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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Weird that Blizz didn't do that for Diablo4. They did it for WoW which was pretty much the first time I ever encountered character sheets for games on the Internet.

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Look at the Diablo4 subreddit for an idea of just how little Blizzard developers cared for quality of life or how the endgame feels to play.

For example, in order to try out a new build it can take upwards of 200-300 clicks to reset the paragon tree. Devs couldn’t be bothered to add a “reset all” button. Meanwhile other games like BG3 have all these extras like twitch integrations.

Keep in mind that, supposedly, Diablo 4 was in development for about 6 years. Resources and development time aren’t an issue for Blizzard.

D4 is one of the worst games I had the misfortune of buying.

It's just one long grins, no auto-generated maps, no change of how it plays, boring itemization, absolute lackluster game, no social tools.

I don't understand how people stream this game.

I barely hit level 60 on hardcore. It's such a snorefest.

And I knew better but I watched some guy on twitch, who did have fun, yeah he had fun because of the chat, not because it's a good game.

When I then bought it, it was completely different experience. I wanted to join that guy's clan, but unlike D3 a clan is limited to 150 people and it was always full.

The while game is terrible. What a waste.

“ I barely hit level 60 on hardcore. It's such a snorefest.”. I hereby grant you the right to not play games you don’t like. :)

That sounds like exactly what the person you’re replying to did. What are you trying to say?

Reaching level 60 on hardcore gives me the impression that he put quite a few hours into the game. Sounds unpleasant if you find the game a “snorefest”. :)

Well, you’re wrong. Level 60 is incredibly fast to reach with how exponential experience scaling works. I can tell you’re not that knowledgeable about what’s going on with D4.

You got me. :) I know nothing of D4. Lvl. 60 does sound high and ex. >20 hours of playing is a lot to me. I.e. to me it spounds horrible if someone plays a game for more than 20 hours while not enjoying the experience. :)

Diablo 4 has a lot of value, and the core moment-to-moment gameplay feel remains excellent. I loved the campaign, and the openworld in which it happens. And THAT 10-minute long cutscene, I'm a lifelong cutscene skipper but that thing was incredible. That drops you around level 45-50, from which you jump to the next level of difficulty and start experiencing new areas of play (Helltides) and some new challenges. By 60 you're done with those, and then the tedium of high level systems sets in.

So those 30-40 hours are great, and (to me) very much worth the $70. But the expectation from a Diablo game is to be evergreen. I kept coming back to Diablo 2 for 4 years, then Diablo 3 for 10 years.

This type of games, today, are built with microtransactions so players who keep playing for a long time have stuff they may want to purchase and increase revenue. Replay and longevity should be the core pillars, and the developers had already applied (and invented) the patterns for making such games.

Diablo 4's systems and design does not encourage that sort of attachment and replay. I played the campaign to 71, then the season to 64, and I'm off until the game changes substantially. Diablo 2 & 3 changed radically years after they launched so I'm hopeful, but it's surprising that D4 seems to have ignored the lessons from the evolution of 2 & 3.

Something oddly similar can be seen with the Borderlands series leading into the latest entry, Wonderlands. Amazing campaign, but the replayability and longevity of previous titles is gone.

Stark reminder that developing creative works is hard even if you are a master of it.

And I grant you all the right to not finish books that get boring at the end. If you got use from the book, it might be that the author didn’t know how to finish and put the good stuff at the beginning.

Walden goes from fascinating to snooze fest really quickly about halfway through.

That sounds on point with my personal experience playing it. Got my first character to lvl 80 before I realized I haven’t seen a single exciting upgrade in 20 levels and there was another twenty levels to go before being able to try to fight the last boss.

Then seasons were started and Blizzard was asking players to repeat the same process without any meaningful changes.

It’s very clear the entire base game was vomited out and by the time people realized it was too late. Blizzard already has your money and they’re now focused on seasons to try to milk the whales with micro transactions. Casual players quitting is actually by design as it allows Blizzard to scale down their infrastructure and milk even more.

Then they have their lead designer talking on Twitter about BG3 and how “not all studios operate under the same conditions”. It’s unbelievable.

I tried to play 3, but it was too dark. Literally and thematically. Torchlight was fun though.

Activision-Blizzard is a publisher who bought the name of a developer. It helps to keep this in mind; they’re in the business of selling games and they only make games as a means to that end.

For example, Destiny 2 was considered by many fans to be too much like CoD and it’s easy to speculate that Activision pushed for this “shooter game” to have similar gameplay to their cash cow shooter game franchise because they expected it would be easier to sell. Never mind that the developers were intending to make an “MMOFPSRPG”, which would necessarily have distinct gameplay elements from CoD.

Sad that Runic games is gone too. But I got the impression that as fun as Torchlight was to play (first game I finished in some time), people were getting tired of working only on Diablo clones. That was the reason given for Hob instead of another torchlight. But then Hob never came out on a device I owned, and then they outsourced III as there were on the way down.

Place like that could have been a good landing spot for ex Blizzard people.

Are there any other companies that I should be watching? Maybe some WoW alumni working on different mmrpgs?

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