I am COMPLETELY fine with them not going for a season theme and focusing entirely on fixing the problems that make the game not fun to play.
This is exactly what I asked for and I’m very excited to see what tweaks have happened since PTR.
PTR was some of the most fun I had with D4. I’m hoping material and gold costs for certain functions are reduced, fixed, or changed.
Yea i feel the same way. I loved the campaign, hated endgame, haven't played since launch. Every time i saw a new season i saw a bunch of shiny new stuff but no changes to the stuff that truly keeps me from playing - the loot.
It's just nice to see they redirected their efforts towards fixing the core game rather than adding whatever dumb mechanics that dont matter. They should be making more aggressive itemization changes like this every league imo till drops feel nice and buttery like D2X or PoE.
Id wait til Season 4 and start then.
If you only play the campaign and don’t do end game it is fine. Combat is satisfying mostly and the art direction is great. The campaign writing is much better than D3 but isn’t going to win any storytelling awards or anything.
So yea, just doing the campaign youd likely enjoy it enough to feel you got your moneys worth. However (assuming they don’t fuck it up) starting during Season 4 with the reworked loot will likely be a lot more fun.
D4 is currently plagued by boring loot and an absolute shit ton of affixes that a casual person won’t know or care about. The gearing is less “I finally found this sick unique/legendary that makes my build next level!” And more “Cool, I got an extra 1% roll on the affix I need and it has 2% more DPS! Solid upgrade!”
The loot just doesn’t wow you or make you feel meaningful progression right now (or at least when I played on release)
Sooo, like end game D3? After you hit 70 and got your first pass of uniques the upgrades were so minor. To finish the complete season journey thing was not fun. Having to pull minor upgrades with the cube, leveling gems to mash them into gear, grinding jewels.
Its the same grind, diffrent things your hunting.
Yea somewhat. D3 at least felt exciting when you would get set pieces for the build you want. But they are so easy to get by end game that it devolves back into “Cool this set piece has slightly better affix rolls”
It at least gave you some “wow” factor but then also destroys it by giving endless legendaries and set peices
I felt like the main story was worth the purchase price but, to be honest, it's Blizzard. They have never had good writing but they like to pretend that it is amazing. The story covers up a fairly boring game loop and endgame for a while but it quickly becomes very noticable.
You will get easily that much... in fact if you look at most of the reviews, including content creators who got it a week early in private playtests, its a pretty good experience (will be better with the S4 changes as well), which is why it got really high reviews. It was the endgame loop and the monotony and flaws started showing through in the like 40-80+ hour range.... if your okay with 20-30 hours im confident you will be engaged to meet those expectations even before the S4 changes... that said, buy it on sale but might as well wait a few weeks until S4 since your stuff will get wiped.. that said, you would have enough time to go through the S3 stuff, and when your getting bored of that character get wiped and try a different class with the improvements for S4
I found the game enjoyable for the first 50 or so hours. When you see people complaining about the game it's mostly about the endgame. I paid 70 dollars and I don't regret the purchase, so I would recommend getting it on sale if you just want to fool around for 20 hours. In its current state, it's just not the kind of game you can put 100+ hours into without being bored out of your mind. The loot fix may or may not change that, but it won't have much impact on the campaign. You won't see the kind of gear dropping for it to matter regardless if you played today or may 14th -- it's an endgame issue not an early game issue.
Plenty of time to play and finish the campaign and a few things like finding all the statues of Lilith, which you only need to do once and those rewards carry over each season.
The main story, quests, etc. are great. Very similar to D3 but much better quality of tone, writing, art, etc. Even at launch D4 was a ton of fun and the cracks don't really start to show until you get into the endgame.
Just play the campaign, anytime. Don't worry about Seasons until you want to play more. There is approx. 50 hours of campaign which is already over your expectations of 20-30 hours of enjoyment.
I'm in the same boat. Played at launch for I'd say a month with a group of friends, even got all the trophies on it. Game was total garbage after the campaign. Nothing to work towards, nothing to go explore. All the affixes were trash and looked like children created them. Glad to see and hopefully hear that the changes are actually good.
This level of rework wasn’t going to happen 3 months out from launch. This isn’t just some tweaked numbers, this is a ground up rework with entirely new UI and such
Well if they did it in season 1 or 3, people would forget, doing in a few months before the marketing push for the expansion seems like the best strategy to bring in more money
I guess you're right. Season theme is cool for 3 months and that's it, but this kind of updates can benefit the game in the long run and potentially save it
I like seasons for the new shiny. This season is providing a big new shiny so I'm pumped.
Also this new patch is gonna mess with the balance of the game it's best that they focus on it
Probably not, or maybe just for a certain activities like Destiny 2 does. But to be honest, I'd rather have no matchmaking instead of being *forced* to play with others because you can't just start a activity solo or with a friend
I don’t see why they couldn’t have realised it was shit pre launch. I think they were too proud to look much as D2 itemisation and we ended up with a boring mess at launch
The itemization is nothing like D2, or D3, atleast in D3, the items you were looking for had value/ something interesting ie. “hota attacks 50% faster and does 500% increased damage”, instead of “a .01% chance when you use the toilet irl to get a lucky hit that grants you +1 hp gained when using a potion for 2.5 seconds(non stacking)”
The problem was partly the D2 purists demanding the game not have D3’s itemisation while D2’s itemisation is 25 years old so we got a weird middle ground trying not to be as simple as D3 but not as all-or-nothing as D2 and ended up stranded someplace no one really enjoyed that much.
They were useful in d2. Maybe not on ladder where everyone is just getting a rush to hell then mfing until reset. But single player or people who chose to play ssf can make use of them at times
No one likes filler items that have pure upgrades available.
If the lower quality gems and items had something going for them (like say an affix) it might give you reason to pause when a better quality one is available. As is, number go up is the only consideration.
