The game is a heart breaking disappointment and a flagship example of enshitification. But the product managers delivered an amazing hack job. They retooled an existing engine, reskinned it tweaked some colors, and added item rolls and launched very quickly after the immortal failure.
The game delivered because the base design was functional, most of the failures came from the new loot system storing cache between players, not being able to scale mob size, lack of qa, lack of added art. All of which can be explained by the rushed time line. But the game sold ungodly amount of copies, just because of the name. Minimal investment and massive payout means it was a business success, although the players are still pissed that the original game designer had no idea what was fun. After the bad press activation did they try clean house but the damage was done.
Gonna need sources. I'm not a D4 apologist. It bored the hell out of me. I got about 50+ hours in and I stopped because I kept falling asleep near the end.
But to say it lacked qa and art, and was rushed?
It's an artistically gorgeous game. The details are amazing. It has a high level of polish. Not a single bug.
Doesn't matter you bought it
You played 50+hours? If it was boring why did you give it that many hours?
I couldnt do that.
I didnt even give it the time of day to purchase it. After diablo immortal and the rest of what had been going on with blizzard around that time i knew the diablo 4 was going to be a cash grab and a waste of time.
It was actually really enjoyable the first 10 hours. Im 40 and love games like this where you can turn off your brain, like Destiny. The demo gave me a nostalgia kick and I felt like a kid again playing Diablo 2 on my old WinXp computer. Unfortunately, there's just no real energy to the game. From level 20 to max level, nothing feels different. My damage became higher, and were just a bit flasher, but i didn't feel that satisfaction of player progression in the game beyond checking tasks like in a crappy Ubisoft game.
I honestly don't think Diablo 4 is a cash grab. The level of details and polish in the game is pretty high. They changed the art style from D3 (which was like a WoW ripoff) and took inspiration from Dark Souls. If it didn't have the online only BS, I strongly feel like modding could fix it a lot.
I'm actually hoping the expansion makes it better. Diablo 3 sucked. But it sas "fixed" with the expansion after two years. (But it still doesn't meet D2's quality)
You are an average shitty user asking for sources and down voting., The fact you liked the game shows it was a business success. But given how poor the execution was, many of us die hard franchise fans would label that response as an apologist. Diablo 3 took 2-3x as long to build, launched with full set armors, full acts, developed a new game engine and still failed at launch. Diablo 4 had roughly 40 uniques? At launch and the Uber uniques were impossible to get. Wow models were used for mounts and mobs. Classes from d3 used the same animations, the dark way was a single dungeon floor was used to at least 15 quests. The story mission was sold as a single act that is added to in the future so they didn't even write a full story. Please don't act like it's perfect
2019 Blizzcon Diablo 4 announced to recover from ^
2023 Release
It bored the hell out of me. I got about 50+ hours in and I stopped because I kept falling asleep near the end.
the fact you liked the game
Da fuk?
50 hours
It's an artistically gorgeous game. The details are amazing. It has a high level of polish. Not a single bug.
You can say positive things and still dislike a piece of media.
"Product managers retooled an existing engine and reskinned it and..."
Jesus fuckin christ dude, stop making things up. As an actual developer, I can with confidence say what you just wrote is complete and absolute bullshit and you either made it up or are parroting something someone else said.
It's really disheartening to see the same uninformed, cynical outrage culture come over from the games communities on Reddit, especially when I know Lemmy is full of tech-y people who know the realities of these things.
The game lacked everything. I got it for free using points and was immediately bored and disgusted with its mtx. The story was not good, graphics were eh, and the gameplay was nothing new.
I'm really disappointed with blizzard lately.
If only financially, yes. It's literally Blizzard's fastest selling game ever.
The game itself is hot garbage to anyone who's played any other arpg.
Diablo 4 sucked. It really did. I wanted my money back. Diablo 3 I replayed for years, lots of fun. But 4 just seemed like a grind with no real after win bonus play at all. It was a slosh to get through even once. And once done I didn't want to try it again from scratch with a new character.
Path of exile I liked. This I can get behind
Back in my day, we all said Diablo 3 sucked, and Diablo 2 was where it's at.
D2R was absolutely perfect. Loved it.
..do you hit tab after every sentence?
Period with 2 spaces. As it should be
You typed three, and it makes no difference. Markdown eats double-spaces and single newlines.
For people here, give last epoch a try. Studio is fair, game is better than diablo 4 and more modern than POE. Really fun to play
It got a 6.1 metacritic user review, more negative than neutral, but its steam score is very positive with 70:20 split. Looks like most of the negative reviews were around launch time? It is a Tencent game, which is problematic, but it was also very controversial for bugs including duping items, and actually it looks like they're still in the middle of those controversies as discussions about the state of the game are actively being removed from various websites...
