Did Blizzard redeem themselves with the D4 Announcment?

[Novaris]

It doesn´t look bad right now.

The three classes so far are not that interesting to me, except the “mage”. I hope for an Amazon with release. Also a little bit worried about DLC in this one.

I´m also curious about what lore stands behind these characters.

Animations look a bit stiff, but difficult to say from a video, after all the game is still at least a year away, lot´s of things they can improve on.

What really bothers me is the shared world. I hope there is a possibility to not take part in this. If you are going back to the roots so to speak, and make a more atmospheric game, the last thing I want is a dozen other “heroes” running around and breaking said atmosphere.

Hardly “redeemed”.

[Moggie]

Will see how it pans out. Much much too early to really get hyped over and many many things can and will change between now and 2-3(00) years whenever it finally gets released.

[SirCowdog]

The game looks a little too much like D3 just with a slightly cleaner engine. And almost all of the details about the game are still in the conceptual stage. I'm highly skeptical of the open world nature of it, and the microtransactions.

Redeemed? Hardly. Blizzard has a long way to go for that. I'm not saying they can't do it, but it's going to take a lot more than a prepared presentation and a handful of promises.

[tikcol]

Itemization seems rather simple atm. I would even say simpler than d3. The runewords they showed were not very convincing. I'll only be convinced after playing for a few days and actually getting immersed in the systems.

I can't even say how much I dislike the attack/defense itemization. They even showed items with 10k attack, wtf.

[rips]

I have well over 1000 hours in D2 and D3 each, so I enjoyed them quite a bit overall. They definitely messed up with the auction house stuff in D3 and fixed it later on. Other than that I would say the game could have used a lot more content updates.

D4 so far is pretty underwhelming to me. It looks like D3 with better graphics and blood painted everywhere in a lazy attempt to make the game more "dark". I am glad druids are back, but hopefully the game looks a lot better between now and release.

how do people still not understand that diablo 4 on the blizzcon was just a demo ? of course its a updated d3 version its the same engine.

[lollerlaban]

how do people still not understand that diablo 4 on the blizzcon was just a demo ? of course its a updated d3 version its the same engine.

D4 is not the engine from D3.

GamesBeat: How much new tech is there with the lighting in the game?

Murphy: It’s a brand new engine, brand new renderer, brand new lighting tech. We have dynamic time of day that happens when you’re in the overworld. We even have dynamic time of day in the random exterior dungeons we’re making.

We have dynamic weather systems. When it starts to rain, things get wet. Ripples start to happen after it’s been raining for a while. Water accumulates. Your hero gets wet. All these things happen, and that affects lighting. It’s PVR, so this is the first time we’ve had that in Diablo. It’s a completely new lighting pipeline. It’s actually been really cool to build it.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/02/b...om-diablo-iii/

Why would they use the same engine that struggles to run decent with shit going on during fights?

[Anastacy]

No, because then their WoW announcement sucked.

Although I suppose last year was still "worse".

[rips]

D4 is not the engine from D3.



https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/02/b...om-diablo-iii/

Why would they use the same engine that struggles to run decent with shit going on during fights?

ok you are right. then they still decided to give it a d3 look

[lollerlaban]

ok you are right. then they still decided to give it a d3 look

While it's close to D3 looks it's still more gritty looking. There was no reason to overhaul the visual aesthetics

[Drazo]

Diablo 4 looks pretty decent though it did not wow me as of yet. Sure, I get how it looks very similar to d3 when it comes to how the combat looks but how is that bad? I really do not want a game looking like PoE with how janky and dated the animations are. Why emulate a game that looks like it came out in the late 2000s. PoE excels in its system even though they are overly complex which is why I think D4 should find a middle ground and reward players with more choice when it comes to builds and talents. So far its better than D3 with the talent tree but I am not seeing as much variety yet.

Despite the negatives ive seen, I am really looking forward to play it. I can understand the hate for the MMO aspects but I feel it depends on how they deal with giving the players the choice on whether they choose to play alone or with people.

