The paragon board really concerns me. Mechanics like Paragon is what spoilt D3 because it turned the gear hunt into a just grind xp 24/7 for infinite power and whoever played 24/7 xp grinding got rank 1.
I'm fine with there being this player-power progression thing but I hope it's tied to in-game achivements and not just XP grinding. I hope it's not infinite and also I hope a decent amount of your power comes from gear. ARPGs are a looter game first and formost, gear should be exciting not a second thought.
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The issue isn't with the game, nobody cares that Blizzard are releasing a mobile game that makes sense.
The issue is the clear disconnect with the fact they thought it was a good idea to announce it at Blizzcon. It was a move that was so absurdly stupid that 4 years later I still can't believe it happened.
To hype up one of the franchies your best known for to your majority-PC devoted playerbase, who have spend possibly thousands to attend your event all to announce a mobile game. I can't even comprehend what leads one to this conclusion. It shows such a deep lack of understanding and disconnect from their community that it creates concern that they have any clue at all what they are doing. That one single act makes me think D4 is going to be bad, because to make such a decision shows me they just don't understand their community anymore.
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D3 has better gameplay but loses in almost every other aspect.
PoE has more depth, more build diversity, better crafting, more interesting gear, better character progress, better content progress, better bosses, more varied end-game content, an actual end-game and more actual content.
Now a lot of these mechanics are subjective. You may not want your game to have crafting or complexity but even with those removed D3 has a core problem and that is that you have your entire gear within 1 day and from there all your doing is hunting for +damage & +defense which is usually done via XP grinding your infinite paragon.
In PoE you progress gear by going from levelling gear > early crafted gear > cheap items > influence mods etc. So the gear progression is more than just +5% damage, it's massive upgrades, some build defining, game changing or just straight massive boosts. In PoE upgrading a piece of gear feels meaningful and that's one of the many places where D3 falls short. Nothing in D3 feels meaningful past the first day so why would I bother to continue to play past that point.
I hope they learnt from D3 and don't make the same mistakes in D4. For D4 to thrive it needs actual gear progression alongside character progression. It needs a varied and progressable end-game system to playthrough (the PoE atlas is an amazing example of this) and it needs to not have an infinitly scaling system that overshadows everything else in the game. I am terrified when I see D4s paragon boards, if they are anything like D3s paragon then D4 will be dead on arrivial. If the most efficent way to improve your character is to just grind an XP bar until you have so many stats nothing else matters then that's poor game design.
I'll admit though, there was a time I thought Blizzard could do no wrong but I am now at a point where I don't think they are up to the task. Blizzard aren't the innovative market leader they once was, they are driven by greed where making a game that keeps players hooked is more important than making a game that's good (which ironically leads to everyone quitting - see WoW). Maybe they will prove me wrong, but as it stands I have lost almost in faith in Blizzard as a company. They have thrown away 15 years of goodwill in a mere couple years.
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What I don't get with this stuff is, why not just add a toggle? Like I've never understood why more games don't just have an "advanced UI" option. Have these things on my default but then the gamers who are like "I dislike this" just let them go into options and turn it off? It would take next to no work to create and I see pretty much zero downside as this benefits those who doesn't like such things while having 0 effect on those that do.
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This is something that has always perplexed me, D3 came out in 2012 with RoS in 2014 that's 6 years ago for the last expansion and not only does it still receive constant updates regardless of the fact it has no in-game shop or subscription (Please tell me any other game that has this level of developement attention without any in-game shop or sub) but it also still has hundreds of thousands of people playing it to this day.
When it first came out, the content was challenging and interesting. It lasted a large majority of the player base a good month before they started to get a bit bored and the several patches to come while it wasn't the most exciting I mean I know I and many others still played it. When RoS came out it was bloody amazing, I loved everything about it and sunk huge amounts of time into it... Sure eventually I got bored but just because I'm bored now doesn't mean the games bad, no game could hold my attention for ever.
A lot of people I see who say the game was a failure either didn't play the game at all and seem to just jump on the band wagon or played the game for 800 hours and then went "this games terrible". To which I say what? Please show me the list of games you have which have no sub, no in-game shop and have still taken so many hours from you before you stepped away. There are also those that slate it for not receiving content updates that match PoE to which I say again no game without some form of in-game shop recieves such treatment so that comparison just makes no sense.
My only assumption is that people wanted it to be like when they first played Diablo 2 and got lost in the game for years. But that would simply be impossible, Diablo 2 was from a different time with less options, less resources to gain information, less saturation of the market and for many the first time they even stepped into an online world so simply interacting with another player seemed amazing. If people expected Diablo 3 to take them back to when they were 12 years old and first stepped into Diablo 2 then ofcourse it was going to fail in there eyes as this is an impossible level to reach.