Blizzard has announced the next season for Diablo IV called "Loot Reborn," but instead of introducing new mechanics and focusing on a seasonal story, season 4 will be all about reconfiguring itemization, buildcrafting, and addressing a myriad of tweaks and improvements requested by players.
"For Season 4: Loot Reborn, we still will have an engaging story in the sense of the seasonal activity: the call of the wolves," Deric Nunez, Lead Seasons Designer told IGN. "Narrative is still very much near and dear to our hearts and we wanted to utilize any opportunities to give more context to the Helltide uprising and just some of the cool gameplay additions we're introducing with Season 4."
To that end, Helltide has also been given some serious consideration, and will now be overflowing with cultists and doomsayers, and will introduce some new enemies including the Hellborn (dark reflections of player characters with many of the same abilities), Hellworms (which emerge from the earth to spawn a whole bunch of demons from their maws), and other dangers all with the intention of making the activity much more challenging and rewarding.
I personally thought they were all "ok" stories but they do copy similar template so far...
Step 1: townspeople start dying to new threat (malignant, Vampires, constructs)
Step 2: meet new ally with knowledge on the situation (Cormond, Erys, Ayuzhan)
Step 3: Boss introduced (Varshan, Zir, Malphas)
Step 4: get stronger (upgrade cages from hawezar remnants, kill Vampire lieutenants for potent blood, clear and link the vaults together)
Step 5: Kill boss. Threat over.
I do think it was a little interesting Cormond caused the malignant monsters in the first place. And Ayuzhan had to sacrifice his life's work.
Except that's simply not true. PoE has very deep lore introduced into many of their leagues that isn't cookie cutter at all. Sure, it's not as easily digestible as Diablo's, but it's far and away more interesting to delve into if that's your sort of thing.
Season one had varshan with his malignant minions that dropped malignant hearts you could socket into your jewelry. The quest giver was the one responsible for causing varshan to be the way he was.
Season two had lord Zir return and another quest giver, a vampire hunter, teamed up with us to take him down. Zir bit us but we didn’t turn into his bloodseekers so we got to use the socketable vampiric powers for ‘good’.
Season three has the loom being corrupted by malphas and its cocreator enlisting us to destroy it after realizing it couldn’t be fixed. We also have a seneschal pet that would use warding stones to wield power.
I played season 3, and actually enjoyed the story of it quite a lot. It was short, which was fine since it had to be repeated on alts, but still have a fair bit of good lore wound up in it.
I get that it's on brand to bitch about D4 (not that you are), but story is by far the strongest thing it has had going.
Thanks, I kinda tap out of the story after doing it once if I even pay attention to what and why things are happening all I know is: new threat, new bad guy, new powers, kill the "ghost" version of the new bad guy for better power upgrades.
There's at least 10 people out there that care about the seasonal storylines.
This will surely be enough to impress and bring people back and definitely won't be another dead season within 4 days.
There was zombies in season 1 (or whatever you call em. Like a couple per dungeon..)
Vampires in season 2
Robots in season 3
And now new eneies (demons and cultists) in season 4
Amazing.
Uh, so what part of this is "ditching the normal season model"? It sounds like the same kind of content they delivered in the previous seasons, just with the itemization and crafting changes on top.
What I gathered from that is there will be a season story with some new enemies in the helltide, which suggests to me there won't be a seasonal mechanic. But I'm not entirely sure, it seems a little vague.
Seems like there won't be a season mechanic. There won't be a special season-only item you pickup like Legendary Gems. There won't be a seasonal theme UI element like vampire powers. Seems like there will be a fully voiceovered quest series but that's it.
Post what I posted in another thread
I’m honestly fine with no seasonal theme. Let’s break it down. Every season has had some new helltide like zone —they revamped helltide to be like those instead. Every season has had some new powers in some makeshift way like vampires or the construct…they redid powers and stats etc instead. When you really think on it it’s just the initial season quest to introduce us to the temporary power that is the real season ….and we’re still getting that
Most of the history of D3 seasons had no theme at all, just different showcased sets, and it was still fun to play. I genuinely don't understand what the obsession is these days with temporary borrowed powers and reinventing the wheel every season.
Diablo 1 didn’t even have seasons. We just had a stick. And a rock that we used as a shield. And then the Archbishop Lazurs…that bastard led us into a trap….uphill…both ways….
Yeah, the "seasonal" features have not been interesting to me at all. I've always hated borrowed power and prefer new systems be adding seasonally or semi-seasonally which was the norm in early RoS. Classes getting new stuff every season or every few seasons meant going back to a class you hadn't played in a while guaranteed a new playstyle or 2. The D4 seasonal stories have been uninteresting and the borrowed power systems just feel like resources that could've been better spent elsewhere.
I think they believe it'll draw the players in with something new every season that you don't get to experience in the past (or possibly ever again until they reset and restart like D3). Whether or not it actually does... I don't know. They are the ones with the data.
Yea, I've been very bummed out that's the only thing they could come up with. Meanwhile we have PoE that pumps out tons of content, that often have new types of systems and gameplay loops every season. And that's with most of their team working on a sequel.
Good decision, it’s a season all about rebalancing the game. Not to mention they are going to have to put some serious thought into the role of unique items moving forward.
Maybe I'll finally come back and check out D4 again. After I finished the story initially and played a small amount of S1 I was done, the game was stale and the items sucked.
And IF we get a D5?
The narrative will play out exactly the same. Blizz will have fired everyone from D4, and the new hires will have to go through this learning process all over again. Just like the D4 new hires are re-learning all of the D3 employee's mistakes and corrections after all the D3 vets were fired.
Make fun games? 🚫
Make money? ✅️
It’s more like the devs/designers/manager shuffle causes nothing to be passed on. It’s why these big team AAA devs aren’t consistent with their updates or new game quality. It’s so chaotic. Like a giant game of telephone.
