Diablo 4?

[tikcol]

I don't think so. Hype for the game has died down too much to just release a new expansion unless they are willing to bundle the original game and RoS with it but I doubt that would happen.

D4 or an HD remake of D1 and D2 is what is probably going to happen. I want the latter less than I want to have my limbs sawed off my body but I think it is very likely.

I just don't believe that the hype is so low that it would warrant and make them gather and expend the resources necessary to create a new game from scratch. Thats why I believe that first they would revamp the game again with an expansion before commiting fully to a new game.

I dont think D4 is a good idea right now because it would lead to a D3 expansion with a Diablo IV label on it and thats not what anyone wants.

Diablo 4 needs to be a new game and not what Diablo vanillla is in relation to RoS

[Phurox]

I think that D3's classes are poorly designed. Boring spells, with no possibility to modify them beside a rune. Still missing a talent tree.

[Coldkil]

I think that D3's classes are poorly designed. Boring spells, with no possibility to modify them beside a rune. Still missing a talent tree.

Actually i'm fine with the current spells/rune system. Paragon should be the huge talent tree that makes spells and runes viable without having to resort to overpowered set bonuses which build your character for you.

[Deleted]

just no. there wont be a d4. and even if there were and they'd show something at blizzcon. release would take at least 3 more years, a shitty beta which is actually a demo and a completely revamped game which will also be dumped down a lot.

[Gallahadd]

Actually i'm fine with the current spells/rune system. Paragon should be the huge talent tree that makes spells and runes viable without having to resort to overpowered set bonuses which build your character for you.

I would love that. If there were the base spells, which could be chopped and changed whenever, like we have now...

But then, paragon would be a huge tree, which would take a longer amount of time to invest in and would allow you to further individualise your play style. This would be possible to reset, but would take time and effort, you couldn't just change it when you feel like it.

Then sets bonus would be small stat/damage boosts, nothing game changing.

[Deleted]

i'd love to see MMO in the Diablo universe, or RPG like skyrim etc.

more like wow these days but with diablo classes. kinda boring tbh

[Silhouette of Seraphim]

Prepare for major hype, or a major sodium imbalance at Blizzcon.

[Coldkil]

Prepare for major hype, or a major sodium imbalance at Blizzcon.

Hahaha i think it's one of the best lines i've read lately.

[Jokubas]

I just don't believe that the hype is so low that it would warrant and make them gather and expend the resources necessary to create a new game from scratch. Thats why I believe that first they would revamp the game again with an expansion before commiting fully to a new game.

Considering how well Reaper of Souls sold despite Diablo 3's reputation in the fandom at the time, it seems we can't judge the hype based on official or even fan forums. I know for myself, while I recognize many problems with the game's current state, most of them don't affect me directly all that much. I simply stopped playing when I did what I set out to do, and would gladly come back if there was more of it.

I think another expansion could easily fix the biggest problems with the game's current state. They may seem like far-reaching issues, but I think they mainly come from two sources:

1) The Infinite Scaling
Diablo 3 was pushed to have infinite replayability, and we got things like Paragon levels, Greater Rifts, and new Difficulties.

The Problem:
Infinite scaling isn't really good for a variety of reasons. First off, it's pretty much impossible to design in a way that will always be balanced as intended. The new difficulties have often been seen as a bit of a necessary evil, and that's why. If you can infinitely climb the ladder, you will also be infinitely trivializing what you have passed. People want challenge, but this system keeps the challenge bar moving in a way that keeps removing old challenge without really adding anything new.

This is also the biggest hurdle to the game having a healthy community. When any given player can be at any point on an infinite line, the chances of them being within a reasonable power range to play with each other becomes ridiculously small. This is terrible for encouraging any kind of multiplayer. The seasons attempt to bandage this by giving a regularly occurring place for everyone to start at the same level, but it's only a bandage that exaggerates the issue.

The Solution:
Start off by raising the level cap again. This will reset most aspects by its very nature, so that people will more easily accept the new endgame when they reach it. Then cut all of the infinite stuff like Paragon Levels. The main replayability should be through gear (I'll get to that next). You can have some alternate advancement stuff, but it should still have a cap. You could maybe even have Greater Rifts still go as high as you can defeat, but with no other ability to gain infinite power, this should be more of an achievement/challenge thing than progression. The main progression should be getting the gear in order to confront the difficulties, with the final difficulty not having gear available to ever make it easy.

