For once, this isn't a clickbait title, it's truly a massive update. The "short" summary is:
- completely reworked the codex and aspect system. No more stupid inventory management, now any aspect you find goes into the codex and gets automatically unlocked. Finding duplicate aspects permanently upgrades the aspect in your codex
- removed/reworked a lot of the useless/absurdly situational affixes and buffed the weaker ones
- added new powerful class/ability specific affixes like projectile duplication
- added a new crafting system similar to the Last Epoch one. You now collect tempering manuals from where you apply those class specific strong affixes on items
- straight up added Greater Rifts from Diablo 3 as an end-game activity
- reworked gear upgrading system
- reworked the uniques/aspects with flat damage to be good in late game
- reworked and greatly buffed minions
- added "greater affixes" to legendaries, so you have something to chase for
- made everything tradable (besides ubers and crafted items)
- added Andariel as a boss and reworked old bosses (including Lilith)
- made an uber lvl 200 version of every boss from the ladder
- added a way to practically guarantee an uber item per season, and made them easier to acquire
- reworked helltides with mechanics from past seasons
And they still haven't announced the seasonal mechanic and content.
We can safely say that Diablo 4 is out of Early Access lol.
Edit: And how could I forget, one of the most requested community features: zoom level lol.
I've done the convert Xbox Live to Gamepass for £1 twice now, so have spent about £280 on Xbox Live but easily have gotten twice the value of that back, maybe even there times tbh
Sure, let me check what’s on there right now.
- Dead Space
- Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
- Fable II
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
- Citizen Sleeper
- Injustice 2
- Alice: Madness Returns
- Persona 3 Reload
- Killer Instinct
- Control: Ultimate Edition
- A Way Out (As long as you have a friend to play it with!)
- Dragon Age Origins / II / Inquisition
- Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
- Celeste
- Fallout 3 / New Vegas
- Guilty Gear Strive
- Hi-Fi Rush
- Lies of P
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
That’s a healthy selection aha. There may be more on there that I missed / have forgotten atm or have left the service.
There’s too many amazing games being released all the time, on every platform and in every genre, to stick to one lane. Some of my all time favourites have been complete surprises I decided to play on a whim.
Still seems kinda bizarre that they aren't waiting for season 4 to release it on Gamepass. Seems like that'd be the perfect time to get a new wave of people into the game.
A lot of casual players who played at release struggled to get on board with making a new character for season 1. I imagine that it will be a similar audience playing the game for the first time and not wanting to "start again" for season 4.
There is so much hilarity in this alone.
It took a year, a buyout, and coming to Gamepass, to finally fix a broken game. *Maybe*.
I realize Software Development is not an overnight process, and being hopeful for S2 was also kind of misleading back before, but it really was a terrible endgame for launch and after.
Here is to hoping my money will eventually be well spent.
I bought the game on launch and haven't touched it since finishing the campaign twice. This will bring me back to it but it still has a long way to go if they want me grinding it like I did diablo 2 and 3.
Nah that patch is coming like first week of May or something with the new season. The GamePass release next week is gonna be the broken shit. I'm still gonna play the broken shit for the story but nothing more until that patch and new season drops
I wouldn't recommend playing on GamePass beyond just trying it out. The reason is because your save will be locked behind a subscription.
If you find that you like Diablo 4 and want to play it more regularly, I would consider just buying the game otherwise unless you don't mind being subscribed to GamePass in the future anytime you want to play Diablo 4.
It's like 7 months of Game Pass in order to match the price of Diablo IV right now. Even assuming you play literally NOTHING else on there, it's still more worth it to play it there if you're not seeing yourself grinding it half a year from now.
That seems like a very fair increase. The fully zoomed out boss cam is a bit much for general gameplay. For me it always felt just a little too close, so about 20% sounds good.
I wish I could disable the "smart camera" on bosses where it sorta pans to keep the boss in view.
The rest of the game your character is dead center of the screen and your aim/movement is based on that. Then suddenly it's no longer center and all that camera familiarity with the game you have been playing is gone.
ehh, I completely disagree with the article title (i didn't read the article) and the OP post saying it's a 'new game.' They just focused and iterated on everything that currently exists. They are quadrupling down on how d4 functions with some minor QOL. They didn't really remake anything and the game is going to be closer to d3 or an MMO gearing system than ever before.
* Codexes just don't appear in inventory, which was dumb af and now it's gone. it's QOL only but the whole system should be scrapped and codexes/aspects need to be added as an option on the skill tree.
* They effectively added primal ancients
* Stats are more focused, but also way more bloated and too generic. I wasn't a fan of 'near enemies', 'far enemies' or 'increased damage to shadow dot enemies' affixes at all but now it's just 'increased damage' which is boring af and homogenizes everything.
* Masterwork is just mobile game chores to extend your play time.
* Coming up on 9 months post release and Uber Andy having the same drop table as Duriel is dumb af. Give them unique drop tables.
* Tempering Manuals do make it so you have some agency on gear, but I don't think it's going to work the way they want it to.
Gearing is even more like an MMO (WoW) or similar to D3 where you need to hit 3 or 4 specific affixes on gear, then add tempering, then add a codex, then add masterwork.
Now that I'm typing this out, I feel like the gearing system is closer to an MMO than it is an ARPG. Along with all of these changes, they are redoing drops so less, but more focused gear drops. However, they buffed all the affixes which further pushes you into gearing your specific class. You can't loot a super badass bow on your sorcerer that makes you want to reroll a rogue. That's not how an ARPG should be, at all.
Is it better? In lots of ways it is, but it's still the same shallow disillusion of choice game they designed. They just took away some of the junk around the edges. In 2 seasons, people are going to be asking for more, because everything they've designed is shallow and silo'd. It's a bunch of non ARPG players and MMO devs trying to create a visionless ARPG.
I would argue these changes take a game from a .9 version to a 1.0 version after open beta and feedback from players.
> but the whole system should be scrapped and codexes/aspects need to be added as an option on the skill tree.
I've seen this many times, and I don't see how it would make the game better. Is clicking on a passive once at lvl X that interesting?
Anyway, with how the game works now, aspects are essentially passives that you upgrade through looting. To me this feels way better.
> They effectively added primal ancients
No, they effectively added exalted items from Last Epoch. You can roll 1-2 greater affixes, you don't have 0.0001% chance of rolling the entire item as a new tier, so it's not really the same system.
> I wasn't a fan of 'near enemies', 'far enemies' or 'increased damage to shadow dot enemies' affixes at all but now it's just 'increased damage' which is boring af and homogenizes everything.
This is false. They added new class and ability specific affixes. Two things they showcased in the stream was Bone Spear having a chance to being cast twice as an affix, and Dust Devil proc chances on abilities.
> Masterwork is just mobile game chores to extend your play time
This is an ARPG. It has RNG.
> Coming up on 9 months post release and Uber Andy having the same drop table as Duriel is dumb af. Give them unique drop tables.
