Diablo IV

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't think I'm the audience for seasonal Diablo play. I'm that weirdo who plays it for the storyline and the single paltry quest line, stretched over various tiers each season, isn't enough for me.

And since the traditional hardcore player wants to grind for hundreds of hours to make the numbers go up slightly on their spreadsheets, the seasonal mechanics are aggressively dense. You need to get 12 whoosits to put into the five whatsists on your armor and then you need to stand on your left foot while reciting pi to 20 digits to get an X percent chance to get an improvement. I didn't even bother monkeying with the vampire powers in the Season of Blood, since they were just too hard to figure out without going out of the game to read up on.

It doesn't help that most of the seasonal armor and seasonal mounts are terrible looking. Only the town portal cosmetics were compelling in the Season of Blood.

I'm taking a break until the expansion drops later this year.

 

[cbwjm]

I do enjoy the seasonal content fir keeping things fresh, I didn't finish season of blood though. Also missed the Christmas content. There are too many other games that I want to play.

Expansion should be cool, I'm looking forward to that.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I do enjoy the seasonal content fir keeping things fresh, I didn't finish season of blood though. Also missed the Christmas content. There are too many other games that I want to play.

Yeah, next to BG3 or even the every six weeks dumps of new content in WoW, the D4 seasonal content is pretty underwhelming.

 

[cbwjm]

Yeah, next to BG3 or even the every six weeks dumps of new content in WoW, the D4 seasonal content is pretty underwhelming.

I still don't have anyone at level 100, I always have fun until around 80 then lose interest.

I've seen a lot of posts about wow getting new content, I've been tempted to resub. My friend mentioned that even D3 has been getting some interesting seasonal content. Now that the old CEO is out, I wonder if we'll end up with some nicer content, from what I've read online, he really stifled creativity in content development.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I've seen a lot of posts about wow getting new content, I've been tempted to resub. My friend mentioned that even D3 has been getting some interesting seasonal content. Now that the old CEO is out, I wonder if we'll end up with some nicer content, from what I've read online, he really stifled creativity in content development.

It's really striking how the old guard leaving during the COVID-era #MeToo reckoning has led to a real renaissance for retail WoW.

Just today, they added a new questline to retake Gilneas from the Scarlet Crusade, the night elves claiming a new world tree and an in-game event that feels like them trying to figure out what to do with archeology that rewards a bunch of recolors of a highly coveted and now unavailable transmog set (the Renowned Explorer set from a previous incarnation of the Refer-A-Friend program), plus a dragonracing competition in Outland.

It's not as substantial as a full patch, but it just has to tide us over six weeks, until an apparently pirate-themed mini-patch is coming.

It's a really fun model. Just as I run out of stuff to do, the next one comes along.

 

[deganawida]

It's really striking how the old guard leaving during the COVID-era #MeToo reckoning has led to a real renaissance for retail WoW.

Just today, they added a new questline to retake Gilneas from the Scarlet Crusade, the night elves claiming a new world tree and an in-game event that feels like them trying to figure out what to do with archeology that rewards a bunch of recolors of a highly coveted and now unavailable transmog set (the Renowned Explorer set from a previous incarnation of the Refer-A-Friend program), plus a dragonracing competition in Outland.

It's not as substantial as a full patch, but it just has to tide us over six weeks, until an apparently pirate-themed mini-patch is coming.

It's a really fun model. Just as I run out of stuff to do, the next one comes along.

Don’t tempt me, I’d need to buy a new laptop for it

 

[Yora]

For a 20 year old game, it can't be that expensive.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, next to BG3 or even the every six weeks dumps of new content in WoW, the D4 seasonal content is pretty underwhelming.

That's one of the two key issues remaining with Diablo IV, for me.

I'm normally quite well-suited to "seasonal" play in ARPGs. I've played Path of Exile and Diablo 3 (and D2 back in the day) extensively, seasonally.

But the D4 seasonal content is a fraction of what Path of Exile provides per season, and it's just not very engaging or exciting stuff. I figure they think it's still early in the game's life-cycle so they don't need to shake things up too much or whatever, but the reality is you need to add to the game in real ways to get people to keep coming back. This is part of what Path of Exile got right - they could keep adding and changing stuff in a way a game with a fixed class structure and fixed level-up trees struggles with - it's actually weird that D4 doesn't seem to be built with room for future stuff to be added to classes - the way the level-up skill tree is designed it's pretty much close to full barring a massive redesign.

The other big remaining problem is that D4 has probably the most boring and uninspiring endgame content and endgame advancement methodology that any AA or AAA ARPG has ever had, with really only fairly dodgy indie ARPGs having worse (and not even all of those!). And they haven't fixed that. Or even hinted that they're going to fix it. Or really even acknowledged it.

It doesn't help that most of the seasonal armor and seasonal mounts are terrible looking. Only the town portal cosmetics were compelling in the Season of Blood.

Yeah that was really bizarre. Like, you're seriously trying to charge people quit a lot of money for the season pass addon that gets you those, and instead of being exciting or cool, they're just kind of ugly and generic looking (which a lot of the paid cosmetics are not!).

It's a really fun model. Just as I run out of stuff to do, the next one comes along.

WoW is really riding pretty high at the moment, I've got respect for it. I came back for a while just to mess around and had an actual good time - I've got more max level characters now than I've had since, like, I dunno, a long time ago.

And yeah they seem to be putting out content at a good rate.

Part of it I think is that WoW, due to the subscription, is more reliably profitable. Diablo IV is fuelled by an overpriced cash shop, an overpriced battle pass bonus thing, neither of which are like, hugely appealing, and expansion sales, and we're not at the expansion yet (though they say "late 2024" so it's this year). And the first two seem kind of gross given the game was $70+, with a huge number of people buying it at $90. So Blizzard have (finally) worked out that if they just keep pumping content into WoW, people will keep subscribing and coming back and so on.

EDIT - I see the 1.3 patch notes are out and Blizzard just still can't stop themselves from nerfing absolutely anything that's "generally effective", and have rather unnecessarily pulled down a bunch of stuff whilst buffing other stuff, when if they really just wanted more build diversity, the buffs would pretty much have achieved that. Now they'll get less build diversity, but it'll just be different builds that are favoured. It's sad because I feel like the team in charge of D4's balancing just aren't hitting the notes, and it's really important that they do to make D4 actually worth investing any time in.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's so weird that the D4 team can't manage a battle pass.

Hearthstone has a battle pass system that seems to have almost 100% buy-in and even a second one for the Hearthstone Battlegrounds that many people also pay into.

Retail WoW has a free cosmetic shop that rotates every month that functions as a battle pass in the sense that you have to be subscribed to get the rewards. That's been a massive hit.

The incentives that get people to pay Blizzard on a regular basis just aren't that mysterious.