I wish Blizzard would watch this. You have nailed it. The look and feel and combat are great, but so many things are half baked and get very annoying over time.
@@EternalGaze8Given all the changes they are making based on player feedback it's kind of silly to say that. Even if they only care because their player count has tanked and they're making less money now, they clearly care.
A good example of "half-baked" to me is the frozen orb animation. I know it's a cut-paste from D3 but even then, I imagined they put an intern in charge of it and they got the basic idea of "swirly thing that ticks damage and then goes boom" but it's a crude superficial approximation. And that's kind of how I feel the entire game design philosophy went: replicating the success of a franchise by pasting together ideas that SEEM to have made it successful without actually understanding why. Personally if I want combat gameplay and flashy skills I'll go back to Lost Ark... better bossfights anyway...
Yet it sold better than any game first week and had 2.5 million concurrent daily players. So bad. 😂 Not to mention players have got hundreds of hours out of it. "bad" isn't the correct term
@@INFJ-ThaneTr No shit it sold well. A huge realease by a huge company. The real issue is, they are making games to maximize profit, not to create actual good games.
@christopher9744 Bad argument. Just because something sells a lot doesn't automatically make the product good. It's all subjective, pop music sells a lot, so does that make pop music automatically good?
I think the fundamental problem with D4 is motivation, theres no reason at all to create a character and go out and grind, the whole purpose of an RPG is progression, and D4 killed every sense of it with level scaling mobs and items. Why would I go explore the huge map if I right where I start I can repeat the same dungeon till level 100, literally, and it wouldnt be much worse than the best way to grind to max level either. Wheres the motive to level up and get stronger to move to the next area? A huge beautiful map and I almost dont need to step out of town to get to max level. With level scaling, all monsters lose personality, all regions lose reason to exist, all items become boring since the next one you find will be higher level and thus better... I know they did it so all content stays relevant no matter what, but in the end, who does overworld anyway? Its purely cosmetic, no reason at all to explore the map.
Regarding player highlight, it only works when you have one large character that is blocking you from view, like a large elite or boss. It needs to be tweaked that when too many enemies and too many damage numbers appears to also activate and needs to stay activated for a period of time (preferably variable) after all the obfuscation is gone to allow your eyes to be able to keep focus on your character.
That’s so strangely limited. I guarantee that play testers let them know that there were other scenarios where the highlight would be helpful. It just happens too often for it not to have been discovered months or even years before the game was even released
Much of what you communicate here is true however the major issue is that I have not had an upgraded sword (1250) for my rogue twisting blade build since level 70 and I'm currently at 97. Additionally, virtually all of the rest of my gear is not been upgraded either. The biggest issue in this game is there is no high-level gear, I am unable to tackle anything above a level 50 nightmare Signet dungeon. There is a major lack in player ability to feel powerful and accomplish high-level goals due to lack of gear and power nerfs.
Lesse... - Ability to resize the UI "scaling" so its not taking 1/5 of the bottom of my screen would be nice. Also ability to move it from Center, far left or far right. - Have a "Compendium" book that's basically a F1 HELP feature. Book will go into details on how resistances work, Lucky hit Chance explanations, show the distance of Close enemies vs far, etc. Basically its a handbook for players to understand the full detailed mechanics of the game. - Fix the stash... I cant believe that for a game that primarily is a equipment hoarding game, you have very limited Stash inventory. - Fix the rerolling affix. Everyone knows its bugged and not "Random" it makes equipment crafting a waste of time. - Give players for options for higher end content. Grinding dungeons over and over and over again is boring. Add Major City seiges during helltides where players have to defend the city against demons trying to overtake it! - World bosses loot drop is pretty trash. Make uniques have a very high chance of dropping. - Do something about the 10,563,264,251 gems that are in my bank. Completely useless at high end. Maybe use them as a currency of sorts?
This video is spot on. A lot of us Diablo veterans and those of us who put in unreasonable amounts of time overlook how easy it is for new players to be mislead by how information is presented in D4. Even though its a sequel, the devs need to approach it like it's the first game of its kind and oeep that mindset when implementing how information is relayed to the players.
