design of that game is literally the design bible of a successful D4 in some alternate reality, where all Blizzard did was shoe-horn a cosmetic store into it.
@@zachb8012 I'm sure all three players of it are enjoying the 20 year old graphics! 😀 (oh and I played D2 to death, and D2R more recently) but things move on.
@@dwinterx At the launch of the last season there was about 5000 concurrent players. The trade site was cookin'. Right now is the tail-end of a roughly 5 month seasonal cycle, so players are down. Don't knock D2's graphics though. The fact that 20 years later there's still a consistent player base is testament to the style. There are definitely things dated about D2, sure, but it ain't the graphics.
I do not understand how the continue to get it wrong. Diablo 2 had a couple main loot related things that set it apart : 1. Rares are technically the absolute best items in the game, but GOOD EFFING LUCK getting a roll that is one of those greatest in the game. 2. There were multiple currencies that ended up being required for multiple uses, as well as the ability to trade those currencies to other players, IE, You can just collect 40 perfect gems to trade for a mid rune so someone doing endgame crafting can craft or use those gems to craft yourself, you can trade mid runes for mid gear or save up runes to combine to higher runes, or use those runes to make runeword gear pieces. Not to mention socketed "base" items also holding tradable value for runes and other legendaries.
Let’s not forget that adding Diablo clone into the game was an absolute master stroke in market correction. There were sooo many duped stones of jordan floating around that they just decided to make it super economical to just sell them to merchants instead of flood the market with them and boom, trade price went from like 40 chipped gems to a high rune overnight and you were more likely to not get scammed by a poofing item! Loved learning basic economics at the age of like 12 from this game.
Tempering and enchanting is like taking your car to a mechanic for an oil change and they not only dont change your oil, but also steal your catalytic converter and one of your tires. Then they tell you that you can pay them again if you want to give it another shot.
Heres WHY. They gave the series to a guy who HATED the original first and second game. Long story short, THAT is it. If you give a game series to some one who HATED the core of the series, you shouldnt be shocked to find it fails and they dont understand what made the games good.
Why is that a theme of modern media. Everything is given over to people who either loathe, or care nothing for the source material. It's like they are trying to destroy everything good.
They ARE trying to destroy it all. They want to rebuild it in their image. Though in this particular instance, I think it was just trend chasing and corporate bs that finished this game series off. This was largely before the twactivists took power in blizzard.
I think what went wrong is quite obvious they simply got greedy. Trying to appeal to a wider audience is a terrible idea. When a game is made for everyone it ends up being for no one. If you don’t know who your original fan base is and don’t respect them you start to steer the game in an entirely different direction leaving people feeling abandoned just so you can try to pick up a new fan base. I like D2 and D3 but they are so different upsetting people was almost inevitable. This led D4 to have no chance of pleasing people the community is badly divided on what they want and the devs have absolutely no idea what to do about it.
It boils down to the fact that they gave the series to a guy who HATED everything about the older games and wanted to fundamentally change it. Thats why.
I was never fond of when level scaling came about. You really don't feel like you're getting stronger, unless you're constantly figuring out a game breaking build every 10 minutes before legendaries. After legendaries, I've been slaughtering everything, especially since I took higher risk, higher reward, and jumped into hell tides right away. Once I got a few good drops, and maxed my resistances, I was smearing everything in side, especially nightmare dungeons a bit above my level
it’s not about whether u can kill monster at higher level. it’s about the speed of killing. u shud aim to complete pit 101 within 1 minute if u are a casual player with ur build set up. or your ultimate goal is to complete pit 200 within 5 minutes or less if ure a full time time diqblo player.
@@user-df2uu3qp3y lol. bro, thats not what real diablo players do. Thats a speed runner adhd mindset. Real diablo players are mf hunters. Those dont exist because diablo 4 isnt a diablo game other than name and lore and even then the lore in d3 and d4 is fucking terrible
In fact you aren't. After a while you practically are completely overpowered by anything and unless you play as one of the builds that doesn't suck taking literally any reason to actually do so away.
Got my first Char to level 100 today. There is a very large map in this game but the only 3 places Im familiar with are the tree for whisper rewards, cerrigar for pit and Zebinzat or whatever for mothers rewards thing in the current season 5. The ONLY time I leave these 3 areas is for helltide. It really is a shame. In other games where the levels are zoned, its SOOO nostalgic starting a new character in the beginner zone. Now I can’t remember half the map. Have to look up where everything is at because I never had to spend a large amount of time in any given zone.
I didn’t inform my self enough and I bought the game and I can tell you you are 200% right. The game feels the same at lvl1 and at lvl 34 where I am currently. I will not be playing it anymore. Wasted money :(
I am an OG Diablo fan, level scaling killed this game for me. Also, can we talk about monster model scaling, nobody mentions this but I think it's a bid deal. The demons and creatures you fight in the beginning should be weak looking. In diablo 1 you're fighting slow moving brain dead zombies and skinny little 3 foot demons. In the last act your fighting muscled up, 8 ft tall, winged demons from the pit of hell. They really struck fear in you from the sight alone. In D4, your fighting the gnarliest looking baddies pretty early, and there is no sense of scariness from the big baddies anymore. So bland, very sad.
Biggest problem is the chaotic visuals from all the laser disco effects and overlays, especially the ever-present bee swarm of proc notifications. Like, why do we need to see numeric values of the damage being dealt with every hit, and 20 copies of the word "Vulnerable" plastered all over the screen? If you want to show that an enemy is vulnerable to a certain kind of attack, why not have something subtle like a different reaction animation for being hit where they recoil a bit harder from the hit? Diablo 2 let us know everything we needed to know to understand exactly what was happening in the game space without any of this crap... just simple, subtle visual queues like tinting a character blue to show they're frozen or green to show they're poisoned, and spells/abilities whose VFX blended seamlessly right into the rest of the game without obscuring any of the action. What's the point of making such beautiful, dark, brooding, realistic graphics just to wallpaper over it with a bukkake of unnecessary numbers, words, and gaudy glowing multicolored neon firework shows?
Gaming companies really need to get better at recognizing their limits and stop trying to follow this exhausting and unsustainable trend of exponential growth. By trying to reach wider and wider audiences, every franchise that gamers beloved is slowly being destroyed piece by piece.
I am sick of exponential growth same as any other consumer. Sadly its something that seems to have become an out of control issue. if you don't aim for exponential growth u fail and will be in ruins. So I would think that companies are just doing it because somewhere it started and it can't be stopped. Also shareholders are greedy fucks that are out of touch with the world and dont know what people like, yet they wanna make decisions they have no knowledge off.
Thing is ,I don't care what improves because they've shown their hand asking $100 a year. For me that's impossible to justify while a better free alternative still exists.
It wasn’t just the honeymoon period, blizzard actually nerfed xp and power pre season 1. They realized they had not developed content to engage people so their answer was to slow down people’s progression and make them weaker. They also didn’t try to develop Diablo 2, a game designed around being fun, they designed a game around making your waste time, look at the renown system. They wanted it reset every season and every character, nothing about that design decision was made with player fun in mind, it was time sink and engagement metrics.
bingo. which is why I sold it after campaign. these are not games, they are hamster wheels powering up the stock price. never again buying an actiblizz product.
If i may add my complaints as i don't hear these mentioned. (1) Sidequests. there are over 200 of them. I propose a nightmare side quest system and a sidequest codex. (2) Enemies. They have little sense of purpose or permanence. Mostly standing still in a mob cluster until you encounter them. Too often appearing out of nowhere. Can't kite them enough with their "chain" system, they run back to their post. An enemy should be able to follow you across the entire map. World bosses and bosses in general should roam the world instead of sitting in one arena. I want to see convoys of demons marching long distance towards a target. Too many enemies, too short lived. Clearing mobs feels more like dashing through quantum geometry than facing demons. I don't like all the enemies appearing and disappearing all the time. I want to feel like the demons are permanent entities. A beastiary would be good too. Another codex to complete. They have good examples ingame already: The Butcher. Penitent Knights having a campfire. Walking in on demons killing civilians. More of this.
THe sidequest could have been good if they didn't just make them fetch quests. I do admit though they are well acted. I just t think it would have been better having more scripts like the campaign over what we got, tough. bunch of fetch quests in a really badly made overworld.
@@Kevfactor for someone who doesn’t want to just run nightmare dungeons all the time I really need the overworld to be better. I suggest roaming bosses as well as the butcher.
As soon as Blizzard got on stage at said that it was online only and an MMO style game, i didnt buy it. Right then and there i figured id remain with Diablo 1, 2, and when im extremely bored Diablo 3. I was never going to waste money on something that was a bastardization of a franchise i enjoyed. The same with Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online. I dont consider those proper entries into those franchises either. i see them as overactive retcons, and ive grown to hate retcons that make no sense. I will treat Diablo 4 as non canon as well.
i already treat d3 as non canon. the story was ass and killing of deckard by some butterfly? who ever thought that was a good idea? who did greenlight this? i can't even imagine those meetings. sometimes i dream of being in those meetings and tearing up the whole room leaving no one alive but maybe that goes a bit too far
@addictedplayer4453 whoa whoa whoa..listen. I am on board with d2 being a better designed game with more meaningful gear than d4. But there are plenty of straight garbage uniques that make me want to cry ...maybe if we are talking ssf and pre runewords? calling every unique amazing is something only blizzard would say lol
@@addictedplayer4453most of it is trash, a few portion of it could be good. But, there is a very small chance of hitting a specific piece that hits the dopamine mark like no other. There is pretry much no memoral loot in d4, while you have plenty in d2.
@@addictedplayer4453 careful there bud. some seem trash for standard builds yeah but i have seen enough videos of weird ass char setups that need that one otherwise crappy unique in order to even work. while some of the uniques and even runewords will seem nonsensical to most, there is always just one weird ass char build away to make it seem legit
I could write paragraphs of how shallow they make the environment, characters, and quests feel. If you've played the games then you know already. What I rarely see people talk about though, is how gutted player interaction has become. In Diablo Two, you could join up and basically pioneer the world together. You could fight each other, talk to each other, and even trade items with each other. You'd take down enemies you maybe couldn't handle alone, and you'd be rewarded with progression. In modern Diablo, you can emote to the other fellow who is just a passerby in *your* world. You may team up with them for random events and take down enemies together, but there's no meaningful impact on the game if you choose to play alone or with others. The other players are there with you in the experience, as you would want them to be; however, the interaction with them doesn't feel any different than the simple engagements you'd have with NPCs/virtual-companions staggered throughout the generic landscapes. You may believe that developers eliminate this shallow interaction when it comes to team-based multiplayer games like: Shooter 3 and Battle Royal 2024. Under the surface pretense of working together, you and every player are still just marketable products. Every match starts with a set-up phase or lobby, where you emote to each other and see the skins everyone is sporting. Shortly after, you have only the attention to engage with the hectic game play of life or death scenarios. You're either going to successfully complete the objective or lose. You get angry at your teammates when you lose, and they feel obligated to buy better equipment or boosts to mitigate the feeling of loss. You get excited together when you win, and further reinforce the idea that the advantages you paid for are working and necessary for you to have fun. That's modern gaming in a nutshell. I'm baffled that the big corps are jealous of successful titles from smaller studios. Not everyone wants to be engaged in the exhausting dark loops of modern live service titles, which seek all of the player's time and money for the sake of competitively progressing against everyone they meet or know. I used to enjoy talking about new games when I was younger, but now there is little to say about the modern experiences that are diluted of all but their marketability.
What you described is happening because companies are creating games intended to be everlasting, commonly known as live service games. The system in Diablo 2 worked and feels better because it was developed as a game with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Diablo 4, on the other hand, is a game with a beginning, middle, and an end with endless modifications and updates. Developers work to create the illusion that what's coming will always be better than what we currently have. The truth is that some problems persist so that the team has something to fix in the next season. The goal of live service games is never to deliver the best experience and the best game possible because they need defects or issues in the current version for the audience to compare with the improvements in future updates. It’s simply a business model aimed at keeping the wheel turning because if the money stops coming in, the company can no longer pay employees, maintain servers, and the system collapses. This is why we often feel that older games are better than the current ones.
Such a shit take bth. Everything you mentioned from 2 is in 4. But you see other players more often. The interaction are not to YOUR liking, which is just your subjective feeling. The interaction is more realistic then what you talk about, since most humans dont interact nowdays. Generic landscape.... What makes D4 a generic landscape compared to D2 or whatever you have in mind? If you choose only those games (which you talk about in the second paragraph), you are at fault. There are over 15k games out there and you seem to play only games you hate... Genius move. Kinda funny, that the older gen seem to evolve in the same way our parents did. Modern gaming bad. But numbers show that many modern games do something right. It's just not to your/our liking.
It feels like the devs were forced to make a mediocre D3 clone with boring characters, mostly boring classes, poor itemization and garbage LS mechanics to get you to keep playing. This is why it feels so bad. There was no passion when the devs were making this game.
yeah if they are gunna add characters they should have actual Character, like Gran wizard! th-cam.com/video/cTi5y9IhSs8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=-BskvBJ-3NsXWEk4 CC is English! enjoy! this guys a trip! totally can see him as a playable Diablo class
It feels to me like they were forced to make a modern d2 at launch and turns out rose tinted glasses don't transfer. So now they are making it more like d3 and moving in the right direction according to the majority of players that are left.
6:26 Jason Schreier's new book explains why Blizzard North was closed down: Blizzard North and Blizzard's parent company, Vivendi, was looking to sell their gaming division, and was shopping around. However, they didn't actually inform any of the companies' leadership teams, and that had a huge effect on morale. Eventually, the blizzard north leaders sent an ultimatum to Vivendi - either they came forward with business plans and projections, or they would resign. This team was Bill Roper, Max and Erich Schaefer, and Brevik. Hours after the email, Vivendi replied that their resignations were accepted, effective immediately (this was a Friday). The next Monday, Morhaime & Co went to Blizzard North's offices and told everyone some would be integrated into Blizzard, in Irvine, and some would be laid off. On top of that, some also took the opportunity to just quit the company. So in retrospect, it wasn't actually Blizz closing down the office, but Vivendi just calling Blizz North ultimatum
There were moments in your video where I could not tell if it was D3 or D4 you were playing. That is how similar I think they look. I see nothing new at all in this game, and I will say it over and over again. D4 is a remake of Diablo Immortal, which is a remake of D3.
Curious about thoughts surrounding monetization, as I think Activision-Blizzard's thirst for micro transactions has negatively impacted D4 almost as much as many of the (very valid) points brought up in this video...from the limited visual diversity inherent to the loot drops to the original spacing of shop keepers (ostensibly to give players a reason to show off bought cosmetics), it eats at the soul of a franchise while ALSO lacking the free-to-play benefits PoE offers
the irony in you mentioning Torchlight is that Runic Games was composed of ex-Blizzard North employees including David Brevik, literally the creator of Diablo himself and you can tell especially as Torchlight 1 is literally Diablo 1 with a reskin and fishing
That's why i fucking hated The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion SO fucking much, it completely fucks up the sense of improvement, progress and journey. It was the first time and to this day the only game I've played with that system, after that awful experience every time if i hear a game has some kind of "level scaling system" i discard it, ignore it and move on. I prefer to actually WASTE my time grinding in a free to play online game than playing something like that... it's that bad. Sorry for the venting, i needed to get this out of my body.
People in the comments saying that "now its good" is mistaking it because the truth is now it is just BETTER, compared to what exactly? Yeah, the disastruous release... there are still many issues, issues that are not and probably will not be fixed in the near future because some are instrinsic to tge "live service" model this game was literally built upon... Also, there are still things even D3 did better than D4, and that says alot, sometimes you play a offbrand looking Diablo (im talking about D3 btw) that is alot fun despite its flaws and in comparison you play the one with the most fidelity to the franchise but its nowhere near as fun, proof of that is how in S4 we are doing the same things we were doing since release but NOW its fun... still filled with frustrating problems, but more enjoyavle overall. All of that beung said, i will never say D4 is a 7 or above simoly by the mere existence of the modern day plague that is the pedatory microtransactions tactics.
I appreciated your good narration, effort, and overall good points. But I'll be honest, we are all overthinking this. Diablo 4 sucks because it's made by a disjointed collection of corporate employees who have near no ownership of the product as a whole and thus create only soulless, disjointed, self-contradicting products modeled by machines that focus on what keeps people addicted versus what's actually a good game. Name me one good game out right now that wasn't made by a bunch of nerds in a basement or a garage or at least a developer that started that way. There is no need to dissect these games. Imagine making a pizza with 30 people and your job is only to gather the tomatoes before someone makes the sauce. But then there is another person that cuts the tomatoes, a different person that starts making the sauce. A different person seasons the sauce. A different person taste tests the sauce, but bases it on a survey they ran for what people like in their sauce rather than the merit of their own taste buds. You get the point. You're gonna get a shit pizza.
back in the day, developers had more freedom to test shit, or had the bravery to go against their boss and then do something different they knew was gonna get better. It wasn't as streamlined and as Thor's dad once said "they had fist fights" over things they didn't agree on. Now everything has specialisation, every employee are under strict routine. While creativity still is a factor its heavily restricted and with that, a developer is similar to a factory worker. And with shareholders who only invest for money and not for their passion about the projects, they cause havoc in the AAA industry.
