I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.
I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.
i get where you’re coming from, i believe, but i don’t mean the, well, “treadmill,” specifically. there were players testing D4 extensively & finding out that 1) some mechanics, while baffling, appeared to be working as intended (necro minion behaviour, for one) & 2) some mechanics were not working as intended (armor chief among them, IIRC). add to this the monetisation, lack of content, dungeon / map design & a whole bunch of other things people had legitimate problems with from the get-go… well. i mean. i know kind of a silly amount of people with a long history with Blizzard / Diablo, some of whom i wouldn’t feel weird calling Blizzard fanboys. not a single one picked up the game at all. like, not that my peers are the alpha & omega; i just kinda hadn’t thought about this much before, but it’s bizarre how many friends & relatives i was sure would eat up anything by Blizzard just straight up ignored the game. again, it’s not really about the treadmill as much as like, just old-fashioned word of mouth, i think. it didn’t take long at all for Blizzard to post their “so, uh, things are gonna change” damage control video, which to me says they know they messed up (for what it’s worth), when everyone & their dog were reporting on the game selling a buttillion copies only a little while before.
i believe i may have been coming on a bit strong. apologies. i don’t at all mean to be saying that D4 was overwhelmingly criticised by everyone, just that the reception seemed to be mixed enough where two people could have an entirely different view of it, depending on the environment. you know? there were people who were primed to hate it no matter what, absolutely, but also a veritable mountain of legitimate critique that i don’t want to be dismissed, because the game was not ready for launch. the “beta testing” showed as much, but of course, it was already too late to change anything. & you know, what boils my piss is, there were folks saying, “have fun with a year’s worth of beta testing you paid for.” because they were right. they shouldn’t have been right about this. this shouldn’t be happening.
I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.
lmao this is such a slimebag thing to say. whether or not you find my opinion valid is irrelevant, because that’s not what this is about. like, why respond at all if you’re so unwilling to engage with what is actually being said?
Your overall point seems to be that despite the wide acclaim on launch & yourself / your peer group’s historic enthusiasm for blizzard games, you came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth engaging with the game via word-of-mouth. What is there to argue about that? The reasons you shared generally don’t ring true to me, but I’m not the arbiter of your collective impressions. At the start of this comment chain I tried to elucidate genuine reasons to dislike it - either reasons that haven’t been already addressed for a significant part of the game’s lifecycle, and aren’t ones where D4 is simply guilty by association with blizzard or another of their games. I think the reasons you’ve given generally fall into these categories.
on initial dev/community response, I agree specifically vulnerable damage didn’t take long to be revealed as overpowered & that cheapened the launch meta. The first dev stream primarily served to address that issue. I’d agree it was significant enough an issue to warrant addressing quickly, but I’d disagree that the response was outside the scope of general expectation for post-launch corrections to the meta of an ARPG. Here I think you’re mistaking the acknowledgement of any fault with the game as going into “damage control” mode, likely due to the issue being played up by commentators. I acknowledge they went into that mode later - following the S1 mid-season patch.
on sticking with bad design, or the intention behind it, it’s hard to respond about the examples you’ve given because the fact both minions & dungeons have been reworked exemplifies that isn’t true. Minions received small updates in S2, buffs & further reworks in S4. Many of the more annoying dungeon affixes were removed for S2 - lightning storm affix was also removed for S4. You could certainly argue that they were intentional parts of the design during the development stage, but that dev time was straight up sacrificed to improve it, so it’s clear to me they aren’t staunch about really any part of the design. Indeed following the codex reworks, running a normal dungeon is no longer necessary at any stage of the game (except for the sorc lvl15 quest). You can still get aspects that way if you want, but you can also get them all from salvaging gear over time. It’s optional content, and additionally there are many small tweaks over the seasons I’d describe as “surprises” - minor things like new animations for normal mobs in particular locations, spider elites creeping down from the roof of a cave, and other small touches that cumulatively make dungeons more interesting / less repetitive. These are mostly not mentioned in patch notes and as such have been almost completely ignored by commentators.
on monetisation, as someone that has had multiple battle passes, they aren’t worth it. There’s simply very little motivation to buy them or any of the individual paid cosmetics in the game, because they aren’t meaningfully better than the free cosmetics. My toons don’t wear my paid cosmetics - it’s literally more interesting to go without transmog. The free cosmetics are good enough & that way there’s at least variety in what’s displayed on the loading screens. When you refer to monetisation as a problem with this game, my question in response is - acknowledging the state of live service game monetisation is generally predatory - how could it be less so in D4? Isn’t an entirely optional system that doesn’t involve fomo about as good a place as you could expect the monetisation to be in?