The fundamental problem with this game is that it's not based on Diablo 2. It's based on Diablo 3. A game that should have never existed in the first place. It's got all of the problems with D3 and a few new ones of it's own. I'm out. The Diablo franchise was flushed down the shitter a long time ago and Blizz has no intention of rectifying that.
2:10 "Money" is at the heart of everything we do at Activison Blizzard, is more of an accurate statement. They so wanted to make this pay to win just like Immortal.
D4 has excellent graphics. Although they toned the graphics down in D4. Why you see a constant monotone grey in most areas of the open world. Which is there to keep particle collision to a minimal in a open world area. As to D4 that is mainly about it. In D4 your inventory and stash are limited. Unlike both Grim Dawn and Path of Exile. In Diablo 4 the stash is so limited you barely have enough space to save gear for a alt character. In Grim Dawn when a loot item drops you can compare that item while it is on the ground to what you are currently wearing. So you can see if you want it or not. D4 forces you to pick up multiple items. Then individually search through them just to see if you have a item that is good. While at the same time filling up your limited inv space. There are also loot filters for Grim Dawn. In both Grim Dawn and Path of Exile boss fights are extremely fun and can be difficult. In D4 even in Nightmare they are basically the same minus Lilith and Butcher. When you beat a boss in POE or Grim Dawn you "feel" that character progression. This is limited with D4. In Grim Dawn you can hot key up to 16 skills between the two hotkey bars. Of which every skill is viable for your characters build. The Devotions(Paragon) tree is multi-faceted. Each devotion offers a variety of build styles and even procs for your character. In POE you can spend a lot of time setting up that perfect character value you want. In D4 it is more linear with limited growth potential. But then again you have a game that allows only up to 6 hot keys. In both POE and Grim Dawn loot is useful. You also get alot of it. Itemization works for both of those titles. A item that has resistances actually has resistances that work and are noticed when equipped. The crafting system for both Grim Dawn and POE are off the chart compared to D4. So many components and things to craft to improve your character. What I mentioned above are just some of the differences between POE , Grim Dawn and D4. In comparision, Diablo 2 is a much more solid game overall than D4. It is almost like Blizzard made a crappy game expecting those of us to live off the nostalgia that was Diablo 2.
Love the idea of pervert as target dummy. Very creative solution. On the other hand, they could just do what other games have done, and provide a section in the UI where you can go through your skills, and see how their actual hit damage changes in real-time when swapping gear/points/etc. I would suggest though, that they don't actually want player choice. They want players to be able to choose between acceptable playstyles they've decided on ahead of time, and that is the definition of the illusion of choice.
The problem is: -Too many people working on a game -People who propably dont communicate with others about mechanics and other stuff just "do your job" -Rushing a game because shareholders So basically bad managment of a project it all started there, at the begining and because of that now we have this "clusterfuck" not a game also patch 1.1.0 showed us that lead devs have no idea about games like this. And recently they were looking for senior level designer or something like that? You people are just looking at the fruits and not the roots.
From a player prespective, you are absolutely correct. But since Blizzard is a company, they cannot throw all the good ideas at once and risk maximum profit. You'll see they give us droplets of QoL updates, and now they've announced they want to release annual expansions, no point of the game anymore until the next big update.
Another thing I never hear anyone mention, but has been driving me crazy is the the Legendary Aspect system and how it kills any joy I get from finding new loot. If you find stronger gear but it doesn't have the Aspect you need for your build you have the option of ignoring the gear in favor of maintaining your build, or you can extract the power and imprint it on your new gear. But this costs you gold and resources, and you can't re-extract an imprinted power. So you could very well imprint it, and then find a better piece of gear two dungeons later. So the other option is to ignore all gear upgrades for that piece for the rest of the game until you get a duplicate of the power with max roll. Once again this kills the joy of getting loot drops.
Yes this he did not bring it up but this is me all time aspects should upgrade in codex as we extract higher level ones it would help. I have 4 tabs of inventory I keep just in case and also make having a alt possible.
