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Diablo 4 review: The horror’s back, and we couldn’t be happier
- Thread starter erek
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RanceJustice
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The season/battlepass stuff I could overlook IF it was done well. Treated like a "premium" subscription once every 2-3 months that would be fine IF AND ONLY IF there wasn't FOMO bullshit designed to make you rush to max it out during the season or lose it forever. Deep Rock Galactic is one of the only games I've seen handle this properly where old season items can be unlocked in a variety of ways (they're not perfect and its a bit grindy, but still way better than most others). I personally would prefer if players who bought the season/battle pass for that season and didn't unlock the whole thing in time bascially got it either A) starting to drop in game next season or B) unlocked on a delay at the start of the second season ahead of it. So if I get Premium pass 1, but life gets busy and I only get to rank 50 of 100 - I don't get to show off all the shiny immediately, but either come Season 2 the S1 items are put into "normal" in game rare drop items in the case of a Diablo like title and/or at the start of Season 3 all the remaining S1 items are unlocked on the account. There could also be discounted "old season premium" for those who were not playing until S2 at all, could pay and have a way to unlock S1 items .
Unfortunately watching Blizz's downward spiral over the past years I have little faith they will do anything like this, from watching what happened with Diablo Immortal on every level, WoW's sadly increasing item mall, and the bloody disaster that is Overwatch 2 (now with canceled PVE mode!). Putting aside the battle pass and likely FOMO bullshit, the thing I really can't stomach is that atop all this is the item mall - paid exclusive cosmetics. I hope this forum is one of the few communities with enough "old guys" who remember when cosmetic content was considered a part of the game, not cut out and sold for surcharge while apologists for greed used every excuse in the book. The "micro" transactions are not micro and there is evidence o of stupidly expensive exclusives. Its not like the game doesn't have other avenues for resource/investment. Its not like Diablo 1 - 3 didn't do VERY well being a buy to play game and from what we've seen so far (ie the massive amount of users playing in the early access period) D4 users aren't just buying the game's base $70 version, but are buying the Deluxe $90 or Ultimate $100 versions! Atop this they have the "premium battle pass" to sell of coursel.
Atop all this they need to push item mall garbage? I'm seeing advertisements in BattleNet for a number of cosmetics- $25 outfits, $16 mounts, and $7 accessories among other items on the first day of early access for people who already paid more than the base game?! I can't stomach this on principle even if other parts of the game turn out decently as each one of those outfits, mounts etc... could have been earnable another way in game but instead were cut out for a la carte sale exclusivity. Sadly though, the ratio of potential profit from people buying them to thew work of their creation makes it very difficult to signal distaste for these practices because even if a huge percentage of users refuse to buy, a relative pittance of those that do make it more than profitable, among other factors making such protests difficult. Thus, its only when a game receives such a universal scathing critique and usually needs to fail on multiple metrics beyond monetization when they start to get the message and if Diablo 4 even comes across as good as its past titles then its not likely for that to happen...to say nothing for a new generation of gamers willing to open their wallet for anything without questioning it in the cases of mobile style and "gacha" games including Genshin Impact and MOBA/BattleRoyale style "freemium" . Frustrating.
Unfortunately watching Blizz's downward spiral over the past years I have little faith they will do anything like this, from watching what happened with Diablo Immortal on every level, WoW's sadly increasing item mall, and the bloody disaster that is Overwatch 2 (now with canceled PVE mode!). Putting aside the battle pass and likely FOMO bullshit, the thing I really can't stomach is that atop all this is the item mall - paid exclusive cosmetics. I hope this forum is one of the few communities with enough "old guys" who remember when cosmetic content was considered a part of the game, not cut out and sold for surcharge while apologists for greed used every excuse in the book. The "micro" transactions are not micro and there is evidence o of stupidly expensive exclusives. Its not like the game doesn't have other avenues for resource/investment. Its not like Diablo 1 - 3 didn't do VERY well being a buy to play game and from what we've seen so far (ie the massive amount of users playing in the early access period) D4 users aren't just buying the game's base $70 version, but are buying the Deluxe $90 or Ultimate $100 versions! Atop this they have the "premium battle pass" to sell of coursel.
