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

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Valderen

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I usually pre-order now just the day before release after reviews are out. As mentioned with digital, it’s not like they are going to run out of copies like it was possible with physical copies.
 

Tuco

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While on principle I agree with you both, the practice DOES encourage studios (or, probably more accurately, publishers) to release games in unfinished, lower quality states.

In the age of brick and mortar stores and limited game boxes on shelves, pre-ordering a game you really wanted to play made a lot of sense (after playing the beta of WoW, you know I immediately preordered my copy of WoW full release). But in the age of digital distribution I don't get the allure. I know some collectors like the extra stuff they may add to the promotion, but that is, imo, just feeding the beast and falling prey to the marketing machine.

But to each his own.
For me it's not a marketing thing, it's a "support shit you want thing".

If I found out that Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader (CRPG) was cancelled, which I preordered about 5 seconds after it was announced, that they were going to stop accepting pre-orders and all the preorder money was gone for good, I'd preorder two more times just to tell Games Workshop and everybody else there is a market for a WH40k RPG.
 
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Daidraco

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I find it entertaining watching this streamers rise and fall in excitement after the first one was linked.
 

Cinge

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While on principle I agree with you both, the practice DOES encourage studios (or, probably more accurately, publishers) to release games in unfinished, lower quality states.

In the age of brick and mortar stores and limited game boxes on shelves, pre-ordering a game you really wanted to play made a lot of sense (after playing the beta of WoW, you know I immediately preordered my copy of WoW full release). But in the age of digital distribution I don't get the allure. I know some collectors like the extra stuff they may add to the promotion, but that is, imo, just feeding the beast and falling prey to the marketing machine.

But to each his own.

I feel like since the internet got better and better, this is just a common thing for all games. When they realized "we can release now and patch something later,". Pre-order or not. Even more so because gamers seem to not care and still buy no matter what.
 

Drajakur

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I found that World Tier Reveal video pretty depressing. The number of times those two guys focused on "progression" and "builds" and "customization" and "endgame" and not on "fun" or "awesome experience" has me pretty alarmed. Those are just the front-end industry buzzwords for "engagement" which is the new revenue metric. The game itself didn't look that interesting and you can bet it is couched in all these mechanics that solely have as their end Day 14 retention. Blech. Maybe I'll be wrong and the game itself will be, you know, fun and exciting but that's certainly not what I took away from that conversation.
 
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Chris

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I found that World Tier Reveal video pretty depressing. The number of times those two guys focused on "progression" and "builds" and "customization" and "endgame" and not on "fun" or "awesome experience" has me pretty alarmed. Those are just the front-end industry buzzwords for "engagement" which is the new revenue metric. The game itself didn't look that interesting and you can bet it is couched in all these mechanics that solely have as their end Day 14 retention. Blech. Maybe I'll be wrong and the game itself will be, you know, fun and exciting but that's certainly not what I took away from that conversation.
Interesting that they moved from the Diablo naming conventions (Nightmare, Hell, Torment) to the Genshin Impact one (World Level).

Shows a disconnect between their past and future which likely means a high turnover of staff - just like between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3.

It's always been a crutch to cover for the lack of content, something PoE already did away with by adding more acts.
 

Utnayan

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Amod Amod requesting a thread title change from "Diablo IV" to "Diablo 4 - If you buy this you are an idiot and deserve the death of a thousand purple haired snowflakes stomping on your nut sack while they sing the song Rainbow Connection"

If you want to make it a donation thing where I can use points to change thread titles that would suffice as well.
 
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Butthurt

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Amod Amod requesting a thread title change from "Diablo IV" to "Diablo 4 - If you buy this you are an idiot and deserve the death of a thousand purple haired snowflakes stomping on your nut sack while they sing the song Rainbow Connection"

If you want to make it a donation thing where I can use points to change thread titles that would suffice as well.
We can talk about it. Maybe "Diablo 4 - Light your money on fire for better entertainment"?
 
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jayrebb

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Wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about the game. The Diablo IV title has gotta go.
 
