Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe

jayrebb · Mar 27, 2023

Mist said:
Wow, someone got an Nvidia driver blue-screen, playing a game that hadn't had game ready drivers for it released. WEIRD.

What's your excuse for assets not loading for cities during off hours when server load is low? Vanguard hitched, but it ALWAYS loaded.

Everyone's seen Kor Vlor not properly load at this point, requiring multiple rezoning attempts to even have a chance.

There's so many performance issues I could throw a dart blindfolded at a list and hit a new one every time. I might just dig them all up and see how many witty rebuttals I can get out of you.

Flipmode · Mar 28, 2023

5900x, 32gb RAM, 3070ti and a gen 4 NVMe drive. This game ran like shit at 3440x1440p. Absolute dog shit. Stuttery, rubber bandy mess on PC. Huge memory leak too. Not to mention the near constant disconnects for me on PC, PS5, and Series X.

The first beta weekend on Series X, got the same disconnects Friday but by Saturday everything was smooth minus the occasional rubber banding.

HDR also did not work on any of the platforms. This game needs a lot of work still.

jayrebb · Mar 28, 2023

I got a page of shills that say otherwise. Fuck your personal experience.

Leadsalad · Mar 28, 2023

Flipmode said:
5900x, 32gb RAM, 3070ti and a gen 4 NVMe drive. This game ran like shit at 3440x1440p. Absolute dog shit. Stuttery, rubber bandy mess on PC. Huge memory leak too. Not to mention the near constant disconnects for me on PC, PS5, and Series X.

The first beta weekend on Series X, got the same disconnects Friday but by Saturday everything was smooth minus the occasional rubber banding.

HDR also did not work on any of the platforms. This game needs a lot of work still.

Ran well on the absurdity that is a 4090, but I'm thinking it had to have been that complete shitshow with the VRAM causing the stutters for you. My GPU was maybe 60% loaded, but the VRAM was nearly full after 30 seconds in game. And I couldn't even tell you how to disable highres textures, I didn't even know I had them installed. The texture option in game said 3-8gb usage in the note.

rhinohelix · Mar 28, 2023

Early Release starts on my birthday. I am excited.

Flipmode said:
5900x, 32gb RAM, 3070ti and a gen 4 NVMe drive. This game ran like shit at 3440x1440p. Absolute dog shit. Stuttery, rubber bandy mess on PC. Huge memory leak too. Not to mention the near constant disconnects for me on PC, PS5, and Series X.

The first beta weekend on Series X, got the same disconnects Friday but by Saturday everything was smooth minus the occasional rubber banding.

HDR also did not work on any of the platforms. This game needs a lot of work still.

Rubber banding is not a PC issue, its a server issue. Disconnects were mostly solved by Sunday, at least if there were any, you were typically kicked back to character select and then were able to go right back into the game. Not being able to leave cities is again a server issue; assets not loading in cities is a server issue.

I didn't see Kor Valor fail to load for me, I got to that point in the main story 3 times ( I played Necro and Sorc to 25 and Rogue to 22), sometimes it took a while for locations, like the Cathedral in Kyovashad to load properly but it always did eventually. There are a few explanations I can think of but I will leave that to the DBAs and the graphics people to reason out. Its surely fixable but I think again I think its stress/numbers related; it wasn't happening to everyone.

Like the previous weekend, Friday was far for me but that's anecdata because we don't know the load/player count information. We don't know if they added servers to the login cluster, how many servers are deployed, how the game servers/application/databases are architected, etc. There is a good chance they were deliberately starving/not adding servers on Friday of both weeks to let performance crash/ride out to see how it would perform under duress. It's a test for fuck's sake.

How many people updated their drivers with the new release on whichever day nVidia released new drivers? The whole point is to generate buzz for the game and uncover bugs to fixed now rather than later. This is more of a stress test but also there are some conditions that require mass, production level eyes to see. Better the past two weekends than June 2nd.

If things like HDR doesn't work on any platform, that's on a project manager's board somewhere. Lots of these things will be fixed; some won't, its true.

We have all learned that there is no "Golden Code" version somewhere in which these issues are already fixed but you only have to fix one or two a week, with different teams working on different problems, to have a more Sunday experience at launch with few bugs than Friday experience. Will there be bugs and troubles? Almost certainly yes. Will it be fun? If the past two weekends are any indication, in my case, almost certainly yes.

Argarth · Mar 28, 2023

Running an older rig (2700X,1080Ti, 16Gig Ram, no RT/DLSS of course) and higher resolution than

Flipmode , and all I needed to do was turn a few settings down, in particular textures to medium, and shadows down a notch. Several others I tinkered with as well, but it's not rocket science or hard to do, and depends on the hardware for sure.

Game still looked freaking amazing. I tried everything on the lowest setting for chuckles, and it still looked "great", so I'm guessing only the most potato of rigs would struggle.