This was based on community feedback. It was stupid to force you through a single activity rotation to have a chance at an Uber Unique. Now you can do more activities and have another boss that you can farm for that purpose.
> Gearing is even more like an MMO (WoW) or similar to D3 where you need to hit 3 or 4 specific affixes on gear, then add tempering, then add a codex, then add masterwork.
In D3 you had 5 mandatory stats on each item slot. This is simply not how items are designed in D4, each slot has their own pool of affixes. Plus in D3 you just slammed your set, and filled the gaps with the strongest legendaries - there's no opportunity cost on item slots like in D4, where you need to craft that legendary with build specific affixes, fill in any relevant uniques, and then divide the aspects between the open slots. It's really not the same thing.
Last Epoch progression is entirely crafting based. In that game you need 3-4 good affixes, then it's all RNG gambling with affixes - is that also an MMO? I don't see how this makes it even remotely close to an MMO/WoW, which use a basic iLvL upgrade system.
> Codexes just don't appear in inventory
Uh, hold on. You used to consume an Aspect when you used it. Now it's in your book and you can use it over and over. That's huge.
Before S4 you used to save up Aspects for later or you'd be stuck with the same weapon for ages because you couldn't find a replacement Aspect. Now that won't happen anymore. It's a huge QoL change.
Sounds like good critique.
The lack of satisfying loot upgrades(because number going up by 2% every level for the same items isn't satisfying at all) is what drove me away and will, if what you say is correct, will do so again.
That said, I suppose it still sounds like a big enough change to give it another go. Controlling your character in D4 is fun enough to at least play for a bit.
They'll have to work hard to keep up. POE's upcomming league is even more impressive and didn't even need to be.
I'm not the biggest ARPG player but:
> Gearing is even more like an MMO (WoW) or similar to D3 where you need to hit 3 or 4 specific affixes on gear, then add tempering, then add a codex, then add masterwork.
This sounds like your describing the heating process of an ARPG lore then an MMO. ARPG have always been about various layers of grinding and RNG too get the item you want, haven't they?
Have they made the itemization interesting yet? Even D3's felt boring to me, I miss some of the whacky shit from Diablo 2 like Breath of the Dying's constant poison nova memes
Well, about half the bullet points I the top comment of this chain are exactly about how they are changing Itemisation and the general consensus I've seen is "this is a massive improvement".
It seems closer to Last Epochs system rather than strictly D2 or D3; Finda solid base item, craft it up from there with your build specific affixes
To me, it seems like they concentrated affixes by increasing values by 50% while also adding more steps to the itemization with the new features. I don't believe it is going to add more agency to your builds based off game/skill balance and the codex system.
(im sorry if this comes of harsher than I mean it to) Does being able to choose what set of affixes to craft onto the item not provide enough agency? From what they showed it looks like you take the item from generic number up to boosting your build specifically
> Class changes—some of which aim to legitimize weak builds like minion necromancers—are coming too
Genuinely the most hype thing for me. I don't know whose idea it was to make the minion classes weakest build having minions. It's all I want to do in these types of games, and devs are always so scared of making the minions too good.
> I don't know whose idea it was to make the minion classes weakest build having minions.
It's always been this way in Diablo then late in the game's life cycle they buff the hell out of them.
I don't know if it's more resources, dumb executives gone, or the bobby goblin not meddling anymore, but something definitely changed.
Improving this much just before the Gamepass launch can't be a coincidence.
I mean the community has been shitting on the game for nine months and blasting the developers with feedback. They've basically been playing catch up since day 1. This cycle happens with all their games. They don't listen to the feedback in the developmental betas then they get confused when the game releases and the playerbase revolts so they then proceed to spend 6 months to a year patching in all their prior feedback.
> They don't listen to the feedback in the developmental betas then they get confused when the game releases and the playerbase revolts so they then proceed to spend 6 months to a year patching in all their prior feedback.
this part is pretty funny to read because if you followed development when it was announced, the dev team almost did nothing but listen to the feedback of D2 aficionados and the online discourse preceding announcement about D2 and D3.
* chase uniques with ridiculous drop rates
* no respecs or very expensive
* white and blue items that "matter"
* no greater rifts
* no sets
* gear plateau before reaching 100
all these are some examples of features asked by the D2 crowd during development. the have or are walking back on every single one of these. so no, they did listen. they listened to the wrong people, and now they are course correcting.
edit: and mind you, this is not to say that all the problems in D4 are because of D2 players. Blizzard made a fuck ton of mistakes with the game on its own. but lets not pretend they didn't listen to feedback.
Blizzard devs, at some point, completely lost their way and designed platforms to make money through microtransactions instead of games. This cannot be entirely blamed on the upper management meddling, it's clear the developers never once thought about how to make the game fun. A year of people telling them their game is awful must have finally sunk in.
Blizzard not listening to feedback has been a thing from when they literaly started lol, also they were one of the first developers to really go deep into mtx in the early 2000', you guys don' t really remember early blizzard at all
It just a coincidence. They’ve been slowly working towards this update since the first campfire chat. They just severely fucked up what they *thought* would be fun and what’s actually fun.
It took them quite literally relearning a decade of lessons from Diablo 3.
I don't know that anything has changed as they've been working on this since around the launch of the game. The game was just released before the end game was fully ready.
This would have taken plenty of development, much more than just couple months really.
But Microsoft is infinitely better at managing their studios than whatever activision was
> But Microsoft is infinitely better at managing their studios than whatever activision was
See the state of Xbox first party since the end of the 360 gen...
Uh I'm gonna doubt that statement...
Microsoft has absolutely no idea how to manage gaming studios, thank for them they have infinite money from elsewhere or they'd be out of gaming by now
It's called 'the pit', but yeah it's basically grifts. You'll have to wait a bit though. Public testing on PC in the battlenet client only starts April 2nd and goes for a week, and the Season 4 patch that was originally supposed to be mid April that will have all these major changes with it is now coming May 14th.
https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-4/news/diablo-4-ptr-overview-season-4-preview-and-itemization-rework-campfire-chat-338169
For those who want more detail. As somebody who has been very unhappy with the game since shortly after launch, this actually looks promising and it's the first time I feel a bit of interest in checking out the game again once the season starts.
> Necromancer and Druid Minions will now inherit 100% of the character's stats.
Like, this alone makes me want to start up the game again. After their statements that they didn't want minion necro to be a thing, I pretty much wrote off the game.
It seriously looks like it will be. Way better passives on the actual summon skills as options in the book of the dead, and minions across the board, Necro or Druid, are getting 100% of your stats too, where before they got a weird mix of percentages of some, none of others, etc. Minions and minion builds should be pretty great now.
>For once, this isn't a clickbait title
It's still hyperbolic in the sense that the game might as well have been in early access for a year. It's nuts to be patting Blizzard on the back for implementing so many common sense changes that everyone's been calling for from day 1. Like good for you Blizzard, you've succeeded in catching up to Reaper of Souls. Which was a game you already made 10 years ago.
