Good Morning Folks. Diablo IV Season 2 is on the very near horizon, and I feel like this is going to be a make-or-break moment for the game going forward. Diablo IV was easily one of the best-selling games Blizzard has ever created… but like a poorly sealed party balloon left out overnight, all of that hype has deflated. So much so that creators who have made their careers upon the Diablo brand… have started shifting focus to diversify into other games. The first season of the game was “not good” and now we have had two live streams talking about the future of the game and what we should be expecting for Season 2. Blizzard also dropped over 40 pages worth of patch notes shortly after the discussion.
I cannot deny that there are a lot of changes coming with this season. Several systems like Resistances and the concept known as Damage Pools are getting completely reworked. Additionally, there is a sweeping set of changes to the way that some legendaries and the paragon boards work in order to attempt to spur more build diversity. So I give the team a lot of credit for seemingly listening to some of the feedback from the players and then attempting to iterate on their design philosophy to address these. This also tells me that the player drop-off was likely even larger than I imagined because this is some significant “desperate to save the franchise” level of hustle. I do worry about what this meant as far as long hours for that team, but if they can nail this season and the changes I have hope for the brand.
One of the things to come out of these patch notes is an attempt to clearly tier the game into three phases… 1-50 campaign game, 50-70 sacred era, and 71-100 ancestral era. One of the big complaints that I had was that once you crossed into World Tier 3, anything that was dropping that was not Sacred quality was absolutely useless. This is being fixed by making any gear drops that are not of the maximum rank will instead drop as materials, which works similarly to how Diablo III Season 28 Altar worked. This seems like a really good change, and while you are in one of these tiers your level increases are going to keep raising the minimum item level so that you are in theory more likely to keep seeing better stuff. The idea is that you won’t move into World Tier 3, and immediately find the best loot you can possibly get for the next 20 levels, before moving into World Tier 4… and having the same impact once you equip your first full set of Ancestral gear.
I think the thing that concerns me the most about this plan, is that it spreads out the worst part of the game for me. I really hate the way gear works in Diablo IV. My “build” is less about making sure I have the right talent points chosen, or the right paragon boards assembled… and way more about making sure I have the correct legendary affixes attached to the right slots. Many of these cannot be pulled from the codex of power, which means that when an item drops… I cannot simply slot that item in and get an immediate boost of power without having to go back to town and scrounge around in my vault hoping I have a good enough aspect to pull from an item in order to make the new item actually useful. In Diablo 3 or even Path of Exile, the leveling process is extremely quick allowing you to stabilize the state of your gear quickly. After that you are just swapping out items on the very rare occasion that you manage to pick up an aspirational item that gives you a significant boost. While moving through the levels I fear that this is going to feel awful to keep shifting to marginally better gear.
The other problem I’ve had with both Season of the Malignant and now the Season of Blood… is that the “new content” that is being added to the game is borrowed power. Neither is expanding the scope of the game in a permanent way and instead giving you a neatly encapsulated seasonal chase that goes away as soon as the next flavor of the quarter mechanic rolls in. I hated the rut that World of Warcraft fell into by having a rotating series of mechanics that only mattered so long as that one expansion was live, and Diablo IV is heading down that same path. Sure you occasionally get a Path of Exile season like Crucible League where you have a borrowed power system in the form of skill trees associated with weapons, but I have faith that those mechanics will likely resurface again in the future in a more permanent form. For example, the Sanctum league introduced a whole rogue-like mode to the game, and while it was gone for the Crucible League it made its return during the current league as a permanent mechanic.
What the Diablo IV seasons are lacking is something that can realistically stick around and become a permanent fixture. Sure they are adding a few more boss fights in this league, and that is fine… but it doesn’t really do much to make me excited about grinding to 100 in order to complete them. Path of Exile has these pinnacle bosses as well, but it also has a lot of other ways that completely shift and change how you approach the game. Betrayal is an obtuse mechanic, but it gives you deterministic ways to modify your gear and obtain new abilities that you can’t get through other means. For example, I’ve been shuffling my entire board in an attempt to get Vorici into Research so that I can in theory get White colored sockets on one of my items, which eases socket pressure and allows me to shift my builds slightly.