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Valderen

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I haven’t followed the development much aside from a few videos recently from IGN, but everything I saw and heard from those videos looks good to me.

Mind you I loved Diablo 3. Aside from MMOs it’s my most played game.
 
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Penance

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Amod Amod requesting a thread title change from "Diablo IV" to "Diablo 4 - If you buy this you are an idiot and deserve the death of a thousand purple haired snowflakes stomping on your nut sack while they sing the song Rainbow Connection"

If you want to make it a donation thing where I can use points to change thread titles that would suffice as well.
On the condition that if its miraculously a pretty decent game we have to rename it to Diablo 4 - Doom and Groom.
 
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turbo

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I haven’t followed the development much aside from a few videos recently from IGN, but everything I saw and heard from those videos looks good to me.

Mind you I loved Diablo 3. Aside from MMOs it’s my most played game.
ya i haven't followed much as D3 just didn't really do it for me from the start and the few times I gave it another go. Grim Dawn was twice the quality of game to me just lacked online envirnment.

Been planning for two years waiting patiently to throw all my time into Last Epoch but have to admit after watching a few of these videos i'm not necessarily in the camp of OMG this game looks like a pile of shit. At some point i think its polarized on both sides just like politics in the US....no matter the facts you are one side or another : ( People that hate blizzard aren't going to give it any more fair assessment then the blizzard fan boys. Personally never been a fan of much blizzard stuff as it always seems to be abit too on rails/spread sheet calculated for my tastes but definitely will start watching this to see if it can persuade me to ditch my LE focus.
 

Caeden

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i was one of the rare few that abbhored D3 at the start but came to really enjoy it as a popcorn game for a bit later....its an inch deep but entertaining....
 
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Tananthalas

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i was one of the rare few that abbhored D3 at the start but came to really enjoy it as a popcorn game for a bit later....its an inch deep but entertaining....

I was the same and I think that's a fair take. Reaper of Souls smoothed a lot of shit out of the game which is when D3 got fun for me.
 
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Daidraco

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I think the D3 team wanted to do more, outside of their own discourse, with the game. Its just Blizzard being the greedy fucks that they are werent going to keep spending the dev costs on the game when its not making a significant amount of money. Unlike D4 which looks to be set up to properly have everything aligned towards a GAAS. The problem Im seeing is that this is going to be such a massive change from the old formula that its just going to alienate the loyal following that Diablo has since its basically chasing after Lost Ark's dollars. The other side of that, is that Blizzard used to be really good about taking something someone else did and making it better - but somewhere in the last handful of years, they lost the ability to do that.
 

OU Ariakas

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Diablo 3 with just the gold auction house, no smart loot, skill points like D2, and some sort of end game mapping that was deeper than rifts would have been great. That isn't a ton of changes.
 

Utnayan

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Diablo 3 with just the gold auction house, no smart loot, skill points like D2, and some sort of end game mapping that was deeper than rifts would have been great. That isn't a ton of changes.

That's just plain silly talk - need to add some transgender barbarians and some way to monetize everything in the game via microtranactions, don't forget a hotline to your cell phone number and if you say a swear word it automatically links your behavior to all social media sites in real life so you get cancelled if you say the word faggot.
 
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Valderen

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I liked Diablo 3 a lot mostly because it was fairly simple, and very flexible about builds. If you take Path of Exiles which I enjoy a bit, but have massive issue with the fact that you essentially need to plan your build ahead of time, and you can't really respec if you find gear that would be great for a different build. That's just a personal thing though.

Now Diablo 4 seems to be going somewhere between the two, you can respec but it gets expensive. We don't know how expensive yet vs how easy/hard it is to earn money although they hinted that at some point it's easier to just reroll. Not a huge fan of this to be honest.

Now while everything I saw mostly looks good to me, I have serious doubts about the current team ability to deliver on it. The talent that used to make Blizzard games day 1 purchase is long gone.

If it’s good I’ll get it, if it’s bad I won’t no matter what happen my life will go the same regardless. I’m too old to waste time being mad at a company for making a bad game. :)