The Evolution of Diablo IV

The one game I have been playing over the last year is Diablo IV. It's been interesting to see how the game has changed since launch and the four seasons so far.

The best way to look at Diablo IV is the conflict between Diablo II and Diablo III. 

It's pretty clear that during development, Blizzard listened to the internet community lauding D2 and looking down on D3. D4 at launch was much closer to D2 and intentionally rejected a lot of the conveniences and power scaling of D3.

So naturally the story of D4 is listening to the community complain about those missing conveniences, and slowly moving D4 closer and closer to D3. More and more posts in the community are calling for an Auction House, of all things!

Now, there are a lot of good things about D4 at launch. The aesthetic was a lot darker than D3, and the player base is happy with that. The performance of the game is closer to D3. And D4 has avoided the one great mistake of D3: armour sets. Armour sets were too vital, and difference in power between getting a set and not was too large. D4 has a smoother power curve.

Season 4 redid a lot of the loot, making it more relevant, and easier to find and get the pieces that you need for your builds. Even the "uber" uniques (will be tagged as Mythic in the next season) have gotten easier and easier to find. It also introduced the Pit, which is basically D3 Greater Rifts.

(Though, to be fair, I've never gotten an uber, I generally stop before that point.)

The big conflict between Blizzard and the vocal community is endgame. Basically, Blizzard wants players  to do a variety of content during their gameplay sessions. Do a Nightmare Dungeon, do a Pit, then maybe kill a couple of bosses. The community, on the other hand, wants to figure out the single optimal activity to get power and spam it 24/7.

It is also interesting that Blizzard allowed trading once more. Now there are people selling items in chat for billions of gold, with probably a lot of gold farming and shady websites selling items for real money. Ironically, though, the high end community seems happy with this. Again, shades of D2.

I think Blizzard is on the right track with Diablo IV. The aesthetic (and trading?) of D2, the gameplay and power of D3, with a bit smoother scaling, is proving to be quite fun. If Blizzard keeps on this track, I think the upcoming expansion should be quite good.

The hard part, of course, is knowing where the line is and keeping from overstepping. For example, I think  an Auction House or class sets would harm the game more than help it.

FFXIV Dawntrail, Part I

Final Fantasy XIV's latest expansion has just launched in early access. The expansion is called Dawntrail, or has I call the first part, The Excellent Adventures of Wuk Lamat.

The story so far is big step back from the world-ending threats of Endwalker. The first part of the story, up to level 94 or so, is set in the continent across the western ocean, Tural. Which is based on South and Central America. You are helping a young claimant to the throne, Wuk Lamat, in a competition to determine the next leader of Tural.

Wuk Lamat is an interesting archetype. The young, naive, good-hearted, airhead. It's a fairly common archetype in Japanese anime, but I'm not really sure it's very attractive to Western eyes. I think we prefer our main characters to be more serious. For example, Stormblood featured a similar claimant to the throne in Hien, but I think Hien worked better for Western sensibilities. The heir in exile, struggling with the weight of his duties.

Which is not to say that Wuk Lamat is a bad character. Just that the airhead-ness sometimes comes across as flippancy, especially very early in the story.

Mechanics-wise, the first part of Dawntrail is an interesting exercise in what happens when you remove fetch quests. As is tradition for these types of competitions, there's lots of arbitrary fetch quests. Except your character does very little of the fetching. Instead the NPCs you are travelling with do all the work. For example, in a previous expansion, you might have to fetch wood and then hunt some animal for dinner. Here, Alphinaud will fetch the wood, and Alisae will do the hunting.

It feels like a very strong reaction to complaints about having to do menial quests in previous expansions.

However, I'm not sure it was a good idea. It doesn't give you much to do. You're basically running your character from cutscene to cutscene, with relatively little opportunity to actually "play" your character. There's still dungeons and the occasional special duty. But the amount of interaction with the world environment and monsters feels unusually limited.

It's quite possible it's a Main Story Quest thing only, and the side-quests have all the interaction one desires. But the game encourages you to save the side-quests for later. Maybe I should consider going back and doing them on a second class before continuing on.

The dungeons and first trial are pretty good. You can actually do the trial with an NPC group this time around, and they've put in some interesting behaviour. For example, the experienced characters always avoid mechanics, but the younger characters get hit the first time they see it.

All in all, the first part of Dawntrail is slower and lighter than previous expansions. It's still pretty good, but I hope it picks up in the next sections.