Also it's just premature to call it revived 2 months before the update. Still skeptical about whether it'll have the depth and staying power to pull people back for more than a week. The fact remains that it still has an offensive number of microtransactions and the game still exists to push those.
I bought the game on release and it was a full experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the main campaign and spent like 30-40 hours in it. Didn’t experience any glitches or technical issues, graphics looked very solid on my PC. Maybe you didn’t like the game but idk where this early access nonsense is coming from
This is a constantly repeated sentiment in video game discussion nowadays. "I did not like these aspects of it so it's an incomplete game/there were bugs so it's incomplete."
Too many people fail to realize that you do not get to decide where the cut-off is for a game being 1.0 or not. That doesn't mean their decision for where 1.0 is can't be shit, it totally can. But this "early access/incomplete game" goofery that gets thrown around constantly is so weird and detracts from the actual discussion of issues.
Acknowledge that bad choices were made, arguing that they just rushed it out and it wasn't really "the full game" yet is weird and unproductive. It was their full game, and it had poor decisions in it, and that's fine. Just say the things you didn't like!
Also “The endgame sucks therefore the whole game does” is a sentiment I see a lot. By all accounts the campaign was great and the endgame was mediocre.
It’s especially strange when 98% of people who played the game (and that might even be a conservative estimate) *don’t give a flying fuck* about the “endgame”
Also people were complaining about the endgame after like the first weekend it was out. People will play 50+ hours in a week and then go online and complain that there wasn’t enough content
Exactly, I haven't buy it yet because of various reasons,
But I closely watched my friend and he played the campaign from the beginning until the end without any complaints. And this is a guy who complained about Starfield, and recently Dragon's Dogma 2 in the first 4 or 5 hours. Definitely not an early-access game, and still have that Blizzard's "polish".
Yeah like I absolutely had issues with the game, but to act like it didn't have a solid 40 hours or so of content is insane. Again, it had issues and I'm glad they've been working on it, but I got my hours worth out of the game and had fun. All this does is give me a reason to return to the game now and go for another run.
Only gripe with the title is the changes aren't actually made yet. They are listed changes for a PTR, which then get tested and then put in the game next season.
So while they sound good we are weeks/months from seeing what the final shape is.
What’s fucking crazy to me is how Diablo III was basically the poster child for how to fix a boring game and make it fun.
The fact these poor developers had to sit through *another* broken ass launch and watch guys with MBAs and no creative vision not learn their lesson has to be frustrating as hell.
I think D4s problem is due more to the long long development cycle and a lack of a cohesive vision for many years. Constant reboots and rehashing of what a Diablo game could be. The final product came together in about a year supposedly, which is still very impressive
Funnily this was the same problem Diablo 3 had.
I think that the reason it took a while for both to find their footing is because it’s probably a lot easier to see what needs improvement or tweaking once you can take a step back and look at the entire product as a whole.
There were 2 things keeping diablo 2 alive over its lifetime; d2jsp and medianXL. One wanted organized pvp and an auction house, and the other wanted difficulty.
So that's what they made (pvp was supposed to be delivered soon after launch). The problem is, it was the fastest and one of the most sold games ever, so while they catered to their diehard fans originally, the masses are more important and want other more casual things.
I don't think those were that important. Maybe in the last 10 years?
I played in private servers for a while and it was impressive, but base Diablo 2 with LOD is still a classic.
Diablo 4’s launch was not caused by “MBAs”, it was caused by design decisions that veterans of the industry like Rod Fergusson made.
MBAs weren’t the ones that designed a game with limited storage space because everyone’s characters are loading in everyone else’s inventories in the same instance. Or designed dungeons in a way that more often than not will lead you to a dead end or in a circle forcing you to back track
At this point, seeing Rod Ferguson come onto a game during development should signify that development has gone completely off the rails and someone needs to step in and make sure this mess ends up as a game.
It's so stupid how everything on this subreddit is just blamed on business people. Like completely bad design that does nothing to save money or sell gear or anything is just some "MBA's" fault apparently.
Like maybe whoever was designing the game just did a shit job? Do those people not exist? Why is that so controversial?
A game is good and it's "omg the developers are so great and smart" and anything goes wrong and it's "those business people ruined the game". Just throwing all nuance out the door.
Something like Overwatch 2 i can totally blame a large part on "MBA's". That game sucked because of stupid plans, paid mechanics, greed, and a complete lack of will to invest in the game.
Diablo 4 is just badly designed. On every level, in ways that no business guy ever had any say in.
I dunno why people struggle to blame business people for business people level decisions and developer for developer level decisions.
Business people level decisions are like "Make sure there is a multiplayer mode for this single player game" (See like the random multiplayer mode in the Tomb Raider remake) or "Have a battlepass with a paid and free track".
Developer level decisions are like "Because our system for drawing new assets at runtime is shitty, loading in NPCs will lag the entire game. So instead we preload all assets during the loading screen and hide them offscreen, only putting them in place when the player needs them. But what this does is bloat loading times and overall system requirements for having a bunch of NPCs loaded for no reason"
D4 had business level problems, but also a lot of technical and game design problems.
Ahhh how history changes with time. D3 while good and went through a massive change was often seen as a bad diablo game until the very end. The hope was that d4 was more D2 than 3. Problem is that there are entire generations of gamers who played D3 and not the second one and thus reaper of souls is their goat.
For me diablo 3 only became good when they close the auction house a few weeks before Reaper of Soul. Good items finally started to drop instead of total trash most of the time. I wasn't an hardcore player, but I went for 25 hours played to a little bit over 100 after Reaper of souls.
Stop...if u watch one of their streams for 10 minutes u will see its not the "suits" that forced them to make a terrible game, its just bad developers with bad ideas, or no ideas at all and too arrogant to take ideas from better games.
Apologies for asking, may I ask what makes diabolo 3 so fun?
I played it with my family (split screen) and found it to be mindless holding down the button to throw spiders as the witch doctor or whatever it is called. What do people enjoy about the game? I'd like some outside perspectives
Saw minions getting buffed and got hyped realized I can go back to my lazy summoner playstyle just like Diablo 2…. Until I fought Diablo and he wiped my guys with his aoe 😂
This does appear to be at least a good step in the right direction. You never feel more powerful as you go along, you just feel more handicapped by a time sink and that your inherent power really just keeps up at the same pace of the things you fight, so it just feels the same and boring always.
At least here they are trying to make it so loot actually does interesting stuff.
What's wild to me is this is dropping *before* the expansion. If this patch is as good as it looks on paper, and the expansion is good as well, then D4 might finally be the game many of us were hoping it'd be. I still have had a lot of fun with it personally, but in its current state can def admit that it's deeply flawed, but they've addressed (at least on paper), pretty much every major gripe I have with the game in this patch. Still have to see how it plays out of course...
D3 was the same way. Loot 2.0 was before the expansion.
but for me D4 needs Loot 2.0 on top of all these season 4 features. the loot itself is still bad.
It is getting loot 2.0 with this patch, the itemization is completely reworked and looks much much better.
https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-4/news/itemization-update-summary-diablo-4-season-4-338170
And btw everything they've shown so far is just the patch, not the seasonal changes/content. They haven't shown any of that yet.