@@wilsoncbip And I believe that was the point, kinda. Having the best made pizza ever taste great, but it will never be the same as the memory of your mom making you dinner. Just an example of what, I hope, most people will make that special smile thinking back on. Diablo 1 and 2 is what stuck in our memory because it wasn't made to be the best game with everyone playing it and win all the rewards…I think.
@@flamingjob2 I don't mind playing D4. I just feel D4 doesnt know what it wants to be. at least I know D3 is straight line Action game for better or worse. I think few more seasons, D4 will get better (I hope so 😂)
Yeah, that's the strange thing. The release of D4 made me appreciate D3 a lot more, something I'd never thought I'd do. Like to the point where I actively would like to play it again. Weird
As someone who plays D2 since 2003 and never got to level 99 ( 85 max ) I think getting to 100 should be an achievement, not something anybody can do, I recently got to level 100 with my Necromancer in D4 and I felt nothing , literally nothing .....
As a kid I loved playing D2 LAN with my dad, we’d always save our characters on floppies, then CDs, playing them for years and years. Fast forward to when Resurrected launched 20 years later and my father had passed away a year before, I dug up an old CD with the character files and imported them into the remastered game. Funny thing is, we both loved lightning javazon, but I was talking shit about his build back in the day and when I asked him if he had a spare Infinity, he said just one, slotted on his mercenary. But when I loaded his character in Resurrected, I saw he had an extra one in his stash and he didn’t give it to me, cause I was being a lil arrogant shit 😂 It felt surreal honestly and no modern game can really give you that experience tbh.
@@peterk2735 I would have done the same thing to be honest 😅, I play games with my son too and when he's a little shit, I beat his ass in say Soul Calibur 6 😜😂 but on a series note, that's awesome you have this kind of memories with him, shame he didn't get to experience D2R 😥
I blamed it to the news fans who complained about low exp. They keep buffing the experience because those players keep complaining on how it took them long time to reach 100. After they reach 100 then they complain about the lack of endgame contents. Pre-Season 1 exp is fine before those snowflakes ruined it.
@@jameslambertus5820 I agree, it should definitely go up a bit, i started new season on Friday last week, already level 67 and I haven't played that much 😅😅
@@jameslambertus5820 I played D2 for years before I could get most of my chars past lvl 90+, especially on hardcore. It’s like….you don’t get there unless you really know what you’re doing. I mean once you get to Hell, no matter what build you have, there are going to be enemies that are immune to your main source of dmg. You gotta find the items to deal with it, otherwise you’re not maxing out, can’t avoid it. I always felt some danger when playing D2, from act 1 normal all the way to uber Tristram. In D4 you never get that.
@@Vexreal_ You clearly didn't watch it then, he switches to the positives about the game a little over halfway through and reviewing what is STILL bad and comparing it to the finer points of previous games is fine. It's good for the game to be studied in order for it to improve.
@@Jessethoth it'd not about his actual points. It's about his thumbnail and title. People won't click on a video perceived as negative when the game itself is doing well right now. He missed that opportunity during the flop of season 3 and prior.
To put it in the simplest way possible, Activision-Blizzard(now Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard technically) simply isn't Blizzard(as in the Blizzard of old). Diablo 1 and 2 were made by Blizzard, Diablo 3 and 4 were made by a completely different company that just so happens to share a name with it: Activision-Blizzard. Saying Blizzard doesn't understand Diablo any more is a misnomer, as it's simply not the same Blizzard. All the old veterans that worked on all of Blizzard's old games, not just Diablo mind you, have all left the company, most of them a long time ago. On top of that, most of the corporate knowledge acquired by said veterans was gone too when Activision took over Blizzard, as since than it's been Activision's corporate knowledge that reigned supreme, not Blizzard's. I found it funny you had so many good things to say about Diablo 4(post 1.10 that is) and gave Activision-Blizzard a lot of credit for actually learning something. In reality all they did was copy Path of Exile's seasonal model of experimenting with new things and than keeping the experiments that resonated well with their player base. What you called 'Activision-Blizzard finally relearning what their fans loved about the Diablo franchise' is in reality Activision-Blizzard throwing random things at the wall and embracing the random things that turned out to be successful. I very much doubt there was much learning done in the process at all as most of Activision-Blizzard's failures happen on the analysis level. The level required to actually learn from experiences. I very much doubt Activision-Blizzard actually understands why certain ideas of theirs happened to be popular and others not, as they just can't seem to properly analyze it.
You missed an important detail, the only thing regular blizzard did for Diablo one and two were cinematics I believe, the rest was done by Blizzard North, a different entity with different employees.
@@ref206a I didn't miss it. Blizzard had multiple teams since forever. Do you think the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises were being worked on by the same team? No! They each had their own dedicated team that worked on their franchise, and than when WoW came it was a brand new team as WoW wasn't an RTS like WC3 so the team couldn't carry over as is. Some of it did, but a lot of it was new. Blizzard north was still Blizzard, it's not an entirely different entity. Activision-Blizzard on the other hand, now that's different as most of the old Blizzard devs simply left or were kicked out and the new hires are something else entirely...
But that's how the game started, leveling, combat, and loot was super slow during the campaign. But the community wanted more mobs, more combat, and more loot... it like they can't win. I think the same will happen to PoE2 very slow at the beginning and then the blaster community will complain that leveling, combat, and the loot progression is too slow and then they will be forced to juice those three things to be fast too :(
I have returned to play d4 in season 4 and its just a fun fast grind and loot fest from 1 to 100 and i agree to everything you said. I still find d2 (remaster) so so so much better, gloomy, dark and isolated…and to be honest…i still prefer it in my heart!!!
Any RPG where the entire world levels up when you do is stupid and appeals only to stupid players. They ruined the elder scrolls series with that nonsense too. No, thanks.
See that what’s pisses me off. Oblivion’s level scaling sucked and ruined the progression systems, you’d think the people making modern games like D4 have played enough games to know that’s not a winning formula. Apparently not…
@@sipjedekat8525 In that specific aspect it does suck. It's a massive design flaw that makes it a dumbed down crpg, no matter how much you may enjoy other aspects of the game. Same for Oblivion. The reason Morrowind is the best of the bunch is precisely the absence of the level scaling nonsense.
@@BH-vh3iu yeah, well, that's like, your opinion, man. But seriously, it's just what you prefer. I'm less familiar with Morrowind but I thoroughly enjoyed Oblivion and Skyrim. I thought it was neat that I could still visit areas I overlooked or skipped earlier on and still have a challenge. I imagine going back to an earlier dungeon where every enemy is insta killed by breathing on them is less fun, but that's just me. It's like Diablo 2 and running around in the first few lvls, really boring.
Classic Diablo 1 was indeed very lucky with the "mood/theme" it presented. The music AND the layout of the first levels in Diablo 1 completely sold the game to me, as i had gotten a demo of the game on pc magazine cover disc. Infact i must admit the initial "hype" .. aka the spot on moody music, the dark visuals, the classic enemies, meaty sound effects .. kinda made me a little dissapointed in the remaining levels at first for not being as "stunningly brilliant" as the beginning of the game. For the very same reason my first impressions of D2 was that it "looked gray" but it thankfully grew on me.
Still remember how I bought "double magic" armor in Diablo 1 to replace my unique quest armor. Both mechanics were great - both uniques, found in quests, and magic items that randomly can be even better.
Blizzard North disbanded because Vivendi purchased them, and they wanted to put all efforts into World of Warcraft. When the boys at Blizzard north went to management and said, if we cant make the game our way, were going to walk to which Vivendi said “ok bye”. Essentially it was because of a corporate merger Blizzard made so executives could cash out on wow. Happened before the future merger of Activision Blizzard. Just google blizzard north. Diablo 1 & 2 were my teenage years and soul. Diablo 3 was an abomination. Diablo 4 was produced in pieces over time with various director and management swaps just to turn out to be just like diablo 3 with updated graphics. Everyone wears the same gear with the same aspects and same gear and same paragons. Its an illusion of choice without actual viable choices for customization. If theres only one fire sorc build with one skill per branch on the skill tree, with a couple of boards for fire…guess what….everyone just copy and pastes a guide and pretends to be a good player. I hate that. There should be multiple viable fire sorc specs with multiple paragon board options for each class etc. Also, they actially made rare items WORSE than D2 instead of evolve them. PoE1 > Diablo 4. PoE2 will eventually beat them all and clown D4 jnto shame Edit: i disagree on the story being good. Diablo four’s story was trash as it’s mainly covered the story of Lilith who is basically an emo girl who never actually said or did anything until one of the very last cinematics yet built a world around her as if she had existed since the dawn of time. She had never even been mentioned in the first Diablo one and two games and only came in to the world after a third-party Warcraft writer wrote her into a fictional book in which case afterward she was put into the game after blizzard north was fractured in the form of Uber. Her character was extremely boring and unforgettable. Then they decided to give a teenage girl powers to the point where she was able to learn ancient her Roddrick within a week. Cain was replaced by a useless drunk who could barely manage assemblance of dignity. And worst of all, in the story they made Mephisto be a wolf more similar to a dog who somehow was trapped in resin in hell but could still be a dog who could teleport himself and other people. It really irks me when I hear people say the story was good in Diablo four because it was absolute garbage. OK looks like I have to continue. The next point would be a flaw that both Diablo three and Diablo four share. In Diablo two for a solid decade after it came out max level was only achievable by the most insane grind usually involving multiple people playing one character to hit max level. The ladder seasons back then were not short term tiny sprints, but lasted a very long time which length I don’t recall but much longer than three months. I wanna say it was every year or maybe half a year. But with that and the old battle.net interface, you could see your player and progress on the ladder giving yourself a sense of accomplishment moving up a space wherever you were on the ladder especially on hard-core mode. But then in Diablo three and four they allowed it so you could easily get max level within hours and that is a complete step back from what the game once was. Max level easy itemization makes what you see on the Diablo three and four leader boards which is essentially just in attack of the clones with all the players using the same exact items in both games. The next insult to Diablo four would be their shameful overworld. If you literally took the cold planes from Diablo too and only allowed it so you could walk alongside the dirt road that would be what Diablo four is. The Claim to have this big open world but it’s more of a spaghetti monster where you have very limited pathing in most places aside from the desert area. it’s a kin to a side stroller where you can only go to a destination using one or maximum two paths to get there. This completely ruins the overworld randomization and replayability that the first and second Diablo games had. If each play through of the first Diablo one and two games were always identical the games would not have been the colossal success as they were. It was critical that world generation and item randomization were both present in order to create an infinitely replaceable game. Moreover they got rid of the requirement to play through the game on harder difficulties all the way through like Diablo one and two had with their normal nightmare and hell notes. Instead they dumped that system down and made it worse. The next point was that they copied the Zoom Zoom place style of modern games. Diablo three and an effort to make everything flashy monsters became ridiculously inconsequentially easy for the majority of the game unless you were pushing the greater rift ladder. It’s not to say that monster should be extremely hard , but Diablo two had the balance just right where some of the monsters on the higher difficulties you just could not go near. Before they Nerf it if a major cast iron maiden on you in the chaos sanctuary and you attacked you would kill yourself. The primeval’s were difficult but not too difficult prior to the 1.10 patch with synergies of course where players could easily one shot bosses but that patch only came about after blizzard north was already falling apart because of the acquisition and was mostly designed by one guy per David Brevik. One thing that people have a hard time realizing especially younger kids that never played Diablo one or two is that Diablo two expanded upon virtually every positive aspect of Diablo one and evolved the game. For example you had more items to equip going from Diablo one to Diablo two. You had a bigger inventory space and it introduced a stash from Diablo one to two. Diablo one only had normal magic and unique items whereas Diablo two in its original release had normal magic rare unique socketed and ethereal items and smaller sets and eventually introduced runewords as Lord of destruction was released. They also introduced a tomb for town portal scrolls, charms in the expansion, be evolved gambling from the 1st to 2nd game, and expanded the world by a multiplicative factor. When you look at Diablo three and four as was mentioned in this video, all they attempted to really do was copy Diablo two rather than actually evolve the genre. J Wilson did decide to add a couple of more items slots, but they really went all in on set items eventually but only after they had reverted back to Diablo ones style of itemization with most people using blues. This could literally go on on virtually every aspect of the game. In the first game you had three characters with the normal archetypes. The second game offered five on release and eventually seven. Diablo three should have released nine at minimum on initial release I’m the same goes for pushing the boundaries with Diablo four but again they didn’t they only seem to copy the second game. These guys were so shameless they couldn’t even come up with their own unique intriguing soundtrack. People still to this day listen to the Diablo one and Diablo two soundtracks graded by Matt Uleman. The Diablo three and four soundtracks are simply put cliché and absolutely forgettable without any soul. It’s like if I asked AI to create me a generic RPG soundtrack. OK one last point before I give up this bottomless reply. I could go on for 100 pages literally talking about all of this in micro detail but I’m just voice to texting a reply after watching the video. One of the other things that bothers me and I believe adds to how forgettable these games are is the monster diversification. They absolutely still failed to understand what players from the first and second game meant when they said dark world. We didn’t only mean a dark world regarding color, it was a dark Gothic fantasy with dark Gothic themes. Most of the monsters that you fight in Diablo four for example are bugs and animals. I’m not kidding. You fight a devil wasp. A devil bore. A devil wolf. Bugs and animals are not interesting or inspirational. They do have skeletons and succubus and goat men but that’s just about it and they are a few and far in between. The whole concept of the Diablo universe is good versus evil. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you’re primarily fighting radical humans, animals of a wide variety, bugs and insects. I don’t know who thought that that was a good or cool idea but they need to go and play Dante’s Inferno or the first couple of games to understand the difference.
I dont like the story, Ive seen this redeemed villain trope a million times in Blizzard games. Karrigan, Sylvanas, Lilith. They dont have the balls to make characters evil anymore like Arthas and Brood Wars Karrigan
Yep, it feels like playing the same game in a different coat of paint. Kerrigan in Brood War was fucking evil and ruthless, so was Arthas and so was the Dark Wanderer. They all started out as heroes, but their respective stories lead them into some truly dark, evil shit. Same with Lillith, I don’t get how she gets labelled as a “tragic” villain. She brought nothing but misery and torment to her “children” and was ready to sacrifice Sanctuary to usurp the Prime Evils.
It's quite funny how the probably heavily overpriced DLC will be "Hey, now girl is possessed by the king of hell, oh noes, go kill." feeling as bland as the bad main game.
Isn't there a cutscene where lilith is watching someone get tortured and she doesn't give af? She is the reason said person is being tortured. Then later mouth breathers try to tell me that lilith was the good guy all along and we should have sided with her lol
Well, running d2 on /players 7-8 there's quite a lot of loot, where you need to spend extra time or use filters to ensure you won't miss anything. But still, there's a point to most things that drop: a good white base, a magical for craft or some unique affix, rares with combination of affixes that could be better than unique, some good sets, lots of unique items, ethereal, runes... And all with varying stats. Ultimate slot machine.
Duluth system in Diablo f****** trash they really need a mess Diablo 4 tempering needs work the items there's no Nostalgia behind any items they're still items in Diablo 2 I haven't found yet like it's crazy man that ionization is trash and that's what Rex the game
Eh. I’ve played all the seasons so far and the game is indeed getting better but it’s still rather mediocre…..and I’m someone who wants the game to be great. It’s almost to where it should have been at launch. The endgame is still pretty boring. NM dungeons = boring. Pit = pretty boring. The new endgame mechanic = looks pretty much the same. There still isn’t enough diversity in things to do in the game. It will probably get there eventually…….it just won’t be season 5. Maybe the expansion is where the game will pop off.
i've found that i can't stay interested in leveling a character in each season. There's little to nothing to hold my interest. In Diablo III there's a definite flow to bounties and rifts, in Diablo II and Path of Exile there's the actual story (3x in Diablo II). Diablo IV has a seasonal story but it's always very threadbare and a lot of it is level gated. And like this season, your first quest is basically a collection quest, get 15 whatevers to get to the next stage. there's little of substance there.
Blizzard should have just continued with D2R and made a DLC for it. They could add the missing act 4 quests, more new runewords, a unique version of every item, improve existing unique items to make them useful, maybe add more endgame content like another difficulty level with new unique items that only drop there. Since they need to make a profit from development, they could make it a paid DLC that you just buy once. This would bring back old players and new ones too.
More D2 content is an absolutely amazing idea on paper, but could you really trust the current Blizzard to not screw it up and add garbage content to an otherwise excellent game? That thought makes me really appreciate what we already have in the form of D2. It's good it ended in the way it did as it gave closure and you can always rely on going back to it without any additional crap tacked on.