System is a lot better than what it is in other games of the genre; you get the legendary power you're after but the equipment rolled completely trash affixes. Remember, D3 didn't have the QoL it has now with the library of powers and such; it was just as bad. Worse even with most of the legendaries doing basically nothing special at all. I'm glad the Codex is there to keep a build at least functional, but I do think it should at least let you add to the Codex the minimum value of EVERY discovered Aspect beyond just the dungeon ones. Season 2 is going to have some form of target farming, so that will definitely help; even indirectly. I've been unable to find a single Shepard's aspect (I think that's the name) for Druid beyond the Codex one. It would be a HUGE boost in my power if I could, but I just get nothing but helm, body, legs, boots; things that can never roll with the aspect, lol.
i think you nailed it with your review and comments. Everything is TOO punishing. Respec, Testing, then shadow surprise nurfs that breaks your build or viable and having to start over. A lot of time and money wasted. They should have a option to transform into 3 pre set Paragon and Skill setting. You pay for those 3 boards/skill tree but takes few seconds like TP to change.
Great video. I agree about the damage numbers just blocking everything from visibility I love the damage threshold idea or being able to turn off certain damage numbers (Burning damage from firebolt enchant as an example). One thing I want is to be able to format the damage numbers that do come on screen. Instead of say 7,500,000 it comes up as 7.5M. Another thing I'd want is an option to take your character stats window (the one that has all your crit chance, crit damage etc) and have it as a pop out window that we can put on the side of the screen and be resizable. Mount's are completely useless when your character a lot of the time runs at 150% or higher. Also please give us a way to plan out our paragon in game I don't know like highlight certain nodes.
Man i been saying the same thing on the d4 fourms. The game systems are designed not to allow you to experiment with new builds and it kills the enjoyment and replayability. I felt locked in and pushed for trying my own builds. But the comments i get on the forum are like stop crying, how many times a day do you respec, bruh i have billions of gold why you crying. It destroyed all the fun and freedom. This is the best thing d3 did you had freedom you coule try out new builds you got excited when items dropped that weren't for your build in d3. Not in d4 i felt forced to follow meta builds and all the extra garbage of have to respec re paragon re roll re imprint just made me lose all interest in trying new builds.
Always enjoy watching your feedback / critique videos for a game. Not many people take the time to really think about the issues and express them well. Really hope the D4 devs take something like this into consideration more than the incoherent thoughts on reddit.
Blizzard might as well lie and say diablo 4 was the first game they ever created as an excuse because there's literally no valid reason behind what they did with the game. It's truly sad.
Hmmm, dont know if i agree with all your take here. Im playing every character offered in D4 and the only time my character makes a diference with attack power is when i of course raise "attack power". Certainly doesnt mean that the rest of what you brought up doesnt play a factor but as a casual player i would much rather have a "D4 for Dummies" approach to this game rather than trying to mathematically decipher what other factors does x, y, and z. None the less, very informative video but i highly doubt the Devs will bother to view or even listen at this point.
They say it's bad because it's bad, not because they are bad or because they don't understand how they are bad... the game is bad. The itemization is terrible because it's terrible, not because people don't understand it. Larian set out to make a good game for people to enjoy. Blizzard set out to make an app that could facilitate long term revenue stream from battlepass nonsense. Results are obvious.
Calling a bad game bad. Doesn’t bring any attention; Or drama, views, subs, or traffic to content creators. Nobody gives a fuck if someone calls Crime Boss: Rockay City a bad game. Or criticizes Madden & COD for being the same game every year. Nobody cares. And Not provocative. Calling D4 bad Sells$$$ (for now)
Few things I would love to see with regard to inventory management 1. Larger inventory in general, maybe double what we can hold now so after every dungeon you don’t need to go back to town right away, 2. Let me favorite an item so I don’t accidentally get rid of it and can easily identify the item as something I need to keep, 3. When I hit sort inventory I wish I had to option to have it sorted where all ancestral are one after another and then all sacred and then everything else. Or at least make the sacred and ancestral gear more identifiable in the inventory. Theres probably a few more but just a few qol changes that would be nice.
