Well, friends… I think I am starting to wind down Diablo IV Season 2. I’ve hit level 73 and swapped out all of my gear… and while mechanically the game is still enjoyable there isn’t a lot of reason to keep grinding for 100. This morning’s post is going to seem negative, and to some extent, it will be… but before I go down that path let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that I had a heck of a lot of fun. According to the unofficial D4 Armory, at the time of writing this post, I have had around 38 hours worth of enjoyment out of this season. This has been nothing short of a remarkable turnaround in the trajectory of this game and I actually look forward to popping back in for Season 3. The team did a great job of picking up a completely derailed game and getting it back on the tracks.
To say that Diablo IV has no endgame is a bit disingenuous. However, I can fully state that it does not have an endgame that I feel is worth grinding for. Nightmare Dungeons are not good and are the sort of byproduct that you end up with when someone attempts to transplant Mythic Plus from World of Warcraft into an Action RPG. It just does not feel good and compounds the problems with the Dungeon system as a whole, only further serving to suck any remaining joy from them by adding mechanics that make them even less enjoyable. Mechanics like Drifting Shadows, Blood Blisters, and Lightning Storm are not difficult but are the definition of something that sounds good on paper but feels completely “unfun” when you experience them in practice.
The Blood Harvest zones and the recent changes to Legion prove that the team can design content that feels good to complete, so it gives me hope that at some point there might be something enjoyable to do once you have hit World Tier IV and sorted out your gear. Right now getting an arbitrary number to 100 doesn’t feel like good enough motivation to keep going when I am out of meaningful goals. I am not saying I will stop playing the game entirely, I might grind out some more of the battle pass but for the moment… a lot of the joy and focus are gone for me. When I completed the last keystone dungeon and started working on World Tier IV, it felt like I arrived at the top floor. I’ve never been a massive completionist and I am largely unmotivated by trying to get a “platinum” trophy in every game.
I am hoping that they can rework dungeons completely at some point because the spackle that they applied with this patch helped them out… but I am not sure there is enough good there to salvage without a top-down redesign. The joy of an ARPG is reaching a flow state as you tear through packs of monsters while getting the occasional dopamine hit of a loot explosion. Dungeons break this flow up constantly by having to focus on some arbitrary objective rather than steamrolling your way to the boss and breaking open the loot pinata. This is made worse by the Nightmare Dungeon mechanics that serve to slow you down further. The dungeon art is top-notch, which I think is why they have been so hesitant to trash the system completely. I am not sure how it can be saved without simply removing ALL objective-focused gameplay.
Another system that needs completely redone is the Helltide. The Blood Harvest “Bloodtide” zones have proven to be a massively superior gameplay experience. Going forward they should really make Helltides work exactly like the Bloodtide where there are a few objectives that spawn in… no loss of embers on death… and available at all times with them rotating between locations every hour. The team has shown us that they understand what went wrong with the Helltide, and we will always lament the “Bloodtide” zones as a far better experience. I’ve been to the Helltide a few times and there are never any other players out there… but every time I do the green Blood Harvest zones they are fairly packed. This has to be something reflected in the total numbers on the backend and should provide some interesting metrics that hopefully they can track.
The other system that I would love to see burned down and rebuilt is the Paragon system. It is just not interesting. While the Path of Exile passive tree is lamented as being far too obtuse for the average player, I also feel like I am only ever one or two points away from some interesting choices that often reframe what I am doing with my build. Most of the Paragon tree is filled with boring stat nodes that you have to take in order to make the fun nodes on the tree not actively suck. Even the “fun” nodes don’t really modify how my character plays. Truthfully that is a larger problem both with the design of Legendary items and Paragon points, in that nothing I am doing seems to make significant changes to the way I am approaching my build. I’m playing Upheaval and there is a similar ability in Last Epoch but in the talent tree associated with that ability I can configure it to fire off when I leap slam or turn it into a self-firing totem… or apply buffs to my minions. None of that sort of freedom of movement within a single ability exists in Diablo IV, which honestly feels like a step backward from even Diablo III.
So I realize that this morning’s post has been me rattling off a litany of problems than the game has. That is only because I now care about the game. I actually feel for the first time that there is a game here worth trying to save. I don’t want Diablo IV to die in infamy… I want it to have a No Man’s Sky style comeback story and keep proving to players that it is putting in the hard work to bring itself back from the brink of oblivion. There is a good game here and there are some strong fundamentals now. That is a shocking change from the burning dumpster fire of a game that I felt existed at launch. My concern now is that most of what I am interacting with are seasonal mechanics that are very likely to go away in January.