If there are no players in game then they won't consider paying for anything. A strategy mmos do to sell yearly content is do a good update or event right before yearly release so players are a shorter trip to the storefront.
is it really wild? doesn't it drop before the expansion so that they can justify charging full price for the expansion as well? I would imagine if D4 endgame was still garbage by the time the expansion drops, people would riot and some would refuse to just buy it at all.
As someone who only vaguely knows what made Diablo IV bad during and post launch, are these changes enough to make picking it up worth it to someone interested in aRPGS? For reference I'm mostly playing Grim Dawn and occasionally Fate to get my fix.
GD is my favorite ARPG, and I also enjoy D4, but for entirely different reasons. The gist of it is that D4 is way more combat/action focused, with lots of activities, compared to that slow methodical journey that GD has. Almost like Retail WoW vs Classic WoW.
Best bet is to try it on gamepass, or get it on sale, since the games are very different and you might not enjoy it. At the very least, the campaign is pretty much universally enjoyable.
Unfortunately it doesnt add anything new or fresh that isnt already in other arpgs or in older diablo games. It becomes D3.5 with some stuff from D:I and now also from Last Epoch.
If you want to play an arpg basically on auto mode very casually, then yes. If you like to enjoy building your own character customized to your liking, then play last epoch instead.
Didn't the same thing happen with Diablo 3?
Step 1: release shitty MTX piece of garbage
Step 2: milk as much money as you can before even the hardcore addicts dry up, like that scene in Goodfellas
Step 3: fix the game by patching it to be how it should have always been at release
Step 4: Blizzard stans announce you heroically saved the game, instantly forgive you, and you get a bunch of suckers willing to pay full price for it
Not yet. They've said this stuff is priority over those, but they want to have more and better 'social elements' was the term they used, by the time the expansion is out, presumably for new activities. So maybe summer we'll see something? Expansion is due this year, probably early fall.
It's definitely a step in the right direction. Calling it a new game is overselling it. One nitpicky aspect of the items that annoy me is the legendary tag. Why do the manuals have the "legendary" tag on it? They should totally remove the legendary tag on everything. Just have common, magic, rare, scared, ancestral and unique items. I hope the expansion, they introduce more base item types with implicit affixes for crafting.
Also, I wish they would make some of the damage affixes local to the item and not a global damage buff. Like 40% damage on a weapon would increase the weapon damage by 40%. Not a global 40%.
The problem is that this blizzard already is a 'new company'. Basically all good devs left years ago. Including the guy who made Diablo 3 good with 2.0 and later the expansion (Josh Mosquiera)
No.
not going to give you any false hope, but at the Q&A section at the end of the livestream they did mention they're making changes to the shop, whatever that means.
I’ve been regretting having bought this game, played it for 10 hours and never picking it up again since last year.
This update better be as good as advertised. Please?
Nah. Game is still hot garbage and Path of Exile’s next patch complete crushes D4’s next patch.
Blizzard reworked items, but it’s still shit. Uber uniques being as good as they are makes everything else shitty. Now that they are easier to get just means if you don’t have them you have a shitty item instead. Reworked or not.
They continue to refuse to add an item filter for reasons that elude me. I guess they really want you to waste time looking at every item drop. Most of them will be garbage. They fixed some dumb mistakes with aspects and inventory management. The design for those were so bad it’s a wonder how it even made it live.
I honestly don't think anything can save D4 at this point.
Forcing me to deal zero damage with a skill to build resource so I can actually hit things means I'm only having fun 50% of combat time. It's a drag and nothing can be done about it.
This is not a problem in the end game. A lot of builds don't even use generators.
As for leveling, most of the basic skills now restore almost 2x the resource that they did on launch since they have been buffed almost every season. With S4 they're adding new base affixes on gear like fury per second which will help you get rid of generators earlier.
Diablo 4 always was, and always will be, a platform to sell mtx with a game running underneath. Nothing about that will change and I have 0 faith that this will make it a good game.
For once, this isn't a clickbait title, it's truly a massive update. The "short" summary is: - completely reworked the codex and aspect system. No more stupid inventory management, now any aspect you find goes into the codex and gets automatically unlocked. Finding duplicate aspects permanently upgrades the aspect in your codex - removed/reworked a lot of the useless/absurdly situational affixes and buffed the weaker ones - added new powerful class/ability specific affixes like projectile duplication - added a new crafting system similar to the Last Epoch one. You now collect tempering manuals from where you apply those class specific strong affixes on items - straight up added Greater Rifts from Diablo 3 as an end-game activity - reworked gear upgrading system - reworked the uniques/aspects with flat damage to be good in late game - reworked and greatly buffed minions - added "greater affixes" to legendaries, so you have something to chase for - made everything tradable (besides ubers and crafted items) - added Andariel as a boss and reworked old bosses (including Lilith) - made an uber lvl 200 version of every boss from the ladder - added a way to practically guarantee an uber item per season, and made them easier to acquire - reworked helltides with mechanics from past seasons And they still haven't announced the seasonal mechanic and content. We can safely say that Diablo 4 is out of Early Access lol. Edit: And how could I forget, one of the most requested community features: zoom level lol.
All ready for its full release on game pass!
Is it going to gamepass for real?
Yes. Next week, March 28
Lmao idk if I've gotten the value out of anything like I have gamepass.
As someone who plays games pretty much every day it’s been an absolute godsend yeah.
I've done the convert Xbox Live to Gamepass for £1 twice now, so have spent about £280 on Xbox Live but easily have gotten twice the value of that back, maybe even there times tbh
Yep, same. And hopefully I can do it for the third time next summer.
I think they nerfed the conversion, I think now you pay for three years of Live but get two years of Gamepass, which tbf is still a saving
They nerfed the conversion. It's not 1:1 anymore but 3:2. So 90 days of Xbox Live gets you 60 days of Gamepass Ultimate.
Mind sharing your favorite gamepass games?
Sure, let me check what’s on there right now. - Dead Space - Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice - Fable II - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Citizen Sleeper - Injustice 2 - Alice: Madness Returns - Persona 3 Reload - Killer Instinct - Control: Ultimate Edition - A Way Out (As long as you have a friend to play it with!) - Dragon Age Origins / II / Inquisition - Mass Effect: Legendary Edition - Celeste - Fallout 3 / New Vegas - Guilty Gear Strive - Hi-Fi Rush - Lies of P - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion That’s a healthy selection aha. There may be more on there that I missed / have forgotten atm or have left the service.
I love to see a fellow variety gamer who likes to sample the medium as a whole.
check out /r/patientgamers
There’s too many amazing games being released all the time, on every platform and in every genre, to stick to one lane. Some of my all time favourites have been complete surprises I decided to play on a whim.
If you like Citizen Sleeper, check out Norco!
Will do, thanks!
Still seems kinda bizarre that they aren't waiting for season 4 to release it on Gamepass. Seems like that'd be the perfect time to get a new wave of people into the game.