I'm not your subscriber, i haven't watched any of your videos nor i knew about your channel. I just randomly clicked on this video. I have to say i found a gem. Many youtubers complain about this game but no one has explained why it is bad, as clear as you.
Paragon loadouts for build changes would be the absolute best. I tend to hold of on a build change until I have all the alternate items ready to go, but the hassle of having to save and reset my paragons then path through again is not my idea of fun.
I wasted million upon millions of gold trying to find new fun builds to play, to only find that none of them were worth a fuck and then I was broke and couldn't return to the build I had before. Also spent all my mats on building multiple gear sets for these multiple builds so I could get a fair shake if they were good or not, to again be broke as fuck. Then I got bored grinding on a gimp and left to play BG3!
I'm not in the "D4 bad" camp, but I would say "D4 frustrating". There are just a thousand QoL features great and small that the game needs to be less annoying. I think most of this will be fixed with time, but it shouldn't have launched like this.
The biggest issue IMHO is that Blizzard don't know what their game is supposed to be, who it's supposed to be for and what they were actually trying to create. They want everyone to be happy and that just don't work. They want a game that works for people that barely play and people that live their whole life inside the game. Balancing for that is impossible. After the last video where the two level designers played we know that the level designers aren't gamers, they don't understand or care what makes a good dungeon. I agree with most of the things you said in the video but there are sooo many other things.
Well researched and presented state of Diablo IV. As a casual player the only real stat I understood is how much disk space I freed up by uninstalling the game
The stats can be very confusing, I recently found out that my frost sorceress wasn't benefiting from damage to slowed and I had it on several pieces of gear. I figured, chill slows enemies so that should allow me to benefit from damage to slowed. Nope, damage to slow only benefits from skills that apply the actual debuff named slow.
You have thought about D4's game mechanics 10 Times more than anyone on Activision Blizzard ' s devs team. Weird times we live in, When consumers know far more about the products than the pro who made it. Thé vidéo game industry is one example of many .
I do not believe them about their mission statement. I call them out directly for lying. They have no intention in giving players choice by balancing the game. Nothing is balanced about the classes. 100% uptime on vulnerabilities has to be met to be able to complete high level nightmare dungeons. For a sorcerer that means ice is the only viable build. I refuse to build , only what they allow. I tested my level 98 fire sorc in a tier 60 nightmare dungeon yesterday. I beat one, barely. I only have one ice skill in an enchantment slot, for the vulnerable. I want to see how balanced they claim to be. Without vulnerability constantly going off. Can’t do the dungeons they put in the game. At the highest level. Give meteor or fireball vulnerability at least. It’s stupid. Rouge can die and make enemy’s vulnerable.
BEST CONSTRUCTIVE VIDEO FOR DIABLO 4 I HAVE SEEN TO DATE. THANK YOU SIR FOR BEING SENSIBLE AND UTILIZING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS. YOU KNOW INSTEAD OF JUST CRYING AND WHINING ABOUT SOMETHING THEY DONT UNDERSTAND AND SIMPLY DONT TRY TO
2:14 yeah rpg are about something, but then you look at dmg calcs/scaling you see no othe does what d3/4 does, which to me is the CORE and fundamental mistake, that not only was done ONCE in D3 but they decide to continue it with d4. The moment i saw that was the way in the free beta i was adding more 1000% into my "i won't play this shit". Want to make a better game ? start with d2 and go from there, 50% better already.
Hate to be that guy but would love to see you do some POE content. So many of its content creators dont even attempt to be as thorough as you on a game thats 1000x less complex. Youd be a godsend to that community. GG once again dude.
Best D4 video of season one. Well said. Here’s hoping the devs can internalize and resolve some of these issues in less than the two years it took to make D3 enjoyable.
Once again Veritas is on point. What's the point of experimentation without testing? What's the point of testing without data? This is exactly what Diablo needs to survive.
...I do NOT understand why these sorts of games REFUSE to include target dummies. Such a simple and basic tool, yet the developers seem to be actively spiting the players by their conspicuous non-inclusion.
