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  1. #1

    Diablo 4 is bad.

    -Two button game - click left click to win. There are few buttons to press, there are no skillshots- the gameplay is dull.

    -Too simple. Zero challenge, just spam left click to win 95% of the time. You can easily fly in and kill any crowd of mobs already at the lowest levels exept for a few elite packs. The bosses are also not difficult, but fat - click them for 5 minutes to kill. Diablo in D3 was much less fat than any random regular boss in D4

    -No sense of progress. Due to scaling, there is no feeling that you are becoming stronger, and because of simplicity, there is no joy that you have leveled up. It’s already easy, why even bother to level up?

    -Gear is not interesting to change - stats do not give much, there is no feeling that I have become stronger after i changed piece of gear. It’s not fun to gear up, it’s not fun to level up, it’s not fun to press your buttons. Why endure grind?

    In such genres as Diablo, the character capabilities should be limited at the beginning of the game (little mana, inventory space, damage, hp, everything), but you must level up to remove these restrictions by getting new of talent points and gear. This makes this games interesting.Plus, the mobs should destroy you at low levels, but the higher level you are, the stronger, on the contrary, you start to destroy them. This approach should be enjoyable because of the sense of progress.

    In Diablo 4, your character is already, from the very beginning, not limited by anything and destroys huge crowds of monsters just with right click (I play as druid, and right-click with a blow of a bear, ONENSHOTS any crowd mobs already at level 5). The character is so strong from the beggining, with the new level it does not become particularly stronger, and due to scaling (feels like) character becomes even weaker.

    At the same time, to level up - you should go do quests in the style: the merchant owes me, bring me the gems. Or: I need to feed everyone and bring me 15 ghoul hearts.

    At the beggining of the main quest, there was an interesting story about how I was poisoned and how Lilith subdued the villagers, but then the main quests became in the same style: go to that garrison and find out something, now go there find out something…

    I see all this and think: WHY DO I PLAY THIS? What is the point? Why should I go get 15 Ghoul Hearts? For what? Why should i even bother leveling up? I am already strong. The plot does not motivate me to do this either. The two-button nobrain gameplay is also not interesting for me and im am not motivated level up to become stronger.

    How gameplay in such a game should look like:

    If you just fly into a pack of mobs, then you die.

    You should have buttons like lifesteal, damage reduction, mass stun, something.

    You have to fly into a pack of mobs, press these buttons, survive at the expense of this buttons and kill this pack.

    So there is a feeling that you did something to be able to overcome them.

    On the early levels, there may not be such buttons, but you should NOT be able to kill packs of mobs at the early levels. Gradually, with the discovery of new abilities, you must master more and more groups of monsters.

    In Diablo 4, I have two buttons until level 10 - left click and right click to deal damage. But this is absolutely enough in D4! And I just destroy everything in the game with these two buttons!!! I can kill 40 monsters in a few seconds with only this two buttons. That is rediculus. What for do i level then? Even in D3 i had to get good gear and use all of my abilities to become so strong.

    Yes, I see that defensive and utility abilities will appear in talents later. Well, I spent talant points on them at level 11. And now a simple game (where I destroy everything on my way without any challange) has become even easier.

    Apparently again, as in a typical modern Blizzard game, fun gameplay will only begin at the maximum level.

    And those stairs. The developers are probably directly proud that they came up with a system of shortcuts.

    But it’s just ridiculous. What is the point of such a system if it is available to everyone from the very beginning of the game and is marked on the map? What does this system gives besides stealing a couple of seconds to climb down these stairs?

    Normally, this system should work like this: these shortcuts should really exist from the beginning of the game and help cut the path, but they should NOT be available to the player to use at the beginning of the game.

    Some classes should have abilities that can immediately give them access to these shortcuts.

    The other clasees must do some kind of quest that will give them an item that will grant them the ability to use shortcuts. And it is desirable that this quest was not simple. You can make different quests for different types of shortcuts.