@@MrAntifreezer That is a good point. The current Blizzard is very different from what it used to be. I'm sure all the people who worked on the original D1 and D2 are long gone from the company. The changes and additions they made to D2R have definitely been good though. If they could just make new content that is actually good then it would be worth paying for a DLC. Seems like we will have to rely on modding in single player to get content like that.
If they remade D2 (not just remastered) to have D4 level graphics, D3 skill runes, and new content (like, say, D3's High Heavens), you'd have a game that would be impossible to ever stop playing.
My favorite Diablo 2 memories are the secret treasure rooms. Those surprises and breaks in the game kept it from staling out. Other examples include the Wirt story line and Secret cow level, the Cairn Stones, the Cube and the limitless varieties on gear. I think the game tends to end quick though if I am to critique it overall. Replayability is there but once everything becomes familiar, it stops holding interest. The sequels need very fresh new ideas to break new ground and feel like new content. Diablo was made at a time when replayability and x hundred hours of fun was a metric. It delivered on that and I think games today forget that goal. Having unfamiliar territory and regular surprises is key.
As a Path of Exile player, I don't treat the game as a free to play title. I treat it as a game that has the entire campaign free for all, but the actual endgame functionally has a 40 dollar buy in. Still a much better value though
I think everyone misundetands what they want with loot, blizzard and hardcore players and casual players. You're right about the rarity being messed up, definitely feel flooded by legendaries and currently kind of happy that I feel like I can just build my own build and it's pretty viable. I do wish we had a significant reduction in costs and drops- needs to be less loot to make the loot feel valuable. Half of your arguments fall flat- rares being worthless is new- they were more likely to be the best gear in season 1, and everyone bitched about being overwhelmed. Now rares are pointless. Definitely still needs work, but I'm enjoying the current season and I think they're doing well to iterate and change it up each season.
When Diablo 2 was first announced my limited imagination was hoping it would be more Diablo 2 but a new village with 4 new dungeons. Maybe even keeping Tristram in the sequel so there would be TWO villages. I was actually a bit disappointed when I saw Diablo 2 for the first time. The graphics and art design didn't have the same gothic style of the first game. I actually didn't get Diablo 2 until a couple years after the expansion pack was released. When I saw that the Assassin was one of the new classes it renewed my interest. I actually didn't really start playing D2 until just a few years before Resurrected was released. I mean, I had played through the campaign a few times, but I never spent any time grinding for loot. So I didn't see the true genius of D2 'til almost 20 years after it was released. Blizzard has made a lot of missteps in recent years, but releasing D2 Resurrected while working on and releasing D4 was brilliant. I still haven't played D4, but it looks way too much like D3, just with a darker art style. I absolutely love D2R. It's nice that Blizzard gave players both D2R AND D4.
Tho your input is valid. The game is in a pretty good spot right now. So is it bad? It could be better. Is it good? It could use some improvement. But overall it's a fun game now
I played D3 and didn't really enjoy it, didnt understand why people liked this series so much. It just felt like a meh generic experience. I just started playing D4 about 2 weeks ago, and my first session lasted 18 hours. Im absolutely in love with this game. Im leaving this comment at the beginning of the Video ill edit at the end to see if you changed my mind. Edit: I believe having not played D4 on launch like i did with D3 allowed me to really enjoy D4. Yes the overworld is shallow but ive come to expect that from MMOish games. I did enjoy the video, keep it up!
A thoughtful and insightful take! I really enjoyed D4 when I first tried it in Season 3. I had been dabbling in Path of Exile (my first foray into ARPGs) and D4s triple A production value was a revelation. I was enchanted by the world and all the different regions - swamps and deserts and bogs. I had a great month with it. Thing is, once I had explored most of the world, the dungeons weren't THAT engaging. And though there have been improvements in QOL, now the leveling up feels a bit like I'm just rinse repeating. I absolutely agree that they could a few layers to give you purpose, such as weapon sets - great idea! I feel like ARPGs are a delicate animal. On the one hand you have rabid power fans wanting more more MORE ( and yes there's nothing like that feeling of sowing vast swathes of destruction through hoards) - on the other hand, when it gets too easy... suddenly you wake up out of the dream and realize 'wait why am I sitting here mashing buttons and staring into this screen?' On the one hand I LOVE the hand-crafted attention to detail throughout the map. On the other hand - yeah SOMETHING has got to keep you engaged and that detail doesn't come cheap. Anyway, as you do I hope they figure it out - because there's some amazing magic in there - be a shame if it goes to waste! Great video - I'll subscribe to encourage you to do more :-)
I hate Neyrelle as a character, she's annoying, immature and utterly stupid. Might even call her a Mary Sue for learning how to do necromancy from reading a single book. Lorath has the personality of a grumpy old drunk. The only one I kinda liked was Donan and they killed him in the lamest way possible while giving plot armor to Prava so she can create some stupid drama in the next expansion. Lore wise, D4 gets a D.
7:02 Oh hell yeah torchlight got mentioned! Those were the first PC games I ever played and they introduced me to diablo as a result. Incredible work on the video, cheers!
Earned yourself a sub! This is THE BEST video I've seen comparing modern Diablo games to the originals and you said just about everything in my head on the topic. I'd add that Diablo 3 is mostly made by WoW devs and that's where that disconnect of them not really understanding the game starts. If they did play it they're the types that finished Normal ONE TIME on ONE CHARACTER with their wife back in like 2003 and then never picked it up again. They don't get why a SHITLOAD of Diablo 2 players felt compelled and satisfied to sit and power level 40+ characters across multiple accounts on one CD key to figure out how to make every build get through Hell mode and farm the badass drops off the Hell mode versions of the act bosses. Another point is that Diablo 4 was ran through by multiple teams, they boasted about 9000 devs working on it, I wouldn't call that a flex though. You mentioned it being more of an MMO, it's worse than that. One team had one iteration of the game going in an MMO direction which was unfinished and before that the first team was pushing it into a Dark Souls direction which was also scrapped. Then they put a team that wasn't even Blizzard mainly (they absorbed Vicarious Visions after the D2 remaster) to finish it up. However, they just stitched all the partially finished elements together and threw some paint on it. You can tell, if you understand game design, that the game was made in stages and each stage wanted to go a different direction. The only other point I don't see a lot of people mention is that Chris Wilson and a lot of the GGG guys were giga Diablo 2 nerds and there's little hints in PoE especially the first few years of it that it's cut from the cloth of Diablo 2 more so than D3 and D4 are. Trading Currencies are mirrors of us on Diablo 2 trading the Stone of Jordan as a currency or medium and high runes as currencies but then the genius part is they put the Horadric Cube recipes for manipulating and rerolling items IN those trade currencies. One of my favorite things about PoE is the orb system and I'd be so disappointed if they ever removed it. My own final point here is MAYBE they can fix it up, give it the "redemption ark" polish treatment that so many other games are now popular for (No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk etc.) but why can't they just make sure the game is good first THEN release it? I see people in comments trying to light roast you saying "Hurr durr game iz gud nao!" and "Too late." because Season 4 is showing a tiny bit of improvement. Played it myself and the shit put me to sleep about 2 hours in but I plan on trying again here in a day or two. If season 5 is good GREAT but how many seasons until it compels me to play as much as D2 STILL DOES which proves it is NOT "just nostalgia bro".
Even with it's improvements you cannot convince me that a single person who worked on D4 is a hardcore ARPG fan. They have at every turn fundamental misunderstood what makes people play ARPGs. It's not that D4 was slow D2 was slow and it's the gold standard the difference was D2's grind was still efficent. You didn't need to take 65 evtra steps collect 19 different currency and slog through four different dungeons before you get to the monster or boss that drops the item you are targeting.
I've played these games since d1, remember the excitement around the d2 release when I was 16, and after its expansion things just took a sour turn. Everything you say and more are valuable points but money is all that talks now. Immersion is out the window because now i see kingbob and queensephiroth666 not only in settlements but everywhere else too (apart from dungeons) and the chat box cannot be hidden nor altered. Loot is just a big miss and they tried to replicate some of the nostalgia by bringing back a few cult items like harlequin crest but failed miserably with how you mention loot just literally rains everywhere and at some point you just grow tired of picking anything up, at all. I did some tormented bosses the other day and after seeing all those it items being "just" normal legendaries and my inventory full I simply reacted with "fuck it" and tpd out. Microtransactions are king and even though I don't even want to see the thing I keep being reminded when the game every so subtly slaps "season journey update" in my face every second as I level up "go on, have a look, you know you want to buy a horse" (or some shit), it takes them season after season to discuss and digest opinions and wishes from players and still not get it right, only to apologize and repeat. The game looks, and plays nice. The art style is always arguable but its cool. It is however, not Diablo. And that's it. It's just a copy cat, much like many other games these days, albeit with a large budget. I just find it really sad, on top of everything else, that companies these days have to be so dirty and focus so heavily on microtransactions. They have nothing (directly) to do with the game, in my honest opinion, and belong on the website. Not in the game, and especially not shoved in our faces. Let us make that choice. Honestly, that's a big thing in d4 overall, if you think about it. Choice. They don't leave us with a lot. Also loadouts for builds and paragon points. Come on devs. That's my "rant" over and far from all of my complaints included.
I think D4 S4 is pretty good. My biggest problem with it is how the tormented bosses are part of the seasonal journey. It's probably my fault, but my barb can kill Duriel in seconds, but when I go against the tormented version it's health barely budges after minutes of fighting. I really don't like such a big difficulty spike, maybe they should make a nightmare version or something in between the two. But for now the past 20 hours of playing I haven't got a single item that would count as an upgrade so I just don't see when I'll be able to beat the tormented bosses. And as such I'll probably won't be able to complete the seasonal journey.
Me too. The solution was totally master working the build which cost a fair amount of gold but eventually yeah, I got strong enough to go fight the Uber Bosses and beat them
You make a lot of good points, but as someone who went back and played the older games but did not play them during their peaks/while I was young, *a lot* of your points tie into wanting to recapture a specific feeling that D4 is missing...but that feeling *can't* be recaptured because it stems from wonder derived from a completely different era of gaming a lot of us miss. When most games were doing something unique and the market wasn't saturated. I agree with almost every point touching on mechanics, and *strongly* agree that making the game an MMO was a mistake, but I think I come from a different place than you on a couple points. These days games are solved in minutes because the cumulative knowledge of the community and base skill level has skyrocketed. This is where I agree with your points on the MMO experience making things worse. If you didn't have 30 people with perfect builds nuking everything in your path, it would feel a lot more rewarding to run into a boss and beat it up with your friends, knowing its a 1v4 at the max. It's why as I get older MMOs have just completely lost their joy. I understand much more than I did when I was younger and experiencing all these things for the first time, so when I look at different pieces of gear/abilities/etc, while I do still that rush of "oh wow thats cool", my subconcious is running down a list of checks and comparisons and doing the math on what the tradeoff is. This honestly kills the experience of a lot of games nowadays, and its something that many players don't realize they're doing. I'm not articulating my point all that well, but I don't think all these problems are faults with Diablo 4. I think gamers and the community have fundamentally changed for the worse, and it's really difficult to navigate the nostalgia we all have. We wish for the times when there was still wonder and we play games chasing that dragon but its just so rarely there. We go back to old experiences and theres that intangible "vibe" as we call it, but that vibe is simply the nostalgic joy making the game feel more than the sum of its parts. There isn't really a solution to this, but I've found that actively making myself make mistakes or choose less optimal things has made many games these days far more enjoyable. But tying back to the MMO conversation...this isn't really a thing any more in public games. I mean shit...look at the problems in WoW. Think about the knowledge level of your average player circa 2010. Now compare it to your average player now. Systems that were functionally esoteric then because so few understood them have become something most 13 year olds just know how to navigate intuitively because they're all raised on parts of those the systems in a million other games. What was once a climb because we didn't know how to tackle the mountain is now trivial because we all see the hidden elevator that we didn't realize existed before.
This is why roguelites have been so successful, when the set to calculate is so much smaller (Which of these 3 options do I want?) and you can't know what you'll need to choose from next, that 'exploration' feel doesn't go away, at least for a lot longer if the design is reasonably executed. (Balance plays a role here, when there is a single best option by miles, that's gonna undermine it for most people.)
I turned my back on D4 *because* they took the MMO route, and they couldn't resist including a battle pass, the worst trend in gaming nobody wants. It's amazing how publishers keep pushing for monetizing engagement, and the games that actually attract the most players and keep them engaged are the ones that focus on a thrilling experience.
Things are definitely looking better. But bricking items absolutely sucks. I bricked an item that would have been an upgrade while you talked about it. Lol rage
Kinda on the same boat, i think the temper should work more like enchant(Getting more expensive each time you rolled, and giving a yes or no for the change, but only 1 stat), mostly because when youre min maxing, you might loose billions of gold worth when this happens
@@renarduwu Not really. because with maiden farms and how easy it is to farm bases if you play enough you constantly have fresh bases and GA bases to try again. it's really not that bad, most BIS tempers are 1/3 1/4 chance, people who say they never hit it are lying or don't temper enough. The only hardcore RNG part is if you want 3 crits on the same masterwork, but that's FUSSY min-maxing and not needed to clear any of the end game.
You hit every point of complaint I have with D4. Sandbox mmo with arpg combat system - Content spread out just to be spread out, no reason to really even play because it's all the same exact stuff - Except I have to do it to earn rewards I would normally earn through playing, but now I have to pay.. ;)
Can't really blame the original devs for leaving since the buyout of blizzard cause theyre no longer making games they love. It's all about increasing metrics for shareholders, not making a good game :(
It's the total overload and oversaturation of flashy firework efx and the fast pace that turn me off the most. It's the complete opposite to Diablo 1 where you progressed slowly through dark and creepy dungeons.
I think at this point the ARPG with the most relaxed pacing that is in that classic style (IE not trying to be top down Dark Souls in terms of combat.) is 40k Inquisitor Martyr and even that game sped up a lot since launch days.
Long rant Season 4 is fire, scaling is a non issue and I dont know why people keep bringing it up, nightmare dungeons are pretty much the level u want you can go hard as you want, lvl 70 but your build is good enough to fight lvl 120 enemies go ahead. U wanna be efficient in getting xp and do em just 10 lvls above u go ahead, u wanna chill and do some lower ones with ur friends thats okay. True endgame the pit its also like this, except that the starting point is 100. The open world is a non issue as well, u run around it a bit doing helltides which are fun and thats it. The superbosses do not scale to your level, they are lvl 200, Lillith its also 100 and harder than the others. I personally hate gear sets and I hope they never return, it actually makes selecting your gear pretty mindless, what armor will I use? Just 5 pieces of this set, instead of choosing a special aspect for each piece of armor and choosing every single affix of every piece of gear to make sure that you hit hard with your preferred skill, while also maxing out your res, armor and getting as much hp as you can, greater affixes, tempering and masterworks also make sure that no one has the same exact items on it is pretty much impossible, and when u get your own unique to your character god roll it feels so good. Making a linear progression for every single character u make would also be so boring and restricting, I have 3 lvl 100s and if I had to do some linear progression thing everytime I wanna make a new character I would drop the game right there. In regards to world tier 1 and 2 being meh tho I agree, however you can blitz em real quick, literally just put some aspects and a few tempers on your crappy gear and by lvl 30 (or even lower) its easy to get through that dungeon, or my favorite approach, just get a buddy to clear both capstone dungeons, and then do 2 nightmare dungeons, this gets you to tier 4 completely naked and lvl 55 and then you can just play on your own and get gear, pretty much starting you at endgame. The patch that nerfed everything for season 1 is irrelevant by now, and most patches that drop are excellent buffing stuff that is underused, we even got free pets a few days ago alongside with pretty much everything being buffed. There are a loooooot of viable builds too. Overall diablo 4 right now is very good and it is on a great starting point for more additions, I do recommend giving it a try. Until poe 2 drops ofc😂.
Agreed sets in an ARPG are the dumbest thing possible how Blizzard does it. I don't want the devs to tell me what build I should be playing, I don't want to play the lame ass generic build they think is interesting. As for the state of the game, you have to understand the main issue is why would you play this over the games? I'm not saying D4 is bad by itself, it's bad when you compare it to other games in the genre. The fact that the game feels good to play doesn't fix the issue that all you do on any Rogue build is spam Twisting Blades because there are no other viable options for T80+ dungeons. There's far too much legendary bottle-necking where over half of your affixes are locked because there are no better options or DIFFERENT options. You always need the single resource dump ability to have its legendary affix and there is only one available, you always need the DR 20% affix, so on and so forth. In PoE if you want defensives you have so many convoluted things, like Eldritch Battery, Chaos Inoculation, damage conversions, Guards and so damn many other means besides unga bunga iten make me take little daymaje. It's basic and simple; it's clearly made for casual players, which is why so many people hate on D4. Because as usual Blizzard started something and other developers improved on it a million times while they completely forgot what they made in the first place. If you ask me, the team that worked on D4 did not even throw one glance at D3 since they repeated the same damn mistakes D3 did and took TEN YEARS to improve upon.