I never felt like playing to paragon levels because the game was so deeply underwhelming. I love that even content creators trying to deep-dive basically couldn’t because the stats were a mess to understand. GG blizzard, time to pack it up
D4 is a stellar example of MVP. Game design by committee and shareholders. I'm pretty jack of it and despite getting more or less my "moneys worth" out of it in time invested before uninstall, am still pissed off and feel like I was deliberately lied to. Hacktivision Bullshit has no excuse for releasing barely complete games. I paid to beta test their game. Woulda been cool with that if they were honest about it. I had to pay for a fucking battlepass for that to become completely clear. Fuck that noise. If anyone, at this point, still believes that their top priority was "making the game more fun for players" I have a bridge to sell you.
Who made you pay for a battlepass that only includes skins? If you want skins you gotta pay for them, simple as. You're not missing out on ANY content if you don't buy the battlepass. Also, I played the public beta and then waited a month after release to by the game. I don't feel like I'm play testing a beta. Rather, I'm playing a finished game that has so many systems that interact with each other, that balancing them all takes a long time and loads of player feedback. Something that I witnessed during D3s lifetime. It takes time and many patches to get a game to such a great state as D3 is now. I expect the same thing for D4.
I started my Hack and Slay carrer with Diablo 1 back in the days. Played it a lot and loved it. I played a lot of Diablo 2, hundred upon hundred of hours Diablo 3 and Diablo 2:R. But Diablo 4 managed to bore me to death after only a few hours of playing. I played in the Beta until I reached levlel 20 (and the last few levels I was already quite bored). The server slam I used to play another char and I reached lvl 12 IIRC. The combat system is great and combat itself felt good. I liked the art style of the game and the voice actors did a great job. But everything else I just disliked. Because of the scaling you never felt more powerful with level 15 than with level 1 (just compare this to D2, where you couldn't even run for a longer time at low levels...) The game was huge - but totally empty, it just felt bloated. The world itself felt just bloated and boring, I had 0 interest to explore anything - and why should I, there was not a single soft gate that kept me from just going forward. Try to go in Level 7 e.g. in Diabo 1. Or go to the River of Flame with an underleveld Char. In Diablo 4 the scaling made you feel exactly as strong on Level 1, as on Level 20, in the starting zone as well as in a zone way later. The story started interesting (the poisoning in the village), but fell of a cliff immediatly after and I can't remember most of it anylonger. Lilith I knew from the sin war book trilogy, and then the story was something about me and a youg girl (no idea how she was called) going after the girls mother and dispelling one seal aftter the other. All seals where put up but immensly powerful beings (Lilith, Horadrim, I remember them at least...) - and all it took was a young girl to take those down in 5 seconds. Yeah, very interesting. I played Diablo 1 30 years ago but I still remember Grisworld, Wirt, Adria, the Butcher... Luckily I got to play the Beta and the server slam and I realized I did not have to buy Diablo 4. And what I have heard from the new patches, the news season, Diablo 4 is not getting better but is getting worse and worse. IMO Diablo 4 will continue to exist of course, and there will always be some players. But I do not really see much of a chance for Diablo 4 to get anything of a playerbase like Diablo 2 had. Hell, even Diablo 3 will be played by more players I guess. Diablo 4 will possibly be totally obsolete when PoE 2 comes out next year.
