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.
Welcome back. I always enjoy your posts.
ReplyDeleteOne of my takeaways with Diablo 3 and 4 is that these sorts of games are very tricky to get right. We loved D2, indeed came into WoW from that having never touched any of the Warcraft games and were wondering why they decided to make an MMO out of a wargame instead of their RP property.
We came into D3 at launch, played through the story, disliked it enough that we set aside the game, and didn't return for the better part of a decade.
We were playing D3 when D4 came out. We tried the "free play" weekend at the end of Beta, and the game felt kind of awful to play in comparison. Maybe it's getting slowly worked into something worth looking at again. What is the "pace" of play like now? It felt in many ways slower than D1 or 2, almost jarring from the absurd pace of D3 seasonal play.
It's probably faster than it was at launch, especially with the gear changes. It's much easier to get good gear now, especially at lower levels.
DeletePart of the issue is that there's a wide variation between a bad build, a decent build which at least tries for some synergies, and an optimized build. Currently, the people who run optimized builds find the early game way too easy, which is probably a good sign if you want to play without looking up a build online.