There seems to be a subset of the Diablo community that has either never played D4 or barely touched Season 1 before quitting and now loves to rag on the game using the same tired old repetitive statements. This video is exactly that. It’s like OP decided to review the game at launch but released the video a year late after things improved drastically. Many of his arguments simply don’t hold any water anymore.
Why would i give more money to a game that fumbled so hard out the gate? The fact they were dumb enough to nerf anything in a pve game was enough reason for me to leave & never trust them again. The game itself is just boring too
23:00 I think you communicated it pretty well because that's how I feel too. Diablo I & II nailed the whole medieval gothic style. Diablo I in particular is my favorite because of it; the atmosphere is perfect. The game feels like a survival horror, with the isolation and the dungeon crawling as you progressively go down through the levels. And I am 100% sure that Brevik and his team made the whole story inspired by campy horror films; Diablo himself is this looming presence echoing through the cathedral until you finally meet him in Hell. None of the other games (not even Diablo II) captured that essence. Heck, Diablo I literally had an item stat called "Light Radius" which affected the vision of your character in the dark; it was brilliant.
D4 is a garbage game, no challenge you feel like a god 1-2 shotting everything form Level one, loot falling from the sky so it doesn’t mean anything. So many more issues but hate what they’ve done to my boy.
Exactly. This season is just about rushing players to 100 but Blizzard doesn’t have anything for you to do at 100. Maybe be season 7 they’ll figure it out
The first one had a better vibe even than D2, but D2 was close. The music, the claustrophobic feel, the mystery, the difficulty, and the horror. I only ever feared the Butcher in the first game. I like all four games, but the first two were S tier.
The problem about being a "different" game compared to D2 is...D2 is the game that made the genre. People playing isometric ARPGs aren't looking for a non-D2 game. They want D2 but better. Path of Exile 2 is iterating on this by making combat more involved/dynamic, though it might not work out for them, since players might not want to press 5 buttons per pack. But as Mathil said, Diablo 2, despite its entire lack of endgame, *STILL* has the best loot system b/c there's ALWAYS something worth farming that's neat. Whether it's top tier set items (E.G. Tal Rasha's set), whether it's high runes, ethereal bases, top tier uniques, etc., there's always something neat in terms of gearing. Path of Exile itself has...lost sight of this. Most gear is garbage. Uniques are too hard to reroll. Div cards aren't as awesome as high runes. D2's assortment of loot is still something that, 25 years later, has yet to be outdone.
The problem with the MMO dynamic is that skills will generally stay the same with equipment making minor adjustments. A more satisfying method would be equipment modifying skills in big ways. The older Diablo games had equipment that were levels lower that made such huge adjustments that it was painful to let them go.
Im actually super addicted rn. I dropped every game 1 month ago and i still havent gone back. However, theres so many items/affixes that straight up dont work and theres a major lack in patches. That really sucks and honesrly makes the whole experience feel worse. I feel bad for ppl who are more casual than me
A lot of these complaints are from you skipping the campaign, I play through it on a new charachter and it gives me a super solid feeling of progression. It stops me from staying in helltides from 1-50 getting rid of that feeling of doing the same thing overamd over. Plus theres all these cool bosses and you get to explore sanctuary at an amazing pace. and it sets you up with herbs and crafting mats for endgame. The story is great, the cinematics are insane. Skipping half the game on every toon is never gunna feel great man....... I recommend making a new toon in season 4 on youre favourite class, make a homebrewed build and go through the campaign, youll be lvl 50 at the end and ready for wt3 plus, especially if you're playing solo. Diablo 4 isnt a bad game, it's just not diablo 2. And thats fine, its been 20 years. This video feels like youre trying to Convince us its bad cause d2 was "different." It was made by a completly different team of devs, a literal entire generation later using the same IP. Just stop comparing it to diablo 2 and start enjoying what it is, a great casual ARPG, with solid content and a great story.
Great video and I think you make fair and constructive assessments and criticisms. I think that this video helps with a lot, not the least of which it helps with bridging the divide between people who like the different games. To me Diablo II isn't just the gold standard, it's the game to play. No other game has captured my as much is that game has. A lot of it is of course nostalgia of having the game around while growing up. It's about as much a part of me as my siblings and the pets that I grew up with. But trying out other games I always felt there was something fundamental lacking in those games that Diablo II did right. Diablo II didn't just get the loot system right, or the maps, or the atmosphere, or the music, or the pvp, or the multiplayer, or the solo games. It did all of that right, with the obvious gripe of not being able to share loot between characters easily, which Plugy fixed and the remake didn't. All the remake did was fix more bugs, rebalance, and show that that all could've been done with the original, which is still the better game despite lacking the bug fixes and balance updates. It's almost impossible to beat that. For me I think there will never be a better game. For one, I can see the appeal to the loot and craft system in PoE, I like it and I would love to delve into it, but it's not for me - it's too much. It requires me to get a PhD in the game and I'm old and I don't have all day, every day to play anymore. Heck, it's summer, I have little to no time to play any game and I just tap my phone screen to play an idle game while having breakfast, taking care of my cat, tending to the garden. I can't even play Diablo II during that, and when autumn hits that will change and I'll get back to playing D2, and mybe try PoE again. They days of playing games all day are behind me and I think fondly of it. I was there when PK'ing people with unexpectedly strong low lvl (lvl 9 to 17) characters was really fun. Duelling was fun and not (always) overly theory crafted. A lot of people like me stayed in classic when LoD came out because online, the charms and runewords and bot farming basically ruined the game and pvp for casual and fair players. Nowadays, thanks to people like MrLlama I and others have rediscovered the beauties of LoD in single player. I don't have the time or the desire to play online with others. I'm fine with the world moving on. I just wish that if you buy or download a game, you could always play it offline by yourself as well. People growing up with games now will see many of their favorite games and childhood memories be deleted by big corporations. That is _not_ okay. And it's easy for me to just not play such games, because for me it's unlikely I'll like it more than Diablo II and the handful of other games I play over and over again. But I also think that people should really think about it and just boycott such games. Not to force game developers and large corporations to make offline single player an option, but for you to have and own the games you play. So that you're not paying a subscription for a game you're not playing when you're visiting family or traveling the world. But to have your game wait for you when you come back and play it if and when you feel like it.
Sorry but I have to disagree on your opinions about D4's vibe. With all the fails D4 has, which I do agree with you, the one thing I believe they nailed down was the moody-ness of it all. I assume you haven't read the books on Diablo lore? If you have , you'll know that the world of Diablo is one of utter pessimism and despair, it's a world where humans really don't get a break, they are assailed from all angles either by the forces of hell, heaven or even the entropic human forces as well. That is part of the reason why D3 was so divisive... it's cartoony WoW-inspired art design and PG13 story was at odds with what fans were used to expect from Diablo by then. D4 definetely pegged down that vibe with its art direction, story and soundtrack... kudos to the artists, writers and musicians for their work!
What you say are the reasons why I wanted to try diablo for first time and those were the ones that kept me in diablo 4. The environment is really special and suggestive. Amazing art.
I would absolutely agree with you if it wasn't for the characters being so over-the-top powerful, which simply destroys the moody-ness immediately. I can't take the enemy seriously if I can very early on slam my hammer and make a wave of rocks delete everything in front of me. D2 didn't have this problem. The bigger skills that have the potential to wipe hordes of enemies come much later in the game with their actual potential being reached when they get maxed out. Example: Whirlwind vs Berserk strike. One does AOE dmg, but much much less per hit, while the other is single target with amazing damage. Only much later can you easily destroy mobs with whirlwind. Visually, it can look rather good with it's sound design and music added to the mix, but to say it's as horror as D1 (especially) and D2, not by a longshot. The game simply gives off no feeling of danger or despair. Nor do you ever dread entering an area as you did in D1.
Now when you do mention it, the cartoony style did feel out of place given what could arguably be said extremely dire circumstances, nothing felt too bloody serious, even though peeps got eliminated everywhere, hell was let loose, heaven invaded, death god going on a rampage, it was as if everything had been filtered down to, just another monday.
@@ImmortalComposer Funny thing, you actually can have world shattering levels of power (even early on) and still have that moodiness. You are a one man army... but you can only be in one place at a time, and the world has a lot of armies that need smiting. Exalted and Godbound (Both Table top RPG games) handle this well in their own ways. I'd argue the root of your 'I am too powerful' issue is actually a factor of the difficulty of fights never scaling meaningfully. You can't run into something that'll tear your face off in a level scaled everywhere game, unless everything does.
I completely get where you're coming from with Diablo 4. It's trying to do so much, but it feels like it's missing that simple, gripping magic that made Diablo so iconic. For me, Diablo 1 had the best story-straightforward but powerful. A cursed village, the descent into darkness, and ultimately facing Diablo himself. No convoluted lore, just pure atmosphere and tension building as you go deeper. It’s a type of storytelling that I think modern Diablo titles are really lacking. Anyone else miss that focused, haunting vibe of the original?
I've never felt so lonely in a multiplayer game as in D4 (except No Man's Sky perhaps). People rarely speak to each other, or even reply when spoken to. A bit depressing, frankly.
_"Blizzard simply doesn't understand Diablo, and I want to explain why..."_
Because all their talent left 🤷🏾♂️
what do you mean "and i wont explain why..."
he said "that the team the company that made 3 and 4 arent the people that made 1 and 2.
@@redeclipseprojects9746
Re-read my comment.
David brevik was the main reason both the first 2 games were so good, and his team of course but he pretty much single handedly programed both diablo and diablo 2
Blizzard North Team is no more. When you destroy the dream team, you have nothing.
@@Kimani_White it makes a lot of sense now for someone like me who wasn’t keeping track of the dev teams.
Damn shame because I love Diablo II.
diablo 1 was in fact a horror game. A game about isolation, the devil, hell, and horrific monsters. They were making a Gothic Horror ARPG.
that’s what made it the best Diablo game
This is what made Diablo so special. The feeling of dread as you slowly walk through the catacombs knowing you are easily killed, the grueling atmosphere, the first time you encountered the butcher, it made you truly uneasy.
Diablo II aside from having a pretty cool story had none of that and when it comes to this is a bad sequel.
I still enjoy Diablo while I abandoned the Necromancer I started up in the D2 remake.
They had no idea what they were doing. By his own account Brevik created the genre by accident. Diablo 2 perfected everything about D1.
Second one pretty much also!
@@frantsel5711 It tried to but none of the grueling dark atmosphere of the first entry was really left.
Diablo 4 wasn't designed for players. Diablo 4 was designed for the shareholders.
Most of these games are nowadays.
I think it was mostly designed by A.I. -- the finished game was then stripped down to the bare minimum they launched with, and they've been patching it for retention by turning features they already have added to the game back on.
I think the expansion has been designed with the whole game from the beginning. They selling it to you for another 100$ for 10% of the content the first 100$ got you. This is how you ruin franchises.
Heh yeah.
Thats true, but probably kind of necessary, regarding the game cost 300 mil to develop. Thats why AAA movies and games now have no own identity anymore, except milking the heck out of their frenchise leaving just an empty shell
No shot the game cost 300 million, I think you'd be lucky if you reached 50 million for a game like Diablo.
world scaling killed any sense of progression.
Lack of procedural generation also killed replayability.
Maybe stop using shitter non aspected gear or using a shit build
You can clear capstones at extremely low levels with the right gear and affixes if you have the know how
Even if monsters didn't scale you could trivialize it easily, just like you can in any other arpg
Freaking smooth brains shitting on something because their favorite edgy content creator is doing it
@@candlestyx8517the generic dungeons are a pain as well, even procedural generated dungeons have more life than any diablo4 dungeon will ever have
It's what ruined the Bethesda RPG's after Morrowind too
@@DoritoWorldOrder isnt morrowind bigger than oblivion and skyrim?
Its always the same. A group of people with alot of passion create Something, it works and brings Money. Then the greedy ones come, kill the passion and try to maximize Profits. Not just gaming industry. Its everywhere, for example automotive and whiskey.
Its just sad
Well you see. Passion doesn’t pay bills for thousands of people. You can be as passionate as you want while being evicted
I know nothing about whiskey, so mind giving an example of that?
It really seems like Blizzard doesn't understand what made their games good in general, not just Diablo.
But things can't last forever, specially with the online games that are based on stories not just made to play competitively, that's why dota, cs and games like that will always last longer. Becouse you can't always make stories and new expansions and think it will not bored people. It's like every TV show that went too far with seasons amd destroyed the story becouse it has not point and end.
I mean... the old hounds are gone. They left the company. Blizzard North was killed in 2005 and during the development of D3 at Blizzard North key employees walked away. D3 then was scrapped and transferred to Blizzard after the shutdown. I'm not saying that fresh blood is unable to pick up the torch old veterans, but some people can't get the "feel" of a series or a setting.
They're too busy sexually harassing their employees
@@amberbaum4079 its as simple as that
A lot of it had to do with just how much focus they put on WoW and how little they put into anything else. And most of the post-WoW stuff has been pretty eSports and microtransaction focused.
I'm honestly convinced that Daiblo 4 didn't start development until the week of the Diablo Immortal announcement (Do you guys not have phones?!) and the massive stink that whole event caused.
If they actually had D4 in development at the time, they would have at least shown something to get hype up. A trailer, a logo, anything. But no, they had literally nothing. And in that short time, they rushed whatever they could out. The corners cut, the developer responses, everything just pointed to a short and rushed 2 year dev cycle that used Diablo 3 as a base to streamline their processes.
feels that way, yeah
@@Wicked-Vortex it was a rush game, they did not expected the backlash with mobile game. And it seem it worked with new d3 recycled game, same mechanic/game but darker, and was a real succesfull game from the POV of cash. Expansion incoming, alots of people are gona buy, again heroic moment on game industry how they sold milions and milions of copy, even if the game sux beyond imagination. At the end, what the point to invest hundert of millions on depth of the mechanic of the game when you can have same effect with 1/10 of the money just by hyping the game and give a good cinematic/trailer. After that, dosent matter so lang is money up front.
@@irinalucaci588 it's really sad, but thats the truth.
I feel like buying the expansion myself, but im still too unsure if it's just a waste of money.
I really dont play D4 that much. I quit the game at level 100 pre seasons, when i realized there wasnt anything to do and the game felt super stale.
And it still has that feeling of an empty game, but with some stuff to do. I dont know how to explain it, but it lacks spirit.
And i dont think the expansion is going to change that.
Might never be anything that can change it.
same
This really seems true
Diablo died with Blizzard North, Blizzard Irvine destroyed it, thanks to Jay Wilson, and they never recovered.
Never let them forget that when Activision came in and destroyed Blizzard North Blizzard died as a company.
Oh gosh, the memories... fuckin' Jay Wilson. That name will always be cursed by Diablo fans.
@@bobbymoore8030 blizzard was already on their deathbed breathing their last breaths when acti came in but yeah
@@hazardeur diablo 3 was in development by North before acti bought them. They didn't want a MMO diablo because it would compete with Wow so they dissolved north to start development on what was to become real money auction house. I know because I lived through it. They were making money before acti, they got greedy and ruined their company.
@@bobbymoore8030 yeah i know all that. the "On their deathbed" comment was meant in terms of creating good games, being seen as a great gaming company, not meant financially. which is a fact that i hate even more because people buying this shit are not only still making sure this company survives, they even make it thrive
The biggest mistake Blizzard ever made in relation to D3, was firing the entire team that created D1 & D2. They then brought in people that worked on WoW, and it was clear they didn't understand, nor respect the lore of the game. We now have devs that don't even play the game... sad.
Yeah they made such a mistake it's only the fourth most sold PC game.😅
@williamwagner79 of course the more it sells the better it is. By that logic diablo 4 must be such a vastly superior game to all diablo games that came before. Same goes for movies, books etc. The richer the CEOS, the better the products.
@@DefinitelANonymous Yeah I never said that D3 was vastly superior. I was just saying they made a hell a lot of money off of a game that his guy is claiming was a mistake.
@@williamwagner79mcdonalds sells ton of their shit. doesn't mean it's good...
@@minimaluser2132 Obviously it must be taste good to quite a few people,. That's always one of the dumbest arguments., I'm sure the billions of people that have been served by McDonald's, all think it just tastes horrible but buy it anyways.
At its core, the issue with D4 is no different than any other modern MMO game. They they half-ass a community oriented design because they just want to sell you cosmetics to show off, that's it. They have no idea what makes a game "massively multiplayer".
Go play a season of Project Diablo 2. For real. Then laugh when you realize they managed to accomplish what a massive corporation couldn't with over a hundred million dollars with a small mostly unpaid community. The fundamental design of that game is literally the design bible of a successful D4 in some alternate reality, where all Blizzard did was shoe-horn a cosmetic store into it.
