Good Morning Friends. Yesterday in the AggroChat Slack there was this whole thread about growing up in the gifted and talented program, but also being just “gifted” enough to fully understand your own inadequacies. I felt this so damned hard because this is essentially the story of my life. I was on the mediocre end of the gifted pool and while I participated in all of the elevated events, and was actually good enough at the academic bowl to place in the district banquet and force the horrible football coach to have to accept an award on my behalf… I never really felt good enough to actually be recognized as such. For most of my life, I have been “winging it” and bumblefucked my way into the occasional success. Take for example this cosmetic outfit that I am wearing on my Explosive Arrow Champion. There was no real planning here, just me clicking on a few random cosmetics because I hate the default look of low-level gear in Path of Exile. By sheer accident, I came up with something that I really love, which is this whole microcosm of my life as a whole. Any real success that I have had… has been purely by accident.
I know yesterday I released this entire blog post talking about my experiences from the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to refine those thoughts a bit and opted to do so in a video of me playing around on my Scion in Path of Exile. Something that I have noticed about myself is that often when I sit down to write about something, it causes me to re-evaluate that topic in my head. This video is largely the place I arrived at after writing an entire blog post about the experience. It allowed me to really refine my thoughts into a sharper point and get to the crux of what my primary problem with the game is. I decided to skip the clever title card and just go with something way more honest. If you want to hear me ramble on for fifteen minutes about the core of my frustrations feel free. But I will skip to the chase and tell you that ultimately it boils down to the level scaling feeling really bad.
In the video, I am poking around at a new character that I have been leveling that I called BelGlamrock mostly because the default Scion appearance looks like an outfit straight out of the hair metal band era. The weird thing about this character is that I honestly have no real intention of ever gearing it fully or turning it into a real character for playing the game. Truth be told, I am not sure if I really like the Scion as a starter class at all. It feels kind of directionless, but I guess that makes sense given it doesn’t have a fixed starter location on the passive tree. The benefit of the class is that you can mix and match the ascendency style of the other classes and build a sort of hybrid to do very specific things. This also feels like the weakness of the class because it doesn’t really have an identity of its own.
Ultimately I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with the character. It was a means to an end and the fact that I had never gotten the achievement for killing Dominus on the Scion bugged me for some reason. I don’t fully understand why I have been motivated to get specific achievements in Path of Exile given that I have never really been an achievement-focused person in any other games. Generally speaking, the only achievements that I spend time on, are the ones that give me something tangible as a reward. This is in part why I have enjoyed the Achievement structure of Guild Wars 2 because almost always they end in some sort of interesting tangible reward. My drive to get achievements in Path of Exile however completely flies in the face of my well-established patterns. I get nothing from having knocked these out other than the sense of checking something off a long list of achievements that I have yet to complete. Similarly, I have this irrational desire to run two characters through Act 2, just to side with the Bandits I have never sided with before in order to knock that achievement as well.
Speaking of achievements, I am nearing 19 league challenges which will give me another sad little totem pole for my hideout. In order to finish this off I respeccced my Atlas Passive tree to drop support for incursion and pile on some of the Abyss nodes. I realize that Abyss is not exactly great in this league, but I am pretty close to knocking out the challenge associated with it. Essentially I need to find several more 4 pit Abysses and I think by trying to force the chance of seeing an Abyssal Depths… it will cause this to happen. In the grand scheme of things I really like Abyss as a mechanic, but it does feel way less rewarding than it did before their most recent revamp. I am going to be running maps anyways to build up sulphite for delving so I might as well be getting the mechanics I need for challenges in the process. I also have a stockpile of abyss scarabs that I can use to force it as well.
I am not entirely certain what my exit strategy is for this league. I’ve still not earned my last two void stones, so given the state my Explosive Arrow Champion is in, I might lend some focus to that. I’ve tried to accumulate the fragments needed for shaper and ultimately uber elder organically, but that is really slow going. I am wondering if I should just use some of my war chest of resources and buy the fragments that I need outright. I still find Delve deeply relaxing but also I am starting to feel a little listless there. I’ve taken down three crystal kings in recent days and failed to get a good amulet, but even if I did get a good one… what exactly would I do with it? I am not sure there are other builds that I really want to spend time doing given that in this league I have made four completely functional builds for doing the various content that I really want to be doing.