The best part of Diablo 4 is searching for items, creating a new build and leveling to lvl 70 or 80. After this there is no meaning to continue playing that character and just go and test other class. The legendary items only exist to extract their powers and imprint them into a rare item. Otherwise they are just material. There is no need for you to be exited for finding a legendary item because there is a high possibility that item is trash. Is just bad design on the items, who thought that it would be ok to have aspects on the items and work around them ? Diablo 3 had the system "set items" that worked and they just moved the damage numbers so the builds would be viable in one way or another, and you just had to switch the item to test builds (this was way before we had loadouts in D3). They wanted a new way to build characters and somehow we ended with the worst possible version of items, this needs a complete overhaul of the current system that wants you to farm forever to find new items for your next build (unless that's what they want you, to farm 24/7) . Now the unique items like tempest roar are just a myth, like an exotic creature. The current uniques are the legendaries from D3. You can theory craft a build based on an unique, but just throw it to the trash is just pure luck to find it. Back in the day D3 had the ancestral primal items, everybody was exited for those items, but guess what? the drop rate for these items was atrocious. So the devs in that game decided that you can craft ancestral primal (maybe upgrade a previous item) if you have the enough materials. They balanced the mistake of the drop rates by promising "you can have the item if you have enough resources" and it worked. We only craft gems in D4 and they are so expensive so better save some gold when you re-spect your character. Also the devs don't understand the cost of rerolling items, imprinting items because they just don't play the game as we play it. We thrive for competitive, we want the best character possible, to go to Torment when we are lvl 50 because we like the challenge; the devs lean down their couch and play a couple of dungeons with some random items and call it for the day. So how can they fix something that they don't even know how broken is? They know that they will be on lvl 100... sure in 5 months... meanwhile we have people over discord server doing dungeons leveling to 100 to fight uber lilith. Now related to their nerfs in damage, in my opinion D4 shouldn't have ancestral items on release. The amount of crit, vulnerable and luck hit that you get from a lvl 800 ancestral vs a lvl 700 sacred is that big that it makes sense to invest your resources in the ancestral item. Now you are so powerful that you alone can oneshot the world server... ask the bone spear necromancer before the damage nerf. If you give to the people an ancestral item, they will find the ancestral item and your damage will be all over the place. If they just had the sacred items and in season 3 or 4 they release the ancestral items out damage would be more balanced and I bet there would be balance in other parts of the game that have a higher priority. Overall me as a player I don't feel that there is someone who is taking ownership of the game and makes the decisions regarding what is the route thay we want to follow, they have this group of people with other group of people that talk to each other and take decisions based on their believes not based on someone who actually decides what we want the game to be. Take Yoshi-P as an example for Final Fantasy, he know what they want for the game so he takes most of the decisions on it... who is this figure in Blizzard? those three guys that sit on the campfire streams? Diablo 4 has potential to be fixed, as they fixed D3 during four years of updates and seasons. So In 2028 Diablo 4 will be balanced... see you all there! Edit: good video tho, I followed you until the end. Maybe is me, but sometimes when you switch topics I didn't notice that we are in a different topic, maybe add like a text on screen when you switch topics with the title of the topic? just a suggesting not a big deal
Great video! Btw you can move the skill bar from the bottom middle to the bottom left corner 😄 it’s in the settings menu somewhere.. maybe graphics or accessibility?
Zup, this is the best video I’ve seen explaining absolutely everything on point. I made the mistake of focusing on “attack power”, I’m lvl 83 and still have a weak necro class. Don’t fully understand the stats and fallow what Maxroll suggested as a great build for the Necromancer. Thanks for the video, makes me feel I am not alone, as a casual player, been frustrated with the game, that I like a lot. I’m trying to understand, even take notes. Lol. Keep those videos coming bro. Shalom!
I'm glad you go through the issues then give some actual solutions rather than just bitching endlessly about things. I have stopped playing the game for a ton of reasons but lots of the reasons are in this video.
Great video! --Rant I'm just tired of games that don't think about things like this video points out. Seems like many games these days focus on the wrong things and always miss the mark. I don't have away to describe what I want, it's a "I know it when I see it" kind of thing for me right now. This video is the "I know it" part. This video has the ethos that I wish more game developers would have. I wish game developers would realise "don't focus on making a cash grab, focus on a good game as that will bring the money". Bad/Hot take: Wouldn't it be wild if game studios brought a bunch of "gamers" in early on development kind of like wireframe time of game to test mechanics. Games don't seem to be made by actual gamers.