What we need are some long-tailed progression systems that will keep the player coming back even after they have capped a character out. Path of Exile does this through the varied forms of endgame content harvested from their version of seasons called “Leagues” and the Atlas of Worlds which allows you to tailor your endgame experience to focus on exactly the kind of content that you want to spend time experiencing. The Blood Harvest while cool, doesn’t really fit a pattern of being content that can remain evergreen and neither does the Malignant Hearts. Diablo IV is going to start needing to design content expansions that can stick around for longer than a three-month period because it needs to keep fleshing out what it means to reach the endgame.
Diablo IV is in a state where it can provide one really fun week of gameplay, but it needs to give us a reason to keep coming back for more. Granted a more casual player will likely be able to stretch that week into a month… but no matter your pace you are going to reach a point where the path forward just isn’t really worth walking down. I have a glimmer of hope though for what the future might bring a year or two from now. So if anyone on the team happens to read this… you’ve already beat my expectations. I thought the game was dead in the water and was saddled with a generally “unfun” game design. You’ve had a massive turn around and I applaud all of the hard work. There are still a lot of difficult choices ahead of you, which are going to mean cutting some content that just isn’t working or at least drastically modifying it. I hope the company as a whole gives you the time to turn this game around completely because I feel like at some point Diablo IV can be a massive success story.
The post Diablo IV Needs an Endgame appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! I am still fairly shocked to be able to say that the Season of Blood in Diablo IV seems good. As I near the point where I will do the capstone dungeon that allows me access to World Tier III, I have to say that my build is holding solid. Overpower still feels great, but I am uncertain how much of that is the core build and how much is how good the assorted vampiric powers feel. This brings up a whole other series of concerns about Blizzard and their dependence on borrowed power systems in World of Warcraft… and now seemingly Diablo IV… but that can be a concern for another season. For now, the game feels great, which is a wild turnaround from my previous feelings about the game.
Last night I recorded a quick and dirty video of some gameplay in the Blood Harvest area. I also talked a bit about some of the vampire powers and showed off some gameplay of what my Barbarian looks like killing things. I have to say that more than anything it is this seasonal mechanic that is making the game feel good. Previously the open world largely felt pointless apart from the Helltide Events, and now I feel like I have a reason to do the thing that I enjoyed the most… which was roaming around aimlessly and killing things. Blood Harvest areas are exceptionally rewarding both in experience and loot and gave me the thing I was missing in this game… aka a default thing to log in and do. No matter how hard I tried I just did not like Nightmare Dungeons. They felt weird and forced and too rigidly structured. Popping into a zone and hopping back and forth between mini-events while killing copious amounts of Vampires is my jam.
All of that said, while I have not reached Nightmare dungeons… the few normal dungeons that I have run to unlock legendary powers have felt much improved. I will essentially have to relearn the pathing, but it does feel like you have to go in the wrong direction far less often and that most of the objectives that you need to collect and take back to a location are closer to the destinations. The Dungeons however continue to feel fairly boring and tedious, and I do worry a bit that I am going to be forced into them in order to level up my paragon glyphs once I hit level 50. The Blood Harvest area feels so fresh and exciting… that the old dungeon design while improved, still feels like a massive step backward. Personally, I still feel like the dungeons need to be taken back to the drawing board. I would love to see all objectives removed and implement some sort of clear percentage system that spawns a boss similar to Nephelem Rifts from Diablo III.
One of the biggest changes for me personally is how much better town and settlement layouts feel. Firstly there are SO MANY more stashes available in the game, and you are rarely far away from one. Take this overhead map of Kyovashad, where there used to be a single stash in the Inn with your Wardrobe, now there is one at the Enchanter, Jeweler, and Smithy giving you rapid access no matter what task you are needing to complete. I would still rather have seen more compact layouts that put everything within a few steps of each other, but for that, we have the Tree of Whispers that now has an Enchanter. If they swapped the Jewelry merchant for an actual Jewel Crafting vendor… that “town” would be perfection because you could do everything that you might need to do in a single location.
However in the “weird hill to die on” department, Blizzard still seems to be pushing the RealID in spite of having long disabled it in my account settings within Battle.net. What this means is that after the Season 2 patch, if you do not go into your settings and enable one of the “Streamer Mode” options you are going to end up doxxing yourself if you happen to take a screenshot with your inventory open. All of the options around this are awful because this originally defaulted to “Character Name (Firstname Lastname)” and with streamer mode on… instead of getting just my character name, I get random character names each time I log into the game. Why this exists on this screen is beyond me and why someone might want to see their RealID in addition to their character name is beyond me. Does anyone use RealID by choice?