    Then these shorts will make sense.

  2. #2
    Kinda agree. Altough it is still in beta, game feels very restricted to its minimum effort and will be bloated with systems later on. The scaling is dull, like in WoW.

  3. #3
    Herald of the Titans Kilpi's Avatar
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    Judging by the first 10 levels of the game, it works and feels very much like D3 (in terms of skills used, difficulty, boss HP/damage, etc.). D3 scaled just the same when leveling and D3 problems were mainly in end game scaling (set items for example).

    Edit: And to add to the difficulty of stuff, playing D3 on "too high" difficulty level where killing things takes ages on low levels, is a lot more annoying and shit than actually getting shit done. So I'm not quite sure Diablo is your game to begin with.
    Last edited by Kilpi; 2023-03-26 at 09:20 AM.

  4. #4
    If you don't like it, there's an option not to play it I guess. Although going by the posts in the D4 forums that doesn't seem to be an option. For me personally it was quite fun, but mostly because I started out with a Sorc. It just plays miles better than any other class at low levels.

    One thing you have to consider is that this was just the first 25 levels and first act. We have no end game systems in the game currently. Who knows what it is going to be in the end. I don't think anyone can say PoE either is terribly exciting for the first 20 levels. Plus from everything I've heard this is an old build from last year. So who knows what we're going to get in 2 months.

    But if you didn't buy it yet, just wait. See if turns out any better. If not, then accept that this isn't the game for you and don't waste money on it.

  5. #5
    I wouldn't call it "really bad", but it's decidedly less fun than I expected it to be. I'm not having a great time. I'm having an okay time. Not sure that's enough.

    The gameplay is... D3. Like almost literally D3. Which is okay, I like D3. But I wanted something else, something new, something more. D2 iterated massively on D1, and D3 iterated massively on D2. This does not iterate on D3, in almost any way. And that's really, really concerning.

    Part of that is the skills. They're just ridiculously boring and uninspired. Almost nothing makes me look at it going "damn I really want to try this!". They're generic, often even straight carbon-copies from D3. And there's WAY too few of them. What's most distressing about this is that D3's main problem has always been that while it has an okay amount of skills (if you count all the runes), most of them are TERRIBLE and have glaring design flaws. They "fixed" this by just having legendaries go "this now deals 50,000% damage" and so you erase the problems by just having them be too OP not to use. And it's looking like "legendaries will fix it" is exactly what their plan is for this, AGAIN. Yeah it probably won't be 50,000% like D3 but I want to use skills because they're cool and work well, not because something says it's now the top damage one; and I certainly don't want skills to stink UNTIL I get an item that says now it doesn't stink. That's terrible design.

    Which plays into complaint #2, the itemization. This is what everyone picked out immediately as the main point of contention going back YEARS - and many of the fears seem to have come true. Items are boring and bland, with an array of largely interchangeable stats that more or less just translate into "do X more damage" only in different ways. How is overpower going to change your playstyle, say? Or lucky hit? Why does +skill actually matter, if all it does is add some numbers? Nothing changes the way you play, it's all just performance bumps with practically no impact on behavior. That's the opposite of what you want. You want things to change what you do, not just change what happens when you do what you always do. That's also terrible design. Granted, we haven't seen the end-stage of gear yet, not really. Maybe all the sacred items completely transform your character, fuck if I know.

    It just doesn't feel fun to build a character, either with gear OR with skills. And that's a massive red flag, all klaxons blaring. I never once looked at stuff going "man I can't wait to try all these things" - instead it was "okay so this is the obvious A build, this is the obvious B build..." with choices relegated to irrelevant things like do I take Teleport or not or whatever. Shallow as a puddle and inspiring as a wet stain. Yeah most people don't want PoE, no one is asking for the spreadsheetpocalypse to happen - but come on, not THIS. Not "do I take +3% periodic damage?" kind of bullshit. Isn't that exactly what killed the original WoW talent trees? Bland and boring must-spend stuff like 5/5 into +1% crit and whatnot that just didn't make you feel like you had agency OR were particularly fun. Why are we suddenly back to that now, 20 years later? Fuck, even D3's skill runes were better than most mods on skills in D4, and those largely got reduced to "what element am I playing".