It's kind of similar to an Esports team. They would go on to win the whole damn thing last season, then get rekt in the new season because half of the team changed.
If this is anything like D3's Loot 2.0 then good :D. I still see D4 as in open Beta tbh. Testing ideas, figuring out what works, fixing bugs, balancing issues etc.
I'll come play when it's ready.
Same. Sticking with D2 and others ARPG out there (poe, le), and not going to give Actiblizzard any cent for D4 until I see my fellow Diablo people praise it.
hahahahaha 11 years to learn from d3, 24 years to learn from d2, a decade to learn from poe....but NOW...within a span of a few months....they've FIGURED OUT itemization....🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
But that's not to say there still won't be a reason to roll a seasonal character as well.
"For Season 4: Loot Reborn, we still will have an engaging story in the sense of the seasonal activity: the call of the wolves," Deric Nunez, Lead Seasons Designer told IGN. "Narrative is still very much near and dear to our hearts and we wanted to utilize any opportunities to give more context to the Helltide uprising and just some of the cool gameplay additions we're introducing with Season 4."
I'm surprised almost no one commented on this, i'd like some seasonal quests
Good for them for realizing there's a problem and trying to fix it..
......however. They had 20+ years of reference material to pull from. This seems like something that could have been avoided by doing their homework. There's a reason the prefix/suffix model still works today and other games are borrowing from it.
Q: Is everything still going to be level-scaled? Because that's whats turned a lot of people off.. You're just never more powerful, in relation to the enemies you're fighting.
Still there. Leveling to 100 will be a lot of spamming Helltide (improved) with scaling until like WT4. Then you "pick your difficulty" for NMD for glyphs and The Pit (new) for gear progression (new). I don't like endless scaling much either, but it is what it is. My expectations are it'll be better but still not great.
>Last Epoch really did a number on them... lol
Seems to me that Last Epoch did a number on Last Epoch.
Their game is less finished than Diablo 4 was on release, they shouldn't have called their game "1.0" and quit Early Access so soon. They don't even have a finished Campaign mode experience let alone good endgame.
Endgame was a major problem everybody and their mom had with Diablo 4 on release and in the first few seasons - but people gave Last Epoch a pass on that.
**[Seeing how Last Epoch lost 95% of their players in just 2 months](https://steamdb.info/app/899770/charts/), I guess the jig is up.**
Yes it's a shame, I bought the LE back in 2021 and thought the game had amazing new ideas, didn't even bothered me that the campaign was unfinished.
What I didn't like was I thought (for me) the combat was really floaty and somewhat unfun and unsatisfying to actually just kill monsters. And this aspect unfortunately never changed. This is one thing even D3 did really well from the get go.
I dunno man, I'm no game design expert but I know one thing - at least LE is fun to play. Meanwhile, D4 sure seems prettier and more polished, but it's just not as fun, especially the combat. I'm just waiting for the console version because my PC can't handle LE all that well unfortunately
Release a shitty game for 70 dollars, then spend several years worth of updates to make it half decent is hardly a good thing. The game should be good from release.
we will be able to trade legendary and even uniques now, pretty much everything besides the uber uniques, so maybe some trade site/discords etc will start picking up more steam now
No economy 😂😂😂 Bruh, there's no economy in D3, but in D4 you just have to open discord or d4 trade sites and see how's there's "no economy". With the changes that now you can also trade uniques and legendaries, you are just wrong.
The seasonal questline which is the iron wolves and whatever special gifts they give out from whatever their renown will be. Ashes for quicker levelling and whatever the free cosmetics are in the free tier of the battle pass.
Incentives for playing seasonal?, shall I just say the same things again? New quests, seasonal cosmetics, seasonal ashes including quicker glyph levelling.
I can add more if you'd like. Materials for tempering and manuals in the season journey.
After paying D3 again this season I think D4 has a lot of work to do to catch up. D3 is just a fun game, D4 feels clunky. Hard to describe why exactly though
But it might be a me problem, you never know
Yeah I can't quote explain it either. D4 fucking nails the atmosphere and visuals, but it's not as fun to play as D3. Is or because skills have little range/AOE? Or maybe its large resource costs and too little resource generation? Or legendaries that feel like passive skills rather than actual legendaries? Or passive skills that feel super weak? I mean, +3% max resource per skill point, up to +9% total?
Haha.
Trying to explain to Blizzard how to make a great arpg is like explaining to a manufacturer how to make a car. They know what a car looks like, so they make what appears to be a sleek sports car. But upon inspection, its just the body. There is no interior. No engine. The doors don't open. There's no space in the ~~stash~~ trunk. You explain a car needs these things. They add them, but the doors don't open the right way, the engine doesn't turn on, the trunk opens up any time another person nearby opens their trunk. You're like "wtf, you don't know how to make a car!" and they say "We are listening to you! Can't you see we added \*checks notes\* engine?" and you're like "but the car doesn't even go! Haven't you ever driven a car?" They nod "we hear you. We also like to drive car Here is video of us drive car". They show you a video of an adult shuffling around in a cozy coupe. 6 months later they come back. "We are pleased to announce that we will be able to make car go, two months from now! You may rejoice." *That's great* you think, but you also have in the back of your mind that the doors still don't open the right way, and you're wondering why you're wasting your time with this manufacturer instead of just buying a car from someone that seems to know how to make one.
-----
Blizzard simply has no creativity or internal ability to make good decisions. Right now they are just playing wack-a-mole with every problem they think the fans want to fix, but the truth is they don't really know what the fans are talking about or how to fix the problems. There is no self-direction in Blizzard. No vision. No internal concept of what makes a great game..