Yes, some hitching in the main town with a lot of other players around, but I only saw rubber-banding once each time when I left town to enter a previously unvisited zone. Once out in the wild, and especially in dungeons, I had very stable FPS/frame-times with very few dips below the mid 60s. (monitor is 75Hz Freesync, capped at 73 with RTSS)

I DID create a massive pagefile on my main storage SSD after the game crashed the first time I played, (debug files mentioned virtual memory being used to build assets) and since that time, zero problems with crashing/slowdowns or disconnects. No idea if this would even be important for those with oodles of free RAM though.

No shill here.

Argarth · Mar 28, 2023

Leadsalad said:
Ran well on the absurdity that is a 4090, but I'm thinking it had to have been that complete shitshow with the VRAM causing the stutters for you. My GPU was maybe 60% loaded, but the VRAM was nearly full after 30 seconds in game. And I couldn't even tell you how to disable highres textures, I didn't even know I had them installed. The texture option in game said 3-8gb usage in the note.

I'm sure I've seen it mentioned in multiple tech articles, that none of the current measuring tools (even windows) can accurately tell you how much VRAM is actually being "used". All they can tell you is how much has been "allocated" by a game or application, and some games will just take it all, if it's available. My 1080Ti went to ~10,550 as soon as I loaded in.

e.g. Many moons ago, I'm sure HWINFO used to say "GPU Memory in Use" or somethingg close to that, and now the wording has been changed to "GPU Memory Allocated"

I think that is still correct.

jayrebb · Mar 28, 2023

BoozeCube · Mar 28, 2023

jayrebb said:

Sounds like people need to be educated on how much money they spent to make this game and how good the voice acting is.... lol clearly they spent 11/10 money.

TJT · Mar 28, 2023

The Diablo story was never amazing Blizzard stories are never compelling. Games like this you want minimal story since you have to run the same dungeons a million god damn times. Voice acting and all that bullshit just becomes something you roll your eyes at after the first time.

Replace ninjas with demons here and boom that is all you need for Diablo story. The Butcher is remembered mostly because it was a good jump scare when we were kids.

Chersk · Mar 28, 2023

Bellular and his unintelligible buddy wet their pants over the game

Daidraco · Mar 28, 2023

Mist said:
Pretty sure the game runs fine if you don't try to load the 45GB of extra textures.

jayrebb said:
Yes and no. I ran for 6+ hours earlier today and eventually hit a VRAM/RAM leak that required a restart.

It's not stable. Even on medium.

Mist said:
And you know this how? If it really is just a memory leak, that's a relatively easy to fix, whether it has to come from the GPU manufacturer or Blizzard. That will absolutely get fixed by launch.

Cinge said:
I am on a old ass machine, a 1070 and old ass i5. I had no issues except loading new areas(aka never visited before), which took a couple seconds to load and then it was back to fine. Though if your recommended specs say 970, it really should be smooth transition no matter what. Really that was the only "issue", which went away after the first visit and had no impact on actually playing the game.

Stuttering in town was their servers it seemed and that went away for me after the first day.

Flipmode said:
5900x, 32gb RAM, 3070ti and a gen 4 NVMe drive. This game ran like shit at 3440x1440p. Absolute dog shit. Stuttery, rubber bandy mess on PC. Huge memory leak too. Not to mention the near constant disconnects for me on PC, PS5, and Series X.

The first beta weekend on Series X, got the same disconnects Friday but by Saturday everything was smooth minus the occasional rubber banding.

HDR also did not work on any of the platforms. This game needs a lot of work still.

The PC Im on right now in my office is a 970 GTX w/i7 4790 w/16gigs 3200 and a 1TB 10kRPM Hard Drive. It's hooked to a shitty 65" 60hz Samsung TV and a 30" Dell 120hz monitor. I use it to play games while Im waiting on people to show up or a phone call. This computer does surprisingly well for the games I typically enjoy playing. I was able to play D4 with Netflix open in chrome playing on the TV with this computer all day Saturday. With or without anything running in the background, the game ran "well enough" on low settings. I chunked in and around Kyovashad and around certain spell interactions. Loads very slow into instances etc. Not once did the client crash on this PC.

When Im home, I play on a relatively brand new computer with a 4090, 12900KF, 32gigs of DDR5 6400 and a 990 Samsung NVME 1TB. The game crashed a few times, read that people thought it was the texture pack, so I took that off. Game never crashed after that - still rubber banded around and occasionally chunked but not even in the same realm of severity as my Office PC. Loads were almost non-existent where as my office PC was a good 30 seconds+.

Game is very much playable on both ends of that spectrum. The 970 was new in 2014 iirc - so its definitely got some age and has been a fantastic PC - but everyone knows its at the end of its useful life. The high res texture pack is most likely the cause of all the issues for some users. The 30x0 series seems to have some architecture problems, more specifically the gigabyte 3080.

TL;DR - all this chunking and rubber banding isnt due to people's computers. I know because I actually have both ends of the acceptable spectrum. The texture pack causes an issue of some type. The rest is based on the server architecture if I understand it all correctly. I do think they are going to clean up how the game runs a lot by launch. (Some latency based issues appear to be present. Needing crisp, clear and fast internet with no background noise.) But I can very much tell that an older PC will still struggle with this game. Especially on old disk drives that access textures slow as fuck compared to the read anywhere simultaneously Gen 4 NVME's.