    There's tons of minor gripes like the whole move/interact fiasco where apparently designing a contemporary ARPG meant you absolute cannot look at the competition and see what's the fucking standard for the genre, or something. Or the fact that to see your stats you have to go 3 screens deep and scroll around, because who would want to check what their CHARACTER STATS are amirite.

    Story is... whatever. We haven't seen enough, really, but it's pretty mediocre. It has some nice dark scenes like the whole village priest murder thing, but those don't really involve the player. You're a bystander in almost every sense. Storytelling through holograms? REALLY? In 2023? You just sit there and watch. There's even a part where you watch the hologram of past events and then RETELL THEM IMMEDIATELY TO AN NPC NEXT TO YOU because she couldn't see it. So the player is watching the player character watch other characters and then watches the player character explain what it watched to another NPC who was watching while the player character watched. And you think that's, like, a good way to use the video game medium to tell a story? Fuck off. Also please stop trying to make us emotionally invested in characters we suddenly meet through contrived circumstances and have known for a few hours of diegetic time. Yeah her mom died, but who is this girl and why do I care? You just put her in my path - she's done nothing, she is no one, we have zero connection or relationship. Why does this need a big emotional moment. Where's that emotion coming from? This is a grimdark nightmare world where demons try and eat your eyeballs every time you go to sleep. Shove your oh-no-mommy moment up your ass, please. At least the boneface wolf guy was kinda cool and kinda out of nowhere, though I'm sure they'll ruin everything by revealing it's Decard Cain or something.

    The game has POLISH, though. No complaints there. I may not be a huge fan of the art direction, but I can't fault the visual design. Everything looks AAA and then some, from the models to the animations. Fluid, natural, gritty and real. Voice acting is surprisingly good, despite the insufferable accents (which I'm sure are due to where we are in this part of the game). Sound quality is great, physics are top notch, all that. PoE looks like a puppet show by comparison (though PoE2 looks to be much improved in that respect, I will admit).

    I also think the performance is largely great, lag and queues not withstanding since those are probably just Beta woes. I'm playing on a shitty laptop with a 3050 and I can still get a solid 60fps throughout at 1440p just by turning on DLSS. I did not expect that. Runs great, feels great - as long as I'm somewhere alone.

    Which brings me to the controversial "MMO" stuff. I get that some people like that. It's something many people want, and thrive on. I personally do not. To me, it was a strict negative - it added absolutely nothing to the experience, while greatly detracting in some places like capital cities, events, and so on. It felt like an intrusion, it broke my immersion, it caused lag, and it made them have an overworld with massive empty stretches where you just walk around instead of constantly cleaving through monsters like in a good Diablo game. The world boss was a boring loot pinata with zero engagement or thought, dodge the obvious two or three attacks, hold button down, wait until it keels over. Direct consequence of the random, ad-hoc matchmaking of course that precludes any form of real difficulty because if you can't choose who you're playing with you can't make things difficult enough to require actual skill. So... why does it exist at all. To appease the MMO fiends, I suppose, who are desperate to have other people /awe at their transmog. Or something. But again - personal thing. I'm a reclusive misanthrope, not a party bro. I get there's more gregarious people out there than me.