Atop all this they need to push item mall garbage? I'm seeing advertisements in BattleNet for a number of cosmetics- $25 outfits, $16 mounts, and $7 accessories among other items on the first day of early access for people who already paid more than the base game?! I can't stomach this on principle even if other parts of the game turn out decently as each one of those outfits, mounts etc... could have been earnable another way in game but instead were cut out for a la carte sale exclusivity. Sadly though, the ratio of potential profit from people buying them to thew work of their creation makes it very difficult to signal distaste for these practices because even if a huge percentage of users refuse to buy, a relative pittance of those that do make it more than profitable, among other factors making such protests difficult. Thus, its only when a game receives such a universal scathing critique and usually needs to fail on multiple metrics beyond monetization when they start to get the message and if Diablo 4 even comes across as good as its past titles then its not likely for that to happen...to say nothing for a new generation of gamers willing to open their wallet for anything without questioning it in the cases of mobile style and "gacha" games including Genshin Impact and MOBA/BattleRoyale style "freemium" . Frustrating.
GoldenTiger
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I too remember this... Used to be if you saw someone with a cool look you knew he had earned it by doing x y or z awesome feat.... Now you just think, "credit card warrior".
OutOfPhase
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It was a badge of honor! And sue me, it felt good to get recognized in a rando dungeon group in WoW for wearing things which indicate I might just be pretty good at this.
Ego stroking, sure. But hey, I don't get many chances for that in reality.
In games where it is $ based - I don't care at all what people look like.
cvinh
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They probably see how much GGG made with PoE's model and wanted to cash in on the same thing.
NightReaver
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Sure....but that's a free game lol. It's just dumb to then charge $70+ up front.
Or maybe not. I'm sure plenty of people are buying into it.
Furious_Styles
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Yeah but typically that stuff just means people played a ton, not necessarily that they are any good.
GoldenTiger
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Depends on the mmo, in most it used to mean they were good.
Legendary Gamer
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Yeah, the storefront in the game got a groan from my cousin and I paid it little attention. It feels like a cash grab gimmick, like owning NFTs with even less of a stake in ownership.
IDK, I suspect this is not the last we see of this nonsense.
Cypher-
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Fucking amen. I put over 1000 hours in Diablo 3 and stopped playing the day they announced Diablo Immortal although admittedly I did play this last season. I want to be hyped about Diablo 4 and I want to be playing it right now, but I cannot fucking stand the state of gaming anymore. I'm so fucking tired of games having timed events to drive FOMO. I'm sick of the fact that there is day one 'DLC'. You know what DLC used to be? Team Fortress Classic. Counter Strike. Skins for Counter Strike that were made by the community that you could install yourself, before they ended up in loot boxes. Then some fuckwit decided 'Hey, lets release the game and release other parts of it and charge more for content that is already fucking done and get even more money' and the community went along with it. It's literally fucking insane.
Everything is now designed to be addictive and take as much of your money as possible. You cant even buy these items with straight money, you have convert cash to 'platinum', but don't you worry, the more money you spend the more of this platinum they will give you at a better rate. It's literally a picture of a coin and they make it feel like they are giving you a deal by giving you more of it at higher prices. Again it's fucking insane.
Remember back when you used to get physical media that came with these cool instruction manuals with extra tidbits in them? Remember back when games came out on day one and weren't complete buggy garbage? It seems Diablo 4 isn't buggy so that's a plus I guess but the fact that I even have to say that is sad. I'm pretty sure back then the devs cared more about the game itself then trying to milk the players out of every nickel and dime. I'm sure there are still some devs out there who feel like that but the greedy corporate machine is ruining shit.
Seriously though I doubt I'll ever pick this up. To all of the "well you don't have to buy the battle pass or the cosmetics" people, you're right. The problem is even if I don't there are people who will and it will reinforce that they should be putting this bullshit into games. At this point I'd rather not give Blizzard any money. I also find it super convenient that the battle pass doesn't go live until a month after the game has been out. I also have absolutely zero faith in Blizzard not to fuck that up. Maybe it wont be on the first season but I'd put money on it coming down the road.
I float back into World of Warcraft about once a year or so. I'll heal for a month, then leave. Priest is my go-to class. I rock the same staff, Benediction, that I earned through that quest line in Vanilla. I often get whispers about it.