Is there something i'm missing, what reasons do people have to view this game as such a huge failure while other games which have taken 1/10th of your time before getting boring are seen as massive successes (I know people who spent 80 hours in Skyrim and claim it is the best game they have ever played yet spent 500 in Diablo 3 and claim it to be a massive dissapointment), why was Diablo 3 held to a standard so much above any other Buy to Play game?
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But... If you made them up then they aren't accurate.. What are you even trying to say here?
Blizzard is still by an absolutely massive country mile the highest valued games company in the world. They are worth more than double what EA Games is worth, what on earth makes you think they would disolve if D4 wasn't a success or even that it wont be.
Literally every single product Blizzard has created has been a MASSIVE commercial success and I see no reason why Diablo 4 wont be to.
On Topic:
I expect D4 to come out Q2/3 2022. I would love to see a Q4 2021 release, but Blizzard themselves said at 2020 that it isn't even Blizzard soon. Outside of some very base concepts we've hardly seen anything about the game, I expect to see a lot more information at this years blizzcon, a Beta announcement at next years Blizzcon and a mid 2022 release.
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Bringing in PKing like in D2 wont work in this day and age. Back in D2 people just played games for fun, so they didn't mind just making PK games and spending huge amounts of time to build a dueling character even though there was absolutely nothing to get from it.
Nowa days unless there is some sort of reward, ranking, balance etc. to it almost nobody will do it. D3 is the perfect example of this, nobody PvPs in D3. The option is there, but there's nothing to be gained from it so nobody does it. People could make rules in it enjoy it just like they did in D2 but they don't.
Personally I'd like to see a runescape Wilderness like thing built, where the enemies had increased rewards but the zones were shared and pvp was enabled meaning players actually fought over the area to get the rewards. Something like this would marry the pve-loot farming thing of ARPGs with PvP. Although I fear this would end up just getting overrun with guilds of 20+ players effectively owning the zone for themselves so don't know how you would balance that.
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I mean, this is just wrong. Like... It's not an opinion it's a fact that to get high on the leaderboard you have to grind Paragon because it makes you hit harder and take less damage. I'm not saying skill isn't also relevant, but no matter how skilled the player a paragon 10, 000 player will be higher than a paragon 1000 and it certainly does make the game less interesting when you outright know you wont be able to compete if you don't play 16hrs/day.
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I would love to see something on the same lines as the Wilderness in RS, where the deeper you go the greater the PvE rewards but also the greater the risk of getting PKed.
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What D2 did you play? 99% of the uniques in D2 were useless to the point where you didn't even pick them up and with the way the gaming market is I feel having everything trad-able is almost impossible personally. I'm happy that there's going to be a top top tier that you need to get yourself and think the "trade but only once" system is a really clever way of stopping people from just being gods via abusing the marketplace.
That is what happened in D3 when the AH was a thing, or what happens in PoE the value of items is determined by the marketplace and the only real way to get super rich is to spend more time trading than actually playing the game.
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I'm curious, what about this fight makes u think claim this looks like "exactly the same fight"? I mean if your referring the model (i.e. that some-what centaur like appearance) then I guess.. Somewhat, but then again Duriels appearance was set wayy before Siegebreaker so I guess one could say Siegebreaker was somewhat inspired by Duriel.
Other than that though, the two fights seem completely different. Unless ofcourse your really generalizing like saying "well both fights have grabs and adds" but one could use that logic to say every boss is a carbon copy of every boss.
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It's probably an engine limitation, very similar to how in WoD they had to make Garrosh heal because otherwise his health would of had to be put above the level the engine could understand.
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One big, easy change I just don't understand is to make use of the campaign... Give the campaign decent scaling and loot that reflects it.
This is one thing almost every ARPG these days lacks, and that is varied content. If everyone only farms 1 way, there's only 1 build. Look at D2:
Countess farming Build, Meph build, Andy build, mlvl 86 build, chaos farming, baal runner, Key farmer, Uber runner all of which was viable for it's own unique reasons.
Not to mention the different brackets of gear going from no gear, to Vmagi to full tals to runewords to being decked out in bloody ebotdz and all that goodness... Also having the super-rare top tier items that let you do crazy things like bramble and what not letting take say Psn Nova at first a build that doesn't work is now one shotting entire screens.
Compare this to Diablo 3, where you get your DB build which is just a gotta go fast buiid. Honestly every classes varient of this feels the same, and then your pushing build. You can't balance abilities to create varied builds, there will always be 1 build that's better but if you have varied content that is what creates varied builds.
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The good thing is, it's gonna be insane one way or another. Either the announcements are gonna be terrible and it's gonna be a riot of Hong Kong & meme questions or there gonna be amazing. I'm not actually sure if i'm more excited for them to announce stuff or not XD
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Wait, what? When have they explicitly said Diablo 2 wont be getting a remaster?
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Reuse the Campaign in some way it's a huge amount of unused content, maybe let it scale like GRs do with similar rewards? I loved a lot of the boss battles and what not and wish there was a challenging, rewarding version of it.