    Overall, I can't help but be disappointed. It's not like I expected this to be a 10/10, but I thought Blizzard would at least make something I wouldn't want to put down for a while. I did put it down. I played through the campaign, durdled around a bit at 25 to round up the dungeons and so on. And then said "okay, I'm done" WAY sooner than I ever thought I would, or usually do with Diablo games. This isn't even an 8/10. It's more like a 6/10 or 6.5/10. It's not TERRIBLE, but it's not great. And I really, really wanted this to be great.
    Last edited by Biomega; 2023-03-26 at 09:55 AM.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by exsanguinate View Post
    Kinda agree. Altough it is still in beta, game feels very restricted to its minimum effort and will be bloated with systems later on. The scaling is dull, like in WoW.
    Its ok, nothing mindblowing, doesnt feel like diablo to me tho for some reason. The fact its beta means nothing at all, what you see here is what you will get on release. Now, sad to say its early to judge and i have no idea how a character will play when its skilled up and geared up with better powers etc but at the moment its a bit... lackluster. The job at the start of a game is to get me hooked but so far its not doing a very good job.

  7. #7
    Sounds like someone only played on Adventurer (World Tier 1).
    "May the way of the Hero lead to the Triforce"

    "May the Goddess smile upon you."

    "Hero", is what they've all been saying. This world, it isn't worth the saving."

  8. #8
    Bloodsail Admiral aarro's Avatar
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    This kid's obviously new to Diablo games...
    An Karanir Thanagor

  9. #9
    I like it. It's super fun and well made. The combat is smooth, but after having all characters to 25 on hardcore they definitely have some balancing work to do. Necromancer and Sorcerer are easily the strongest classes. With necromancer probably having the edge on sorcerer. The graphics and audio is excellent and I like that the game has an atmosphere that feels somewhat darker and grittier than D3 and thus more in line with the earlier Diablo games. There could be a bit more variety in dungeon bosses, but I suspect it is also a consequence of us having limited access to content in this "beta" (more like demo lol). I also like that they added some random WTF moments to dungeons like when the Butcher came charging in and butchered me and my buddy.

  10. #10
    I largely agree with all your thoughts. I tried the Beta with an open mind. To be honest, I was really looking forward to it. Overall, everything felt super bland and meaningless to me. It's evident that this is a mainstream game made for a broad audience. I felt like my choices barely mattered. It felt like gear upgrades and upgrading skills had no real impact. Also the world bosses are just timegated loot pinatas. I tried three classes and overall, I was super bored after reaching level's 10-15. It's just a very meh game. Similar to something like AC: Valhalla I can see this doing really well since it's very accessible and designed to be played by a broad audience.

    For me, overall, I’m very disappointed and I guess this game just isn’t for me. It didn't hook me in any way. I felt like my choices didn't matter at all. Furthermore, it really did feel like Diablo Immortal, it felt like it had mobile/console game elements which I absolutely hated.
    "There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." by Jiddu Krishnamurti, Philosopher and Educator

  11. #11
    No, it's not /thread

  12. #12
    I agree with thread opener completly. i tryed out beta a bit, but the game just didnt have the grief to soak me in at all. I think diablo 3 was superior to diablo 4.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Fabled View Post
    Sounds like someone only played on Adventurer (World Tier 1).
    I played the entire thing twice at veteran. Its very easy lol. OP going overboard. But some of his takes are true.

    -the mob scaling is absolute ass, its tuned like shit. I went to play with a lvl 1 friend, Hes one shotting the mobs until he hit lvl 5 lmao. Meanwhile my lvl 25 ass rogue is doing less damage on the mini bosses while im hitting for 500? You are gona go there as a fresh lvl 100 and be out damaged by a lvl 5 too lmao. The idea of scaling is not exactly bad, but it needs a rework so that someone multiple time your level doesent look like they are doing less damage then a single digit level character. Perhaps mobs that were under your level when you level should simply always be increased to 5 level under you max. For example if you hit 25. Any mob 20,21,22,24 stays the same, anything under 20 becomes level 20. So the game keeps up with you, but doesent just make you worse unless you find a gear pieces and if you go in the started zone, youll probably appear to be much stronger then a lvl 5.