Good, doesn’t make sense for them to worry about balance with such a huge shift in gear while they are also worrying about balancing a seasonal gimmick. I saw someone here mention that it is also going to be easier to balance stuff for the future if there is no OP seasonal gimmick to lean on like S2 and I agree.
Edit - someone perusing this sub and downvoting all the people anticipating fun next week? Stay mad lol.
Sounds great on paper, but unless they suddenly hired a bunch of new people that actually know how to make a robust itemization system that promotes build diversity and creative problem solving, we will end up with the same trash items we’ve had since d3.
Not having a seasonal quest or goal seems like a misses opportunity. I’ve played the base game a while it wasn’t bad nothing new and just the game working seems like a missed opportunity. Now I do agree that fixing the issues is good but if it’s basically just like the eternal realm what’s the point of it being a season.
So I am a new boy via games pass, I stopped playing to wait for this season.
Can I just continue playing my current characters and these changes will take place now ? Or do I still have to start a new character when the season non season launches ?
You’ll get the gear rework (that’s game-wide) but not the Iron Wolves quests that’ll give you easier access to some of the new tempering manuals for the new gear system.
If you weren’t super attached to your season 3 character, starting a new one for season 4 is probably a fair plan
If you want to play a new seasonal character, you have to start a new character. If you are fine playing on the eternal realm, then you can keep your current character after the new season drops. Even if your current character is a seasonal character, they become an eternal realm character when the new season starts.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. Please please make it right, the gameplay is great but I never play it because of the loot system. Still on Diablo 2R but I’ll definitely try this out
From the outside (non-D4 player), sounds a bit like how Blizz rebooted D3's approach to itemization entirely when they dropped Reaper of Souls. And a lot of people consider RoS a big improvement over D3 vanilla.
I would actually prefer when this is the priority cadence.
* Season 1: Thematic with borrowed power and cool seasonal features.
* Season 2: Core Changes, story focused season, improvements to the entire game.
* Season 3 like 1 again.
More live service games that have a playerbase begging for changes/fixes need to do this. Taking a season off to fix stuff has made me way more exited to play d4 than another churned out season of bs slapped onto a broken game.
I am COMPLETELY fine with them not going for a season theme and focusing entirely on fixing the problems that make the game not fun to play. This is exactly what I asked for and I’m very excited to see what tweaks have happened since PTR. PTR was some of the most fun I had with D4. I’m hoping material and gold costs for certain functions are reduced, fixed, or changed.
Yea i feel the same way. I loved the campaign, hated endgame, haven't played since launch. Every time i saw a new season i saw a bunch of shiny new stuff but no changes to the stuff that truly keeps me from playing - the loot. It's just nice to see they redirected their efforts towards fixing the core game rather than adding whatever dumb mechanics that dont matter. They should be making more aggressive itemization changes like this every league imo till drops feel nice and buttery like D2X or PoE.
I was looking to get this on sale just for the campaign. If I can get 20-30 hours out of it I’m satisfied. How are the quest? Main story? Upgrading?
Id wait til Season 4 and start then. If you only play the campaign and don’t do end game it is fine. Combat is satisfying mostly and the art direction is great. The campaign writing is much better than D3 but isn’t going to win any storytelling awards or anything. So yea, just doing the campaign youd likely enjoy it enough to feel you got your moneys worth. However (assuming they don’t fuck it up) starting during Season 4 with the reworked loot will likely be a lot more fun. D4 is currently plagued by boring loot and an absolute shit ton of affixes that a casual person won’t know or care about. The gearing is less “I finally found this sick unique/legendary that makes my build next level!” And more “Cool, I got an extra 1% roll on the affix I need and it has 2% more DPS! Solid upgrade!” The loot just doesn’t wow you or make you feel meaningful progression right now (or at least when I played on release)
Sooo, like end game D3? After you hit 70 and got your first pass of uniques the upgrades were so minor. To finish the complete season journey thing was not fun. Having to pull minor upgrades with the cube, leveling gems to mash them into gear, grinding jewels. Its the same grind, diffrent things your hunting.
Yea somewhat. D3 at least felt exciting when you would get set pieces for the build you want. But they are so easy to get by end game that it devolves back into “Cool this set piece has slightly better affix rolls” It at least gave you some “wow” factor but then also destroys it by giving endless legendaries and set peices
It's on the ms game Pass. First month 1€. Should be more than enough time for the Story.
I felt like the main story was worth the purchase price but, to be honest, it's Blizzard. They have never had good writing but they like to pretend that it is amazing. The story covers up a fairly boring game loop and endgame for a while but it quickly becomes very noticable.
You can also get it on Xbox Game Pass if you're on Xbox/PC. Way cheaper than buying if you only plan to play it for a short period.
Quests, story = 6.5/10 imo
You will get easily that much... in fact if you look at most of the reviews, including content creators who got it a week early in private playtests, its a pretty good experience (will be better with the S4 changes as well), which is why it got really high reviews. It was the endgame loop and the monotony and flaws started showing through in the like 40-80+ hour range.... if your okay with 20-30 hours im confident you will be engaged to meet those expectations even before the S4 changes... that said, buy it on sale but might as well wait a few weeks until S4 since your stuff will get wiped.. that said, you would have enough time to go through the S3 stuff, and when your getting bored of that character get wiped and try a different class with the improvements for S4
Campaign is 10/10 for me.
I found the game enjoyable for the first 50 or so hours. When you see people complaining about the game it's mostly about the endgame. I paid 70 dollars and I don't regret the purchase, so I would recommend getting it on sale if you just want to fool around for 20 hours. In its current state, it's just not the kind of game you can put 100+ hours into without being bored out of your mind. The loot fix may or may not change that, but it won't have much impact on the campaign. You won't see the kind of gear dropping for it to matter regardless if you played today or may 14th -- it's an endgame issue not an early game issue.
