Diablo IV Quarterly Update - September 2020

[exochaft]

Here's a crazy thought Blizzard.. Instead of constantly trying to come up with things you "think players might like" how about you actually use something players do like.. Make it as close as you can to Diablo 2.. You know.. The thing everyone liked, the most popular of that franchise.. I know, I know.. It's a crazy thought how silly of me

First of all, it appears from how things are framed and have been framed in the quarterly updates that Blizz is moving towards D2. As an example, Blizz stating they're trying to move player power away from items a bit is huge when you look at D3 and how insane power scaling is based upon certain pieces/sets. They can have a marked effect, but D3 is the extreme where not only does the baseline player power feel anemic, but also most gear is just worthless to where the power curve just shoots up at an insane exponential rate based upon 1-2 pieces. D2 had more power distributed baseline in the classes, as well as the talent trees, all while allowing gear to matter.

As an addendum, PoE is a great example of how even yellow gear can be powerful in the endgame, or even more powerful than uniques in many cases. D3 at the start had placed some value in well/perfectly rolled yellows being great, but current D3 has yellows as trash tier in pretty much every scenario while legendary items are always BiS. The trick is how many stats you have, how they're weighted on the items, if the stats can vary on legendaries, the amount of customization/crafting you can perform, etc.

Secondly, not everyone likes the same thing. Furthermore, not everyone likes new games being the exact same as its predecessors. While many people like the systems of old, many people want new systems instead. Just because something was popular decades ago doesn't mean it'll be popular now, or that it cannot be improved. It's a precarious path to travel, offering new experiences and systems while preserving the integrity and soul of the series, and I don't think people appreciate how bloody hard that is to achieve.

[Nite92]

Never understood the appeal in those trees, same with FFX's nodes... it's mostly just fluff and a pain to navigate to reach abilities and nodes that are actually worth your time.

It makes the simplest decision quite hard, and if you dont plan ahead in PoE, some people may not even be able to kill the story endboss on first playthrough

[Kumorii]

It makes the simplest decision quite hard, and if you dont plan ahead in PoE, some people may not even be able to kill the story endboss on first playthrough

Doesn't sound like good design to me. Not the part where you can't defeat the story endboss I think that's fine. But making choices like talents hard because of a convoluted web that's difficult to see the overarching path you want to take is not something that swings with me.

Information should be easy and intuitive to take in but the choices is where the difficult should lie in.

[Nite92]

"We agree with the feedback that a character’s power is currently too dependent on items."

This is literally the core concept of Diablo. Why does every Blizzard game have to end up an amalgamation of Diablo and WoW?

I haven't played diablo 2, but did diablo 2 have like 10000% damage multipliers? Because D3 has and I think they just don't want your character be 100x stronger depending on if you have 5 or 6 set pieces.

- - - Updated - - -

Path of Exile takes the cake with that...

From a hr/player perspective, sure. From a # of player perspective, no.

[BrintoSFJ]

I have a feeling this will be Star Citizen 2.0, which will take a veery long time before it's released. And at least I've lost my interest in SC totally just because of the super long wait, so I'd assume same can happen with D4. Especially as there will be probably a POE 2 before D4 is out.

Isn't SC already released? I just feel that they are intentionally keeping the game in alpha mode for no reason. What kind of alpha game is played by millions of players worldwide? As far as I have seen, the game is also quite polished, better than many released AAA games. For what reason they are still keeping the game in alpha is beyond me.

[Dracullus]

Cool to see they share something every quarter. I won't read it though, unlike WoW I want to go into Diablo IV completely blind.

[bobrock1982]

Not worth my time. In the final release every single one of these systems will be nothing like what they are showing us now.

[huth]

It's a bit subjective as to whether it qualifies as "massive," but I'm counting 87 nodes on that tree. Compared to D2's 10 per tree, three per class, that's a large increase. Classic WoW has ~46 nodes between a class's three trees. Something like PoE or FFX's grids blow it out of the water, obviously. It's significantly larger than trees in Blizzard's other games, so I'm guessing that's where the "massive" comes from.