    -HP on regular mob is too little, everything dies in one hit. I like that they made it so less enemy are on screen and we dont spam 500 yards of aoe. But the smaller enemies should be a challenge in groups. Boss on the other hand have ridiculous amount of HP, but pose no threat still. Icy clan thing in that stronghold feels like he has a million hp and Im hitting him for 500 and I have to dodge ice stuff for 5 minutes. Retarded design. Cut his hp to 1/4 and just make his damage higher where if you dont dodge one or two ice you die. it will be a one minute fight where you can die instead.

    -I dont agree that we need more item scaling. 100 dex = 10% damage is perfectly fine. We dont ever need this retarded diablo 3 garbage again. If nobody ever hits for more then 5000 damage, that would be fucking great. The problem is not the number you see here. Its the tuning being shit because of how bad the scaling is with mobs leveling with you and boss HP being just 500% what they should be because they dont want to make anything hard after the d3 original inferno. So they make idiot think its hard, because wow I hit the same boss 5 minutes! Was thought! No it wasent, you had no chance to die that thing does negligible damage and shits 5 healing potions per 20 seconds of you hitting him for the entire 5 minutes. You are gona beat it, its just slow.

    the rest I am fine with.
    Last edited by minteK917; 2023-03-26 at 11:47 AM.

  14. #14
    I haven't tried the beta, but it sounds like Blizz basically took no risks.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by pahbi View Post
    I haven't tried the beta, but it sounds like Blizz basically took no risks.
    They played it extremely safe. It’s a console/mobile MMO-esque game aimed at a broad audience.
    "There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." by Jiddu Krishnamurti, Philosopher and Educator

  16. #16
    "Not fun" sums the game up for me, I think. Throughout the beta I was just waiting for the fun to kick in, and it never did. I was constantly frustrated by the zoomed in camera and the obvious console-first design of the UI. When a guildmate announced that a world boss was coming up in 10 minutes, I just logged off - that's not why I play Diablo.

    I'm not buying this game.

  17. #17
    yup, I refunded last night - got all characters into 20 and so bored I can't even force myself to login - no desire, way to much wrong with the game..

    I can't remember the name of a single npc (maybe a few), city, town, hub, quest etc - it's got no stick and not for me which pains me deep I was extremely excited for this - but not $150 pre-order excited anymore, maybe if it were like $45 on sale down the road or a couple seasons in with major changes..
    "We will not compromise our standards to release a title before it is ready."
    WoW T.W.O ( The Wars Over )

  18. #18
    Stood in the Fire BrokenRavens's Avatar
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    I am still not quite understanding why they turned it into a mmo. I could not help thinking if this games combat system suffered for it.

    I would disagree with one bit though. The barbarians combat just feels off. I can’t quite describe it. Compared to the other classes it felt not as powerful. Maybe the other classes need nerfs?

    The main quest starts well with that small town. And then it just deflates. It’s a weird choice to open to the public this area with a main quest this bland.
    Go and talk to the person in the woods, go and talk to the person in the cathedral, they want us to talk with a third person elsewhere.
    I just lost interest in the plot.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by BrokenRavens View Post
    I am still not quite understanding why they turned it into a mmo. I could not help thinking if this games combat system suffered for it.

    I would disagree with one bit though. The barbarians combat just feels off. I can’t quite describe it. Compared to the other classes it felt not as powerful. Maybe the other classes need nerfs?

    The main quest starts well with that small town. And then it just deflates. It’s a weird choice to open to the public this area with a main quest this bland.
    Go and talk to the person in the woods, go and talk to the person in the cathedral, they want us to talk with a third person elsewhere.
    I just lost interest in the plot.
    From what I understand, Barbarians and druids can’t complete their class quests you get at lvl 15. According to some vids, caster dudu is as OP as other casters, but I’m kinda hoping the melee gameplay will improve with the power gain from the class quest.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by ZeroTool View Post
    --- snip ---
    How far did you progress in D3 or any ARPG games ?

    Mod Edit: Don't quote a whole giant post for a simple one-sentence reply.
    Last edited by Aucald; 2023-03-26 at 12:43 PM. Reason: Snipped quoted post

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