There are 2 exceptions in my mind regarding generally anti-consumer stuff (the isolated incidents I referred to earlier). That is 1. additional DRM that was in place during the early access period for purchasers of the collector’s edition, and 2. the dark pattern implementation causing unintentional activation of S1 battle pass tokens for that same group. These are both things I disagree strongly with on principle, and if anyone dropped the game because of them - I’d agree with them. Indeed when my buddy ran into DRM roadblocks during early access, I promptly refunded my collector’s edition and purchased the standard one upon launch instead.
Now in regards to yours/your friends initial impressions, I think it’s worth considering the impact of external factors such as Blizzard’s reputation, and the general launch state of the litany of games released post-covid delays during 2022-23, both of which I think served to negatively impact interest at launch. IIRC it was their first major non-WoW release following the revelation of issues that culminated in the DFEH lawsuit, and the resulting major changes in company structure. I actually think D4’s launch state is pretty admirable overall in light of those issues, but could certainly understand if Blizzard fans were trepidatious about continuing to support them at the time. Against a backdrop of failed major launches, it’d at least make a lot of sense to wait for post-launch independent feedback.
And likewise if they had held off until that S1 midseason patch where everything was nerfed to shit and people logged in to find their builds suddenly needed extensive reworking, I’d agree with anyone dropping interest in the aftermath of that. I did too, temporarily.
Lastly, keep in mind that they had Megan Fox advertising the game in Superbowl ads. I don’t think it’s the case that D4’s launch state was bad and caused a noteworthy player exodus. I think that ARPG’s simply aren’t that mass-marketable, and that advertising reached a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t pay D4 any mind, and that group just aren’t generally interested in that kind of game. And so once they reconciled how it was advertised vs what it is, they stopped playing. From my perspective, that isn’t meaningful in terms of analysing whether it’s a good game.
I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.
I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.
i get where you’re coming from, i believe, but i don’t mean the, well, “treadmill,” specifically. there were players testing D4 extensively & finding out that 1) some mechanics, while baffling, appeared to be working as intended (necro minion behaviour, for one) & 2) some mechanics were not working as intended (armor chief among them, IIRC). add to this the monetisation, lack of content, dungeon / map design & a whole bunch of other things people had legitimate problems with from the get-go… well. i mean. i know kind of a silly amount of people with a long history with Blizzard / Diablo, some of whom i wouldn’t feel weird calling Blizzard fanboys. not a single one picked up the game at all. like, not that my peers are the alpha & omega; i just kinda hadn’t thought about this much before, but it’s bizarre how many friends & relatives i was sure would eat up anything by Blizzard just straight up ignored the game. again, it’s not really about the treadmill as much as like, just old-fashioned word of mouth, i think. it didn’t take long at all for Blizzard to post their “so, uh, things are gonna change” damage control video, which to me says they know they messed up (for what it’s worth), when everyone & their dog were reporting on the game selling a buttillion copies only a little while before.
i believe i may have been coming on a bit strong. apologies. i don’t at all mean to be saying that D4 was overwhelmingly criticised by everyone, just that the reception seemed to be mixed enough where two people could have an entirely different view of it, depending on the environment. you know? there were people who were primed to hate it no matter what, absolutely, but also a veritable mountain of legitimate critique that i don’t want to be dismissed, because the game was not ready for launch. the “beta testing” showed as much, but of course, it was already too late to change anything. & you know, what boils my piss is, there were folks saying, “have fun with a year’s worth of beta testing you paid for.” because they were right. they shouldn’t have been right about this. this shouldn’t be happening.
I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.
lmao this is such a slimebag thing to say. whether or not you find my opinion valid is irrelevant, because that’s not what this is about. like, why respond at all if you’re so unwilling to engage with what is actually being said?