Well the season was delayed. And delaying gamepass arrival would be poorly received
Enough time for people to enjoy the campaign, explore the world, fill the renown (account wide buffs) for season 4 release.
A lot of casual players who played at release struggled to get on board with making a new character for season 1. I imagine that it will be a similar audience playing the game for the first time and not wanting to "start again" for season 4.
Maybe they thought since these changes were so massive better to get players to join in on this wave of the game than the old one?
Yup! Next week!
There is so much hilarity in this alone. It took a year, a buyout, and coming to Gamepass, to finally fix a broken game. *Maybe*. I realize Software Development is not an overnight process, and being hopeful for S2 was also kind of misleading back before, but it really was a terrible endgame for launch and after. Here is to hoping my money will eventually be well spent.
I bought the game on launch and haven't touched it since finishing the campaign twice. This will bring me back to it but it still has a long way to go if they want me grinding it like I did diablo 2 and 3.
The updates mentioned in this article don’t come until May.
[удалено]
Nah that patch is coming like first week of May or something with the new season. The GamePass release next week is gonna be the broken shit. I'm still gonna play the broken shit for the story but nothing more until that patch and new season drops
I wouldn't recommend playing on GamePass beyond just trying it out. The reason is because your save will be locked behind a subscription. If you find that you like Diablo 4 and want to play it more regularly, I would consider just buying the game otherwise unless you don't mind being subscribed to GamePass in the future anytime you want to play Diablo 4.
I was one of the sad fuckers who bought it on release. Been waiting on it getting fixed and this seems to be a start
Meh it wasn’t that bad on release. Better than D3 was at least. Can’t not enjoy anything Ralph Ineson is in too.
It's like 7 months of Game Pass in order to match the price of Diablo IV right now. Even assuming you play literally NOTHING else on there, it's still more worth it to play it there if you're not seeing yourself grinding it half a year from now.
>one of the most requested community features: zoom level Just to clarify, does this mean I can zoom out more? How much more?
Halfway between what it is now and what it zooms out for boss battles
That seems like a very fair increase. The fully zoomed out boss cam is a bit much for general gameplay. For me it always felt just a little too close, so about 20% sounds good.
I wish I could disable the "smart camera" on bosses where it sorta pans to keep the boss in view. The rest of the game your character is dead center of the screen and your aim/movement is based on that. Then suddenly it's no longer center and all that camera familiarity with the game you have been playing is gone.
Like 1.25x
Neat. I'll have to give season 4 a shot.
ehh, I completely disagree with the article title (i didn't read the article) and the OP post saying it's a 'new game.' They just focused and iterated on everything that currently exists. They are quadrupling down on how d4 functions with some minor QOL. They didn't really remake anything and the game is going to be closer to d3 or an MMO gearing system than ever before. * Codexes just don't appear in inventory, which was dumb af and now it's gone. it's QOL only but the whole system should be scrapped and codexes/aspects need to be added as an option on the skill tree. * They effectively added primal ancients * Stats are more focused, but also way more bloated and too generic. I wasn't a fan of 'near enemies', 'far enemies' or 'increased damage to shadow dot enemies' affixes at all but now it's just 'increased damage' which is boring af and homogenizes everything. * Masterwork is just mobile game chores to extend your play time. * Coming up on 9 months post release and Uber Andy having the same drop table as Duriel is dumb af. Give them unique drop tables. * Tempering Manuals do make it so you have some agency on gear, but I don't think it's going to work the way they want it to. Gearing is even more like an MMO (WoW) or similar to D3 where you need to hit 3 or 4 specific affixes on gear, then add tempering, then add a codex, then add masterwork. Now that I'm typing this out, I feel like the gearing system is closer to an MMO than it is an ARPG. Along with all of these changes, they are redoing drops so less, but more focused gear drops. However, they buffed all the affixes which further pushes you into gearing your specific class. You can't loot a super badass bow on your sorcerer that makes you want to reroll a rogue. That's not how an ARPG should be, at all. Is it better? In lots of ways it is, but it's still the same shallow disillusion of choice game they designed. They just took away some of the junk around the edges. In 2 seasons, people are going to be asking for more, because everything they've designed is shallow and silo'd. It's a bunch of non ARPG players and MMO devs trying to create a visionless ARPG. I would argue these changes take a game from a .9 version to a 1.0 version after open beta and feedback from players.
> but the whole system should be scrapped and codexes/aspects need to be added as an option on the skill tree. I've seen this many times, and I don't see how it would make the game better. Is clicking on a passive once at lvl X that interesting? Anyway, with how the game works now, aspects are essentially passives that you upgrade through looting. To me this feels way better. > They effectively added primal ancients No, they effectively added exalted items from Last Epoch. You can roll 1-2 greater affixes, you don't have 0.0001% chance of rolling the entire item as a new tier, so it's not really the same system. > I wasn't a fan of 'near enemies', 'far enemies' or 'increased damage to shadow dot enemies' affixes at all but now it's just 'increased damage' which is boring af and homogenizes everything. This is false. They added new class and ability specific affixes. Two things they showcased in the stream was Bone Spear having a chance to being cast twice as an affix, and Dust Devil proc chances on abilities. > Masterwork is just mobile game chores to extend your play time This is an ARPG. It has RNG. > Coming up on 9 months post release and Uber Andy having the same drop table as Duriel is dumb af. Give them unique drop tables. This was based on community feedback. It was stupid to force you through a single activity rotation to have a chance at an Uber Unique. Now you can do more activities and have another boss that you can farm for that purpose. > Gearing is even more like an MMO (WoW) or similar to D3 where you need to hit 3 or 4 specific affixes on gear, then add tempering, then add a codex, then add masterwork. In D3 you had 5 mandatory stats on each item slot. This is simply not how items are designed in D4, each slot has their own pool of affixes. Plus in D3 you just slammed your set, and filled the gaps with the strongest legendaries - there's no opportunity cost on item slots like in D4, where you need to craft that legendary with build specific affixes, fill in any relevant uniques, and then divide the aspects between the open slots. It's really not the same thing. Last Epoch progression is entirely crafting based. In that game you need 3-4 good affixes, then it's all RNG gambling with affixes - is that also an MMO? I don't see how this makes it even remotely close to an MMO/WoW, which use a basic iLvL upgrade system.
> Codexes just don't appear in inventory Uh, hold on. You used to consume an Aspect when you used it. Now it's in your book and you can use it over and over. That's huge. Before S4 you used to save up Aspects for later or you'd be stuck with the same weapon for ages because you couldn't find a replacement Aspect. Now that won't happen anymore. It's a huge QoL change.
Sounds like good critique. The lack of satisfying loot upgrades(because number going up by 2% every level for the same items isn't satisfying at all) is what drove me away and will, if what you say is correct, will do so again. That said, I suppose it still sounds like a big enough change to give it another go. Controlling your character in D4 is fun enough to at least play for a bit. They'll have to work hard to keep up. POE's upcomming league is even more impressive and didn't even need to be.