This is just one example because there are countless mechanics that started out as the focus of a single League but eventually found their way into the game as evergreen content. I am a Delve-enjoyer, and I build characters for the purpose of being able to crawl through the darkness looking for interesting loot. Other folks might build entirely around the Breach league mechanic which opens portals allowing demons to bleed into our reality, which then in turn allows you to collect materials to fight specific bosses that award unique items. Over the last decade, there have been forty-one leagues, and each of them has left some permanent mark on the game as a whole. What I see instead with Diablo IV is a focus on creating disposable FOMO-inducing content… which gives me great concerns about the long-term success of the title.
None of this is to dilute the fact that the team has put in an awful lot of work on this second season. I hope it improves a lot of the problems with the game, and that subsequent seasons also continue to move that bar forward. It feels like we are sort of dealing with issues that should never have made it out of beta testing, but that is where we are unfortunately. There were just some poorly designed systems in this game that will need to be fixed in order to make the game better in the long-haul. I do have to say though… that the faith that Blizzard will put forth the work in order to improve the game is not really there for me. I worry that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction to the massive fall-off in players, and if Season 2 does not magically fix things… the game might just be abandoned entirely.
All of this said I am certain I will poke my head into the season when it launches in a week or so to see how the game feels in its updated state. I think a huge thing for the life of this game is going to be erecting a PTR and letting players test the content as it is being developed. While Blizzard ignored a lot of the feedback coming from the community during the beta tests of the game leading into launch, I think they have realized that they did so at their own peril.
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Hey Folks! This morning I was struggling to find something to write about and I thought I would Trials of the Ancestors league has been going for me so far. We are now forty-six days into the league, and it shows no real signs of slowing down. Generally speaking after the first month there is a massive drop off in players, and based on Steam Charts we’ve maintained at least 40k players for the average concurrency. As compared to this point in the Crucible League the numbers were down to around 16k, and in Sanctum around 21k. There are a lot of factors that are likely generating this. Firstly the base state of the game is amazing right now, and there are so many viable builds available. While Deadeye is currently dominating with 17% of players on the ladder… there is a pretty decent spread among other ascendancies with some reasonable build diversity within each of them.
The other thing that is happening right now, is a bit of an abandoning of the Diablo franchise by content creators and players. Diablo IV was initially well-received but really had some issues. I have talked about this at length on my own blog but the truth is the game was not designed for the Core ARPG player audience. What this has translated to is a massive influx of players trying out Path of Exile and Last Epoch for the first time, and oftentimes realizing that they enjoy it more. Final Fantasy XIV went through a similar glow-up when World of Warcraft was floundering, and we are essentially seeing the same sort of effect happening now in the ARPG market as folks move away from Diablo. The biggest shock for me however is when I saw Raxxanterax essentially announcing that he was going to be moving on to other games. He was the core pillar of the Diablo III Youtube community, and is the CEO of Maxroll.gg so to see him abandoning Diablo IV was rather telling.
Similar to during the great migration from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV a few years ago, I started seeing a number of videos gaining traction like the one above where someone who played a lot of Diablo tried out Path of Exile for the first time. Even more than that… I’ve seen a broadening of the community as more folks try their had at creating content for the game. As a Path of Exile enjoyer, it has been extremely cool to see essentially a broadening of the base. I think the next few years for the game are going to be exceptionally strong as we get the launch of Path of Exile 2 and see just what the release cadence of a two-game experience is going to look like. I think more than anything I am thankful that Path of Exile is going to keep running because no matter what happens with the second game I am always going to be able to return to the first.
As for me, I am still having a blast churning through content and trying out assorted builds. I recorded a new video this morning that shows off my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in its current state. Mostly I recorded it because I realized I did not have a video for Righteous Fire Jugg yet in this league. As far as my other builds I have played Lightning Arrow Raider, Guardian Summon Raging Spirits, Storm Brand Inquisitor, and Shield Crush Chieftain. I have this problem where I get excited about a build… pour some currency into getting it stabilized… and then start wanting to move on to the next build. All of my builds could be so much better than they currently are… if I were playing it and tuning it as my only build. I really like screwing around with new builds and figuring out what makes them tick, and ultimately this has been a huge part of my learning process with the game as a whole.