Your overall point seems to be that despite the wide acclaim on launch & yourself / your peer group’s historic enthusiasm for blizzard games, you came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth engaging with the game via word-of-mouth. What is there to argue about that? The reasons you shared generally don’t ring true to me, but I’m not the arbiter of your collective impressions. At the start of this comment chain I tried to elucidate genuine reasons to dislike it - either reasons that haven’t been already addressed for a significant part of the game’s lifecycle, and aren’t ones where D4 is simply guilty by association with blizzard or another of their games. I think the reasons you’ve given generally fall into these categories.
on initial dev/community response, I agree specifically vulnerable damage didn’t take long to be revealed as overpowered & that cheapened the launch meta. The first dev stream primarily served to address that issue. I’d agree it was significant enough an issue to warrant addressing quickly, but I’d disagree that the response was outside the scope of general expectation for post-launch corrections to the meta of an ARPG. Here I think you’re mistaking the acknowledgement of any fault with the game as going into “damage control” mode, likely due to the issue being played up by commentators. I acknowledge they went into that mode later - following the S1 mid-season patch.
on sticking with bad design, or the intention behind it, it’s hard to respond about the examples you’ve given because the fact both minions & dungeons have been reworked exemplifies that isn’t true. Minions received small updates in S2, buffs & further reworks in S4. Many of the more annoying dungeon affixes were removed for S2 - lightning storm affix was also removed for S4. You could certainly argue that they were intentional parts of the design during the development stage, but that dev time was straight up sacrificed to improve it, so it’s clear to me they aren’t staunch about really any part of the design. Indeed following the codex reworks, running a normal dungeon is no longer necessary at any stage of the game (except for the sorc lvl15 quest). You can still get aspects that way if you want, but you can also get them all from salvaging gear over time. It’s optional content, and additionally there are many small tweaks over the seasons I’d describe as “surprises” - minor things like new animations for normal mobs in particular locations, spider elites creeping down from the roof of a cave, and other small touches that cumulatively make dungeons more interesting / less repetitive. These are mostly not mentioned in patch notes and as such have been almost completely ignored by commentators.
on monetisation, as someone that has had multiple battle passes, they aren’t worth it. There’s simply very little motivation to buy them or any of the individual paid cosmetics in the game, because they aren’t meaningfully better than the free cosmetics. My toons don’t wear my paid cosmetics - it’s literally more interesting to go without transmog. The free cosmetics are good enough & that way there’s at least variety in what’s displayed on the loading screens. When you refer to monetisation as a problem with this game, my question in response is - acknowledging the state of live service game monetisation is generally predatory - how could it be less so in D4? Isn’t an entirely optional system that doesn’t involve fomo about as good a place as you could expect the monetisation to be in?
There are 2 exceptions in my mind regarding generally anti-consumer stuff (the isolated incidents I referred to earlier). That is 1. additional DRM that was in place during the early access period for purchasers of the collector’s edition, and 2. the dark pattern implementation causing unintentional activation of S1 battle pass tokens for that same group. These are both things I disagree strongly with on principle, and if anyone dropped the game because of them - I’d agree with them. Indeed when my buddy ran into DRM roadblocks during early access, I promptly refunded my collector’s edition and purchased the standard one upon launch instead.
Now in regards to yours/your friends initial impressions, I think it’s worth considering the impact of external factors such as Blizzard’s reputation, and the general launch state of the litany of games released post-covid delays during 2022-23, both of which I think served to negatively impact interest at launch. IIRC it was their first major non-WoW release following the revelation of issues that culminated in the DFEH lawsuit, and the resulting major changes in company structure. I actually think D4’s launch state is pretty admirable overall in light of those issues, but could certainly understand if Blizzard fans were trepidatious about continuing to support them at the time. Against a backdrop of failed major launches, it’d at least make a lot of sense to wait for post-launch independent feedback.
And likewise if they had held off until that S1 midseason patch where everything was nerfed to shit and people logged in to find their builds suddenly needed extensive reworking, I’d agree with anyone dropping interest in the aftermath of that. I did too, temporarily.
Lastly, keep in mind that they had Megan Fox advertising the game in Superbowl ads. I don’t think it’s the case that D4’s launch state was bad and caused a noteworthy player exodus. I think that ARPG’s simply aren’t that mass-marketable, and that advertising reached a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t pay D4 any mind, and that group just aren’t generally interested in that kind of game. And so once they reconciled how it was advertised vs what it is, they stopped playing. From my perspective, that isn’t meaningful in terms of analysing whether it’s a good game.