Mountain Biker · Mar 28, 2023

Argarth said:
Looks absolutely fucking amazing at 3840x1600 on my 38" Ultrawide, especially the lighting and volumetric effects. They've completely nailed the grim/dark aesthetic.

The sound design is world class - combat, staging, music, ambience. I'm especially enjoying the music, old school, loving the strings and woodwind instruments etc.

The dialogue and voice acting in particular is a major step up. I'm really glad they didn't cut corners here, given that the rest of the production is so impressive.

Really enjoying the slower pace, visceral combat, large world and MMO elements. I've really been taking my time, and purposely haven't leveled past the mid teens.

Nothing really to say about the skills, balance, builds, itemization etc. All this stuff will be in permanent flux anyway, and can't be bothered speculating about the endgame.

Suffice to say, I've been having an absolute blast, and I'm even more excited than before to play. Buddy of mine is also super pumped to co-op, that's a huge bonus.
Not playing WoW or any other MMO, so if Blizzard actually punches out quality updates for the next few years, I'll be happy to $contribute$.
Almost certainly waiting for the the first round of reviews, and the inevitable week 1 patch. Can hardly believe D3 was 11 years ago.

Yeah people complaining about class balance doesn't make sense. If it's anything like retail WoW they will nerf/buff every class every other week. Just pick your favorite class thematically and eventually you will have your day (and eventually be nerfed).

Mr Creed · Mar 28, 2023

Khane said:
In D4, you'll be herded toward specific activities on a Blizzard schedule and your progression will be beholden to that schedule.

That's my main concern with this whole "MMO-ish" gimmick. I don't actually want to play MMOs anymore, and while I liked Lost Ark the amount of daily/weekly checkmarks led to me not sticking with that game. D4 seems to take a lot from them at first glance. That won't keep me playing.

I will buy it, I can say that much after the beta, because playing the entire campaign with 2-3 classes would easily land me at 50-100 hours of fun for the box price. If their live service interests me will be something I find out in the summer, but I have no qualms dropping a live service game once I had my fill. Right now the live service part is full of red flags, but we'll see.

Zindan · Mar 28, 2023

Ingame performance was quite a bit worse for the open beta weekend vs. pre order weekend. Quite a bit of rubberbanding and getting hung up on zone crossings.

Szeth · Mar 28, 2023

I'm running a 3080ti. I got one single crash all weekend, and only rubberbanded a single time each time I tried to leave the city. Otherwise performance was great. I didn't even try to go through settings to optimize anything just ran at high.

Deathwing · Mar 28, 2023

Mountain Biker said:
Yeah people complaining about class balance doesn't make sense. If it's anything like retail WoW they will nerf/buff every class every other week. Just pick your favorite class thematically and eventually you will have your day (and eventually be nerfed).

This seems a bit too reductive. Why complain about anything then? What bug or issue can't be fixed in post?

This was essentially a giant advertisement for the game. ARPGs are about power fantasy. If two of the classes are so poorly balanced that they can't achieve said fantasy, that should have worrisome implications regarding the IQ of the developers. I think it would have been better to leave Barb and Druid out of the beta. Or delay it. Just a couple more weeks would have been enough, right?

Daidraco · Mar 28, 2023

Deathwing said:
This seems a bit too reductive. Why complain about anything then? What bug or issue can't be fixed in post?

This was essentially a giant advertisement for the game. ARPGs are about power fantasy. If two of the classes are so poorly balanced that they can't achieve said fantasy, that should have worrisome implications regarding the IQ of the developers. I think it would have been better to leave Barb and Druid out of the beta. Or delay it. Just a couple more weeks would have been enough, right?

Theyre just being obtuse. Especially the ones that were touched in their no-no spot by Blizzard and saying its just the first 25 levels. Ya, its the first 25 levels but only a moron would think this makes sense: (Both skills in the respective classes tree that are Base and also Stun.)
Sorceress

Druid

Druid Base 2 (This is a root, not a stun, but AOE)

Not only does the Sorcerer do more damage at all times (and scales better), but is also ranged (with most abilities), and also always stuns (disregarding the enchantment). The AoE also does full damage to everything it hits, instead of reduced damage for each subsequent hit. Im not a game designer, obviously - but shouldnt this be the other way around? You know, the class that has to stand in the fucking poison puddles, up close and personal, should be doing more damage? The reason being they arent able to be up in the mobs face non fucking stop like a caster standing in one spot?

Druid abilities were just phoned in and saying its "just" level 25 shit when we have have literal access to all the skills and the paragon tree - is dumb. In before someone says something idiotic about the Ultimates - the same fucking situation is at the top too, bird brains.

GuardianX · Mar 28, 2023

Mist said:
Wow, someone got an Nvidia driver blue-screen, playing a game that hadn't had game ready drivers for it released. WEIRD.

You say that like it's a normal thing........

I don't think I've EVER gotten a blue-screen from Star Citizen and that game is fucked in every way.

Hell I can't even remember the last time I did get a blue screen other than running some janky ass 3rd party overlay bullshit.

Mist · Mar 28, 2023

Diablo 4 / IV / IIII / Fore / Cope / Seethe

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