I think maybe when I finish up this 19th challenge for the league I might take a bit of a break. I can do so happy that I accomplished pretty much everything that I really wanted to accomplish save for the Uber bosses. I might take a run at those, but to be honest… I don’t really love bossing in the first place. I like the big loot explosions that come from lower tiers of activities and I can’t really bring myself to buy an endless supply of fragments from the trade league in order to chain-run bosses. I might want to do some more heist and burn down my contracts a bit, but other than that… I think I can maybe put the Crucible league to bed for awhile.
The post Forever Winging It appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This past weekend there was another Diablo IV Stress Test event, and I thought I would poke my head in to see how it felt. On the show Saturday night I talked about it feeling much better as a whole and that is true. However better, in this case, does not necessarily equate to “great”. I am still not super sold on Diablo IV but since I was gifted a copy, I figure I will be playing some at launch regardless so I can see if yet again they make a number of tweaks to potentially improve things further. One thing that shocked me about the “Server Slam” event is how short it actually was. I fully expected this thing to last until mid-day on Monday as most “weekend” events do. Instead, it cut off in the middle of Sunday afternoon unexpectedly. The only reason why I realized this had happened is that I finished a quest and could not port anywhere, after trying ten times I opted to log out and back in when I was hit with the “event is over” banner on the Battle.net launcher. I found it weird that it did not actually disconnect me from the server, it just stopped my character from doing anything meaningful.
Since I was testing out the changes, I decided to play Barbarian again because of the classes available it is really the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart. If there was a Crusader you would likely see me playing nothing but that all the time as I did when I played Diablo Immortal. The last round of testing the Barbarian felt awful. It felt like I had no survivability and struggled to keep up gear levels so that I could actually kill anything before it killed me. Of note… during neither beta did I spend any time “farming” gear drops and instead just sort of subsisted with whatever happened to fall while playing the game. One of the biggest weaknesses that Diablo IV has in my opinion is the fact that the world is constantly leveling up with you. I think this is an attempt at creating an evergreen game that “lasts longer” for the player, but the end result feels like the world gets more difficult faster than you gain power. While it was less noticeable during this test, it still felt like from levels 15-20 I lost power and the time to kill in the world kept getting worse.
One massive change in this test was that they nerfed drop rates into the ground. Like I knew without a doubt that legendary drops were increased for testing purposes in the last open beta weekend. However, I did not expect them to be quite this anemic going forward. It was level 17 before I found a single legendary item, and even then… by the time I finished with the weekend I had seen two and they were both rings. The only gear slot that seems to matter significantly is your weapon slot, and I struggled consistently to find upgrades there. The game just does not really seem to drop a lot of gear in general or when it does… drops them in a manner that is not upgrading. I saw lots of items that were just slightly worse than what I was wearing but extremely rarely ever saw something with more power. Even when you stumbled across a Loot Goblin, they seemed deeply anticlimactic for the amount of effort they took to kill. I took one down on Sunday and it dropped 2 blue items, 2 gems, and some Obols the new pseudo-Kadala currency.
Speaking of Obols… this is a screenshot from the last test of that vendor. It became my prime source of upgrades and was how I got most of the legendary items that I pulled last time around. In this test… it was nerfed into the ground and became a largely worthless interaction. Since I was not getting gear through other sources I kept spending my Obols trying to target specific slots, and the vast majority of the time I would end up getting a white item and trigger the “bad luck” voice line from the vendor. At level 20, I kept trying to target a chest piece and never got anything that would be considered an upgrade. At a minimum, this vendor should be dropping Magic and Rare items much more frequently, because every activity in the game seems to be balanced around paying out a stock of this dumb alternative currency. If this vendor is pure shit, then it makes every interaction with the game feel much worse.
One interaction however that was massively improved was the completion of “Cellars”. These are little mini dungeons where you rush in, kill a pack of monsters and get a chest to drop. These went from being the most useless thing in the game to quite possibly the most lucrative when it comes to farming items. These chests almost always rewarded two yellows, two blues, some gems, and some gold. I feel like Blizzard does not really want us farming Cellars over and over… but also right now as it stands those are way more beneficial than running an actual dungeon given that they both provide about the same amount of rewards but for a significantly lower time investment. I fully expect the cellar system to be nerfed into the ground before launch and for them to once again fade into something that is not worth your time to complete.