[owbu]

So far we know their marketing and art departments are working and that they are able to listen to feedback if it is purely cosmetically.

To redeem yourself you have to actually show improvement in the areas you screwed up in.

And so far we got a nonsense apologize that would put EA to shame and some artwork. Nothing to condemn them nothing to praise them for.

[Mendzia]

No.
They will if the game will be good (i mean 'old Blizzard standard' good) and not easy cash grab clown fiesta.
I really, really doubt that so not even planning on prepurchase it.

[infinit]

The game from what we have seen looks the same as D3 and that's what? 8 years old now.

everything at blizzcon was a massive disappointment

[PaladinBash]

It's updated Diablo 2 and that's all I wanted from Diablo 3 so I'll take it with this.

[Aphrel]

It looks great, and i like direction theya re going with.

I have however two concerns.

1. Gear and build diversity. The char panel look alarmingly simple. With defense, offense and life being the only 3 stats i saw. Comapred to poe where we have well over a 100 diffrent stats leading to a very diverese gearsets for the diffrent builds. This is one of my mian worries. that we will have a repeat of d3 where every single spec goes for near identical stats on gear.

2. Gameplay, How will the endgame look like? Im not a fan of the pure ai generated content of greater rift.

Places, uinque bosses, loots, locations, they matter. NAMES MATTER.
Places should have a name and be recognizable to some degree. Bosses should have a name, they should have iconc abilities, a uinque appearance and they should belong to a location.

[Coldkil]

It looks great, and i like direction theya re going with.

I have however two concerns.

1. Gear and build diversity. The char panel look alarmingly simple. With defense, offense and life being the only 3 stats i saw. Comapred to poe where we have well over a 100 diffrent stats leading to a very diverese gearsets for the diffrent builds. This is one of my mian worries. that we will have a repeat of d3 where every single spec goes for near identical stats on gear.

2. Gameplay, How will the endgame look like? Im not a fan of the pure ai generated content of greater rift.

Places, uinque bosses, loots, locations, they matter. NAMES MATTER.
Places should have a name and be recognizable to some degree. Bosses should have a name, they should have iconc abilities, a uinque appearance and they should belong to a location.

First point always baffles me. How is attack/defense different from STR/INT/AGI/STA? They're literally the same thing.

And as you said, like PoE what makes items unique is the affixes - we will have plenty of them, though while PoE aims to have rares basically the true endgame items on par with uniques, in D4 there's a clear distinction and they're just a stepping stone towards higher tier of items. Add Runewords that have their own unique affixes you can customize any item with, i'd say we're fine.

If anything, PoE is bloated by affixes. In the end, only an handful of them are useful and most stuff that drops is completely useless you have to play with a loot filter to get rid of all crap. Though the goal of the two game sis completely different. PoE is an awesome game.

Agree on point 2. I hope the dungeons are not generic GRs style - i like the dungeon layout to be randomized, but as you said i hop for actual fixed bosses to be present. Giving identity to specific places is super important. But from what we know it seems to be exactly like that - at least for places and name. You know that in a specific zone there's a specific dungeon and you can go stratight farming that. Don't know about specific bosses, but it seems that excluding the trash/elites, bosses should be full fledged specific fights. We don't really know for sure though.

[Aphrel]

First point always baffles me. How is attack/defense different from STR/INT/AGI/STA? They're literally the same thing.

And as you said, like PoE what makes items unique is the affixes - we will have plenty of them, though while PoE aims to have rares basically the true endgame items on par with uniques, in D4 there's a clear distinction and they're just a stepping stone towards higher tier of items. Add Runewords that have their own unique affixes you can customize any item with, i'd say we're fine.

If anything, PoE is bloated by affixes. In the end, only an handful of them are useful and most stuff that drops is completely useless you have to play with a loot filter to get rid of all crap. Though the goal of the two game sis completely different. PoE is an awesome game.