I dosbox Dune II every now and then, and in between scenarios, you are asked questions about machines, weapons, Houses, etc. in order to move onto the next scenario. You were required to grab the game's manual, and flip through it and find the answer. I'm talking speeds of tanks, range of missiles, and important leaders of Houses. You got the question wrong, you had to REDO the previous mission. I still have the book. [grabs cane] Remember, this game came out before Internet.
Don't forget "you can only buy platinum in certain increments and those don't match up with the price of items."
Ima "akshually" you right here, but I don't disagree with anything else you said.
was it? I don't recall having the ability to look that info up online back then. meh, /shrug
I was curious--the game came out in '92 or '93, I've already forgotten. The Internet had been around for years, but if you weren't in the military or college, you didn't really have access to it yet: Endless September hadn't started yet.
Look at this normie over here. /s
Tengis
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I beat D3 within a week of it coming out... realized it was boring/barely any replay and thought the real life auction house was BS... uninstalled never to play again.
The auction house was awesome. I sold enough stuff that I was able to buy whatever expansion there was for World of Warcraft with the funds, haha
I'm playing with Intel Iris Xe cpu graphics on a 1080P laptop and it is buttery smooth. Loading the game I left it at defaults and to my complete surprise most graphic settings were set at high. Intel released a driver end of May with D4 optimizations and it hasn't crashed but once exiting the game, (it locked up) on exit. Hope you can find the cause of the stuttering.
Only issue I have is you can't change the mouse curser color so I lose it on the screen ever now and then. I did increase the curser size but didn't help much.
DukenukemX
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Took a while but good game reviewers have released their reviews of Diablo 4. There's the ActMan who heavily criticized the game, for good reasons. The fanboys were so upset over his review he had to make a video to talk about the criticisms of his critiquing. Then there's Yahtzee, you know the guy who started the whole PCMasterRace meme, who also thinks the game isn't good. Both seem to agree with the fact when you level up, so do the enemies in the game, which shows poor game design. ActMan's review goes much deeper and actually compares D4 to D1 and D2, the good Diablo games.
Comixbooks
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There is hope for this game they just gotta put out a good DLC that breaks the mold of the vanilla game maybe some really good level design. The thing is your character is so OP what do you do with that? I would introduce a level that looks like a Giant overlapping staircase that keeps going up and if you fall down you can't continue something to that extent.
Armenius
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Have you actually played the game yourself? This "ActMan" person is just regurgitating Reddit talking points from two months ago and Yahtzee has never liked these types of games.
DukenukemX
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Kinda defeats the purpose of reviewers if I gotta buy the game. Too bad there's no Demo or shareware version of the game, especially at $70. I feel the problems they pointed out are glaring enough to avoid the game. Enemies that scale with you is stupid, and the loot system seems even dumber. I also have no interest in the end game as it's pointless to grind loot when in 3 months everything is reset.
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Really? I thought that was one of it's stronger points. I could play with friends at different levels and we each get an experience that's appropriate for our various levels. Loot system has always been grindy, but again if you're a diablo vet it isn't a surprise. I rate the game 8/10. Will be interesting to see how it evolves with DLCs and changes made each season.
UnknownSouljer
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I’m no fan of D4, but mostly because of end game etc doesn’t really have anything worth striving for or doing. In fairness to Blizzard, an end game content grind is hard to balance between fun and also time consuming.
Anyway, the part I wanted to address was seasons. Seasons have existed since D2, it’s one of the elements that allows them to introduce limited time content and also makes the game competitive. It is in essence a race - to see who can build a character and clear content the fastest from the same starting point: which is nothing.
When D2 seasons first started they were much more boring than now. It was just a race to 99. No other new content. Now they build new affixes, equipment, sometimes skills into the game. And even new enemy/rpg content.
Seasons is the reason you can play the game for 10 years. If you don’t like that you can always play non-seasonal. After each season your character gets kicked to non-seasonal and you keep all your stuff. You could simply play non-seasonal and grind that out until “you’re done” playing the game. But I assure you seasonal is what keeps an aRPG interesting. PoE also has a seasonal system for the same reasons.
I like the game, but I don't know the specifics of why. The loop is dull the RNG is arguably bad, but I do.
Pop on with the guys, get in Discord, and the next thing I know it's 2 a.m. and the wife is angry I wasn't asleep hours ago.