The goal of this weekend was to successfully kill Ashava, and for doing so you got some nifty-looking horse armor. I have to admit this was not necessarily my personal goal for the weekend. I wanted to see if Barbarian felt any better, and at least partially it does… not great… but better. After editing the AggroChat podcast on Sunday I decided to finally make my way over to the staging grounds for the Ashava fight. My hope was that if I showed up early enough I might happen upon a decent group and that seems to have paid off as everyone that was milling around in the area was at least level 20. This was apparently a huge problem for players this weekend as level 2 players could wander into the area and essentially destroy the chances of that group succeeding at the encounter since Ashava is templated at level 25 and does not scale.
This is the one where I am going to complain at length about this encounter and the way it works. The difficulty level of this encounter does not necessarily match the open-world nature of the encounter. This fight feels like it is designed to have a team full of ringers that actually know what is going on. Instead, you get a group of random players and hope that fate smiles upon you and you end up with a group that is at least going to give it their best effort. The limited-time nature of the fight however makes it so that if you failed… you don’t get another chance any time soon. If I were Blizzard I would change the way this works entirely and make it so that you queue into the “serious mode” version of Ashava and then have a much more watered-down version that exists in the real world showing up on a specific timer… but also make that timer fire every thirty mins rather than every three hours.
The group I was in managed to take down Ashava with roughly three of the fifteen-minute clock left. What I did not realize however is that I got in on the very last Ashava kill of the entire testing period. I wandered over through the sheer happenstance of finishing editing and having time to play and made zero plans to actually accomplish this over the weekend. I am deeply fortunate that I happened upon a group of players who did not give up and just kept throwing themselves at the boss. What did annoy me however is that before the fight I purposefully slotted Poison Resistance into every gem slot that I had, and it did not seem to make a damned bit of difference on this fight. This only leads me back down the path of that gear doesn’t really mean anything and only your weapon slot seems to make any significant difference in your performance. For example, in Path of Exile, if you equip a couple of frost resistance rings before you face Merveil, it will absolutely make that encounter much easier and oftentimes just straight-up trivializes it. Poison Resistance did not seem to do a damned thing against getting clipped by one of Ashava’s attacks and only through spamming potions were you able to survive getting poisoned.
I hope at some point that this game is good and worthy of the Diablo name. I like the story well enough, but the moment-to-moment gameplay still just feels bad. Maybe that is the wrong statement to make. It doesn’t feel like an Action RPG should, or at least how I have come to expect one to play. It seems to be going for more consequential gameplay, which is counter-intuitive to this genre for me at least. I care about shredding monsters and getting “phat lewts”, and this game doesn’t really deliver in that department. Fights feel like a battle of attrition more than a power fantasy, and as a result, I am not sure it is ever going to be my jam. The weekend of playing Diablo IV made me dive back into Path of Exile after the event was over and it just felt so much better. Maybe this is just a franchise I need to let go of in the way I have at least partially let go of Zelda after Breath of the Wild and Metroid after Dread. It sucks… but maybe it is time for me to move on considering I apparently have preferences that are not going to be served going forward.
The post Accidental Ashava Timing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.
Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.
Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.
To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.
So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.
This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.
The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.
I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.
I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.
This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.
The post My ARPG Hours Played appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday the Diablo IV PR team dropped a video previewing the “endgame” activities that you will participate in after you hit the level cap. I had heard that it was getting more downvotes than likes, and as a result, I thought I might talk about my own feelings regarding what I saw in the video. I feel like it is important to cover some ground before I do so. I am a huge fan of ARPGs and if you sift through the last decade and a half of this blog you will see evidence of this scattered throughout its pages. Second I’ve played both very limited closed and open testing periods for Diablo IV but can only really reflect my thoughts on the open testing. It isn’t like the closed testing really gave me information that I did not gain through the open weekends, however. I’ve also already largely decided that Diablo IV is not a game being designed for me and the types of gameplay that I enjoy in ARPGs. You can read some of my comments on my experiences here, but I wanted to get this out of the way to explain that I am going to try and be balanced but I have my specific biases as does everyone talking about this game.