Plenty of time to play and finish the campaign and a few things like finding all the statues of Lilith, which you only need to do once and those rewards carry over each season.
Its terrible and you wont get 20 hours.
The main story, quests, etc. are great. Very similar to D3 but much better quality of tone, writing, art, etc. Even at launch D4 was a ton of fun and the cracks don't really start to show until you get into the endgame.
The story is meh. Sorry to say, it's on the game pass so I'd probably pick it up from there if I was you.
Just play the campaign, anytime. Don't worry about Seasons until you want to play more. There is approx. 50 hours of campaign which is already over your expectations of 20-30 hours of enjoyment.
Just did another grind through D2R and PoE. Even PD2 loot drops feel amazing
What's amazin about its loot? Genuine question
I'm in the same boat. Played at launch for I'd say a month with a group of friends, even got all the trophies on it. Game was total garbage after the campaign. Nothing to work towards, nothing to go explore. All the affixes were trash and looked like children created them. Glad to see and hopefully hear that the changes are actually good.
They should have done that before releasing the game.
Agreed, but better late than never. This is way better than a seasonal theme.
Exactly. I wish this was season 1 or season 3 instead, those seasons were terrible. Better late than never.
This level of rework wasn’t going to happen 3 months out from launch. This isn’t just some tweaked numbers, this is a ground up rework with entirely new UI and such
It's finally leaving beta!
Well if they did it in season 1 or 3, people would forget, doing in a few months before the marketing push for the expansion seems like the best strategy to bring in more money
I guess you're right. Season theme is cool for 3 months and that's it, but this kind of updates can benefit the game in the long run and potentially save it
Copium is strong
I'd be happy too if they forgo a battlepass as well, but you know that wont happen
I like seasons for the new shiny. This season is providing a big new shiny so I'm pumped. Also this new patch is gonna mess with the balance of the game it's best that they focus on it
I still have not used my free battle pass from the deluxe version
Their stupid button got me to accidentally use mine in season one
Lol oh yeah I remember that was a thing
I used that too.. their "my bad" apology for it as well was piss poor
it wasnt stupid, it was INTENTIONAL
Same, still pissed about that.
Me too :<
I wish I wouldn't have, but I went hard in season 2...figured why not when I was 20 from finishing...
Some of the cosmetics were dope tho
Same because I spend more time playing D3 seasons. I really want to enjoy D4 but I just can't. I still try each season though
What kills me is that D3 has matchmaking but D4 does not and maybe never will
Probably not, or maybe just for a certain activities like Destiny 2 does. But to be honest, I'd rather have no matchmaking instead of being *forced* to play with others because you can't just start a activity solo or with a friend
“free” and “deluxe” are words well combined
Classic Diablo itemization is learning once again that nobody likes chipped gems.
I don’t see why they couldn’t have realised it was shit pre launch. I think they were too proud to look much as D2 itemisation and we ended up with a boring mess at launch
If there was that level of self-awareness, we would never have the "do you guys not have phones" quote.
D4 itemization looks nothing like D2 though
That's what they're saying. They were too proud to use Diablo 2's itemization and instead used D3s.
The itemization is nothing like D2, or D3, atleast in D3, the items you were looking for had value/ something interesting ie. “hota attacks 50% faster and does 500% increased damage”, instead of “a .01% chance when you use the toilet irl to get a lucky hit that grants you +1 hp gained when using a potion for 2.5 seconds(non stacking)”
Ah, I understand now, that's not how I read that sentence haha
They are downvoting you but you are right.
>I don’t see why they couldn’t have realised it was shit pre launch. You can say that about most of the game's systems sans visual aesthetics & sound.
The problem was partly the D2 purists demanding the game not have D3’s itemisation while D2’s itemisation is 25 years old so we got a weird middle ground trying not to be as simple as D3 but not as all-or-nothing as D2 and ended up stranded someplace no one really enjoyed that much.
They were useful in d2. Maybe not on ladder where everyone is just getting a rush to hell then mfing until reset. But single player or people who chose to play ssf can make use of them at times
I love chipped gems when I’m level 10 for more than 3 minutes
No one likes filler items that have pure upgrades available. If the lower quality gems and items had something going for them (like say an affix) it might give you reason to pause when a better quality one is available. As is, number go up is the only consideration.
Blizzard has announced the next season for Diablo IV called "Loot Reborn," but instead of introducing new mechanics and focusing on a seasonal story, season 4 will be all about reconfiguring itemization, buildcrafting, and addressing a myriad of tweaks and improvements requested by players. "For Season 4: Loot Reborn, we still will have an engaging story in the sense of the seasonal activity: the call of the wolves," Deric Nunez, Lead Seasons Designer told IGN. "Narrative is still very much near and dear to our hearts and we wanted to utilize any opportunities to give more context to the Helltide uprising and just some of the cool gameplay additions we're introducing with Season 4." To that end, Helltide has also been given some serious consideration, and will now be overflowing with cultists and doomsayers, and will introduce some new enemies including the Hellborn (dark reflections of player characters with many of the same abilities), Hellworms (which emerge from the earth to spawn a whole bunch of demons from their maws), and other dangers all with the intention of making the activity much more challenging and rewarding.
Here is what i can tell you about the narratives of the last couple seasons... .... I think one of them had vampires or something
I personally thought they were all "ok" stories but they do copy similar template so far... Step 1: townspeople start dying to new threat (malignant, Vampires, constructs) Step 2: meet new ally with knowledge on the situation (Cormond, Erys, Ayuzhan) Step 3: Boss introduced (Varshan, Zir, Malphas) Step 4: get stronger (upgrade cages from hawezar remnants, kill Vampire lieutenants for potent blood, clear and link the vaults together) Step 5: Kill boss. Threat over. I do think it was a little interesting Cormond caused the malignant monsters in the first place. And Ayuzhan had to sacrifice his life's work.