Immediate response to the premise of this video: assuming the breakdown not the devs communicating with the public (stated that they're actually doing pretty well at it), but that the breakdown is the communication between the game UI and the public. That's automatically wrong. The UI is actually pretty decent. The UI's job is to be a user interface that is pretty and easy to read. Your first comment is about attack power being wrong. That's not a UI issue, that's a dev talking communicating to the public issue. Devs are failing to properly calculate what attack power is, and so are failing to show what attack power is. The UI accurately states what Devs want you to think attack power is. In that sense, the UI is 100% functional. Additionally, attack power is based on your non multiplicative stats. Anything that's additive is included. The % damage increase you get from skill point attributes, and crit dmg and crit strike are multiplicative and aren't a part of attack power. That much is pretty clear and is accurately displayed. I DO AGREE THAT A DIFFERENT ALGORITHM SHOULD BE MADE TO INCLUDE ALL ATTACK POWER RELATED STATS AND NOT EXCLUDE THOSE MULTIPLICATIVE STATS, but that's a big issue for them to try to fix. Not sure we'll ever see that... Either way, that's still a Dev issue, not a UI issue. The Devs decided that's how the UI would be designed, and the UI works as intended. "Communicating character state" us then directed mostly at devs not communicating changes in the game via patches. A specific example used was "changes to items only being applied to items picked up after the patch". I'd argue that is correct, devs should have blasted that on patch notes, but the you of a few minutes ago would have argued otherwise, because Devs communicated clearly in campfire bullshjt sessions that this was going to be the case. Talking about bugs you should be reporting or intentional interactions you should be using, that's across the board. Devs have had such a bad idea of how the game is being played that they find bugs that players (after data mining and testing think are legit) use are actually exploits, while at the same time shit that players think are bugs are actually how Devs intended the game to function. Fixing player highlighting: I think your point here is valid but would t really fix the issue. If player highlighting worked WELL instead of not working at all, you'd just see am ugly visual. Debuffs would still be hard to point out and getting 1 shot would still be a thing. Actually fixing this problem involves a ton of damage and HP Bala ces changes to make monsters a d players tankier and deal less damage. Dying to chain CC is usually either players not paying attention or getting 1 shot by those CC effects. Clearing 98% of a dungeon while easily tanking all damage but then getting 1 shot by a cold enchanted monster is a clear indication thag damage to ho ratios are imbalanced. Resistances is a part of the issue, but not the whole issue. Some mobs need less hp, others need more hp, some need less damage, others need more damage. The balance is currently very wrong. Horse and zoom problems: 100% agree on the zoom. Devs have already said they most likely won't change the zoom because it's "too hard wahh". I disagree about the horse problems though. The horse just gets stuck on anything, visible or not visible. Horse issues have (almost) nothing to do with the camera zoom. Being able to go faster or slower is a perk of keyboard and mouse that you don't get on controller. It's clunky for sure (mostly because of the zoom) but it's not why most of the horde interactions suck balls. That's all much more easy to fix horse mechanics that Blizzard just fails to accomplish. Even though I don't attribute horse problems (which are rampant) to zoom, I 100% agree thay zoom is a huge problem in the game. Scrolling zoom on the minimal will never work on console and so it's 100% not an option. Hit boxes and timing I think work much better in D4 than most other games. They certainly have room for improvement, like you said, so I don't disagree. I also completely agree that unlimited evades should just be a thing. The Teleport sorcerer enchantment can easily be changed to accommodate that. Player choice, I don't think the gold cost associated with rerolling is annoying. Having to individually delete paragon or stat trees is annoying. Your build not working was a result of Devs not play testing the changes they were rolling out. The entire section of you complaining about damage numbers and builds is 100% attributed to Devs failing to program the game correctly alongside Devs not being knowledgeable enough about the game mechanics to develop them for players. I don't think the spend system to change your build is bad at all, its just that the bukd you want to try out is broken because the Devs suck. Lots of talking points I didn't mention, because I didn't disagree with them at all. Your video was great, and even if you said something I personally disagreed with, I could be totally wrong. At the end of the day you're providing an opinion that you hope will be beneficial, and that is a 100% positive. Thanks for the good content, keep it up bro man. Sorry if I sounded too negative.