So of course I am now eyeing the “next” build. While I was leveling an SRS Guardian in the Toucan league over the weekend, there was a short stint where I was trying to weave Absolution into the build. I mean I was doing it completely wrong, but I had enough fun with the ability that I would like to try and build something around it. Seeing as I have now leveled two Minion Guardians and have no Witches yet in this league, I was leaning toward building on that class. I’ve been out looking at what folks are actively playing on POE.Ninja but have not really landed on a final build. I was an altoholic in MMORPGs and it seems like I am even more so in ARPGs given now many individual builds I wind up making in a given league.
I get that Path of Exile is not the game for everyone, but I have enjoyed watching folks warm to it. Closer to home I have been enjoying watching Kodra get the swing of things. What seemed to really cause him to begin to grok the game was the Magic the Gathering Analogy that we talked about on the show some weeks back. It has been a joy to watch him dive into various concepts of the game and assimilate them into his own game style preferences. Every league I seem to learn something new, and this league has been about getting into Blight and Legion more than anything else. There is just too much content in the game to sort of grasp all of it at once. I am where I am today because I have been doing this for five leagues and gathering bits of information along the way. Path of Exile is not a game that you master in a few hundred hours, but instead, one that you keep learning thousands of hours into the gameplay.
Anyways. I am still having a stupid amount of fun. I think maybe Trial of the Ancestors has been my favorite league thus far. They’ve all been on an upward trajectory since Kalandra. I do really wish that particular league mechanic would get its own glow-up and return to the core game. I thought building Lakes was deeply interesting, but the mechanical state of the game was rough. Anyways… I have no clue who actually makes it to the end of one of my Path of Exile posts but I figure it is a small group. Thanks for sticking around as I continue to obsess about this nonsense.
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This morning’s blog post is admittedly going to be a bit of a wild ride. It is a topic that I have been kicking around in my skull for a few weeks now. I hope to do it even half the justice it deserves. Lately, I have been on this binge of consuming the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I’ve been listening to these in Audiobook form while playing Path of Exile, and I love this so much. While I still read books, there is something about listening to the narration while my nervous energies are channeled into a video game that has largely been committed to muscle memory at this point. I feel fully engaged, and it has rapidly become my “happy place”. It also helps that so far this series has been amazing.
I was looking forward to this series because John Scalzi at this point was a known property. I backed into his works differently than most, and the very first novel that I read was Kaiju Preservation Society. I consumed this over the course of a few evenings of staying up well past midnight reading from bed. A few months later I did the same with Redshirts, and after having consumed both… I knew that at some point I would have to read the series he is most known for “Old Man’s War”. This made logical sense because at this point I had consumed two different books from the same author, so it was highly likely that I enjoyed their particular writing style. It was a safe bet because well-established authors tend to bring with them a similar vision to the material that they write.
This does not work for video games. Video Games are a combination of lots of different creatives pouring their energies into a single project. While we love to elevate a single figurehead at a given studio… each game is a snapshot of the state of that company at that very moment. While there are certain tropes that a given studio might have… I can say that Starfield feels like a very “Bethesda” game. I can say this because it is approaching problem-solving in the same way I have experienced in other Bethesda titles. I cannot however state that Starfield is a great experience, because Bethesda created it. It was created by a wide number of individuals who took inspiration from previous titles, but the game being fun and engaging was not a certain thing. I would be surprised if anyone that worked on Fallout New Vegas for example, worked on Starfield. The games were created by wildly different casts of individuals, but we as gamers… have this bad habit of trying to compare them as equivalent products.
So when I approached Diablo IV, I brought with me all of the emotional baggage of having played thousands of hours of games in the Diablo franchise. I also brought with me the emotional baggage of having grown up idolizing Blizzard as a studio. So when I played the game, and it felt bad… it was very hard for me to reign in my disappointment and keep myself from turning into a rabid poo-flinging monkey. I still think that Diablo IV is a bad game, and I think that because I am a core ARPG gamer… and quite frankly the game was never targeting me in the first place. I also think of Blizzard as this storied monolith of a company that encompasses so many fond memories… when in reality they have not produced a new game that I enjoyed since 2013. Sure I enjoyed the heck out of Legion, but that was an expansion to a game that came out in 2004.