@@zachb8012 I'm sure all three players of it are enjoying the 20 year old graphics! 😀 (oh and I played D2 to death, and D2R more recently) but things move on.
@@dwinterx At the launch of the last season there was about 5000 concurrent players. The trade site was cookin'. Right now is the tail-end of a roughly 5 month seasonal cycle, so players are down. Don't knock D2's graphics though. The fact that 20 years later there's still a consistent player base is testament to the style. There are definitely things dated about D2, sure, but it ain't the graphics.
@@dwinterx PD2 is actually quite active, thousands of players
Lamest community
I do not understand how the continue to get it wrong. Diablo 2 had a couple main loot related things that set it apart : 1. Rares are technically the absolute best items in the game, but GOOD EFFING LUCK getting a roll that is one of those greatest in the game. 2. There were multiple currencies that ended up being required for multiple uses, as well as the ability to trade those currencies to other players, IE, You can just collect 40 perfect gems to trade for a mid rune so someone doing endgame crafting can craft or use those gems to craft yourself, you can trade mid runes for mid gear or save up runes to combine to higher runes, or use those runes to make runeword gear pieces. Not to mention socketed "base" items also holding tradable value for runes and other legendaries.
Let’s not forget that adding Diablo clone into the game was an absolute master stroke in market correction. There were sooo many duped stones of jordan floating around that they just decided to make it super economical to just sell them to merchants instead of flood the market with them and boom, trade price went from like 40 chipped gems to a high rune overnight and you were more likely to not get scammed by a poofing item!
Loved learning basic economics at the age of like 12 from this game.
Tempering and enchanting is like taking your car to a mechanic for an oil change and they not only dont change your oil, but also steal your catalytic converter and one of your tires. Then they tell you that you can pay them again if you want to give it another shot.
Bro stop going with your car to Romanian mechanics.
That's a perfect analogy.
😂😂😂😂
And after repeating that five times then telling you "oops, we broke it, you better go get another one"
No, it is like a plastic surgery. Those often fail most of the time :)
Heres WHY. They gave the series to a guy who HATED the original first and second game. Long story short, THAT is it. If you give a game series to some one who HATED the core of the series, you shouldnt be shocked to find it fails and they dont understand what made the games good.
Why is that a theme of modern media. Everything is given over to people who either loathe, or care nothing for the source material. It's like they are trying to destroy everything good.
They ARE trying to destroy it all. They want to rebuild it in their image. Though in this particular instance, I think it was just trend chasing and corporate bs that finished this game series off. This was largely before the twactivists took power in blizzard.
This is what happened to Star Wars !
@@ZaneKornaylus And Star Trek, LotR, and many others.
@@Sorain1 aaah is that why I hear nothing good about the Rings of Power?
I think what went wrong is quite obvious they simply got greedy. Trying to appeal to a wider audience is a terrible idea. When a game is made for everyone it ends up being for no one. If you don’t know who your original fan base is and don’t respect them you start to steer the game in an entirely different direction leaving people feeling abandoned just so you can try to pick up a new fan base. I like D2 and D3 but they are so different upsetting people was almost inevitable. This led D4 to have no chance of pleasing people the community is badly divided on what they want and the devs have absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Most people love it , only old Diablo fans don't like it and that's kinda minority right now.
When companies suffer money-losing fiascos, it usually came about because they tried to force a money-making fiesta.
@@goblin-night i agree and I like the way you worded that.
It boils down to the fact that they gave the series to a guy who HATED everything about the older games and wanted to fundamentally change it. Thats why.
@@hanilfsat8820
Oh gee, is that why the newest PTR was a staggering failure by all accounts lmao
What planet are you guys on, honestly
Seasons and MMO does not mix. They really don't understand their own games.
For sure. D4 is clearly not an MMO
D4 is not an MMO
I was never fond of when level scaling came about. You really don't feel like you're getting stronger, unless you're constantly figuring out a game breaking build every 10 minutes before legendaries. After legendaries, I've been slaughtering everything, especially since I took higher risk, higher reward, and jumped into hell tides right away. Once I got a few good drops, and maxed my resistances, I was smearing everything in side, especially nightmare dungeons a bit above my level
it’s not about whether u can kill monster at higher level. it’s about the speed of killing. u shud aim to complete pit 101 within 1 minute if u are a casual player with ur build set up. or your ultimate goal is to complete pit 200 within 5 minutes or less if ure a full time time diqblo player.
@@user-df2uu3qp3y lol. bro, thats not what real diablo players do. Thats a speed runner adhd mindset. Real diablo players are mf hunters. Those dont exist because diablo 4 isnt a diablo game other than name and lore and even then the lore in d3 and d4 is fucking terrible
@@jimmythecrow the entire game of diablo is get loot and kill monster faster. dnt act like u know wat diablo is u casual noob.
Some of the comments on here are so ungodly dumb lol
In fact you aren't. After a while you practically are completely overpowered by anything and unless you play as one of the builds that doesn't suck taking literally any reason to actually do so away.
I refuse to touch an arpg with level scaling
That's the key reason I couldn't get through D4
Got my first Char to level 100 today. There is a very large map in this game but the only 3 places Im familiar with are the tree for whisper rewards, cerrigar for pit and Zebinzat or whatever for mothers rewards thing in the current season 5.
The ONLY time I leave these 3 areas is for helltide. It really is a shame. In other games where the levels are zoned, its SOOO nostalgic starting a new character in the beginner zone. Now I can’t remember half the map. Have to look up where everything is at because I never had to spend a large amount of time in any given zone.
go get grim dawn , both its expansions then get the mod DAWN OF MASTERIES
OH YAAA 1700 hrs later still going
and new expansion comes later next year
I didn’t inform my self enough and I bought the game and I can tell you you are 200% right. The game feels the same at lvl1 and at lvl 34 where I am currently. I will not be playing it anymore. Wasted money :(
I am an OG Diablo fan, level scaling killed this game for me. Also, can we talk about monster model scaling, nobody mentions this but I think it's a bid deal. The demons and creatures you fight in the beginning should be weak looking. In diablo 1 you're fighting slow moving brain dead zombies and skinny little 3 foot demons. In the last act your fighting muscled up, 8 ft tall, winged demons from the pit of hell. They really struck fear in you from the sight alone. In D4, your fighting the gnarliest looking baddies pretty early, and there is no sense of scariness from the big baddies anymore. So bland, very sad.
Biggest problem is the chaotic visuals from all the laser disco effects and overlays, especially the ever-present bee swarm of proc notifications. Like, why do we need to see numeric values of the damage being dealt with every hit, and 20 copies of the word "Vulnerable" plastered all over the screen? If you want to show that an enemy is vulnerable to a certain kind of attack, why not have something subtle like a different reaction animation for being hit where they recoil a bit harder from the hit? Diablo 2 let us know everything we needed to know to understand exactly what was happening in the game space without any of this crap... just simple, subtle visual queues like tinting a character blue to show they're frozen or green to show they're poisoned, and spells/abilities whose VFX blended seamlessly right into the rest of the game without obscuring any of the action. What's the point of making such beautiful, dark, brooding, realistic graphics just to wallpaper over it with a bukkake of unnecessary numbers, words, and gaudy glowing multicolored neon firework shows?
Gaming companies really need to get better at recognizing their limits and stop trying to follow this exhausting and unsustainable trend of exponential growth.
By trying to reach wider and wider audiences, every franchise that gamers beloved is slowly being destroyed piece by piece.
Hear hear
I am sick of exponential growth same as any other consumer. Sadly its something that seems to have become an out of control issue. if you don't aim for exponential growth u fail and will be in ruins. So I would think that companies are just doing it because somewhere it started and it can't be stopped. Also shareholders are greedy fucks that are out of touch with the world and dont know what people like, yet they wanna make decisions they have no knowledge off.
Thing is ,I don't care what improves because they've shown their hand asking $100 a year. For me that's impossible to justify while a better free alternative still exists.
It wasn’t just the honeymoon period, blizzard actually nerfed xp and power pre season 1. They realized they had not developed content to engage people so their answer was to slow down people’s progression and make them weaker. They also didn’t try to develop Diablo 2, a game designed around being fun, they designed a game around making your waste time, look at the renown system. They wanted it reset every season and every character, nothing about that design decision was made with player fun in mind, it was time sink and engagement metrics.
bingo. which is why I sold it after campaign. these are not games, they are hamster wheels powering up the stock price. never again buying an actiblizz product.
Gear sets arent gone they just sell them in the cosmetic shop with no passives LOL
That's..
That's not set items with bonuses..
Those are just crappy skins with old sets I used to know's names....
you clearly dont know what sets are lol delete your comment its embarrassing
@@yucel8769 do you know what a joke is?
@@Aftokraftor in your case, a poor attempt to mask your comment. delete it
@@Aftokraftor He clearly does not 😅
If i may add my complaints as i don't hear these mentioned.
(1) Sidequests. there are over 200 of them. I propose a nightmare side quest system and a sidequest codex.
(2) Enemies. They have little sense of purpose or permanence. Mostly standing still in a mob cluster until you encounter them. Too often appearing out of nowhere.
Can't kite them enough with their "chain" system, they run back to their post. An enemy should be able to follow you across the entire map. World bosses and bosses in general should roam the world instead of sitting in one arena. I want to see convoys of demons marching long distance towards a target.
Too many enemies, too short lived. Clearing mobs feels more like dashing through quantum geometry than facing demons.
I don't like all the enemies appearing and disappearing all the time. I want to feel like the demons are permanent entities.
A beastiary would be good too. Another codex to complete.
They have good examples ingame already: The Butcher. Penitent Knights having a campfire. Walking in on demons killing civilians.
More of this.
I agree
"200 quests" with half of them being copy/pastes
THe sidequest could have been good if they didn't just make them fetch quests. I do admit though they are well acted. I just t think it would have been better having more scripts like the campaign over what we got, tough. bunch of fetch quests in a really badly made overworld.
@@Kevfactor for someone who doesn’t want to just run nightmare dungeons all the time I really need the overworld to be better. I suggest roaming bosses as well as the butcher.
That's a good criticism that actually would make the game more engaging.
As soon as Blizzard got on stage at said that it was online only and an MMO style game, i didnt buy it. Right then and there i figured id remain with Diablo 1, 2, and when im extremely bored Diablo 3. I was never going to waste money on something that was a bastardization of a franchise i enjoyed. The same with Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online.
I dont consider those proper entries into those franchises either. i see them as overactive retcons, and ive grown to hate retcons that make no sense. I will treat Diablo 4 as non canon as well.
ESO is the best elder scrolls entry. And I say that as a dedicated fan.
If you like single player only, ES5 and D1 still exist.
ESO imo is better than all the ES games
Shame, because D4 isn't really that bad. The hate is mostly unjustified by people who made up their minds long before it ever came out, like you.
i already treat d3 as non canon. the story was ass and killing of deckard by some butterfly? who ever thought that was a good idea? who did greenlight this? i can't even imagine those meetings. sometimes i dream of being in those meetings and tearing up the whole room leaving no one alive but maybe that goes a bit too far
"Keeping the experience fresh"
Ah yes nothing exudes freshness like your 16 millionth pindle run 😅
you can have an item that no other player have in pidble runs. d4 is all generic and non-sense. every unique that you drop in d2, is amazing.
@addictedplayer4453 whoa whoa whoa..listen. I am on board with d2 being a better designed game with more meaningful gear than d4. But there are plenty of straight garbage uniques that make me want to cry ...maybe if we are talking ssf and pre runewords? calling every unique amazing is something only blizzard would say lol
@@tha_juice3262 i mean the surprise of getting an unique in hell difficulty. of course some are trash.
@@addictedplayer4453most of it is trash, a few portion of it could be good. But, there is a very small chance of hitting a specific piece that hits the dopamine mark like no other. There is pretry much no memoral loot in d4, while you have plenty in d2.
@@addictedplayer4453 careful there bud. some seem trash for standard builds yeah but i have seen enough videos of weird ass char setups that need that one otherwise crappy unique in order to even work. while some of the uniques and even runewords will seem nonsensical to most, there is always just one weird ass char build away to make it seem legit
I could write paragraphs of how shallow they make the environment, characters, and quests feel. If you've played the games then you know already. What I rarely see people talk about though, is how gutted player interaction has become. In Diablo Two, you could join up and basically pioneer the world together. You could fight each other, talk to each other, and even trade items with each other. You'd take down enemies you maybe couldn't handle alone, and you'd be rewarded with progression. In modern Diablo, you can emote to the other fellow who is just a passerby in *your* world. You may team up with them for random events and take down enemies together, but there's no meaningful impact on the game if you choose to play alone or with others. The other players are there with you in the experience, as you would want them to be; however, the interaction with them doesn't feel any different than the simple engagements you'd have with NPCs/virtual-companions staggered throughout the generic landscapes.
You may believe that developers eliminate this shallow interaction when it comes to team-based multiplayer games like: Shooter 3 and Battle Royal 2024. Under the surface pretense of working together, you and every player are still just marketable products. Every match starts with a set-up phase or lobby, where you emote to each other and see the skins everyone is sporting. Shortly after, you have only the attention to engage with the hectic game play of life or death scenarios. You're either going to successfully complete the objective or lose. You get angry at your teammates when you lose, and they feel obligated to buy better equipment or boosts to mitigate the feeling of loss. You get excited together when you win, and further reinforce the idea that the advantages you paid for are working and necessary for you to have fun. That's modern gaming in a nutshell.
I'm baffled that the big corps are jealous of successful titles from smaller studios. Not everyone wants to be engaged in the exhausting dark loops of modern live service titles, which seek all of the player's time and money for the sake of competitively progressing against everyone they meet or know. I used to enjoy talking about new games when I was younger, but now there is little to say about the modern experiences that are diluted of all but their marketability.
that why like musou split screen coop in the old days
What you described is happening because companies are creating games intended to be everlasting, commonly known as live service games. The system in Diablo 2 worked and feels better because it was developed as a game with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Diablo 4, on the other hand, is a game with a beginning, middle, and an end with endless modifications and updates. Developers work to create the illusion that what's coming will always be better than what we currently have. The truth is that some problems persist so that the team has something to fix in the next season. The goal of live service games is never to deliver the best experience and the best game possible because they need defects or issues in the current version for the audience to compare with the improvements in future updates. It’s simply a business model aimed at keeping the wheel turning because if the money stops coming in, the company can no longer pay employees, maintain servers, and the system collapses. This is why we often feel that older games are better than the current ones.
@@nonsononessunooko4066 nah. diablo was never split screen until d3
Such a shit take bth.
Everything you mentioned from 2 is in 4. But you see other players more often. The interaction are not to YOUR liking, which is just your subjective feeling. The interaction is more realistic then what you talk about, since most humans dont interact nowdays.
Generic landscape.... What makes D4 a generic landscape compared to D2 or whatever you have in mind?
If you choose only those games (which you talk about in the second paragraph), you are at fault. There are over 15k games out there and you seem to play only games you hate... Genius move.
Kinda funny, that the older gen seem to evolve in the same way our parents did. Modern gaming bad. But numbers show that many modern games do something right. It's just not to your/our liking.
Well said, very well said. 👏👏👏
It feels like the devs were forced to make a mediocre D3 clone with boring characters, mostly boring classes, poor itemization and garbage LS mechanics to get you to keep playing. This is why it feels so bad. There was no passion when the devs were making this game.
yeah if they are gunna add characters they should have actual Character, like Gran wizard! th-cam.com/video/cTi5y9IhSs8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=-BskvBJ-3NsXWEk4 CC is English! enjoy! this guys a trip! totally can see him as a playable Diablo class
It feels to me like they were forced to make a modern d2 at launch and turns out rose tinted glasses don't transfer. So now they are making it more like d3 and moving in the right direction according to the majority of players that are left.
6:26 Jason Schreier's new book explains why Blizzard North was closed down: Blizzard North and Blizzard's parent company, Vivendi, was looking to sell their gaming division, and was shopping around.
However, they didn't actually inform any of the companies' leadership teams, and that had a huge effect on morale.
Eventually, the blizzard north leaders sent an ultimatum to Vivendi - either they came forward with business plans and projections, or they would resign. This team was Bill Roper, Max and Erich Schaefer, and Brevik.
Hours after the email, Vivendi replied that their resignations were accepted, effective immediately (this was a Friday).
The next Monday, Morhaime & Co went to Blizzard North's offices and told everyone some would be integrated into Blizzard, in Irvine, and some would be laid off. On top of that, some also took the opportunity to just quit the company.
So in retrospect, it wasn't actually Blizz closing down the office, but Vivendi just calling Blizz North ultimatum
Ironically, I think Path of Exile, with its minimalist story telling and exposition, manages to convey more Diablo vibes than any Diablo game since 3
There were moments in your video where I could not tell if it was D3 or D4 you were playing.