Let’s talk about what was outlined in the video while staring at my Beefcake Murder Hobo Barbarian from Open Beta. Essentially the video outlines a number of activities that will exist and will at least make up the early “endgame”. It also indicates that releases will be made on a semi-regular basis that will add additional “content” but we are uncertain exactly what any of that release schedule will entail. Diablo Immortal “launched” on July 7th of 2022 and has released a total of 11 “seasons” worth of content some with major changes and some with minor tweaks for an update roughly every 24 days. Diablo III has had a rather anemic release schedule going for long periods of time with no updates other than the rolling new season every 3-4 months… most of which only entail the release of a new cosmetic chase item. I expect that Diablo IV is going to land somewhere between these two with not nearly the frenetic schedule of a mobile game, but at least something dropping each quarter. How significant each drop is going to have not been explained yet. I also expect expansions that add the missing classes to the game like Crusader and potentially Witch Doctor.
I am going to start by Cataloging the Endgame Activities outlined in the video:
Four World Tiers
Open World
Events
World Bosses
Dungeons and Strongholds
Nightmare Dungeons
Requires consumable “Sigil” to unlock
Helltide Rifts (this one I am uncertain about)
Bounty Board in the form of an Angry Tree
PVP Areas
World Tiers
The video introduces the concept of World Tiers, and in the Open Beta, we immediately had access to two of these… Adventurer and Veteran. After completing the campaign moving to Nightmare sounds like it is gated by what they referred to as a “Capstone Dungeon”. Upon beating that dungeon you can set your world to the next difficulty which I would assume involves some grinding again and unlocking the next capstone dungeon and progressing forward. There is no clear indicator if you will need to progress through the story again at Nightmare difficulty, or if this just opens up the next Capstone Dungeon immediately. In Diablo III, the initial endgame was effectively just repeating the story over and over at different difficulties so I would hope that they do not make this critical mistake again.
It kinda feels bad that the different difficulties don’t just open up on their own. For example, in Diablo III the difficult tiers are level gated, and if you are absolutely Feeling your Wheaties you can run the entire initial campaign on Torment 1 if you so choose. This was absolutely a key mechanic before helping your friends catch up quickly to the endgame levels but zooming them through content and catchup experience is likely not going to be a thing in Diablo IV based on the limited testing I did with friends during the beta. Essentially higher world tiers feel like more of the same… same open-world areas, same events that reoccur on a schedule, and same world bosses.
It is really the World Bosses that concern me the most when it comes to Higher World Tiers. Essentially this template of keeping moving forward in World Tier is something that we experienced with Diablo Immortal. There if you fell behind the average level of your server, you simply did not have groups to do anything with. I simply could not get groups for the bosses at lower World Tiers, after taking a break from the game and seeing the majority of the server zoom ahead of me. This is probably going to be something that is rapidly a problem with this type of world design for Diablo IV unless all of the world tiers are blended together at the same time.
Nightmare Dungeons
So based on the video, there are apparently “over” 120 dungeons in the game. Now I have talked about them before and how similar they felt… with it feeling a bit like the World of Warcraft cave problem of every single cave in the game having the same layout. That aside… there is apparently the chance of having a “sigil” drop that allows you to turn a dungeon into a “Nightmare Dungeon”. Doing so adds “affixes” to the dungeon that modifies the experience. If you have played World of Warcraft since the Legion expansion, you will know this system as Mythic Dungeons. Now it does not necessarily sound like keys upgrade in this system, but using a key to unlock a game mode that adds challenging modifiers to the dungeon… is basically the same thing as Mythic. This does nothing to disprove my hypothesis that Diablo IV is an MMORPG, but whatever people generally enjoy Mythic as a game mode.
It does concern me a bit because this absolutely sounds like a “bring your own group” type experience. I am hoping that the game offers some form of matchmaking other than just spamming chat and looking for a group.
Helltide Rifts
So this one I am completely uncertain about as to if it is an actual game mode or not. During the section talking about dungeons, Joseph Piepiora specifically calls out one of his favorite modifiers called Helltide Rifts. So that would lead me to believe that this is just a subsection of Nightmare Dungeons. However on Reddit folks are specifically listing this as a game mode, and further on in the video, there is footage making it seem like this is taking place in Open World areas as well. So I am utterly confused by this, but it sounds like Rifts shown above open up, and harder mobs that don’t necessarily exist normally in an area spawn forth. So other than that I legitimately have no clue what is going on here.