I'm not the biggest ARPG player but: > Gearing is even more like an MMO (WoW) or similar to D3 where you need to hit 3 or 4 specific affixes on gear, then add tempering, then add a codex, then add masterwork. This sounds like your describing the heating process of an ARPG lore then an MMO. ARPG have always been about various layers of grinding and RNG too get the item you want, haven't they?
Have they made the itemization interesting yet? Even D3's felt boring to me, I miss some of the whacky shit from Diablo 2 like Breath of the Dying's constant poison nova memes
Well, about half the bullet points I the top comment of this chain are exactly about how they are changing Itemisation and the general consensus I've seen is "this is a massive improvement". It seems closer to Last Epochs system rather than strictly D2 or D3; Finda solid base item, craft it up from there with your build specific affixes
To me, it seems like they concentrated affixes by increasing values by 50% while also adding more steps to the itemization with the new features. I don't believe it is going to add more agency to your builds based off game/skill balance and the codex system.
(im sorry if this comes of harsher than I mean it to) Does being able to choose what set of affixes to craft onto the item not provide enough agency? From what they showed it looks like you take the item from generic number up to boosting your build specifically
When is this update going live?
14th of May.
damn, I was kind of hoping it'd arrive before D4 lands on game pass, this sounds like the better experience
D4’s fun as-is up to a point - and you’ll prob hit that point by the time those changes roll around.
To add there is a PTR for anyone on PC + Battlenet in April
> Class changes—some of which aim to legitimize weak builds like minion necromancers—are coming too Genuinely the most hype thing for me. I don't know whose idea it was to make the minion classes weakest build having minions. It's all I want to do in these types of games, and devs are always so scared of making the minions too good.
> I don't know whose idea it was to make the minion classes weakest build having minions. It's always been this way in Diablo then late in the game's life cycle they buff the hell out of them.
this sounds really good actually
RIFTS are back?? Oh shit here we go time for me to reinstall D4
They added greater rifts????? Holy shit that's the only reason I liked d3
Thanks for the recap. I played S1 and S2. Definitely some good updates here. Still unsure if I'll play any season pre DLC.
What having no Bobby do to a mofo
I don't know if it's more resources, dumb executives gone, or the bobby goblin not meddling anymore, but something definitely changed. Improving this much just before the Gamepass launch can't be a coincidence.
D. None of the above. It's the normal cycle of life for a Diablo game.
Bingo
Yeah in my opinion reaper of souls is when D3 became really good
I mean the community has been shitting on the game for nine months and blasting the developers with feedback. They've basically been playing catch up since day 1. This cycle happens with all their games. They don't listen to the feedback in the developmental betas then they get confused when the game releases and the playerbase revolts so they then proceed to spend 6 months to a year patching in all their prior feedback.
> They don't listen to the feedback in the developmental betas then they get confused when the game releases and the playerbase revolts so they then proceed to spend 6 months to a year patching in all their prior feedback. this part is pretty funny to read because if you followed development when it was announced, the dev team almost did nothing but listen to the feedback of D2 aficionados and the online discourse preceding announcement about D2 and D3. * chase uniques with ridiculous drop rates * no respecs or very expensive * white and blue items that "matter" * no greater rifts * no sets * gear plateau before reaching 100 all these are some examples of features asked by the D2 crowd during development. the have or are walking back on every single one of these. so no, they did listen. they listened to the wrong people, and now they are course correcting. edit: and mind you, this is not to say that all the problems in D4 are because of D2 players. Blizzard made a fuck ton of mistakes with the game on its own. but lets not pretend they didn't listen to feedback.
Blizzard devs, at some point, completely lost their way and designed platforms to make money through microtransactions instead of games. This cannot be entirely blamed on the upper management meddling, it's clear the developers never once thought about how to make the game fun. A year of people telling them their game is awful must have finally sunk in.
Blizzard not listening to feedback has been a thing from when they literaly started lol, also they were one of the first developers to really go deep into mtx in the early 2000', you guys don' t really remember early blizzard at all
It just a coincidence. They’ve been slowly working towards this update since the first campfire chat. They just severely fucked up what they *thought* would be fun and what’s actually fun. It took them quite literally relearning a decade of lessons from Diablo 3.
I don't know that anything has changed as they've been working on this since around the launch of the game. The game was just released before the end game was fully ready.
They said that Season 4 would be where most of these changes would occur way back in the Season 1/2 time so I'm not sure it is thanks to no bobby.
This would have taken plenty of development, much more than just couple months really. But Microsoft is infinitely better at managing their studios than whatever activision was
> But Microsoft is infinitely better at managing their studios than whatever activision was See the state of Xbox first party since the end of the 360 gen... Uh I'm gonna doubt that statement... Microsoft has absolutely no idea how to manage gaming studios, thank for them they have infinite money from elsewhere or they'd be out of gaming by now
Sounds neat. Gonna jump back in once it lands.
Seems like a huge QoL improvement. I might have to go back in
Oooh so they finally added the rifts ?? Might get back in the game, I was desperate to re play something on my ps5
It's called 'the pit', but yeah it's basically grifts. You'll have to wait a bit though. Public testing on PC in the battlenet client only starts April 2nd and goes for a week, and the Season 4 patch that was originally supposed to be mid April that will have all these major changes with it is now coming May 14th.
Now all it needs is a Paladin, and I can finally play the game.
https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-4/news/diablo-4-ptr-overview-season-4-preview-and-itemization-rework-campfire-chat-338169 For those who want more detail. As somebody who has been very unhappy with the game since shortly after launch, this actually looks promising and it's the first time I feel a bit of interest in checking out the game again once the season starts. > Necromancer and Druid Minions will now inherit 100% of the character's stats. Like, this alone makes me want to start up the game again. After their statements that they didn't want minion necro to be a thing, I pretty much wrote off the game.
It's so nice that there is some competition between ARPGs now.
Oh wow. That sounds like Ill come back and play D4. Now if only summon necro is viable and Ill be so happy
It seriously looks like it will be. Way better passives on the actual summon skills as options in the book of the dead, and minions across the board, Necro or Druid, are getting 100% of your stats too, where before they got a weird mix of percentages of some, none of others, etc. Minions and minion builds should be pretty great now.
>For once, this isn't a clickbait title It's still hyperbolic in the sense that the game might as well have been in early access for a year. It's nuts to be patting Blizzard on the back for implementing so many common sense changes that everyone's been calling for from day 1. Like good for you Blizzard, you've succeeded in catching up to Reaper of Souls. Which was a game you already made 10 years ago. Also it's just premature to call it revived 2 months before the update. Still skeptical about whether it'll have the depth and staying power to pull people back for more than a week. The fact remains that it still has an offensive number of microtransactions and the game still exists to push those.