That is how similar I think they look. I see nothing new at all in this game, and I will say it over and over again.
D4 is a remake of Diablo Immortal, which is a remake of D3.
D4 isnt going for D2.... its going for a online store with a gotcha style mini game with zero content
.... everything is copy/paste
Part of Diablo identity is dark gothic horror. It's hard to be horrified when you're in a big giant open world with many other players running around.
Yeah, they even copy pasted damaged code from D3 (storage bug). I have absolutely no faith in Blizzard making good games anymore.
Curious about thoughts surrounding monetization, as I think Activision-Blizzard's thirst for micro transactions has negatively impacted D4 almost as much as many of the (very valid) points brought up in this video...from the limited visual diversity inherent to the loot drops to the original spacing of shop keepers (ostensibly to give players a reason to show off bought cosmetics), it eats at the soul of a franchise while ALSO lacking the free-to-play benefits PoE offers
the irony in you mentioning Torchlight is that Runic Games was composed of ex-Blizzard North employees including David Brevik, literally the creator of Diablo himself and you can tell especially as Torchlight 1 is literally Diablo 1 with a reskin and fishing
Brevik didn't work on Torchlight, it was created by Schaefer bros.
Game companies that get too big, always " forget" how they got there.
I can't play any game with level scaling. Especially ARPG games.
Right?? It takes away the feeling of improvement until your level 100 scaling up to level 300 foes.
@@Rando-w4d Yeah, it's shit. It's a game mechanic that counteracts with the main game mechanic of leveling.
That's why i fucking hated The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion SO fucking much, it completely fucks up the sense of improvement, progress and journey. It was the first time and to this day the only game I've played with that system, after that awful experience every time if i hear a game has some kind of "level scaling system" i discard it, ignore it and move on. I prefer to actually WASTE my time grinding in a free to play online game than playing something like that... it's that bad.
Sorry for the venting, i needed to get this out of my body.
Each and every drop valuable in d2? What crafting mats u get from every item wtf?And every white item mean something?
Did u play d2 even?
Ironically enough, for this video I got a commercial for Diablo Immoral... Arguably an even worse game in the same franchise.
People in the comments saying that "now its good" is mistaking it because the truth is now it is just BETTER, compared to what exactly? Yeah, the disastruous release... there are still many issues, issues that are not and probably will not be fixed in the near future because some are instrinsic to tge "live service" model this game was literally built upon...
Also, there are still things even D3 did better than D4, and that says alot, sometimes you play a offbrand looking Diablo (im talking about D3 btw) that is alot fun despite its flaws and in comparison you play the one with the most fidelity to the franchise but its nowhere near as fun, proof of that is how in S4 we are doing the same things we were doing since release but NOW its fun... still filled with frustrating problems, but more enjoyavle overall.
All of that beung said, i will never say D4 is a 7 or above simoly by the mere existence of the modern day plague that is the pedatory microtransactions tactics.
Sad part is they're counting on the "it's better now" types. It works. Otherwise, these companies wouldn't keep doing it
🤧
This atrocity of a game will never be good.
How are the D4 cosmetic micro transactions predatory exactly? The system is exactly the same as in Path of Exile.
I fell into the trap. S4 was pretty good so I bought the expansion. Now I can't refund it and I wish I could.
I appreciated your good narration, effort, and overall good points. But I'll be honest, we are all overthinking this. Diablo 4 sucks because it's made by a disjointed collection of corporate employees who have near no ownership of the product as a whole and thus create only soulless, disjointed, self-contradicting products modeled by machines that focus on what keeps people addicted versus what's actually a good game.
Name me one good game out right now that wasn't made by a bunch of nerds in a basement or a garage or at least a developer that started that way.
There is no need to dissect these games. Imagine making a pizza with 30 people and your job is only to gather the tomatoes before someone makes the sauce. But then there is another person that cuts the tomatoes, a different person that starts making the sauce. A different person seasons the sauce. A different person taste tests the sauce, but bases it on a survey they ran for what people like in their sauce rather than the merit of their own taste buds. You get the point. You're gonna get a shit pizza.
...shit pizza...this speaks to me. Great point.
I got your meaning and agree but it was a bad analogy... Because that's how professional kitchens work.
back in the day, developers had more freedom to test shit, or had the bravery to go against their boss and then do something different they knew was gonna get better. It wasn't as streamlined and as Thor's dad once said "they had fist fights" over things they didn't agree on. Now everything has specialisation, every employee are under strict routine. While creativity still is a factor its heavily restricted and with that, a developer is similar to a factory worker. And with shareholders who only invest for money and not for their passion about the projects, they cause havoc in the AAA industry.
@@wilsoncbip And I believe that was the point, kinda. Having the best made pizza ever taste great, but it will never be the same as the memory of your mom making you dinner. Just an example of what, I hope, most people will make that special smile thinking back on.
Diablo 1 and 2 is what stuck in our memory because it wasn't made to be the best game with everyone playing it and win all the rewards…I think.
Anything made by DEI employees will be garbage.
I actually prefer D3 at this point. 😂
d3 is nowhere near d4 season 4. try it
@@flamingjob2 Nope
@@flamingjob2 I don't mind playing D4. I just feel D4 doesnt know what it wants to be. at least I know D3 is straight line Action game for better or worse.
I think few more seasons, D4 will get better (I hope so 😂)
I think season 4 is a good start. I quit after season 1 and start playing again in season 4. I do enjoy it though
Yeah, that's the strange thing. The release of D4 made me appreciate D3 a lot more, something I'd never thought I'd do. Like to the point where I actively would like to play it again. Weird
As someone who plays D2 since 2003 and never got to level 99 ( 85 max ) I think getting to 100 should be an achievement, not something anybody can do, I recently got to level 100 with my Necromancer in D4 and I felt nothing , literally nothing .....
As a kid I loved playing D2 LAN with my dad, we’d always save our characters on floppies, then CDs, playing them for years and years. Fast forward to when Resurrected launched 20 years later and my father had passed away a year before, I dug up an old CD with the character files and imported them into the remastered game. Funny thing is, we both loved lightning javazon, but I was talking shit about his build back in the day and when I asked him if he had a spare Infinity, he said just one, slotted on his mercenary. But when I loaded his character in Resurrected, I saw he had an extra one in his stash and he didn’t give it to me, cause I was being a lil arrogant shit 😂 It felt surreal honestly and no modern game can really give you that experience tbh.
@@peterk2735 I would have done the same thing to be honest 😅, I play games with my son too and when he's a little shit, I beat his ass in say Soul Calibur 6 😜😂 but on a series note, that's awesome you have this kind of memories with him, shame he didn't get to experience D2R 😥
I blamed it to the news fans who complained about low exp. They keep buffing the experience because those players keep complaining on how it took them long time to reach 100. After they reach 100 then they complain about the lack of endgame contents.
Pre-Season 1 exp is fine before those snowflakes ruined it.
@@jameslambertus5820 I agree, it should definitely go up a bit, i started new season on Friday last week, already level 67 and I haven't played that much 😅😅
@@jameslambertus5820 I played D2 for years before I could get most of my chars past lvl 90+, especially on hardcore. It’s like….you don’t get there unless you really know what you’re doing. I mean once you get to Hell, no matter what build you have, there are going to be enemies that are immune to your main source of dmg. You gotta find the items to deal with it, otherwise you’re not maxing out, can’t avoid it. I always felt some danger when playing D2, from act 1 normal all the way to uber Tristram. In D4 you never get that.
youre about 6 months too late
Editing is hard
The game is still bad, so I don't think he is late.
@@LordJaroh oh but he is. The general opinion of d4 has improved a ton, so a negative video isn't exactly going to get a tom of views.
@@Vexreal_ You clearly didn't watch it then, he switches to the positives about the game a little over halfway through and reviewing what is STILL bad and comparing it to the finer points of previous games is fine. It's good for the game to be studied in order for it to improve.
@@Jessethoth it'd not about his actual points. It's about his thumbnail and title. People won't click on a video perceived as negative when the game itself is doing well right now. He missed that opportunity during the flop of season 3 and prior.
To put it in the simplest way possible, Activision-Blizzard(now Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard technically) simply isn't Blizzard(as in the Blizzard of old). Diablo 1 and 2 were made by Blizzard, Diablo 3 and 4 were made by a completely different company that just so happens to share a name with it: Activision-Blizzard. Saying Blizzard doesn't understand Diablo any more is a misnomer, as it's simply not the same Blizzard. All the old veterans that worked on all of Blizzard's old games, not just Diablo mind you, have all left the company, most of them a long time ago. On top of that, most of the corporate knowledge acquired by said veterans was gone too when Activision took over Blizzard, as since than it's been Activision's corporate knowledge that reigned supreme, not Blizzard's.
I found it funny you had so many good things to say about Diablo 4(post 1.10 that is) and gave Activision-Blizzard a lot of credit for actually learning something. In reality all they did was copy Path of Exile's seasonal model of experimenting with new things and than keeping the experiments that resonated well with their player base. What you called 'Activision-Blizzard finally relearning what their fans loved about the Diablo franchise' is in reality Activision-Blizzard throwing random things at the wall and embracing the random things that turned out to be successful. I very much doubt there was much learning done in the process at all as most of Activision-Blizzard's failures happen on the analysis level. The level required to actually learn from experiences. I very much doubt Activision-Blizzard actually understands why certain ideas of theirs happened to be popular and others not, as they just can't seem to properly analyze it.
You missed an important detail, the only thing regular blizzard did for Diablo one and two were cinematics I believe, the rest was done by Blizzard North, a different entity with different employees.
@@ref206a I didn't miss it. Blizzard had multiple teams since forever. Do you think the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises were being worked on by the same team? No! They each had their own dedicated team that worked on their franchise, and than when WoW came it was a brand new team as WoW wasn't an RTS like WC3 so the team couldn't carry over as is. Some of it did, but a lot of it was new. Blizzard north was still Blizzard, it's not an entirely different entity. Activision-Blizzard on the other hand, now that's different as most of the old Blizzard devs simply left or were kicked out and the new hires are something else entirely...
its the pacing... diablo 4 is like mindles fast pace killing that just gets old fast. i think a slower pace would be better, less loot better loot.
But that's how the game started, leveling, combat, and loot was super slow during the campaign. But the community wanted more mobs, more combat, and more loot... it like they can't win. I think the same will happen to PoE2 very slow at the beginning and then the blaster community will complain that leveling, combat, and the loot progression is too slow and then they will be forced to juice those three things to be fast too :(
Play on world tier 1 or 2. Problem solved.
#skillissue
I just got used to the evade build... I can't go back to slow! XD
I have returned to play d4 in season 4 and its just a fun fast grind and loot fest from 1 to 100 and i agree to everything you said. I still find d2 (remaster) so so so much better, gloomy, dark and isolated…and to be honest…i still prefer it in my heart!!!
Any RPG where the entire world levels up when you do is stupid and appeals only to stupid players. They ruined the elder scrolls series with that nonsense too. No, thanks.
See that what’s pisses me off. Oblivion’s level scaling sucked and ruined the progression systems, you’d think the people making modern games like D4 have played enough games to know that’s not a winning formula. Apparently not…
@@peterk2735 Indeed.
So Skyrim sucked, right?
@@sipjedekat8525 In that specific aspect it does suck. It's a massive design flaw that makes it a dumbed down crpg, no matter how much you may enjoy other aspects of the game. Same for Oblivion. The reason Morrowind is the best of the bunch is precisely the absence of the level scaling nonsense.
@@BH-vh3iu yeah, well, that's like, your opinion, man.
But seriously, it's just what you prefer. I'm less familiar with Morrowind but I thoroughly enjoyed Oblivion and Skyrim. I thought it was neat that I could still visit areas I overlooked or skipped earlier on and still have a challenge. I imagine going back to an earlier dungeon where every enemy is insta killed by breathing on them is less fun, but that's just me. It's like Diablo 2 and running around in the first few lvls, really boring.
Classic Diablo 1 was indeed very lucky with the "mood/theme" it presented. The music AND the layout of the first levels in Diablo 1 completely sold the game to me, as i had gotten a demo of the game on pc magazine cover disc. Infact i must admit the initial "hype" .. aka the spot on moody music, the dark visuals, the classic enemies, meaty sound effects .. kinda made me a little dissapointed in the remaining levels at first for not being as "stunningly brilliant" as the beginning of the game. For the very same reason my first impressions of D2 was that it "looked gray" but it thankfully grew on me.
Still remember how I bought "double magic" armor in Diablo 1 to replace my unique quest armor. Both mechanics were great - both uniques, found in quests, and magic items that randomly can be even better.
Stop making games only playable online
Blizzard North disbanded because Vivendi purchased them, and they wanted to put all efforts into World of Warcraft. When the boys at Blizzard north went to management and said, if we cant make the game our way, were going to walk to which Vivendi said “ok bye”.
Essentially it was because of a corporate merger Blizzard made so executives could cash out on wow. Happened before the future merger of Activision Blizzard. Just google blizzard north. Diablo 1 & 2 were my teenage years and soul. Diablo 3 was an abomination. Diablo 4 was produced in pieces over time with various director and management swaps just to turn out to be just like diablo 3 with updated graphics. Everyone wears the same gear with the same aspects and same gear and same paragons. Its an illusion of choice without actual viable choices for customization. If theres only one fire sorc build with one skill per branch on the skill tree, with a couple of boards for fire…guess what….everyone just copy and pastes a guide and pretends to be a good player. I hate that. There should be multiple viable fire sorc specs with multiple paragon board options for each class etc. Also, they actially made rare items WORSE than D2 instead of evolve them. PoE1 > Diablo 4. PoE2 will eventually beat them all and clown D4 jnto shame
Edit: i disagree on the story being good. Diablo four’s story was trash as it’s mainly covered the story of Lilith who is basically an emo girl who never actually said or did anything until one of the very last cinematics yet built a world around her as if she had existed since the dawn of time. She had never even been mentioned in the first Diablo one and two games and only came in to the world after a third-party Warcraft writer wrote her into a fictional book in which case afterward she was put into the game after blizzard north was fractured in the form of Uber. Her character was extremely boring and unforgettable. Then they decided to give a teenage girl powers to the point where she was able to learn ancient her Roddrick within a week. Cain was replaced by a useless drunk who could barely manage assemblance of dignity. And worst of all, in the story they made Mephisto be a wolf more similar to a dog who somehow was trapped in resin in hell but could still be a dog who could teleport himself and other people. It really irks me when I hear people say the story was good in Diablo four because it was absolute garbage.
OK looks like I have to continue. The next point would be a flaw that both Diablo three and Diablo four share. In Diablo two for a solid decade after it came out max level was only achievable by the most insane grind usually involving multiple people playing one character to hit max level. The ladder seasons back then were not short term tiny sprints, but lasted a very long time which length I don’t recall but much longer than three months. I wanna say it was every year or maybe half a year. But with that and the old battle.net interface, you could see your player and progress on the ladder giving yourself a sense of accomplishment moving up a space wherever you were on the ladder especially on hard-core mode. But then in Diablo three and four they allowed it so you could easily get max level within hours and that is a complete step back from what the game once was. Max level easy itemization makes what you see on the Diablo three and four leader boards which is essentially just in attack of the clones with all the players using the same exact items in both games.
The next insult to Diablo four would be their shameful overworld. If you literally took the cold planes from Diablo too and only allowed it so you could walk alongside the dirt road that would be what Diablo four is. The Claim to have this big open world but it’s more of a spaghetti monster where you have very limited pathing in most places aside from the desert area. it’s a kin to a side stroller where you can only go to a destination using one or maximum two paths to get there. This completely ruins the overworld randomization and replayability that the first and second Diablo games had. If each play through of the first Diablo one and two games were always identical the games would not have been the colossal success as they were. It was critical that world generation and item randomization were both present in order to create an infinitely replaceable game. Moreover they got rid of the requirement to play through the game on harder difficulties all the way through like Diablo one and two had with their normal nightmare and hell notes. Instead they dumped that system down and made it worse.
The next point was that they copied the Zoom Zoom place style of modern games. Diablo three and an effort to make everything flashy monsters became ridiculously inconsequentially easy for the majority of the game unless you were pushing the greater rift ladder. It’s not to say that monster should be extremely hard , but Diablo two had the balance just right where some of the monsters on the higher difficulties you just could not go near. Before they Nerf it if a major cast iron maiden on you in the chaos sanctuary and you attacked you would kill yourself. The primeval’s were difficult but not too difficult prior to the 1.10 patch with synergies of course where players could easily one shot bosses but that patch only came about after blizzard north was already falling apart because of the acquisition and was mostly designed by one guy per David Brevik.