Playing alone, I can easily see how the game would get very old very fast. But even with a 30-level difference between the lot of us none of us are dead weight, I don't know how they scale it in the back end but nobody feels like they aren't contributing.
Diablo 4 is a multi-player game at heart, because if you grind it solo you need to either be OCD AF to pay attention to it, or you are going to put Netflix on while playing and die a lot when you get to higher tiers when you die a lot because you are bored of the game.
Pop on with the guys, get in Discord, and the next thing I know it's 2 a.m. and the wife is angry I wasn't asleep hours ago.
Playing alone, I can easily see how the game would get very old very fast. But even with a 30-level difference between the lot of us none of us are dead weight, I don't know how they scale it in the back end but nobody feels like they aren't contributing.
Diablo 4 is a multi-player game at heart, because if you grind it solo you need to either be OCD AF to pay attention to it, or you are going to put Netflix on while playing and die a lot when you get to higher tiers when you die a lot because you are bored of the game.
DukenukemX
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Diablo 4 just keeps getting worse. Glad I didn't get this game, especially with Baldur's Gate 3 out.
UnknownSouljer
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I waited on D3 until 1.0.3. But in reality it wasn’t until RoS that D3 got worth playing.
D4 is even worse. I don’t think it will ever be worth playing.
Doesn’t matter anyway. Better to simply write it off. Diablo isn’t Diablo anymore just as blizzard isn’t blizzard.
D4 is even worse. I don’t think it will ever be worth playing.
Doesn’t matter anyway. Better to simply write it off. Diablo isn’t Diablo anymore just as blizzard isn’t blizzard.
You obsession with running around shitting on games on here is odd.
$70 just for the campaign (which is 30 hours) is worth it. You can spend 70 bucks just leaving the house on a Friday night. It is a stupid and nonsensical argument.
Also, the endgame grind is no different than any of ARPG. Not sure how this is worse than running Meph 1000 times to only end up with nothing.
In D2 at least you end up with something different than what you already have, that might encourage a new build for a different class. In D4, at best, you get a very slightly better version of something you already have.
D4 isn't a bad game, as long as you stop playing it around level 50 or so and don't expect anything more.
One of the great features of Vanilla WoW, was the feeling of unlimited power youbgor when visiting low level zones as level 60. You really felt you had ascended to a hugher plane when killing Hogger with a distracted wave of your hand.
You can still play with your lowlevel friends. Escorting or protecting them.
Having mobs levels adjust to yours is just lazyness. It is the literal threadmill. You will never improve over these Murlocs… Then whats the point?
Vanilla Wow was fantastic world building. Its still fun.
dpoverlord
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That's exactly how I felt. Finished as sorcerer.
Then felt what is the point after this, except shit loads of hours to beat Uber lilith. Vanilla wow was super satisfying.
Worth $70 but not worth getting to 100.
I don’t think it’s worth 70$. Especially with how crappy the story was. Like, who was that dumbass teen girl and why was she shoe horned into the story? I knew the story was fucked when the narrator said “we needed her more than she needed us” or something like that. Yes, my demon slaying barb with magic weapons that’s 300lbs of muscle and an ancient order of wizards need a female teen with a bad attitude that offers absolutely nothing. This was mind boggling to me. This dumbass npc somehow just kept sticking around. By the end her voice was like nails on a chalkboard. I don’t think I’ve disliked a character as much in a long time and she may be number one.
sfsuphysics
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Or I could go to a football (American) game, pay well over $200 for parking, admission, hotdog and a beer all for 3-4 hours of enjoyment. So a $200 game that has ten times the play time is totally worth it!!!
I agree, "it is a stupid and nonsensical argument", compare apples to apples when putting the value on entertainment.
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NightReaver
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Agreed. People place different values on different types of entertainment. Going out for a personal experience is usually valued much more than sitting on the couch playing a game.
Come on, dude, you wouldn't have gotten into Rathma's sanctuary without her, unless you wanted to spend a week with a pickaxe.
Darunion
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I have been enjoying the game so far. I like the art style of it and gameplay. Still working through story so far but im pretty happy with it. I dont expect a masterpiece of a game but as long as i get my money's worth from it im happy with a game. Lilith gives me Winter Queen from shadowlands vibes though.