Pass.
There were a lot of server problems at launch, but apart from that the game is REALLY good, even for people like me who spent 600hours on PoE.
I bought Last Epoch during Early Access and they have done so much good work, it's very impressive. The devs are very reactive to feedback, and when streamers said the game was bad in very early access, they listened to the complaints and made it better. Zizaran said they had the best reaction towards negative feedback.
I havent heard about the duping items things, and it is less owned by tencent than PoE is.
I said PASS
On public forums, answers aren't always written for you...
I answered it pretty well
?
I liked last epoch. Got about 40 hours in with two playthroughs. Necromancer is just a blender of death, and old wizard man drops meteors on everything.
The end game is a little tepid and there's no ng+, so I'm done with it for now, but I feel like I got my money's worth.
Yeah they will focus on endgame now do I'm sure it will get way better
Still a Skinner box for taking real money in-game.
I wish they would charge $20 for it and make the mtx half the cost
I hated Diablo 4’s story so much. If that game did anything positive for me, it was that it drove me to seek out good palate cleanser games.
this is what d4 should’ve been. (played the demo extensively at exilecon) just as poe is what d3 should’ve been
the forefathers of the genre at exilecon
I was in the auditorium for this conversation, it was every ARPG i played from my childhood. It was surreal
welcome fellow brother 🙏🙏🙏
I've seen the overseas version of PoE and I'm not really convinced. If anything, Diablo 4 was chasing PoE's success.
It’s not a success in my eyes. I beat the game, played season one for an evening and said “this is boring I’m going back to diablo3”
Oof. I played d3 and it also go very stale very quick to me. I didn't even attempt d4.
I like it because it feels so much faster than 4, and I can disconnect my brain and mono my way to glory
No such thing.
The only ethical free model is giving shit away. Any form of charging money inside a video game is an abuse.
Just sell games.
Trash take
Use your words.
GGG has been actively developing and supporting PoE for more than a decade post launch. Other studios develop 3-4 full scale games during that time frame. If they wanted to price all of this into a one time cost, PoE would have cost 150-200€ at release, a price no one would be willing to pay for a new game of a new studio with no track record. The game just wouldn't exist.
And yet you're claiming that them financing development primarily via optional cosmetic micro transactions is abuse. People have spent thousands of hours in this game without spending more than like 50 bucks on quality of life stuff. Your comment tells me you know nothing about PoE or GGG. That's why I'm calling it a trash take.
TBF I would have much rather played 4 finished PoE games than watch them milk whales for a decade. No offense to people who speedrun both acts and maps, that shit takes massive skill, but it's not a game for the wider audience.
Is PoE a pay for power type game? I thought about getting into it, but then looked at the skill tree and uninstalled.
No, and yes. You can start a brand new account on the first day of a league and be at par with everyone else. The vast majority of the game is accessible with no demands on you aside from time and skill. Every purchase you make is cosmetic only, simply changing the way some spells look or giving you a pet that follows you around and looks cool while doing nothing extra.
The one exception? Stash tabs. Tabs that specialize in holding certain items for you in your stash. Tabs that let you sell items to others with greater ease. It has gotten to the point where if you want to be best of the best, you should probably have the extra tabs. Why? Because at the endgame, you'll need to start trading for items that make your build sing, or simply eke out the extra 15% damage that multiplies with other sources to make your dps soar into the millions, because PoE is all about finding something that you can push past where it was supposed to stop being good. Without those stash tabs, making cool items or easily trading with others is much more difficult.
Now, how much would it cost you to be 'competitive' with tabs? Probably $10 at most. For a game that I've played for over a decade and probably 1000-2000 hours at this point, I think the <$100 bucks I've thrown their way is worth it. I have friends who love the game and likely have 3k+ hours in it, and they've only spent $150 or so. I think that's pretty reasonable for that much enjoyment.
The cost/benefit for hours played vs money spent is ridiculously good.
I will probably give PoE2 a shot once it comes out since they are keeping the same cost system. Thank you for the answer.
That depends on which version you're playing. On the Chinese version upon character creation you get the option to buy into the pay-to-win version of the league server, where you get better item drops. You can also directly pay for better exp rates over there.
In the US/New Zealand version of the game most purchases are cosmetic, except for bank tabs. A lot of people have come to the conclusion that the reason for poorly balanced leveling and enemies is because balance was built around the heavily buffed Pay-to-Win Chinese gameplay, so playing the US version in comparison is like playing hell mode with nerfs on.