One thing that people have a hard time realizing especially younger kids that never played Diablo one or two is that Diablo two expanded upon virtually every positive aspect of Diablo one and evolved the game. For example you had more items to equip going from Diablo one to Diablo two. You had a bigger inventory space and it introduced a stash from Diablo one to two. Diablo one only had normal magic and unique items whereas Diablo two in its original release had normal magic rare unique socketed and ethereal items and smaller sets and eventually introduced runewords as Lord of destruction was released. They also introduced a tomb for town portal scrolls, charms in the expansion, be evolved gambling from the 1st to 2nd game, and expanded the world by a multiplicative factor. When you look at Diablo three and four as was mentioned in this video, all they attempted to really do was copy Diablo two rather than actually evolve the genre. J Wilson did decide to add a couple of more items slots, but they really went all in on set items eventually but only after they had reverted back to Diablo ones style of itemization with most people using blues. This could literally go on on virtually every aspect of the game. In the first game you had three characters with the normal archetypes. The second game offered five on release and eventually seven. Diablo three should have released nine at minimum on initial release I’m the same goes for pushing the boundaries with Diablo four but again they didn’t they only seem to copy the second game. These guys were so shameless they couldn’t even come up with their own unique intriguing soundtrack. People still to this day listen to the Diablo one and Diablo two soundtracks graded by Matt Uleman. The Diablo three and four soundtracks are simply put cliché and absolutely forgettable without any soul. It’s like if I asked AI to create me a generic RPG soundtrack.
OK one last point before I give up this bottomless reply. I could go on for 100 pages literally talking about all of this in micro detail but I’m just voice to texting a reply after watching the video. One of the other things that bothers me and I believe adds to how forgettable these games are is the monster diversification. They absolutely still failed to understand what players from the first and second game meant when they said dark world. We didn’t only mean a dark world regarding color, it was a dark Gothic fantasy with dark Gothic themes. Most of the monsters that you fight in Diablo four for example are bugs and animals. I’m not kidding. You fight a devil wasp. A devil bore. A devil wolf. Bugs and animals are not interesting or inspirational. They do have skeletons and succubus and goat men but that’s just about it and they are a few and far in between. The whole concept of the Diablo universe is good versus evil. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you’re primarily fighting radical humans, animals of a wide variety, bugs and insects. I don’t know who thought that that was a good or cool idea but they need to go and play Dante’s Inferno or the first couple of games to understand the difference.
I dont like the story, Ive seen this redeemed villain trope a million times in Blizzard games.
Karrigan, Sylvanas, Lilith. They dont have the balls to make characters evil anymore like Arthas and Brood Wars Karrigan
Yep, it feels like playing the same game in a different coat of paint. Kerrigan in Brood War was fucking evil and ruthless, so was Arthas and so was the Dark Wanderer. They all started out as heroes, but their respective stories lead them into some truly dark, evil shit. Same with Lillith, I don’t get how she gets labelled as a “tragic” villain. She brought nothing but misery and torment to her “children” and was ready to sacrifice Sanctuary to usurp the Prime Evils.
It's quite funny how the probably heavily overpriced DLC will be "Hey, now girl is possessed by the king of hell, oh noes, go kill." feeling as bland as the bad main game.
Redeemed villain?
Lol, somebody havent played the game, at all.
Isn't there a cutscene where lilith is watching someone get tortured and she doesn't give af? She is the reason said person is being tortured.
Then later mouth breathers try to tell me that lilith was the good guy all along and we should have sided with her lol
@@killerspartan666 simps
Well, running d2 on /players 7-8 there's quite a lot of loot, where you need to spend extra time or use filters to ensure you won't miss anything. But still, there's a point to most things that drop: a good white base, a magical for craft or some unique affix, rares with combination of affixes that could be better than unique, some good sets, lots of unique items, ethereal, runes... And all with varying stats.
Ultimate slot machine.
I don't know, season 4 is pretty fire and 5 is looking even better
Duluth system in Diablo f****** trash they really need a mess Diablo 4 tempering needs work the items there's no Nostalgia behind any items they're still items in Diablo 2 I haven't found yet like it's crazy man that ionization is trash and that's what Rex the game
My uncle was a part of Diablo Diablo 1 he's an OG when it was blizzard North
I agree 100% I hated it on release shit is dope now
Eh. I’ve played all the seasons so far and the game is indeed getting better but it’s still rather mediocre…..and I’m someone who wants the game to be great. It’s almost to where it should have been at launch. The endgame is still pretty boring. NM dungeons = boring. Pit = pretty boring. The new endgame mechanic = looks pretty much the same. There still isn’t enough diversity in things to do in the game. It will probably get there eventually…….it just won’t be season 5. Maybe the expansion is where the game will pop off.
Sorry, I disagree. They still haven't fixed the issues with the game: the repetition of content and the lack of player-driven character progression.
obviously any new character has to play the game from the start. what the hell else would the case be??
Adventure Mode from Diablo 3 says hi! Unless you meant character level specifically.
Bro took so long to make this video that half of the stuff in the video had already been changed by the time he uploaded it
it didn't, game still trash in its core.
The game in itself hasn't and will never change.
Still the same dog sh... beta test unbalanced turd
i've found that i can't stay interested in leveling a character in each season. There's little to nothing to hold my interest. In Diablo III there's a definite flow to bounties and rifts, in Diablo II and Path of Exile there's the actual story (3x in Diablo II). Diablo IV has a seasonal story but it's always very threadbare and a lot of it is level gated. And like this season, your first quest is basically a collection quest, get 15 whatevers to get to the next stage. there's little of substance there.
Blizzard should have just continued with D2R and made a DLC for it. They could add the missing act 4 quests, more new runewords, a unique version of every item, improve existing unique items to make them useful, maybe add more endgame content like another difficulty level with new unique items that only drop there. Since they need to make a profit from development, they could make it a paid DLC that you just buy once. This would bring back old players and new ones too.
More D2 content is an absolutely amazing idea on paper, but could you really trust the current Blizzard to not screw it up and add garbage content to an otherwise excellent game? That thought makes me really appreciate what we already have in the form of D2. It's good it ended in the way it did as it gave closure and you can always rely on going back to it without any additional crap tacked on.
@@MrAntifreezer That is a good point. The current Blizzard is very different from what it used to be. I'm sure all the people who worked on the original D1 and D2 are long gone from the company. The changes and additions they made to D2R have definitely been good though. If they could just make new content that is actually good then it would be worth paying for a DLC. Seems like we will have to rely on modding in single player to get content like that.
If they remade D2 (not just remastered) to have D4 level graphics, D3 skill runes, and new content (like, say, D3's High Heavens), you'd have a game that would be impossible to ever stop playing.
My favorite Diablo 2 memories are the secret treasure rooms. Those surprises and breaks in the game kept it from staling out. Other examples include the Wirt story line and Secret cow level, the Cairn Stones, the Cube and the limitless varieties on gear. I think the game tends to end quick though if I am to critique it overall. Replayability is there but once everything becomes familiar, it stops holding interest. The sequels need very fresh new ideas to break new ground and feel like new content. Diablo was made at a time when replayability and x hundred hours of fun was a metric. It delivered on that and I think games today forget that goal. Having unfamiliar territory and regular surprises is key.
path of exile is free with unlimited playtime while diablo 4 cost about 100 dollars for a buggy mess just let that sink in 😂😂😂😂😂
As a Path of Exile player, I don't treat the game as a free to play title. I treat it as a game that has the entire campaign free for all, but the actual endgame functionally has a 40 dollar buy in. Still a much better value though
yes it is free to play but they locked a basic QoL features behind a paywall. Good luck playing it through the endgame without paying anything.
Nice 5% player retention after Act 1 homie LMAO
are you trying to convince us or just yourself
What
Himself
No he’s just stating the obvious. D4 is shit and huffing all the copium in the world ain’t going to change that.
Lmao the overweight discord users have arrived.
@@BumMilkSandwhich what
I think everyone misundetands what they want with loot, blizzard and hardcore players and casual players.
You're right about the rarity being messed up, definitely feel flooded by legendaries and currently kind of happy that I feel like I can just build my own build and it's pretty viable.
I do wish we had a significant reduction in costs and drops- needs to be less loot to make the loot feel valuable.
Half of your arguments fall flat- rares being worthless is new- they were more likely to be the best gear in season 1, and everyone bitched about being overwhelmed. Now rares are pointless.
Definitely still needs work, but I'm enjoying the current season and I think they're doing well to iterate and change it up each season.
When Diablo 2 was first announced my limited imagination was hoping it would be more Diablo 2 but a new village with 4 new dungeons. Maybe even keeping Tristram in the sequel so there would be TWO villages. I was actually a bit disappointed when I saw Diablo 2 for the first time. The graphics and art design didn't have the same gothic style of the first game. I actually didn't get Diablo 2 until a couple years after the expansion pack was released. When I saw that the Assassin was one of the new classes it renewed my interest. I actually didn't really start playing D2 until just a few years before Resurrected was released. I mean, I had played through the campaign a few times, but I never spent any time grinding for loot. So I didn't see the true genius of D2 'til almost 20 years after it was released. Blizzard has made a lot of missteps in recent years, but releasing D2 Resurrected while working on and releasing D4 was brilliant. I still haven't played D4, but it looks way too much like D3, just with a darker art style. I absolutely love D2R. It's nice that Blizzard gave players both D2R AND D4.
Can't wait to see you reach 10k subs and more. You really deserve it, such a quality in these videos
i played the beta, experienced the loot system, stopped playing, and waited for everyone to come to the realization that it was crap.
Tho your input is valid. The game is in a pretty good spot right now.
So is it bad? It could be better. Is it good? It could use some improvement.
But overall it's a fun game now
I played D3 and didn't really enjoy it, didnt understand why people liked this series so much. It just felt like a meh generic experience.
I just started playing D4 about 2 weeks ago, and my first session lasted 18 hours. Im absolutely in love with this game.
Im leaving this comment at the beginning of the Video ill edit at the end to see if you changed my mind.
Edit: I believe having not played D4 on launch like i did with D3 allowed me to really enjoy D4. Yes the overworld is shallow but ive come to expect that from MMOish games. I did enjoy the video, keep it up!
I never liked set items. Not in Diablo or wow. Oh, cool new piece of gear! Nah, can't use it cause it will break the set bonus.
For sure I pray they never introduce sets and if they do they should only be 2-3 items max
The only way for sets to work is to have them use their own slots. If they have to compete with raw stats, you have a design problem.
A thoughtful and insightful take! I really enjoyed D4 when I first tried it in Season 3. I had been dabbling in Path of Exile (my first foray into ARPGs) and D4s triple A production value was a revelation. I was enchanted by the world and all the different regions - swamps and deserts and bogs. I had a great month with it. Thing is, once I had explored most of the world, the dungeons weren't THAT engaging. And though there have been improvements in QOL, now the leveling up feels a bit like I'm just rinse repeating. I absolutely agree that they could a few layers to give you purpose, such as weapon sets - great idea! I feel like ARPGs are a delicate animal. On the one hand you have rabid power fans wanting more more MORE ( and yes there's nothing like that feeling of sowing vast swathes of destruction through hoards) - on the other hand, when it gets too easy... suddenly you wake up out of the dream and realize 'wait why am I sitting here mashing buttons and staring into this screen?' On the one hand I LOVE the hand-crafted attention to detail throughout the map. On the other hand - yeah SOMETHING has got to keep you engaged and that detail doesn't come cheap. Anyway, as you do I hope they figure it out - because there's some amazing magic in there - be a shame if it goes to waste! Great video - I'll subscribe to encourage you to do more :-)
I hate Neyrelle as a character, she's annoying, immature and utterly stupid. Might even call her a Mary Sue for learning how to do necromancy from reading a single book. Lorath has the personality of a grumpy old drunk. The only one I kinda liked was Donan and they killed him in the lamest way possible while giving plot armor to Prava so she can create some stupid drama in the next expansion. Lore wise, D4 gets a D.
7:02 Oh hell yeah torchlight got mentioned! Those were the first PC games I ever played and they introduced me to diablo as a result. Incredible work on the video, cheers!
Earned yourself a sub! This is THE BEST video I've seen comparing modern Diablo games to the originals and you said just about everything in my head on the topic. I'd add that Diablo 3 is mostly made by WoW devs and that's where that disconnect of them not really understanding the game starts. If they did play it they're the types that finished Normal ONE TIME on ONE CHARACTER with their wife back in like 2003 and then never picked it up again. They don't get why a SHITLOAD of Diablo 2 players felt compelled and satisfied to sit and power level 40+ characters across multiple accounts on one CD key to figure out how to make every build get through Hell mode and farm the badass drops off the Hell mode versions of the act bosses.
Another point is that Diablo 4 was ran through by multiple teams, they boasted about 9000 devs working on it, I wouldn't call that a flex though. You mentioned it being more of an MMO, it's worse than that. One team had one iteration of the game going in an MMO direction which was unfinished and before that the first team was pushing it into a Dark Souls direction which was also scrapped. Then they put a team that wasn't even Blizzard mainly (they absorbed Vicarious Visions after the D2 remaster) to finish it up. However, they just stitched all the partially finished elements together and threw some paint on it. You can tell, if you understand game design, that the game was made in stages and each stage wanted to go a different direction.
The only other point I don't see a lot of people mention is that Chris Wilson and a lot of the GGG guys were giga Diablo 2 nerds and there's little hints in PoE especially the first few years of it that it's cut from the cloth of Diablo 2 more so than D3 and D4 are. Trading Currencies are mirrors of us on Diablo 2 trading the Stone of Jordan as a currency or medium and high runes as currencies but then the genius part is they put the Horadric Cube recipes for manipulating and rerolling items IN those trade currencies. One of my favorite things about PoE is the orb system and I'd be so disappointed if they ever removed it.
My own final point here is MAYBE they can fix it up, give it the "redemption ark" polish treatment that so many other games are now popular for (No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk etc.) but why can't they just make sure the game is good first THEN release it? I see people in comments trying to light roast you saying "Hurr durr game iz gud nao!" and "Too late." because Season 4 is showing a tiny bit of improvement. Played it myself and the shit put me to sleep about 2 hours in but I plan on trying again here in a day or two. If season 5 is good GREAT but how many seasons until it compels me to play as much as D2 STILL DOES which proves it is NOT "just nostalgia bro".
Even with it's improvements you cannot convince me that a single person who worked on D4 is a hardcore ARPG fan. They have at every turn fundamental misunderstood what makes people play ARPGs. It's not that D4 was slow D2 was slow and it's the gold standard the difference was D2's grind was still efficent. You didn't need to take 65 evtra steps collect 19 different currency and slog through four different dungeons before you get to the monster or boss that drops the item you are targeting.
I've played these games since d1, remember the excitement around the d2 release when I was 16, and after its expansion things just took a sour turn. Everything you say and more are valuable points but money is all that talks now.
Immersion is out the window because now i see kingbob and queensephiroth666 not only in settlements but everywhere else too (apart from dungeons) and the chat box cannot be hidden nor altered.
Loot is just a big miss and they tried to replicate some of the nostalgia by bringing back a few cult items like harlequin crest but failed miserably with how you mention loot just literally rains everywhere and at some point you just grow tired of picking anything up, at all. I did some tormented bosses the other day and after seeing all those it items being "just" normal legendaries and my inventory full I simply reacted with "fuck it" and tpd out.
Microtransactions are king and even though I don't even want to see the thing I keep being reminded when the game every so subtly slaps "season journey update" in my face every second as I level up "go on, have a look, you know you want to buy a horse" (or some shit), it takes them season after season to discuss and digest opinions and wishes from players and still not get it right, only to apologize and repeat. The game looks, and plays nice. The art style is always arguable but its cool. It is however, not Diablo. And that's it. It's just a copy cat, much like many other games these days, albeit with a large budget. I just find it really sad, on top of everything else, that companies these days have to be so dirty and focus so heavily on microtransactions. They have nothing (directly) to do with the game, in my honest opinion, and belong on the website. Not in the game, and especially not shoved in our faces. Let us make that choice. Honestly, that's a big thing in d4 overall, if you think about it. Choice. They don't leave us with a lot. Also loadouts for builds and paragon points. Come on devs.
That's my "rant" over and far from all of my complaints included.
I think D4 S4 is pretty good. My biggest problem with it is how the tormented bosses are part of the seasonal journey.
It's probably my fault, but my barb can kill Duriel in seconds, but when I go against the tormented version it's health barely budges after minutes of fighting.
I really don't like such a big difficulty spike, maybe they should make a nightmare version or something in between the two.
But for now the past 20 hours of playing I haven't got a single item that would count as an upgrade so I just don't see when I'll be able to beat the tormented bosses.
And as such I'll probably won't be able to complete the seasonal journey.
Me too. The solution was totally master working the build which cost a fair amount of gold but eventually yeah, I got strong enough to go fight the Uber Bosses and beat them
You make a lot of good points, but as someone who went back and played the older games but did not play them during their peaks/while I was young, *a lot* of your points tie into wanting to recapture a specific feeling that D4 is missing...but that feeling *can't* be recaptured because it stems from wonder derived from a completely different era of gaming a lot of us miss. When most games were doing something unique and the market wasn't saturated. I agree with almost every point touching on mechanics, and *strongly* agree that making the game an MMO was a mistake, but I think I come from a different place than you on a couple points.