2) The Gear Affixes
Affixes on Legendaries and Set Bonuses can be really neat, fun, and interesting to play around with, but their implementation has caused some serious issues throughout the game.

The Problem:
Affixes are powerful. Too powerful. Affixes (and I'm including set bonuses) make or break builds entirely on their own. When you find a piece of gear, the affix is everything. Sure, once you have the sets and legendaries you were looking for, you start trying to squeeze out optimal stats and ancient legendaries and stuff, but it still means that you instantly ignore all other gear. In a game like this, loot is really meant to be the main progression. While not every piece of loot can ever be interesting (nor should it, as that would slow everything to a frustrating crawl), seeing an explosion of loot should be exciting, not "look at all that salvage." This helped inspire the first problem as well. Since loot wasn't an interesting progression anymore, numbers themselves became the progression, but that scaled infinitely and became unsustainable. This also destroys build diversity. When a set gives a 4000% damage increase to a certain ability, all other abilities become useless. You don't have to be a min-maxer to find that stupid to pass up.

The Solution:
Affixes are fun, they should not be entirely removed. Instead, I think most of them should simply be moved. I don't have a specific suggestion here, but that's because there are a lot of ways you could do it. For a quick example, you could make it the new alternate advancement system. A lot of affixes are like runes. You could remove affixes from gear and turn them into something similar to the rune system, but one you unlock at max level. In a lot of ways, this would also be like Kanai's Cube (and would probably require a revamp/removal of that), but something you progress more directly on as part of your character. With this change, each piece of gear becomes more relevant, because they all become potential upgrades again.

Now, obviously, that second solution is not a small amount of work, but I think it's within an expansion's level of work. Between these two things, I think the game could be made relatively healthy again with a second expansion, just as Reaper of Souls fixed so much about the original launch. The question is more of whether Blizzard considers these things issues than whether they can reasonably resolve them in an expansion.

[Defused]

i dont think bilz wil announce d4 for a bit longer if any thing its gona be new xpac with maby a new clas to play

[Orangetai420]

And then lose nearly all the customers since the only ones appealed by older Diablo game snow are 99% nostalgia bearers.

I mean, D2 is awesome and is on many levels better than D3, but i don't see D2HD to be the big hit everyone claims it will be. It will be a nice perk, nothing more. Games evolved a lot, so anything following D3 in the Diablo universe needs to bring something new to the table.

That's a bold claim. D2 has a better item system, character progression, and "open feeling" world. The end game events felt way more epic than grinding rifts until my eyes bleed.

Many remasters do bring more to the table. It's hard to argue that D3 and D2 share the same design philosophy, both are ARPGs but take very different approaches. D3 feels like an arcade game and not an RPG. D2's character building was much closer to an RPG. Even the enemies in D2 gave me a better sense of immersion - "that demon is immune to fire? makes sense!"

[Coldkil]

That's a bold claim. D2 has a better item system, character progression, and "open feeling" world. The end game events felt way more epic than grinding rifts until my eyes bleed.

Many remasters do bring more to the table. It's hard to argue that D3 and D2 share the same design philosophy, both are ARPGs but take very different approaches. D3 feels like an arcade game and not an RPG. D2's character building was much closer to an RPG. Even the enemies in D2 gave me a better sense of immersion - "that demon is immune to fire? makes sense!"

That's correct.

But many people don't take in consideration the fact that while we can discuss about this, the whole amount of new players (and i mean the ones that didn't play original diablo games) are used to a completely different gameplay system, and i'm not talking about Diablo only. I'm talking about being spoiled by instant gratification everywhere.

D2HD will be appreciated by a lot of people, but they will be all the ones that actually played it and most new players will just buy it and then complain about how long and difficult is to get stuff or turn onto trading to skip the farming step - which happened immediately on D3 with the AH.

I'm not questioning D2 or the possible quality of an HD remake; just that old game system + current playerbase is not a nice combo and may lead to disappontment.