I bought the game on release and it was a full experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the main campaign and spent like 30-40 hours in it. Didn’t experience any glitches or technical issues, graphics looked very solid on my PC. Maybe you didn’t like the game but idk where this early access nonsense is coming from
This is a constantly repeated sentiment in video game discussion nowadays. "I did not like these aspects of it so it's an incomplete game/there were bugs so it's incomplete." Too many people fail to realize that you do not get to decide where the cut-off is for a game being 1.0 or not. That doesn't mean their decision for where 1.0 is can't be shit, it totally can. But this "early access/incomplete game" goofery that gets thrown around constantly is so weird and detracts from the actual discussion of issues. Acknowledge that bad choices were made, arguing that they just rushed it out and it wasn't really "the full game" yet is weird and unproductive. It was their full game, and it had poor decisions in it, and that's fine. Just say the things you didn't like!
Also “The endgame sucks therefore the whole game does” is a sentiment I see a lot. By all accounts the campaign was great and the endgame was mediocre.
It’s especially strange when 98% of people who played the game (and that might even be a conservative estimate) *don’t give a flying fuck* about the “endgame”
Also people were complaining about the endgame after like the first weekend it was out. People will play 50+ hours in a week and then go online and complain that there wasn’t enough content
Exactly, I haven't buy it yet because of various reasons, But I closely watched my friend and he played the campaign from the beginning until the end without any complaints. And this is a guy who complained about Starfield, and recently Dragon's Dogma 2 in the first 4 or 5 hours. Definitely not an early-access game, and still have that Blizzard's "polish".
Yeah like I absolutely had issues with the game, but to act like it didn't have a solid 40 hours or so of content is insane. Again, it had issues and I'm glad they've been working on it, but I got my hours worth out of the game and had fun. All this does is give me a reason to return to the game now and go for another run.
What’s hyperbolic is saying this game should have been in early access for the first year of release.
Lol Dont judge the gamed future based on patch notes Wait till you gry it..
Damn, maybe I do have to go back. I never even beat the game, but this sounds like it might have fixed some of my major issues with it
Only gripe with the title is the changes aren't actually made yet. They are listed changes for a PTR, which then get tested and then put in the game next season. So while they sound good we are weeks/months from seeing what the final shape is.
Bruh I was about to install the game again lol thanks for telling us
Close call. You almost played Diablo 4 haha.
If Diablo 3 PTR is anything to go by, there are usually only small changes before the patch goes to live servers, if any.
The point was you can't go download and play those changes now.
Well that is significant. So none of the information is relevant now. lol.
Hey, aren't you that Galactic Reign guy from YouTube?!
What’s fucking crazy to me is how Diablo III was basically the poster child for how to fix a boring game and make it fun. The fact these poor developers had to sit through *another* broken ass launch and watch guys with MBAs and no creative vision not learn their lesson has to be frustrating as hell.
I think D4s problem is due more to the long long development cycle and a lack of a cohesive vision for many years. Constant reboots and rehashing of what a Diablo game could be. The final product came together in about a year supposedly, which is still very impressive
Funnily this was the same problem Diablo 3 had. I think that the reason it took a while for both to find their footing is because it’s probably a lot easier to see what needs improvement or tweaking once you can take a step back and look at the entire product as a whole.
There were 2 things keeping diablo 2 alive over its lifetime; d2jsp and medianXL. One wanted organized pvp and an auction house, and the other wanted difficulty. So that's what they made (pvp was supposed to be delivered soon after launch). The problem is, it was the fastest and one of the most sold games ever, so while they catered to their diehard fans originally, the masses are more important and want other more casual things.
I don't think those were that important. Maybe in the last 10 years? I played in private servers for a while and it was impressive, but base Diablo 2 with LOD is still a classic.
From what I understand, the Diablo 4 team didn't communicate at all with the Diablo 3 and Diablo 2 Resurrected teams.
Diablo 4’s launch was not caused by “MBAs”, it was caused by design decisions that veterans of the industry like Rod Fergusson made. MBAs weren’t the ones that designed a game with limited storage space because everyone’s characters are loading in everyone else’s inventories in the same instance. Or designed dungeons in a way that more often than not will lead you to a dead end or in a circle forcing you to back track
[удалено]
At this point, seeing Rod Ferguson come onto a game during development should signify that development has gone completely off the rails and someone needs to step in and make sure this mess ends up as a game.
It's so stupid how everything on this subreddit is just blamed on business people. Like completely bad design that does nothing to save money or sell gear or anything is just some "MBA's" fault apparently. Like maybe whoever was designing the game just did a shit job? Do those people not exist? Why is that so controversial? A game is good and it's "omg the developers are so great and smart" and anything goes wrong and it's "those business people ruined the game". Just throwing all nuance out the door. Something like Overwatch 2 i can totally blame a large part on "MBA's". That game sucked because of stupid plans, paid mechanics, greed, and a complete lack of will to invest in the game. Diablo 4 is just badly designed. On every level, in ways that no business guy ever had any say in.
I dunno why people struggle to blame business people for business people level decisions and developer for developer level decisions. Business people level decisions are like "Make sure there is a multiplayer mode for this single player game" (See like the random multiplayer mode in the Tomb Raider remake) or "Have a battlepass with a paid and free track". Developer level decisions are like "Because our system for drawing new assets at runtime is shitty, loading in NPCs will lag the entire game. So instead we preload all assets during the loading screen and hide them offscreen, only putting them in place when the player needs them. But what this does is bloat loading times and overall system requirements for having a bunch of NPCs loaded for no reason" D4 had business level problems, but also a lot of technical and game design problems.
What's so so so stupid about that inventory thing is that Diablo 3 had the SAME PROBLEM, and was fixed a long time ago.
This is reddit, businessman bad, developer wholesome.
Ahhh how history changes with time. D3 while good and went through a massive change was often seen as a bad diablo game until the very end. The hope was that d4 was more D2 than 3. Problem is that there are entire generations of gamers who played D3 and not the second one and thus reaper of souls is their goat.
For me diablo 3 only became good when they close the auction house a few weeks before Reaper of Soul. Good items finally started to drop instead of total trash most of the time. I wasn't an hardcore player, but I went for 25 hours played to a little bit over 100 after Reaper of souls.
why blame mbas and not shit game directors. if mbas were involved i would see more aggressive mtx but there really isnt
Stop...if u watch one of their streams for 10 minutes u will see its not the "suits" that forced them to make a terrible game, its just bad developers with bad ideas, or no ideas at all and too arrogant to take ideas from better games.
You talk like anybody on the D4 team knew better. They were all new hires with no experience.
MBAs ruin everything good in this world
I just hope they don't shut it down. I play d3's seasons at least twice a year
Battlefield developers: first time?
343 and Blizzard would be a match made in hell. They're both great at fixing up games and then completely fucking up their next release anyway.
Apologies for asking, may I ask what makes diabolo 3 so fun? I played it with my family (split screen) and found it to be mindless holding down the button to throw spiders as the witch doctor or whatever it is called. What do people enjoy about the game? I'd like some outside perspectives
I take it the large open world is pretty much pointless now?
Always has been.