Agree on point 2. I hope the dungeons are not generic GRs style - i like the dungeon layout to be randomized, but as you said i hop for actual fixed bosses to be present. Giving identity to specific places is super important. But from what we know it seems to be exactly like that - at least for places and name. You know that in a specific zone there's a specific dungeon and you can go stratight farming that. Don't know about specific bosses, but it seems that excluding the trash/elites, bosses should be full fledged specific fights. We don't really know for sure though.

the diffrence between attack/defense (2 stats) vs the 100+ stats we have in poe is that it allows for build diversity. Wich is key for trading. If all builds go for the exact same items it creates a very uninteresting market where everything thats good for you is also good for everyone else and everything you dont need is likely not very good for anyone else either.
Ofc if they go the d3 route of gearing where yellows is something you wear for an hour or 2 until my char is decked out in uinqes then it doesnt matter. But i hope they dont, i found that there wasnt that many choices to make in what uinques one decided to wear in d3. Very often most slots had a clear BIS option.

[NatePsy]

Too early to tell right now, I'll reserve judgement until I've seen the gameplay and it's many systems.

[Coldkil]

the diffrence between attack/defense (2 stats) vs the 100+ stats we have in poe is that it allows for build diversity. Wich is key for trading. If all builds go for the exact same items it creates a very uninteresting market where everything thats good for you is also good for everyone else and everything you dont need is likely not very good for anyone else either.
Ofc if they go the d3 route of gearing where yellows is something you wear for an hour or 2 until my char is decked out in uinqes then it doesnt matter. But i hope they dont, i found that there wasnt that many choices to make in what uinques one decided to wear in d3. Very often most slots had a clear BIS option.

And that's where the whole thing falls apart.

There are NO 2 stats only in D4 (excluding normal items). There are all the affixes like in every other chapter - not like D3 where everything was crit/critdmg/as. Also, the 100+ stats in PoE are not actually all useful because all items need to have specific ones to be valuable, narrowing down a lot the options.

This is really laughable. Both games have the same base concept - your build is going to be defined by items affixes you have available. In PoE it's just the same - the trading thing you bring out is just nonsense, since what's good for me can be good for people playing a similar build or using the same skill or what's not good for my build can be good for someone else.

I'm not saying PoE is bad. But what's BiS is and will always be BiS for everyone playing the same build. Meta exists in PoE aswell, so i don't see any difference.

The only difference is that obtaining such BIS items in PoE is terribly time consuming or needs you to invest lots of currency. The fact is that you don't really need those BiS to do everything in game, it's needed just for minmaxing. The only difference in D4 is that they decided to go a more streamlined route where you have clear progression in item power.

Granted, all of this comes from the limited informations we have. It can become easily the scenario you depict. However, you are thinking about D4 a system akin to the one that was in D3 which is completely and totally not the case. It's been literally shown how stuff works and here's a breakdown:

- items have att/def instead of mainstat/stam
- items will have a number of affixes depending on quality
- progression is the usual normal-magic-rare-legendary/sets-mythic
- sets won't be like D3, will be comparable to legendaries and won't be required for any build
- legendaries are designed to change how skills work and be build-enablers
- mythic will be "only one equipped at a time" tier
- runewords will assume the role of "custom triggers" where you can combine condition and effects to have your own ones

So, no more "X build has Y set and these legendaries". It all depends on balance and how many legendaries we will have available. As in PoE, the more stuff we have, the more options we get. I find PoE crafting system extremely convoluted for no real reason other than to force people into trading. For the rest, it's the perfect ARPG for me right now.

EDIT: i don't mean to attack you. I don't really see how one system is better than the other when they're very much similar, granted the design differences.

[iosdeveloper]

All we got at Blizzcon:
-cool cinematic (more matriarchy propaganda tho)
-D3 reskinned to look like D2
-"not even Blizzard soon"

Recent updates:
-cosmetic micro-transactions (means free armor will look like shit)

That's a NO in my book.
I'll be glad to be wrong in 2023-2024