Or they could release 3-4 full scale games. A price people are plainly willing to pay, over more than a decade. More games would exist.
They're only able to drag out this one game by turning it into a factory for manufactured discontent. Their revenue comes from keeping people hooked, and while they are hooked, influencing them to keep forking over more money. People have spent thousands of hours in this game. Can you even quantify how much impact the most subtle and "ethical" mechanics have had on their decisions?
Every game with real-money charges is the same pattern. This business model is built on addiction and frustration. You have to be unhappy enough that some of you will fork over money - ideally for the least content possible - sometimes for the same content over and over. But you have to be hooked or you might not put up with that tickling denial for just one more daily challenge. There have to be people who will blow hundreds or thousands of dollars, or this whole gross mess wouldn't be so much more profitable than just selling games.
This is half the industry's revenue, now. It's in single-player games. The format of this abuse is the same, no matter how openly gross its details are, in any particular game. Insisting otherwise is like saying gambling isn't gambling if the amounts are smaller. The mechanism is the same, and the mechanism has intense intrinsic problems. It is inseparable from exploitation of humans' sloppy grasp of value. That's the only reason it works.
If only it could stick to its release dates too.
So release a half-baked, half broken turd on time then take 3-5 years to patch it. Got it.
PoE2 has been postponed for 5 years. It's the classic example of feature creep.
Will it be amazing when it comes out? Maybe.
You know what would have been amazing, having all those new animations and models for the past 5 years. It could have been an iterative work, nobody asked them to do it all in one go.
POE2 was never set to release 5 years ago. True, they did just delay beta, but at no point did they commit to a release date. Kinda hard to delay a game you never committed to a release date for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OosC1E8TVM&t=1s
This was 4.5 years ago, before the scope creep. The expected turnaround was less than 1 year.
The project is more than 5 years in the works, and will probably reach 6-7 years before it's done.
Yeah... still not a delay. Internally deciding to make a bigger game, having not announced a release date should be commended, not derided.
GGG has left poe to rot for the past 5 years while they've been creating a game for a new audience and misleading their current players in their intentions. They certainly won't be commended by me.
It's a >10 year old game with thousands of hours of content. It hasn't been left to rot, it's retired... Gods you are a spoilt brat.
Plenty of old live service games see active development like world of warcraft. I'll remind you that you don't know me, so please keep your projections to yourself if you want to keep arguing.
Diablo 4 was a success?
The game is a heart breaking disappointment and a flagship example of enshitification. But the product managers delivered an amazing hack job. They retooled an existing engine,
reskinned ittweaked some colors, and added item rolls and launched very quickly after the immortal failure.The game delivered because the base design was functional, most of the failures came from the new loot system storing cache between players, not being able to scale mob size, lack of qa, lack of added art. All of which can be explained by the rushed time line. But the game sold ungodly amount of copies, just because of the name. Minimal investment and massive payout means it was a business success, although the players are still pissed that the original game designer had no idea what was fun. After the bad press activation did they try clean house but the damage was done.
Gonna need sources. I'm not a D4 apologist. It bored the hell out of me. I got about 50+ hours in and I stopped because I kept falling asleep near the end.
But to say it lacked qa and art, and was rushed?
It's an artistically gorgeous game. The details are amazing. It has a high level of polish. Not a single bug.
Doesn't matter you bought it
You played 50+hours? If it was boring why did you give it that many hours?
I couldnt do that.
I didnt even give it the time of day to purchase it. After diablo immortal and the rest of what had been going on with blizzard around that time i knew the diablo 4 was going to be a cash grab and a waste of time.
It was actually really enjoyable the first 10 hours. Im 40 and love games like this where you can turn off your brain, like Destiny. The demo gave me a nostalgia kick and I felt like a kid again playing Diablo 2 on my old WinXp computer. Unfortunately, there's just no real energy to the game. From level 20 to max level, nothing feels different. My damage became higher, and were just a bit flasher, but i didn't feel that satisfaction of player progression in the game beyond checking tasks like in a crappy Ubisoft game.
I honestly don't think Diablo 4 is a cash grab. The level of details and polish in the game is pretty high. They changed the art style from D3 (which was like a WoW ripoff) and took inspiration from Dark Souls. If it didn't have the online only BS, I strongly feel like modding could fix it a lot.