Saw minions getting buffed and got hyped realized I can go back to my lazy summoner playstyle just like Diablo 2…. Until I fought Diablo and he wiped my guys with his aoe 😂
This does appear to be at least a good step in the right direction. You never feel more powerful as you go along, you just feel more handicapped by a time sink and that your inherent power really just keeps up at the same pace of the things you fight, so it just feels the same and boring always. At least here they are trying to make it so loot actually does interesting stuff.
This is the most important comment here. Until this gets fixed, the game is dead to me.
I've been extremely critical of D4 in the past, but these changes will probably be enough to bring me back.
Is it a rule that modern main series Diablo games have to be released in a state that will be later largely overhauled?
As someone who hasn't played Diablo since #1, should I get Diablo 4, or last epoch?
Last epoch
Gotcha. Thanks!
The reworks are essentially a copy of Last Epoch so get the original.
Personally I burned out of playing Last Epoch a lot faster than D4. I'm waiting for both of them to get better.
What's wild to me is this is dropping *before* the expansion. If this patch is as good as it looks on paper, and the expansion is good as well, then D4 might finally be the game many of us were hoping it'd be. I still have had a lot of fun with it personally, but in its current state can def admit that it's deeply flawed, but they've addressed (at least on paper), pretty much every major gripe I have with the game in this patch. Still have to see how it plays out of course...
D3 was the same way. Loot 2.0 was before the expansion. but for me D4 needs Loot 2.0 on top of all these season 4 features. the loot itself is still bad.
It is getting loot 2.0 with this patch, the itemization is completely reworked and looks much much better. https://www.wowhead.com/diablo-4/news/itemization-update-summary-diablo-4-season-4-338170 And btw everything they've shown so far is just the patch, not the seasonal changes/content. They haven't shown any of that yet.
If there are no players in game then they won't consider paying for anything. A strategy mmos do to sell yearly content is do a good update or event right before yearly release so players are a shorter trip to the storefront.
is it really wild? doesn't it drop before the expansion so that they can justify charging full price for the expansion as well? I would imagine if D4 endgame was still garbage by the time the expansion drops, people would riot and some would refuse to just buy it at all.
As someone who only vaguely knows what made Diablo IV bad during and post launch, are these changes enough to make picking it up worth it to someone interested in aRPGS? For reference I'm mostly playing Grim Dawn and occasionally Fate to get my fix.
GD is my favorite ARPG, and I also enjoy D4, but for entirely different reasons. The gist of it is that D4 is way more combat/action focused, with lots of activities, compared to that slow methodical journey that GD has. Almost like Retail WoW vs Classic WoW. Best bet is to try it on gamepass, or get it on sale, since the games are very different and you might not enjoy it. At the very least, the campaign is pretty much universally enjoyable.
Unfortunately it doesnt add anything new or fresh that isnt already in other arpgs or in older diablo games. It becomes D3.5 with some stuff from D:I and now also from Last Epoch.
If you want to play an arpg basically on auto mode very casually, then yes. If you like to enjoy building your own character customized to your liking, then play last epoch instead.
Actually sounds pretty good. Not played since launch but this seems like a big enough overhaul to give the game another shot.
Didn't the same thing happen with Diablo 3? Step 1: release shitty MTX piece of garbage Step 2: milk as much money as you can before even the hardcore addicts dry up, like that scene in Goodfellas Step 3: fix the game by patching it to be how it should have always been at release Step 4: Blizzard stans announce you heroically saved the game, instantly forgive you, and you get a bunch of suckers willing to pay full price for it
Step 5: REPEAT! They seriously just want to slowly release the whole game $20 at a time.
Is there any sort of group finder or matchmaking yet?
Not yet. They've said this stuff is priority over those, but they want to have more and better 'social elements' was the term they used, by the time the expansion is out, presumably for new activities. So maybe summer we'll see something? Expansion is due this year, probably early fall.
Cool, thanks. That's what I love about Helldivers, so easy to just get straight in with a group.
It's definitely a step in the right direction. Calling it a new game is overselling it. One nitpicky aspect of the items that annoy me is the legendary tag. Why do the manuals have the "legendary" tag on it? They should totally remove the legendary tag on everything. Just have common, magic, rare, scared, ancestral and unique items. I hope the expansion, they introduce more base item types with implicit affixes for crafting. Also, I wish they would make some of the damage affixes local to the item and not a global damage buff. Like 40% damage on a weapon would increase the weapon damage by 40%. Not a global 40%.
Is it possible to search for groups/party's yet?
[удалено]
The problem is that this blizzard already is a 'new company'. Basically all good devs left years ago. Including the guy who made Diablo 3 good with 2.0 and later the expansion (Josh Mosquiera)
Did they remove the microtransactions? If so, then I'm ready to go!
No. not going to give you any false hope, but at the Q&A section at the end of the livestream they did mention they're making changes to the shop, whatever that means.
The mtx, including the seasonal passes, are 100% cosmetic. Unless you are taking a hard principled stand, it is quite survivable.
I’ve been regretting having bought this game, played it for 10 hours and never picking it up again since last year. This update better be as good as advertised. Please?
With 10 hours you probably didn't even finish the campaign. Nothing in this update will really help you with that. Game probably just isn't for you.
It's not even out yet. Won't be for awhile.
Nah. Game is still hot garbage and Path of Exile’s next patch complete crushes D4’s next patch. Blizzard reworked items, but it’s still shit. Uber uniques being as good as they are makes everything else shitty. Now that they are easier to get just means if you don’t have them you have a shitty item instead. Reworked or not. They continue to refuse to add an item filter for reasons that elude me. I guess they really want you to waste time looking at every item drop. Most of them will be garbage. They fixed some dumb mistakes with aspects and inventory management. The design for those were so bad it’s a wonder how it even made it live.
Offline mode?
I will not buy it until it has a proper offline mode. I can play Last Epoch whenever I want. I could not do the same with Diablo 4.
So diablo 4 is launching soon? For realsies this time?
Haven't even played the changes and are already celebrating its greatness. How do they do it after so many fails?
Do you think this game will ever be fun?
Some teams at blizzard are really trying to listen to the players, and it feels like they are playing tug of war with shareholders.
Zoom is something I wanted from the first beta. Add in the increased xp and I actively want to play now.
Haha seriously? Have they even play it yet?
I honestly don't think anything can save D4 at this point. Forcing me to deal zero damage with a skill to build resource so I can actually hit things means I'm only having fun 50% of combat time. It's a drag and nothing can be done about it.
Did you never play d3 on launch? In d3 it was 80% unfun abilities 20% fun It’s definitely fixable
This is not a problem in the end game. A lot of builds don't even use generators. As for leveling, most of the basic skills now restore almost 2x the resource that they did on launch since they have been buffed almost every season. With S4 they're adding new base affixes on gear like fury per second which will help you get rid of generators earlier.
They coulda just said "Copied basically everything good from Last Epoch". Because that is essentially what they're doing
Diablo 4 always was, and always will be, a platform to sell mtx with a game running underneath. Nothing about that will change and I have 0 faith that this will make it a good game.