IMO Season 3 is a step back. I finally managed to get the Tempest Roar at around 85 for my Druid and there is literally no Endgame… A week ago i’ve completted all season milestones and didn’t uninstal the game because of the lunar event. An event from 6. till 20 feb… i finished the event in an hour. Blizzard has so many resources and still manage to fail. Gauntlet was going to be the silver lining of this season for me and they still cant bring it online.
I regreted the purchase of D4 at season1, s2 kinda gave hope but the last 2 weeks, nah i’m done.
Honestly I think Diablo 4 is just geared towards relatively casual players. I can only play an hour-ish per day, and I’m on a reasonable pace to finish the battle pass with week to spare.
I understand the frustration from hardcore players though, when you consider the level of commitment D2 took.
Even D3 had the promise of perpetual marginal progression. Even if you “completed” a season you still had things to chase.
From very soon after starting D4 I felt the “why am I still playing?” question, and that was never a sense I had in D2, D3, or POE. The answer in those games was always, “Because it’s fun!” In D4, by contrast, the sense is instead, “Well if you complete these chores eventually it’ll be fun,” but the fun always feels just out of reach. This isn’t a dig at S3–it was the same even right after launch. I have an hour to play every day–but I just can’t bring myself to care to.
To be fair, that balance of progression in D3 didn’t come until Reaper of Souls. Should they have learned from it? Yeah. But D4 is honestly in a better place than D3 was at launch.
Technically correct, but why was D3 such shit at launch? Because they designed around a doomed premise - the RMAH.
I think they haven’t learned much since then about how to design a fun and engaging arpg. For a company which pretty much invented the genre, this is incredibly tragic. F.
Oh absolutely. D3 launch is a profoundly low bar to overcome–and I don’t think anyone sincerely expected an improvement over the last season of D3–but I honestly would have expected more of the hard-learned lessons to remain learned. It feels like the franchise is amnesiac, and in terms of institutional memory and company turnover, it quite literally is. And that’s a shame.
technically yes but it feels like D3 had more to offer. Maybe i’m wrong and it’s the nostalgia.
D3 at launch had no endgame at all, much like D2. It was just farm bosses in the campaign until you got better gear to move to the next difficulty, rinse and repeat. Now, it did take longer because the game was balanced around the auction house. You were incredibly unlikely to find gear that would carry you into the next difficulty, so buying gear was generally the strategy to get you to the next difficulty. Then you could sell the gear you farmed there. It wasn’t really an issue on Normal/Nightmare, but it was on Hell/Inferno.
Sounds like more endgame than D4 has… And diablo was always a grind game, same as PoE or Warframe. But with D4 you just crash into a wall at full velocity when your build is good. Nightmare 100 dungeons are no problem. The only “fun” part was when butcher and the son of malphas decided to team up. Uber Lilith is a spit in the face but that’s it. There is literally nothing to grind for… And that’s my problem. It’s no fun to min/max when you don’t have anything to try it on
To be honest, i love to see games being played by everyone. It’s cool they offer casual players enough time to finish the season or the events but they also shall offer something for the endgame players. Anything else instead a hard wall. Open the limit for nightmare dungeons or the gauntlet/greater rifts from D3 but ATM there is nothing.
My friends and I shelved D4 a couple months after launch as we realized it was D3 launch all over again. We decided to give it a year or two and come back whenever the expansion drops, as we’re assuming that’s when they’ll fix a lot of the core design problems with the game, similar to what happened with D3 and Reaper of Souls.
I will say that we absolutely had a blast playing through the campaign together and even solo on occasions. The game has solid bones and tons of potential, but it seems like they were rushed and it didn’t have enough player testing and system refinement iterations. It very obviously needed at least another year of development. Hopefully they can turn it around in the expansion/future patches, because it’d be a damn shame for what’s there to just go to waste indefinitely with half-assed seasonal content.