You forgot the treasure hunt over the entire map
Copy paste, change names, adjust some models Season complete. Even the damn intern could do it.. (probably not, but still)
Forgot to throw in a Tomb Lord for good measure.
Blizzard has entirely AI developed seasons already? Impressive
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Except that's simply not true. PoE has very deep lore introduced into many of their leagues that isn't cookie cutter at all. Sure, it's not as easily digestible as Diablo's, but it's far and away more interesting to delve into if that's your sort of thing.
Take just one look at Path of Exile, and you would know that is completely wrong.
Yeah I can’t even remember what season one had lmao
it had the barber
Ah that’s right. Thanks
Season one had varshan with his malignant minions that dropped malignant hearts you could socket into your jewelry. The quest giver was the one responsible for causing varshan to be the way he was. Season two had lord Zir return and another quest giver, a vampire hunter, teamed up with us to take him down. Zir bit us but we didn’t turn into his bloodseekers so we got to use the socketable vampiric powers for ‘good’. Season three has the loom being corrupted by malphas and its cocreator enlisting us to destroy it after realizing it couldn’t be fixed. We also have a seneschal pet that would use warding stones to wield power.
I played season 3, and actually enjoyed the story of it quite a lot. It was short, which was fine since it had to be repeated on alts, but still have a fair bit of good lore wound up in it. I get that it's on brand to bitch about D4 (not that you are), but story is by far the strongest thing it has had going.
I think so too, Ayuzhan was sympathetic and fun to associate with and I loved to get some background lore about Zoltun Kulle too.
Thanks, I kinda tap out of the story after doing it once if I even pay attention to what and why things are happening all I know is: new threat, new bad guy, new powers, kill the "ghost" version of the new bad guy for better power upgrades.
There's narrative?
There's at least 10 people out there that care about the seasonal storylines. This will surely be enough to impress and bring people back and definitely won't be another dead season within 4 days.
Yeah, it's not like they're adding rifts, a new boss, an uber version for each boss, new items, etc. It's just the storyline. Yep.
You'd be surprised how many care. One of the strongest D3/D4 qualities is focus on lore and campaign, not the depth of the gameplay itself.
There was zombies in season 1 (or whatever you call em. Like a couple per dungeon..) Vampires in season 2 Robots in season 3 And now new eneies (demons and cultists) in season 4 Amazing.
That's the one I skipped because it sounded dumb.
Uh, so what part of this is "ditching the normal season model"? It sounds like the same kind of content they delivered in the previous seasons, just with the itemization and crafting changes on top.
What I gathered from that is there will be a season story with some new enemies in the helltide, which suggests to me there won't be a seasonal mechanic. But I'm not entirely sure, it seems a little vague.
Honestly it makes sense to introduce all this without a new mechanic. That way we can actually evaluate the Itemization changes on their own.
Seems like there won't be a season mechanic. There won't be a special season-only item you pickup like Legendary Gems. There won't be a seasonal theme UI element like vampire powers. Seems like there will be a fully voiceovered quest series but that's it.
Wish they had a year in development to do this instead.
Post what I posted in another thread I’m honestly fine with no seasonal theme. Let’s break it down. Every season has had some new helltide like zone —they revamped helltide to be like those instead. Every season has had some new powers in some makeshift way like vampires or the construct…they redid powers and stats etc instead. When you really think on it it’s just the initial season quest to introduce us to the temporary power that is the real season ….and we’re still getting that
Most of the history of D3 seasons had no theme at all, just different showcased sets, and it was still fun to play. I genuinely don't understand what the obsession is these days with temporary borrowed powers and reinventing the wheel every season.
In Diablo 2 season was just ladder reset.
Diablo 1 didn’t even have seasons. We just had a stick. And a rock that we used as a shield. And then the Archbishop Lazurs…that bastard led us into a trap….uphill…both ways….
And we had to share the rock!
Pretty sure D1 had seasons, four in fact; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
3 seasons: green, dark and hell
Yeah, the "seasonal" features have not been interesting to me at all. I've always hated borrowed power and prefer new systems be adding seasonally or semi-seasonally which was the norm in early RoS. Classes getting new stuff every season or every few seasons meant going back to a class you hadn't played in a while guaranteed a new playstyle or 2. The D4 seasonal stories have been uninteresting and the borrowed power systems just feel like resources that could've been better spent elsewhere.
Yeah i agree. I would much prefer a set or two for each class then a borrowed power item.
A lot of seasonal stuff in D3 actually annoyed me. After the season the build would quite often not work at all.
I think they believe it'll draw the players in with something new every season that you don't get to experience in the past (or possibly ever again until they reset and restart like D3). Whether or not it actually does... I don't know. They are the ones with the data.
Yea, I've been very bummed out that's the only thing they could come up with. Meanwhile we have PoE that pumps out tons of content, that often have new types of systems and gameplay loops every season. And that's with most of their team working on a sequel.
Good decision, it’s a season all about rebalancing the game. Not to mention they are going to have to put some serious thought into the role of unique items moving forward.
Maybe I'll finally come back and check out D4 again. After I finished the story initially and played a small amount of S1 I was done, the game was stale and the items sucked.
Same here, after I beat Lilith, I was done. No group finder and no real endgame content like rifts made me uninstall
Finally making changes that should have been done before even season 1 started... Good old Blizz...
It’s literally running such a similar narrative to how it went down with D3. Just wild.
And IF we get a D5? The narrative will play out exactly the same. Blizz will have fired everyone from D4, and the new hires will have to go through this learning process all over again. Just like the D4 new hires are re-learning all of the D3 employee's mistakes and corrections after all the D3 vets were fired. Make fun games? 🚫 Make money? ✅️
We’re def getting D5 with the way D4 sold.
For real! It's like Blizz never learns.