Similarly when I approached Mass Effect Andromeda or even Anthem… I brought with me the memories of hundreds of hours spent with each and every Bioware game to that point (save for Jade Empire, I never got into that). I enjoyed Andromeda quite a bit, but it was a pale comparison to the greatness that was achieved over the course of the three games in the Mass Effect trilogy… and even then… they didn’t really stick the landing in that third game. With Anthem I brought my expectations of what a Bioware MMORPG looks like… because Star Wars The Old Republic was a phenomenal experience… and once again I was sadly disappointed. While there was some cross-over between these teams… each game represented a brand new version of what the studio was trying to produce, and as a result, was a completely different product offering.
As gamers, we have this bad habit of personifying Game Studios. We treat them as though the organizational structure itself is capable of pooping out phenomenal game experiences that are similar to those we have had in the past. Sometimes even studios believe this themselves… see the information that came out about the launch of Andromeda and how it was expected that the “Bioware Magic” would somehow pull together a brilliant product in the end. The games that we have loved were snapshots of a moment in time… that may or may not ever happen again. Personifying the Studio as having these indelible properties that can recreate that experience… is only setting us up for heartbreak, disappointment, and eventually failure.
Truth be told… we as gamers with our unrealistic expectations are not entirely to blame for this problem. Game Studios themselves and games media in general are also stoking this fire. How many times have you seen a project being marketed based on where the devs working on it came from before? Hell, the entirety of studios like Dreamhaven seems to be a large dish full of member berries trying to stoke nostalgia about the imagined “good ole days” of a specific studio. The thing is… You would be hard-pressed to find a single game studio out there that does not at least have one person who used to work for Blizzard or Bethesda or Bioware, etc. The game development community is extremely fluid and because of the lack of stability and the tendency to burn a team down after release… means that folks have to go whenever they can to keep a paycheck coming in. Since around 2005, there has never been a time where I have not had at least one close friend working for Blizzard… but the thing is… none of them have really stuck around for more than a few years at a time.
We would be so much better off if we could approach each game that gets released with a fresh set of eyes, and ignore the many-tentacled hype machine. This is part of the reason why folks seem to respond so glowingly to anything that is truly new to them. For example, we are seeing this sort of glow-up happening right now with Baldur’s Gate III, because for so many people Larian Studios was an unknown property. However, for me, I have been playing their games since at least Divinity II, and was definitely there for the fledgling roots of what we are seeing in BG3 with Divinity Original Sin. All of that said though, it is so pure to watch players embrace a game on its own terms… and for its own merit. It is equally heartbreaking when a game that is genuinely good but still a little rough around the edges due to launch constraints, gets memed into oblivion by Streamers and YouTubers.
The hype cycle sometimes inflates a game to proportions that it never could have lived up to. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of these situations, but quite frankly… so was Mass Effect Andromeda. Both were games that given time and attention could be turned into something beautiful. We are seeing this redemption arc with Cyberpunk, but given the financial backlash instead saw with Andromeda the entire Mass Effect series killed off for the better part of a decade. So while I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the gamers for trying to treat the game studios in the same way that I am treating books by a single author… aka John Scalzi. I also blame the studios themselves, the marketing departments, and the 24-hour gaming news cycle desperately seeking anything that even smells a little bit like news in order to fill content deadlines. I fail miserably myself at this all the time, but I also know I would be far happier, or at least less grumpy if I allowed myself to approach everything without expectations.
That is it… that is my soapbox and now I will stand down from it. Expect more blog posts about me talking about some nonsense that I am up to in Path of Exile tomorrow. I can only handle so much seriousness at once, and even with Path of Exile, I have had to deliver myself a dose of realism. I had a lot of hype built up going into the Path of Exile II announcement, only to walk away disappointed and afraid that this game I was pinning my hopes on… was not really going to be what I wanted to play. Instead, now I am trying to stop thinking about it and just enjoy what I enjoy. It feels deeply weird that I am not engaged in the Zeitgeist right now, and not feverishly playing either Baldur’s Gate III or Starfield… while having at the same time enjoyed both. I’m trying to plot my own course independent of FOMO, and right now… my brain craves the familiar rhythms of Path of Exile.
I have no clue what point I was really trying to make this morning, and I definitely doubt that it will make any difference. I hope you have a most excellent day… but now my cats want me to feed them.
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A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.
I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.
At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.
Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.
Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.
I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.
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