All things considered, though I am enjoying myself and I didn’t really think that was possible. I think my biggest frustration is… had the game launched in this state I think it might have been a game of the year candidate. Now however it is probably going to take a lot to get some players to return. I know my friend Cyl for example pretty much wrote the game off, and has moved on to other games and is probably unlikely to pop back in and give it a second chance. This is the challenge with games that launch in a rough state, you never really get that second chance to amend those first impressions. New World is a prime example of this, and it has more or less improved everything that was wrong with that game at launch… but will never again see the numbers it did in those first few weeks. It is going to take a lot of work to remediate the meme of “D4 Bad”.
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Good Morning Folks! This is me doing a Saturday post, which is not exactly something that I do often. However this month we have Blaugust running and I thought that just maybe for once I would try and hit 31 posts in my own damned event. In truth, the only day that I don’t normally post is Saturday given that I make weekly normal blog posts, and on Sundays, I advertise the podcast episode. So that really means I am only trying to squeeze a few more blog posts in total to hit 31 so I might as well actually make that happen. I figured that I would start off the first of these and talk a bit about what has garnered the majority of my attention for the past two days… Baldur’s Gate 3. This is a game that I have technically owned since 2020, but have avoided doing much with because I did not want to spoil the experience. I get that probably does not make a whole lot of sense, but I am a huge fan of Larian Studios and I viewed my purchase of Early Access as a way of helping fund the development. It turns out that faith was rewarded as all of the early access holders got access to the digital deluxe version free.
The original Baldur’s Gate was a heck of a lot of fun, but I will be honest it wasn’t really until Icewind Dale was released that I began ravenously devouring these games. So when Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn I was well enough indoctrinated into the series to be hyped and ready to go on launch day. Playing Baldur’s Gate III, over the last few nights has felt like my memories of Baldur’s Gate II. What I mean by that is that I have been transported back in time to an era when I could just meld with the game and become hopelessly engrossed in it. I’ve experienced “time loss” like I have not in years where I sit down thinking I am only playing for a few minutes, and I look up and three hours have passed. I mean this in the best way possible, and while it took me a bit to get used to the slower pace of a real-time-action game… now that I am engaged I am fully engaged.
I’m not going to dive too deeply into the story, that will probably come for a much later blog post. For character options, I decided to keep it simple and went with a Barbarian. I opted to go for an entertainer background which gave me performance and acrobatics, both of which have already come in handy. For the race I decided to follow my heart and go with a Dwarf and given the Ithilid roots of this game, I opted to go with Duergar. So far I am pretty happy with all of my choices save for maybe the voice I went with. To be truthful, none of the voice actors really felt like a Duergar should feel. Thankfully most of the time I am a silent protagonist, but there is a bit of a mental disconnect whenever I say anything.
For the most part, I like all of the characters. If you told me this was a Bioware game I would have believed you, because I already care about my little party of misfits. Like we really are a “bad ideas” party, but I am enjoying adjusting to the nonsense and I am glad I am able to be zero shocked when someone reveals more awful things that they are dealing with. It does feel a bit weird that in a party of “chosen ones” I seem to keep being set up as the “most chosen” of them all. The only character I am sus about is Lae’zel but mostly because she is a bit aggro all the time. I run around with her mostly because apart from me she is the strongest hitter.
I like Gale an awful lot, but he has this weird uncanny resemblance to a young Mel Gibson. I have to see it every time I play the game so now you do too. All things told though while I don’t normally like “finger wigglers” as I call them… he is pretty cool for a magic user. Like he has his own “bad ideas” traits about him, but he reminds me a bit of my love of Dorian from Dragon Age Inquisition. Shadowheart is probably my favorite, but truthfully… were Shadowheart introduced differently I probably would have hated the character. I have this thing against the “does not trust you” characters… so I could see Shadowheart reading as a “Corso Riggs” if I was not already inherently wired to want to help her because I saved her from a pod.
All told I am about ten hours into the game and still have yet to replace the weapon I got from the tutorial. Admittedly there are a lot of people who probably did not get that weapon, and I only did so because I happened to read a bit specifically stating that I should. Right now my party comp is Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Gale and I am not sure if I completely missed getting Wyll. I’ve done some research as to where to find him, but I never seemed to bump into him in that area of the game. I do wonder if I screwed that up and am completely unable to get him now. I need to backtrack a bit and roam around the area just to make sure I did not miss something.
Anyways greatly enjoy the game, and will very likely be mainlining this at least until the launch of the Path of Exile Ancestor’s League on the 18th. I hope yall are having a most excellent weekend. It is raining this morning, which we desperately need because it hit 107 the other day… which is just not fun.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV and I did in fact play the game as the servers came up. There was a bit of weirdness with battle.net as things launched but it had resolved itself within the first fifteen minutes. After that for the most part it felt like logging in and playing any game that had been active for months. I feel like whatever work Blizzard did ahead of the launch was deeply beneficial to the stability of the servers, because while we have yet to see what a difference the “standard copy” players make on the 6th… for the most part every was solid. In fact, I would say that the game itself performed far better than I had experienced in any of the closed or public testing phases that I had participated in. The entire game just felt snappier than I remember from the last public test and I am not sure if this was engine optimization on the side of Blizzard or the fact that Nvidia released brand-new drivers for the game launch. Whatever the case it felt pretty great, which I guess is making me question some of my early opinions of the game.