These days games are solved in minutes because the cumulative knowledge of the community and base skill level has skyrocketed. This is where I agree with your points on the MMO experience making things worse. If you didn't have 30 people with perfect builds nuking everything in your path, it would feel a lot more rewarding to run into a boss and beat it up with your friends, knowing its a 1v4 at the max. It's why as I get older MMOs have just completely lost their joy. I understand much more than I did when I was younger and experiencing all these things for the first time, so when I look at different pieces of gear/abilities/etc, while I do still that rush of "oh wow thats cool", my subconcious is running down a list of checks and comparisons and doing the math on what the tradeoff is. This honestly kills the experience of a lot of games nowadays, and its something that many players don't realize they're doing.
I'm not articulating my point all that well, but I don't think all these problems are faults with Diablo 4. I think gamers and the community have fundamentally changed for the worse, and it's really difficult to navigate the nostalgia we all have. We wish for the times when there was still wonder and we play games chasing that dragon but its just so rarely there. We go back to old experiences and theres that intangible "vibe" as we call it, but that vibe is simply the nostalgic joy making the game feel more than the sum of its parts.
There isn't really a solution to this, but I've found that actively making myself make mistakes or choose less optimal things has made many games these days far more enjoyable. But tying back to the MMO conversation...this isn't really a thing any more in public games. I mean shit...look at the problems in WoW. Think about the knowledge level of your average player circa 2010. Now compare it to your average player now. Systems that were functionally esoteric then because so few understood them have become something most 13 year olds just know how to navigate intuitively because they're all raised on parts of those the systems in a million other games. What was once a climb because we didn't know how to tackle the mountain is now trivial because we all see the hidden elevator that we didn't realize existed before.
This is why roguelites have been so successful, when the set to calculate is so much smaller (Which of these 3 options do I want?) and you can't know what you'll need to choose from next, that 'exploration' feel doesn't go away, at least for a lot longer if the design is reasonably executed. (Balance plays a role here, when there is a single best option by miles, that's gonna undermine it for most people.)
I turned my back on D4 *because* they took the MMO route, and they couldn't resist including a battle pass, the worst trend in gaming nobody wants. It's amazing how publishers keep pushing for monetizing engagement, and the games that actually attract the most players and keep them engaged are the ones that focus on a thrilling experience.
Things are definitely looking better. But bricking items absolutely sucks. I bricked an item that would have been an upgrade while you talked about it. Lol rage
Kinda on the same boat, i think the temper should work more like enchant(Getting more expensive each time you rolled, and giving a yes or no for the change, but only 1 stat), mostly because when youre min maxing, you might loose billions of gold worth when this happens
@@renarduwu Not really. because with maiden farms and how easy it is to farm bases if you play enough you constantly have fresh bases and GA bases to try again. it's really not that bad, most BIS tempers are 1/3 1/4 chance, people who say they never hit it are lying or don't temper enough. The only hardcore RNG part is if you want 3 crits on the same masterwork, but that's FUSSY min-maxing and not needed to clear any of the end game.
You hit every point of complaint I have with D4. Sandbox mmo with arpg combat system - Content spread out just to be spread out, no reason to really even play because it's all the same exact stuff - Except I have to do it to earn rewards I would normally earn through playing, but now I have to pay.. ;)
I miss playing offline the. Always online lag is killing me
Yes, the lag is incredibly bad for a triple A title
Can't really blame the original devs for leaving since the buyout of blizzard cause theyre no longer making games they love. It's all about increasing metrics for shareholders, not making a good game :(
Diablo 4 has no Diablo
Scam
Period
It's the total overload and oversaturation of flashy firework efx and the fast pace that turn me off the most. It's the complete opposite to Diablo 1 where you progressed slowly through dark and creepy dungeons.
I think at this point the ARPG with the most relaxed pacing that is in that classic style (IE not trying to be top down Dark Souls in terms of combat.) is 40k Inquisitor Martyr and even that game sped up a lot since launch days.
Long rant
Season 4 is fire, scaling is a non issue and I dont know why people keep bringing it up, nightmare dungeons are pretty much the level u want you can go hard as you want, lvl 70 but your build is good enough to fight lvl 120 enemies go ahead. U wanna be efficient in getting xp and do em just 10 lvls above u go ahead, u wanna chill and do some lower ones with ur friends thats okay. True endgame the pit its also like this, except that the starting point is 100.
The open world is a non issue as well, u run around it a bit doing helltides which are fun and thats it.
The superbosses do not scale to your level, they are lvl 200, Lillith its also 100 and harder than the others.
I personally hate gear sets and I hope they never return, it actually makes selecting your gear pretty mindless, what armor will I use? Just 5 pieces of this set, instead of choosing a special aspect for each piece of armor and choosing every single affix of every piece of gear to make sure that you hit hard with your preferred skill, while also maxing out your res, armor and getting as much hp as you can, greater affixes, tempering and masterworks also make sure that no one has the same exact items on it is pretty much impossible, and when u get your own unique to your character god roll it feels so good.
Making a linear progression for every single character u make would also be so boring and restricting, I have 3 lvl 100s and if I had to do some linear progression thing everytime I wanna make a new character I would drop the game right there.
In regards to world tier 1 and 2 being meh tho I agree, however you can blitz em real quick, literally just put some aspects and a few tempers on your crappy gear and by lvl 30 (or even lower) its easy to get through that dungeon, or my favorite approach, just get a buddy to clear both capstone dungeons, and then do 2 nightmare dungeons, this gets you to tier 4 completely naked and lvl 55 and then you can just play on your own and get gear, pretty much starting you at endgame.
The patch that nerfed everything for season 1 is irrelevant by now, and most patches that drop are excellent buffing stuff that is underused, we even got free pets a few days ago alongside with pretty much everything being buffed.
There are a loooooot of viable builds too.
Overall diablo 4 right now is very good and it is on a great starting point for more additions, I do recommend giving it a try. Until poe 2 drops ofc😂.
Agreed sets in an ARPG are the dumbest thing possible how Blizzard does it. I don't want the devs to tell me what build I should be playing, I don't want to play the lame ass generic build they think is interesting.
As for the state of the game, you have to understand the main issue is why would you play this over the games? I'm not saying D4 is bad by itself, it's bad when you compare it to other games in the genre. The fact that the game feels good to play doesn't fix the issue that all you do on any Rogue build is spam Twisting Blades because there are no other viable options for T80+ dungeons. There's far too much legendary bottle-necking where over half of your affixes are locked because there are no better options or DIFFERENT options. You always need the single resource dump ability to have its legendary affix and there is only one available, you always need the DR 20% affix, so on and so forth. In PoE if you want defensives you have so many convoluted things, like Eldritch Battery, Chaos Inoculation, damage conversions, Guards and so damn many other means besides unga bunga iten make me take little daymaje.
It's basic and simple; it's clearly made for casual players, which is why so many people hate on D4. Because as usual Blizzard started something and other developers improved on it a million times while they completely forgot what they made in the first place. If you ask me, the team that worked on D4 did not even throw one glance at D3 since they repeated the same damn mistakes D3 did and took TEN YEARS to improve upon.
There seems to be a subset of the Diablo community that has either never played D4 or barely touched Season 1 before quitting and now loves to rag on the game using the same tired old repetitive statements.
This video is exactly that. It’s like OP decided to review the game at launch but released the video a year late after things improved drastically. Many of his arguments simply don’t hold any water anymore.
Why would i give more money to a game that fumbled so hard out the gate? The fact they were dumb enough to nerf anything in a pve game was enough reason for me to leave & never trust them again. The game itself is just boring too
23:00 I think you communicated it pretty well because that's how I feel too. Diablo I & II nailed the whole medieval gothic style. Diablo I in particular is my favorite because of it; the atmosphere is perfect. The game feels like a survival horror, with the isolation and the dungeon crawling as you progressively go down through the levels. And I am 100% sure that Brevik and his team made the whole story inspired by campy horror films; Diablo himself is this looming presence echoing through the cathedral until you finally meet him in Hell. None of the other games (not even Diablo II) captured that essence. Heck, Diablo I literally had an item stat called "Light Radius" which affected the vision of your character in the dark; it was brilliant.
D4 is a garbage game, no challenge you feel like a god 1-2 shotting everything form
Level one, loot falling from the sky so it doesn’t mean anything. So many more issues but hate what they’ve done to my boy.
Exactly. This season is just about rushing players to 100 but Blizzard doesn’t have anything for you to do at 100. Maybe be season 7 they’ll figure it out
The first one had a better vibe even than D2, but D2 was close. The music, the claustrophobic feel, the mystery, the difficulty, and the horror. I only ever feared the Butcher in the first game. I like all four games, but the first two were S tier.
3 fuckn sucks ass not even a Diablo game dude sure it’s a fun Arpg in its own right but it’s a dog shit Diablo game
The problem about being a "different" game compared to D2 is...D2 is the game that made the genre. People playing isometric ARPGs aren't looking for a non-D2 game. They want D2 but better. Path of Exile 2 is iterating on this by making combat more involved/dynamic, though it might not work out for them, since players might not want to press 5 buttons per pack. But as Mathil said, Diablo 2, despite its entire lack of endgame, *STILL* has the best loot system b/c there's ALWAYS something worth farming that's neat. Whether it's top tier set items (E.G. Tal Rasha's set), whether it's high runes, ethereal bases, top tier uniques, etc., there's always something neat in terms of gearing.
Path of Exile itself has...lost sight of this. Most gear is garbage. Uniques are too hard to reroll. Div cards aren't as awesome as high runes. D2's assortment of loot is still something that, 25 years later, has yet to be outdone.
The problem with the MMO dynamic is that skills will generally stay the same with equipment making minor adjustments.
A more satisfying method would be equipment modifying skills in big ways. The older Diablo games had equipment that were levels lower that made such huge adjustments that it was painful to let them go.
Level scaling honestly hurt the RPG genre, it completely guts the feeling of progression.
Im actually super addicted rn. I dropped every game 1 month ago and i still havent gone back. However, theres so many items/affixes that straight up dont work and theres a major lack in patches. That really sucks and honesrly makes the whole experience feel worse. I feel bad for ppl who are more casual than me
A lot of these complaints are from you skipping the campaign, I play through it on a new charachter and it gives me a super solid feeling of progression. It stops me from staying in helltides from 1-50 getting rid of that feeling of doing the same thing overamd over. Plus theres all these cool bosses and you get to explore sanctuary at an amazing pace. and it sets you up with herbs and crafting mats for endgame. The story is great, the cinematics are insane. Skipping half the game on every toon is never gunna feel great man....... I recommend making a new toon in season 4 on youre favourite class, make a homebrewed build and go through the campaign, youll be lvl 50 at the end and ready for wt3 plus, especially if you're playing solo.
Diablo 4 isnt a bad game, it's just not diablo 2. And thats fine, its been 20 years.
This video feels like youre trying to Convince us its bad cause d2 was "different."
It was made by a completly different team of devs, a literal entire generation later using the same IP. Just stop comparing it to diablo 2 and start enjoying what it is, a great casual ARPG, with solid content and a great story.
Great video and I think you make fair and constructive assessments and criticisms. I think that this video helps with a lot, not the least of which it helps with bridging the divide between people who like the different games.
To me Diablo II isn't just the gold standard, it's the game to play. No other game has captured my as much is that game has. A lot of it is of course nostalgia of having the game around while growing up. It's about as much a part of me as my siblings and the pets that I grew up with. But trying out other games I always felt there was something fundamental lacking in those games that Diablo II did right.
Diablo II didn't just get the loot system right, or the maps, or the atmosphere, or the music, or the pvp, or the multiplayer, or the solo games. It did all of that right, with the obvious gripe of not being able to share loot between characters easily, which Plugy fixed and the remake didn't. All the remake did was fix more bugs, rebalance, and show that that all could've been done with the original, which is still the better game despite lacking the bug fixes and balance updates.
It's almost impossible to beat that. For me I think there will never be a better game.
For one, I can see the appeal to the loot and craft system in PoE, I like it and I would love to delve into it, but it's not for me - it's too much. It requires me to get a PhD in the game and I'm old and I don't have all day, every day to play anymore. Heck, it's summer, I have little to no time to play any game and I just tap my phone screen to play an idle game while having breakfast, taking care of my cat, tending to the garden. I can't even play Diablo II during that, and when autumn hits that will change and I'll get back to playing D2, and mybe try PoE again. They days of playing games all day are behind me and I think fondly of it. I was there when PK'ing people with unexpectedly strong low lvl (lvl 9 to 17) characters was really fun. Duelling was fun and not (always) overly theory crafted. A lot of people like me stayed in classic when LoD came out because online, the charms and runewords and bot farming basically ruined the game and pvp for casual and fair players.
Nowadays, thanks to people like MrLlama I and others have rediscovered the beauties of LoD in single player.
I don't have the time or the desire to play online with others. I'm fine with the world moving on. I just wish that if you buy or download a game, you could always play it offline by yourself as well.
People growing up with games now will see many of their favorite games and childhood memories be deleted by big corporations. That is _not_ okay.
And it's easy for me to just not play such games, because for me it's unlikely I'll like it more than Diablo II and the handful of other games I play over and over again. But I also think that people should really think about it and just boycott such games. Not to force game developers and large corporations to make offline single player an option, but for you to have and own the games you play. So that you're not paying a subscription for a game you're not playing when you're visiting family or traveling the world. But to have your game wait for you when you come back and play it if and when you feel like it.
i hope your channel blows up! very high quality videos, you deserve it!
For real, one of his first three videos popped up in my recommended, and I was shocked that there were only like 450 subs. Love this channel
There is no Blizzard. There is only Activision.
Sorry but I have to disagree on your opinions about D4's vibe. With all the fails D4 has, which I do agree with you, the one thing I believe they nailed down was the moody-ness of it all. I assume you haven't read the books on Diablo lore? If you have , you'll know that the world of Diablo is one of utter pessimism and despair, it's a world where humans really don't get a break, they are assailed from all angles either by the forces of hell, heaven or even the entropic human forces as well. That is part of the reason why D3 was so divisive... it's cartoony WoW-inspired art design and PG13 story was at odds with what fans were used to expect from Diablo by then. D4 definetely pegged down that vibe with its art direction, story and soundtrack... kudos to the artists, writers and musicians for their work!
What you say are the reasons why I wanted to try diablo for first time and those were the ones that kept me in diablo 4. The environment is really special and suggestive. Amazing art.
I agree... But, this is the only correct strike of Diablo 4, the atmosphere...
I would absolutely agree with you if it wasn't for the characters being so over-the-top powerful, which simply destroys the moody-ness immediately.
I can't take the enemy seriously if I can very early on slam my hammer and make a wave of rocks delete everything in front of me. D2 didn't have this problem. The bigger skills that have the potential to wipe hordes of enemies come much later in the game with their actual potential being reached when they get maxed out. Example: Whirlwind vs Berserk strike. One does AOE dmg, but much much less per hit, while the other is single target with amazing damage. Only much later can you easily destroy mobs with whirlwind.
Visually, it can look rather good with it's sound design and music added to the mix, but to say it's as horror as D1 (especially) and D2, not by a longshot. The game simply gives off no feeling of danger or despair. Nor do you ever dread entering an area as you did in D1.
Now when you do mention it, the cartoony style did feel out of place given what could arguably be said extremely dire circumstances, nothing felt too bloody serious, even though peeps got eliminated everywhere, hell was let loose, heaven invaded, death god going on a rampage, it was as if everything had been filtered down to, just another monday.
@@ImmortalComposer Funny thing, you actually can have world shattering levels of power (even early on) and still have that moodiness. You are a one man army... but you can only be in one place at a time, and the world has a lot of armies that need smiting. Exalted and Godbound (Both Table top RPG games) handle this well in their own ways. I'd argue the root of your 'I am too powerful' issue is actually a factor of the difficulty of fights never scaling meaningfully. You can't run into something that'll tear your face off in a level scaled everywhere game, unless everything does.
I completely get where you're coming from with Diablo 4. It's trying to do so much, but it feels like it's missing that simple, gripping magic that made Diablo so iconic. For me, Diablo 1 had the best story-straightforward but powerful. A cursed village, the descent into darkness, and ultimately facing Diablo himself. No convoluted lore, just pure atmosphere and tension building as you go deeper. It’s a type of storytelling that I think modern Diablo titles are really lacking. Anyone else miss that focused, haunting vibe of the original?
Seeing the praise season 4 got made me lose all hope.
This game is just not for me.
I love grinding for hours to get a greater affix 3 with +life +life on hit and +60% resistance. So fun.
Awful and misleading title, amazing video
I've never felt so lonely in a multiplayer game as in D4 (except No Man's Sky perhaps). People rarely speak to each other, or even reply when spoken to. A bit depressing, frankly.