EDIT: also, the phrase you bolded out was referred to rehiring blizzard north employees, which delivered a very good game and then simply disappeared after Hellgate:London, which was interesting but not good. At all.

[Orangetai420]

EDIT: also, the phrase you bolded out was referred to rehiring blizzard north employees, which delivered a very good game and then simply disappeared after Hellgate:London, which was interesting but not good. At all.

I agree that many gamers now don't seem to have the same taste as I did growing up, so I see your point.

I played Hellgate London, it was full of bugs and had not much endgame but I did enjoy it for what it was. It certainly felt rushed and was no where near the quality of D2 but I spent an enjoyable 20-30 hours and then was done.

[Blayze]

EDIT: also, the phrase you bolded out was referred to rehiring blizzard north employees, which delivered a very good game and then simply disappeared after Hellgate:London, which was interesting but not good. At all.

Hellgate: London, the only game so boring it failed twice.

[Kontinuum]

New job posting (Senior Character Artist)
http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company...tml?id=160010T

[RoKPaNda]

I'm hoping for an expansion. It's way too soon for Diablo 4. Blizzard just doesn't churn out sequels that fast.

I loved Diablo 2. I would rush home from High School, finish my homework, and play hours of Diablo 2 with my RL friends. I played D2 for years and honestly I loved every minute of it. Diablo 3 was announced, I played the beta and as limited as the beta was I was hooked. It was a very different game, some aspects of it were simplified and some aspects of it felt "Easier" because they were more streamlined.

I didn't mind the loot system, I didn't mind that half the time when I found a legendary it had shit stats, because if we're all honest with each other here the loot system in Diablo 2 and every other ARPG is complete and total shit also. The only reason that the D3 system felt worse was because you could easily bypass it by buying amazing gear on the gold AH .. I mean you could find gear that wasn't perfect but it was still amazing and fully gear yourself out for a few hundred thousand gold and then nothing you'd find in your farming would compare with what you had. If it wasn't for the gold AH, finding gear wouldn't have been quite so frustrating. It would have felt good to find a decent piece of loot instead of "Oh, I spent some gold and got some gear and now everything I find is ass and I'm not really working for anything."

Original pre-nerf Inferno difficulty was frustrating at times, but in a good way, like D2 ... I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF INFERNO DIFFICULTY. Beating Inferno before they nerfed the shit out of it felt amazing. Granted class balance was awful. The expansion casualized the shit out of the game, trivialized a lot of things, etc .. but I went back and played D2 recently and realized that I actually like D3 a lot more. I loved D2 because I didn't know any better, I didn't have anything really to compare it to, and now that we have better games like D3 and PoE I really don't have much interest in an HD re release of D2, or a D4 that's closer to D2 than D3.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Honestly, considering it's Diablo 20th, I strongly believe we're going to get a remastered version. Maybe just updated software or perhaps a full remaster, but a remaster nonetheless.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

I'm hesitant towards it being a Diablo 2 HD remake. On one hand, I'd love to see it brought back and put on a modern engine with all of the old systems (lobby, trade, stats, pvp etc...) left unchanged whereas on the other hand I am afraid of how much will get ripped out of it for bullshit reasons.

[Coldkil]

I'm hesitant towards it being a Diablo 2 HD remake. On one hand, I'd love to see it brought back and put on a modern engine with all of the old systems (lobby, trade, stats, pvp etc...) left unchanged whereas on the other hand I am afraid of how much will get ripped out of it for bullshit reasons.

I don't think they're going to make a move like that - it's easy to see how it will fail on any aspect. If anything they0re just making the game run on modern machines with maybe support for increased resolutions and maybe bigger stash, end of story. "Very maybe" we get hi-res textures.

Anyway, i don't think we will see it very soon. I hope it comes out as a patch/dlc thing to download if you have the game already registered on the bnet account.

[Synadrasa]

If only PoE and Diablo were to make a baby. PoE at the moment just seems so much more interesting in terms of making your own builds and complexity and as such feels rewarding, but Diablo steals the show when it comes to graphics and in game environments. I really dislike how blizzard has been on this path of making super dumbed-down video games with no complexity or investment, that desire to always appeal to the lowest denominator is what scares me.