PoE's Skilldrassil and FFX spheroboard are mostly just stat boosts, though. It's not hard to create hundreds of those, but they aren't terribly interesting to get, either. This looks like every single point will have a direct impact on your gameplay.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Here's a crazy thought Blizzard.. Instead of constantly trying to come up with things you "think players might like" how about you actually use something players do like.. Make it as close as you can to Diablo 2.. You know.. The thing everyone liked, the most popular of that franchise.. I know, I know.. It's a crazy thought how silly of me

It is crazy, you think everybody actually liked D2. I spent about 45 minutes playing it before quitting out of sheer boredom because I found none of the gameplay or core systems to be remotely interesting.

I don't think D4 looks bad, but literally the only thing in it I'm interested in is the story. None of the systems they've presented are attractive to me.

[Aresk]

PoE's Skilldrassil and FFX spheroboard are mostly just stat boosts, though. It's not hard to create hundreds of those, but they aren't terribly interesting to get, either. This looks like every single point will have a direct impact on your gameplay.

Yeah. You also get more points with those systems. I fully expect D4 to have more meaningful point allocation, where points are rarer but each point gives a lot more power relative to those other systems.

[huth]

Items will still convey a lot of power. You'll just be more like 10,000x more powerful than a character in "white" gear instead of 1,000,000,000x more powerful...

Some people just don't understand the difference between "at all" and "too much".

[Inoculate]

But-but... this is a Diablo topic?

Aye, but it's under the Activision banner. I'm saying that with their track record with diablo games and how this is shaping up has left me pretty skeptical they will ever pull off the magic of diablo and diablo 2.

Sure, I'm well aware I'm wearing rose tinted glasses as I was in middle school / high-school for those games and was young and impressionable, but they just can't produce anything innovative to save even high profile projects like Titan.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Aye, but it's under the Activision banner. I'm saying that with their track record with diablo games and how this is shaping up has left me pretty skeptical they will ever pull off the magic of diablo and diablo 2.

Sure, I'm well aware I'm wearing rose tinted glasses as I was in middle school / high-school for those games and was young and impressionable, but they just can't produce anything innovative to save even high profile projects like Titan.

Titan was going to be an MMO which isn't really innovative, innovatiton isn't the ONLY thing that gaming needs to focus on you know.

[Sevarin]

a passive meteor rain seems fun... but are they still all about the god awful resource system that 3 used? nothing says super fun like having to spam garbage attacks so you can use an attack that isnt terrible eventually.

I haven't played diablo 2, but did diablo 2 have like 10000% damage multipliers? Because D3 has and I think they just don't want your character be 100x stronger depending on if you have 5 or 6 set pieces.

diablo 2 power creep was actually pretty tame. it got a bit worse with lord or destruction when charms were released. with charms you could get an extra.... its been a long time, but i wanna say 13 skills from just having an inventory worth of charms. base skill level cap was 20, so that would put you at 33 before skills from gear came into play.

but even with all that, the most ridiculous rares and such, you were maybe.... 20 times stronger than someone in the basic common uniques and runewords.

[Inoculate]

Titan was going to be an MMO which isn't really innovative, innovatiton isn't the ONLY thing that gaming needs to focus on you know.

A game isn't innovative, the systems, story and gameplay are. Doesnt matter if it's an ARPG or MMORPG, both can be innovative...

And as for a game doesn't have to be innovative, it absolutely has to be. Look at Warcradt 3 reforged. Sure some people wanted an upgraded graphic version but what excited, and subsequently disappointed people, is they said initially they were going to reframe the story to make it better align with the current wow story.

If people just want clones then download the old games and replay those, I do it all the time with games like FF6. Nothing wrong with that but if I expected the next FF title to just use the systems in 6, it would have a very niche group (myself included) but probably wouldn't be successful.

[Jetstream]

Okay. Okay fine. That's fine.

But please don't make it a literal tree.

Please?

That's a little twee and on the nose, even for Blizzard.