It does not strike me as anything close to the usage of the word “Rifts” from Diablo III, where they were instanced content that you ran through either on a timer or until you collected a specific number of orbs. The Open World footage reminded me a bit of the raid rifts from the game Rifts, so again I am clear as mud on what this even is… or if it is just a subsection of Nightmare dungeons. Maybe the footage I think looks like Open World is just dungeons that have a more open layout. Diablo Immortal definitely had dungeon areas that looked more like just an Open World map, so maybe Diablo IV does as well.
Bounty Boards / Bounty Tree
Apparently, there is a tree that is angry with us, and it wants us to do bounties for it to make it less mad at us. I mean that is what I got from the words that were said in the video. Mechanically what I understood it as… is that there is a tree somewhere in the world that serves as the new bounty board. In Diablo Immortal conveniently located in the town was a board… and you could accept mini-quests to kill some stuff, collect some monster giblets… or do something similarly menial. Doing bounties looks like it allows folks to purchase gear. I mean I am fine with bounties as a concept, and honestly, I enjoy doing them. They were probably part of Diablo Immortal that I enjoyed the most. However, generally speaking, these are less an objective in themselves and more something that you do while you are doing other objectives. I can’t really get excited very much about this feature.
PVP Areas
We knew there would be PVP in the game, but I have to tell you right now… this is very much not a game mode for me. I will never participate in it, because I don’t really do PVP in general. I do not care about flopping my virtual schlong on the table and measuring it against other players. I am not terribly competitive in nature, and the main reason why I enjoy WvW in Guild Wars 2, is that traditionally… there is a lot of killing of NPCs and capturing of objectives and very little actual fighting. From the sounds of what was described in the video… it seems like Diablo IV pvp is something akin to the Dark Zone from The Division. This has more collectively become known as “extraction mode” where you go into a dangerous area and are trying to get back out with a resource of some sort. In this case, it is some sort f shard that you need to purify inside the danger zone, and while doing that you are flagged on the map to all players in the vicinity so they can come to kill you and take your stuff.
Again… this is not a game mode I am ever going to engage in. They specifically call out spending these shards to buy cosmetics. I kinda hate when cosmetic appearances are locked behind specific systems that I have no interest in engaging with… but I lived with that in WoW with the cool PVP armor and mounts and I guess I can live with it in the Diablo MMORPG as well.
More of the Same
I’ve already told you my biases, but there is part of me that had held out hope that the endgame was going to blow me away. The leveling game in Path of Exile for example feels NOTHING like the variety and fun of the endgame. However, what it sounds like, at least based on this PR video… is the Diablo IV endgame is more of the same type of content that you have already experienced to that point. Since I was not really feeling the experience of playing Diablo the MMORPG, then I don’t think it is going to drastically change when I hit the level cap. I’m a bit disappointed and maybe this is going to be another situation like Diablo III and we have to wait until the expansion comes through before the game actually gets good.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Diablo IV is going to sell extremely well, and there are going to be a lot of players that play through the campaign and then uninstall the game never to be seen again. I do not think they have designed a compelling endgame experience that is going to target the ARPG audience in the way that Diablo III, Path of Exile, or Last Epoch have. I think there will likely be some World of Warcraft players that eat this game up, because legitimately as I have said before it is the Diablo MMORPG. I just don’t know if there are going to be enough players sticking around after the credits roll to make the endgame feel like it is thriving.
I know that I will likely spend at least some time poking around in the game when it releases in June, but this video has done absolutely nothing to sell me on a vision for the type of gameplay experience I actually want. I didn’t even talk about the paragon board system in part because we really don’t know a ton about it. However, the footage from the video shows really boring options like what we consider “travel nodes” in Path of Exile that just reward flat stats. I still do not feel like this game is targeting me or the other players that regularly participate in seasons, ladders, and leagues. That said… I am still uncertain who the players are that are going to be sticking around and feeding Blizzard long-tailed transactional money to keep this game making money in the long term. I am glad that is not my problem to solve.
The post More of the Same appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