I'm actually hoping the expansion makes it better. Diablo 3 sucked. But it sas "fixed" with the expansion after two years. (But it still doesn't meet D2's quality)
You are an
averageshitty user asking for sources and down voting., The fact you liked the game shows it was a business success. But given how poor the execution was, many of us die hard franchise fans would label that response as an apologist. Diablo 3 took 2-3x as long to build, launched with full set armors, full acts, developed a new game engine and still failed at launch. Diablo 4 had roughly 40 uniques? At launch and the Uber uniques were impossible to get. Wow models were used for mounts and mobs. Classes from d3 used the same animations, the dark way was a single dungeon floor was used to at least 15 quests. The story mission was sold as a single act that is added to in the future so they didn't even write a full story. Please don't act like it's perfectDa fuk?
You can say positive things and still dislike a piece of media.
"Product managers retooled an existing engine and reskinned it and..."
Jesus fuckin christ dude, stop making things up. As an actual developer, I can with confidence say what you just wrote is complete and absolute bullshit and you either made it up or are parroting something someone else said.
It's really disheartening to see the same uninformed, cynical outrage culture come over from the games communities on Reddit, especially when I know Lemmy is full of tech-y people who know the realities of these things.
The game lacked everything. I got it for free using points and was immediately bored and disgusted with its mtx. The story was not good, graphics were eh, and the gameplay was nothing new.
I'm really disappointed with blizzard lately.
If only financially, yes. It's literally Blizzard's fastest selling game ever.
The game itself is hot garbage to anyone who's played any other arpg.
Diablo 4's what now?
Financial success.
"Success"
Success!
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Success
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I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Diablo 4 sucked. It really did. I wanted my money back. Diablo 3 I replayed for years, lots of fun. But 4 just seemed like a grind with no real after win bonus play at all. It was a slosh to get through even once. And once done I didn't want to try it again from scratch with a new character.
Path of exile I liked. This I can get behind
Back in my day, we all said Diablo 3 sucked, and Diablo 2 was where it's at.
D2R was absolutely perfect. Loved it.
..do you hit tab after every sentence?
Period with 2 spaces. As it should be
You typed three, and it makes no difference. Markdown eats double-spaces and single newlines.
For people here, give last epoch a try. Studio is fair, game is better than diablo 4 and more modern than POE. Really fun to play
It got a 6.1 metacritic user review, more negative than neutral, but its steam score is very positive with 70:20 split. Looks like most of the negative reviews were around launch time? It is a Tencent game, which is problematic, but it was also very controversial for bugs including duping items, and actually it looks like they're still in the middle of those controversies as discussions about the state of the game are actively being removed from various websites...
Pass.
There were a lot of server problems at launch, but apart from that the game is REALLY good, even for people like me who spent 600hours on PoE. I bought Last Epoch during Early Access and they have done so much good work, it's very impressive. The devs are very reactive to feedback, and when streamers said the game was bad in very early access, they listened to the complaints and made it better. Zizaran said they had the best reaction towards negative feedback.
I havent heard about the duping items things, and it is less owned by tencent than PoE is.
I said PASS
On public forums, answers aren't always written for you...
I answered it pretty well
?
I liked last epoch. Got about 40 hours in with two playthroughs. Necromancer is just a blender of death, and old wizard man drops meteors on everything.
The end game is a little tepid and there's no ng+, so I'm done with it for now, but I feel like I got my money's worth.
Yeah they will focus on endgame now do I'm sure it will get way better
Still a Skinner box for taking real money in-game.
I wish they would charge $20 for it and make the mtx half the cost
I hated Diablo 4’s story so much. If that game did anything positive for me, it was that it drove me to seek out good palate cleanser games.
this is what d4 should’ve been. (played the demo extensively at exilecon) just as poe is what d3 should’ve been
I was in the auditorium for this conversation, it was every ARPG i played from my childhood. It was surreal
welcome fellow brother 🙏🙏🙏
I've seen the overseas version of PoE and I'm not really convinced. If anything, Diablo 4 was chasing PoE's success.
It’s not a success in my eyes. I beat the game, played season one for an evening and said “this is boring I’m going back to diablo3”
Oof. I played d3 and it also go very stale very quick to me. I didn't even attempt d4.
I like it because it feels so much faster than 4, and I can disconnect my brain and mono my way to glory
No such thing.
The only ethical free model is giving shit away. Any form of charging money inside a video game is an abuse.
Just sell games.
Trash take
Use your words.
GGG has been actively developing and supporting PoE for more than a decade post launch. Other studios develop 3-4 full scale games during that time frame. If they wanted to price all of this into a one time cost, PoE would have cost 150-200€ at release, a price no one would be willing to pay for a new game of a new studio with no track record. The game just wouldn't exist.
And yet you're claiming that them financing development primarily via optional cosmetic micro transactions is abuse. People have spent thousands of hours in this game without spending more than like 50 bucks on quality of life stuff. Your comment tells me you know nothing about PoE or GGG. That's why I'm calling it a trash take.