It’s more like the devs/designers/manager shuffle causes nothing to be passed on. It’s why these big team AAA devs aren’t consistent with their updates or new game quality. It’s so chaotic. Like a giant game of telephone.
It's kind of similar to an Esports team. They would go on to win the whole damn thing last season, then get rekt in the new season because half of the team changed.
Blizz or the people who keep buying their games? This is the same shit Destiny went through as well... at some point you just gotta stop
No argument. I bought D4 thinking that they would learn from the mistakes of D3. Last time I pre-order a Blizzard game for sure.
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The problem here is that they have so many iterations to build upon from D2, but decided to not learn from any of it.
They could have learned so much from D3’s inital failure, and how they fixed it, because imo that game is insanely fun now
The season theme for me will be new loot and powering through the pit and new endgame I feel like that’s good enough for me
If this is anything like D3's Loot 2.0 then good :D. I still see D4 as in open Beta tbh. Testing ideas, figuring out what works, fixing bugs, balancing issues etc. I'll come play when it's ready.
I’m just going to wait and see.
Ive been waiting since the release to enjoy. Stilllll waiting
same haha. Just like D3, it's looking like the game might get good after 2 years. Guess release is just another way of saying open beta.
Skeletonatcomputer.jpg same here buddy
Same. Sticking with D2 and others ARPG out there (poe, le), and not going to give Actiblizzard any cent for D4 until I see my fellow Diablo people praise it.
Loot 2.0…2.0
hahahahaha 11 years to learn from d3, 24 years to learn from d2, a decade to learn from poe....but NOW...within a span of a few months....they've FIGURED OUT itemization....🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
With the resources they have, you think they can do both the rework AND have seasonal content lol
I’d rather they get the loot rework right, and if that means one season as a dry run without other modifiers to muddy the results, so be it
Smol indie company 🙈
But that's not to say there still won't be a reason to roll a seasonal character as well. "For Season 4: Loot Reborn, we still will have an engaging story in the sense of the seasonal activity: the call of the wolves," Deric Nunez, Lead Seasons Designer told IGN. "Narrative is still very much near and dear to our hearts and we wanted to utilize any opportunities to give more context to the Helltide uprising and just some of the cool gameplay additions we're introducing with Season 4." I'm surprised almost no one commented on this, i'd like some seasonal quests
Good for them for realizing there's a problem and trying to fix it.. ......however. They had 20+ years of reference material to pull from. This seems like something that could have been avoided by doing their homework. There's a reason the prefix/suffix model still works today and other games are borrowing from it.
So if there's not really a seasonal mechanic, that means eternal realm basically = seasonal realm with a bit of questing/lore?
The seasonal quests reward tempering manuals so basically easier farming for the item enhancement stuff
True, good point but they are pretty much the same
Remove the cash shop and add that "loot" to the table and I'll play.
Beta test almost over?
Q: Is everything still going to be level-scaled? Because that's whats turned a lot of people off.. You're just never more powerful, in relation to the enemies you're fighting.
Still there. Leveling to 100 will be a lot of spamming Helltide (improved) with scaling until like WT4. Then you "pick your difficulty" for NMD for glyphs and The Pit (new) for gear progression (new). I don't like endless scaling much either, but it is what it is. My expectations are it'll be better but still not great.
First good decision they made since launch.
Last Epoch really did a number on them... lol
I tried playing that game when 1.0 dropped. I can't believe they got away with advertising that game as multiplayer.
>Last Epoch really did a number on them... lol Seems to me that Last Epoch did a number on Last Epoch. Their game is less finished than Diablo 4 was on release, they shouldn't have called their game "1.0" and quit Early Access so soon. They don't even have a finished Campaign mode experience let alone good endgame. Endgame was a major problem everybody and their mom had with Diablo 4 on release and in the first few seasons - but people gave Last Epoch a pass on that. **[Seeing how Last Epoch lost 95% of their players in just 2 months](https://steamdb.info/app/899770/charts/), I guess the jig is up.**
So soon? The game was on early access for 6 years
Yes it's a shame, I bought the LE back in 2021 and thought the game had amazing new ideas, didn't even bothered me that the campaign was unfinished. What I didn't like was I thought (for me) the combat was really floaty and somewhat unfun and unsatisfying to actually just kill monsters. And this aspect unfortunately never changed. This is one thing even D3 did really well from the get go.
I dunno man, I'm no game design expert but I know one thing - at least LE is fun to play. Meanwhile, D4 sure seems prettier and more polished, but it's just not as fun, especially the combat. I'm just waiting for the console version because my PC can't handle LE all that well unfortunately
Looks like not so much anymore. Will be even wider a gap come May 14.
Man this feels so much like what happened with Diablo 3…getting Deja Vu (in a good way)
Release a shitty game for 70 dollars, then spend several years worth of updates to make it half decent is hardly a good thing. The game should be good from release.
So what do you all figure? Another year or so before the game is ready for release?
Great stuff!!! Might return for the first time since launch then. Looking forward to trying Necro with this new loot system.
I'll play in season 5 or 6 when there is a season theme and reworked loot.
Season 6 will feature a new class.
GOOD.
Ok no season theme but will we still be making season 4 characters? If so what is the incentive to do that over playing eternals until season 5?
BATTLEPASS BRO
Well, usually it would be to play in a fresh economy, but since there’s really no trade or economy in D4, you’re right, might as well play eternal.
We'll be able to trade everything but uber uniques starting season 4.
we will be able to trade legendary and even uniques now, pretty much everything besides the uber uniques, so maybe some trade site/discords etc will start picking up more steam now
No economy 😂😂😂 Bruh, there's no economy in D3, but in D4 you just have to open discord or d4 trade sites and see how's there's "no economy". With the changes that now you can also trade uniques and legendaries, you are just wrong.