I made a Barbarian, and effectively the same one I have made a half dozen times in various testing phases which allowed me to breeze through the character creation boss. As far as a skill set I decided to give Maxroll a shot and follow their Upheaval guide since of all of the fury spenders that one felt the best to me in previous phases. Now I am uncertain which is the case, but either Blizzard significantly buffed the Barbarian to make it feel better at the early stages of the game… or the entire game has been nerfed a bit. Whereas before combat felt sluggish and plodding… it now feels snappy and fluid. I gotta say… I don’t hate this game. It still isn’t really an ARPG in my book… at least not one in the traditional sense but for an Isometric MMORPG it feels pretty solid. Maybe I have just had enough time to get over my initial disappointment, or maybe it is the fact that I have largely finished with the current Path of Exile League and have mentally put that game to bed for a while. Whatever the case I had quite a bit of fun last night. Not so much fun that I did not have a pause mid-evening to go out and play with the outdoor cats.
When I say… something significant has changed what I mean is that I am level 15 and have mainlined the story through the first zone and have not taken a single death yet. This is very much NOT the case in previous testing phases. Barbarians had to basically spam potions to survive the early phases of combat and it feels like I have barely had to pay attention to my health other than during boss fights. Someone from the team had announced that this was pretty much the same build as the most recent stress test, but I do not believe them at all. It does make me want to fire up a Necromancer to see what the state of minions looks like and determine if that is also fixed. Whatever the case… my opinion of Diablo IV as a whole would be massively different had I experienced THIS build in any of my testing phases. I’m not sure what last-minute balance changes were made but they certainly feel significant.
The cash shop is now available in the game, and it is in fact a cash shop. Some of the cosmetics are pretty good looking, like this crusader-esc outfit for the Barbarian. However, most of the cosmetics are kinda fugly. Like maybe I am just not as big of an equestrian person, but it feels like a lot of effort went into the horses in this game and they are all sorta awful looking. I am hoping there will be mounts OTHER than horses… because really… I almost NEVER ride a horse in an MMO. Give me a big bear mount or something like that, and you might pry some money from my hands. Maybe it is a side effect of growing up around horses my entire life… but they are sorta boring. Essentially there is a single outfit for the Necromancer and a single outfit for the Barbarian that I consider worthy of a purchase, but the rest of the dross is kinda “mid” at best. Essentially the conversion rate of Platnium to dollars is $1 to 100, so the big fancy cosmetic armor packages are $24.
All I really did last night was make a beeline through the story bits that I have seen multiple times for this first zone. I’ve not even unlocked most of the map, so in theory tonight I will be spending my time branching out and exploring things… and now I feel like I have the motivation to actually complete all the dungeons to get the imprint unlocks. Mostly I wanted to finish up the story while I was still relatively low level in case they had not resolved the problem of leveling up and making you feel weaker. So far that has not really been the case, which I am hoping means that is the side effect of more balance changes. I am sure I will be focused on this game for most of the weekend and will likely give you a more formal review on Monday.
I created a Clan last night if any of the usual suspects want a home. However, I am rapidly realizing how long I have been away from Blizzard games and how pretty much everyone has a new guild family that they play with. I will admit it was a little weird to see that <House Stalwart> had been created and that I had nothing to do with it. Granted I have been “Not-The-Guild-Leader” of the guild that I founded far longer than I was actually the leader, and it has always been in great hands with Kylana. I figure <GREY> will be pretty small in Diablo IV given that I am not sure if any of the AggroChat regulars intend to play the game. That said if you need a chill home feel free to apply in the game or hit me up while I am playing for an invite. I left it public so folks could sign up while I was offline.
I’m still not entirely sure what I think of Diablo IV. I think better of it now after having played this latest version… but it is still not necessarily what I was hoping it would be. I think this is going to be a great game for most of the players who decide to pick it up because the vast majority of Diablo players as a whole… get in… play through the campaign once or twice… and then uninstall the game feeling satisfied maybe to revisit it at some point in the future when they get the itch. I do wonder what the endgame and seasonal cadence is going to look like going forward. I’m not entirely certain this is going to be a game for the players who have adapted to the ways of Last Epoch and Path of Exile. In fact, I think there are probably going to be some players who were waiting around to see what Diablo IV was… before finally committing to those games. I do have to give Blizzard credit for starting to change my opinion though with some last-minute tweaks and balance changes… and an incredibly stable launch night.
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