TBF I would have much rather played 4 finished PoE games than watch them milk whales for a decade. No offense to people who speedrun both acts and maps, that shit takes massive skill, but it's not a game for the wider audience.
Is PoE a pay for power type game? I thought about getting into it, but then looked at the skill tree and uninstalled.
No, and yes. You can start a brand new account on the first day of a league and be at par with everyone else. The vast majority of the game is accessible with no demands on you aside from time and skill. Every purchase you make is cosmetic only, simply changing the way some spells look or giving you a pet that follows you around and looks cool while doing nothing extra.
The one exception? Stash tabs. Tabs that specialize in holding certain items for you in your stash. Tabs that let you sell items to others with greater ease. It has gotten to the point where if you want to be best of the best, you should probably have the extra tabs. Why? Because at the endgame, you'll need to start trading for items that make your build sing, or simply eke out the extra 15% damage that multiplies with other sources to make your dps soar into the millions, because PoE is all about finding something that you can push past where it was supposed to stop being good. Without those stash tabs, making cool items or easily trading with others is much more difficult.
Now, how much would it cost you to be 'competitive' with tabs? Probably $10 at most. For a game that I've played for over a decade and probably 1000-2000 hours at this point, I think the <$100 bucks I've thrown their way is worth it. I have friends who love the game and likely have 3k+ hours in it, and they've only spent $150 or so. I think that's pretty reasonable for that much enjoyment.
The cost/benefit for hours played vs money spent is ridiculously good.
I will probably give PoE2 a shot once it comes out since they are keeping the same cost system. Thank you for the answer.
That depends on which version you're playing. On the Chinese version upon character creation you get the option to buy into the pay-to-win version of the league server, where you get better item drops. You can also directly pay for better exp rates over there.
In the US/New Zealand version of the game most purchases are cosmetic, except for bank tabs. A lot of people have come to the conclusion that the reason for poorly balanced leveling and enemies is because balance was built around the heavily buffed Pay-to-Win Chinese gameplay, so playing the US version in comparison is like playing hell mode with nerfs on.
Or they could release 3-4 full scale games. A price people are plainly willing to pay, over more than a decade. More games would exist.
They're only able to drag out this one game by turning it into a factory for manufactured discontent. Their revenue comes from keeping people hooked, and while they are hooked, influencing them to keep forking over more money. People have spent thousands of hours in this game. Can you even quantify how much impact the most subtle and "ethical" mechanics have had on their decisions?
Every game with real-money charges is the same pattern. This business model is built on addiction and frustration. You have to be unhappy enough that some of you will fork over money - ideally for the least content possible - sometimes for the same content over and over. But you have to be hooked or you might not put up with that tickling denial for just one more daily challenge. There have to be people who will blow hundreds or thousands of dollars, or this whole gross mess wouldn't be so much more profitable than just selling games.
This is half the industry's revenue, now. It's in single-player games. The format of this abuse is the same, no matter how openly gross its details are, in any particular game. Insisting otherwise is like saying gambling isn't gambling if the amounts are smaller. The mechanism is the same, and the mechanism has intense intrinsic problems. It is inseparable from exploitation of humans' sloppy grasp of value. That's the only reason it works.
If only it could stick to its release dates too.
So release a half-baked, half broken turd on time then take 3-5 years to patch it. Got it.
PoE2 has been postponed for 5 years. It's the classic example of feature creep.
Will it be amazing when it comes out? Maybe. You know what would have been amazing, having all those new animations and models for the past 5 years. It could have been an iterative work, nobody asked them to do it all in one go.
POE2 was never set to release 5 years ago. True, they did just delay beta, but at no point did they commit to a release date. Kinda hard to delay a game you never committed to a release date for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OosC1E8TVM&t=1s This was 4.5 years ago, before the scope creep. The expected turnaround was less than 1 year. The project is more than 5 years in the works, and will probably reach 6-7 years before it's done.
Yeah... still not a delay. Internally deciding to make a bigger game, having not announced a release date should be commended, not derided.
GGG has left poe to rot for the past 5 years while they've been creating a game for a new audience and misleading their current players in their intentions. They certainly won't be commended by me.
It's a >10 year old game with thousands of hours of content. It hasn't been left to rot, it's retired... Gods you are a spoilt brat.
Plenty of old live service games see active development like world of warcraft. I'll remind you that you don't know me, so please keep your projections to yourself if you want to keep arguing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=9OosC1E8TVM&t=1s
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Id rather a game that works and is high quality than on time