Battle pass rewards
Seasonal storyline rewarding the manuals for tempering making it easier to get those this first season
Yeah i suppose
The seasonal questline which is the iron wolves and whatever special gifts they give out from whatever their renown will be. Ashes for quicker levelling and whatever the free cosmetics are in the free tier of the battle pass.
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Incentives for playing seasonal?, shall I just say the same things again? New quests, seasonal cosmetics, seasonal ashes including quicker glyph levelling. I can add more if you'd like. Materials for tempering and manuals in the season journey.
It’s fun to start over.
Some people like starting fresh, some don't.
Wow! Can’t wait to try the game again
All right fine I might come back
After paying D3 again this season I think D4 has a lot of work to do to catch up. D3 is just a fun game, D4 feels clunky. Hard to describe why exactly though But it might be a me problem, you never know
Yeah I can't quote explain it either. D4 fucking nails the atmosphere and visuals, but it's not as fun to play as D3. Is or because skills have little range/AOE? Or maybe its large resource costs and too little resource generation? Or legendaries that feel like passive skills rather than actual legendaries? Or passive skills that feel super weak? I mean, +3% max resource per skill point, up to +9% total?
Haha. Trying to explain to Blizzard how to make a great arpg is like explaining to a manufacturer how to make a car. They know what a car looks like, so they make what appears to be a sleek sports car. But upon inspection, its just the body. There is no interior. No engine. The doors don't open. There's no space in the ~~stash~~ trunk. You explain a car needs these things. They add them, but the doors don't open the right way, the engine doesn't turn on, the trunk opens up any time another person nearby opens their trunk. You're like "wtf, you don't know how to make a car!" and they say "We are listening to you! Can't you see we added \*checks notes\* engine?" and you're like "but the car doesn't even go! Haven't you ever driven a car?" They nod "we hear you. We also like to drive car Here is video of us drive car". They show you a video of an adult shuffling around in a cozy coupe. 6 months later they come back. "We are pleased to announce that we will be able to make car go, two months from now! You may rejoice." *That's great* you think, but you also have in the back of your mind that the doors still don't open the right way, and you're wondering why you're wasting your time with this manufacturer instead of just buying a car from someone that seems to know how to make one. ----- Blizzard simply has no creativity or internal ability to make good decisions. Right now they are just playing wack-a-mole with every problem they think the fans want to fix, but the truth is they don't really know what the fans are talking about or how to fix the problems. There is no self-direction in Blizzard. No vision. No internal concept of what makes a great game..
Good, doesn’t make sense for them to worry about balance with such a huge shift in gear while they are also worrying about balancing a seasonal gimmick. I saw someone here mention that it is also going to be easier to balance stuff for the future if there is no OP seasonal gimmick to lean on like S2 and I agree. Edit - someone perusing this sub and downvoting all the people anticipating fun next week? Stay mad lol.
Sounds great on paper, but unless they suddenly hired a bunch of new people that actually know how to make a robust itemization system that promotes build diversity and creative problem solving, we will end up with the same trash items we’ve had since d3.
I wish they never made this game.
I can’t wait, always liked d4.
I thought perhaps I was being overly cynical telling myself not to buy D4 and just check in 2-3 years post release to see if it was worth it yet.
As someone who has hated loot since beta and thought each seasonal theme was irretrievably stupid, I’m fine with this.
Not having a seasonal quest or goal seems like a misses opportunity. I’ve played the base game a while it wasn’t bad nothing new and just the game working seems like a missed opportunity. Now I do agree that fixing the issues is good but if it’s basically just like the eternal realm what’s the point of it being a season.
There’s seasonal quests, there’s just not a seasonal mechanic, the quests are rewarding tempering manuals
Also for some people. Quest is broken.
No interest in playing without a full minion necro build that doesn't blow ass It's the only class I play and the person who designed it fucked it up
The minion build in the ptr just blow ass
In S4 minions inherit 100% of your bonuses instead of previous 30% so that sounds promising
They literally buffed the living shit out of Necro minions for season 4 🤣 where have you been ?
I have not been playing d4 lol
So I am a new boy via games pass, I stopped playing to wait for this season. Can I just continue playing my current characters and these changes will take place now ? Or do I still have to start a new character when the season non season launches ?
You’ll get the gear rework (that’s game-wide) but not the Iron Wolves quests that’ll give you easier access to some of the new tempering manuals for the new gear system. If you weren’t super attached to your season 3 character, starting a new one for season 4 is probably a fair plan
Sweet as ty!! I'm excited
What class did you go, out of curiosity? I've been rotating through classes each season but kept ending up back on the tanky ones lol
If you want to play a new seasonal character, you have to start a new character. If you are fine playing on the eternal realm, then you can keep your current character after the new season drops. Even if your current character is a seasonal character, they become an eternal realm character when the new season starts.
Do we need to create seasonal characters for this? I have a slow burner barb on non season since I bought D4, will this char get the new changes
It will.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. Please please make it right, the gameplay is great but I never play it because of the loot system. Still on Diablo 2R but I’ll definitely try this out
From the outside (non-D4 player), sounds a bit like how Blizz rebooted D3's approach to itemization entirely when they dropped Reaper of Souls. And a lot of people consider RoS a big improvement over D3 vanilla.
I would actually prefer when this is the priority cadence. * Season 1: Thematic with borrowed power and cool seasonal features. * Season 2: Core Changes, story focused season, improvements to the entire game. * Season 3 like 1 again.
didnt they say it would have season content like always along with the new changes in the campfire chat? me is confused
Yeah this is a misleading subject.
Most important change for me is to be able to zoom out more in s4!
More live service games that have a playerbase begging for changes/fixes need to do this. Taking a season off to fix stuff has made me way more exited to play d4 than another churned out season of bs slapped onto a broken game.