Most of your comment made no sense, and most of us are a little dumber for having read it. You are awarded no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Regarding visibility: I came to D4 from D3 with 1000s of hours playtime. I'm one of those players that loved D3 from the day it was released and only skipped two seasons since release. I knew from the start that any help to increase visibility would be sorely needed with all the effects, numbers, item labels and mobs on screen, which is why I turned the "always highlight" feature in the accessibility tab on before even making my first character. It still isn't good enough but it certainly helps. If you can stand the fact that your character always has a green shine to it, you should give it a go and see if it does anything for you. While you're at it, take a look at the other accessibility features that help with visibility, like reducing screen effects, camera shake etc. Regarding all your other issues, I fully agree. I don't even get why refunding skills should cost anything. That's what made changing builds in D3 so much fun. You just hit the reset all button, respec and go try it out. If it sucks you just TP back to town and respec again, until you find a build that works and is fun. The complexity of item affixes, stats and their effect on your build as well as lack of communication or rather bad communication in the case of attack power were already a thing in D3 but at least your damage number would change dynamically with all the buffs you had active. You couldn't really keep track of it because the value would sometimes change for only a few frames but it was a thing. Aiming for certain item affixes was a lot easier in D3 since there weren't that many different roll combinations you could get and the only "advanced" priorities were elemental and skill damage. Meaning the average player could simply aim for crit chance, crit damage, attack speed and flat damage+. If you wanted to really min max you also had to consider elemental damage and skill damage but even if you didn't, you could build an extremely powerful character that was fun to play at the highest difficulty. All in all D4 is a great successor to D3 with faaaaaaar more things to change and do. They learned from many of their mistakes in D3 but they massively increased the affix complexity, skill system and paragon system (I'm still overwhelmed by it. So many choices and if I get something wrong and only later realise I have to spend tons of gold to fix my mistake, WHY?!) but in many cases tried to stick to the simplicity of D3. Their level of communication to the player is nearly identical to D3 while D4 is about twice or even three times as complex. That simply doesn't work, at least not for players new to the franchise or even returning players that are more casual players. Which represent, as you said, the vast majority of the D4 player base. For players like me it wasn't too much of a challenge, because we are used to D3s shenanigans and we were the ones coming up with the new meta build for the season that then was copied by thousands but that isn't a good thing. I don't want to be in that situation and I don't want the game to be in that situation. Sure, there will always be a group of players that will figure out the absolute min/maxed perfect build that is another step above everything else but there should also be a way for the more casual players to just build a char that is powerful and fun to play with a few easy stats, like in D3. Like, in lower lvls, just go for main stat and flat damage and then in the late game also pay attention to crit chance and crit damage and you're good. It's not the right way to describe it but something like a lowest common denominator. A "do this and your char will be strong" basic bitch build that is strong enough to play on medium or hard and have fun but if you want to play torment and fight uber bosses you need to spend the time and figure out a proper build with the right affixes. Anyways, I'm starting to rant and ramble. In summary, I agree. D4 needs more work but they already have a decently fun foundation.
I agree with your points. Technically, all your suggestions are valid thoughts on how to make the game better. However, there is a difference between making Diablo IV technically polished and making it into a great game. The final ingredient here is a reason for a player to log on! When I log on to D4, I do it to kill off some moments of my spare time...but there is no carrot stick, no drive for me to progress. The story line of D4 is so boring, so tedious, so poorly delivered that I was in agony waiting for that drudgery to go away. With the best graphics of the four games to push it along, instead of being the drive to improve and build your character, the story is the worst part of any of the four Diablo installments (D3's story was subpar, but I never wanted to bleed from my own eyeballs while trudging through it). Then, at long last, the agony was over. Donut (read: Donnan) had died the death of a tourist (you know, after not bothering to bring any armor or weapons with him and poking at demon-clad pillars during his lunch break). The other utterly pointless, irritating npcs went off screen somewhere to my thorough delight, allowing me to forget their names instantly. I killed Lillith against my actual better judgement, not because I wanted to but because the game made do me so just so that I could finally play the Diablo 4. And I did for a time. I played around with some paragon grinding, some builds...yet, eventually, I asked myself a series of questions, three of which I present to you here: 1) Why did I need to spend all those hours being tormented through that mindless clicker fest of a "story", if it had no bearing on the game itself? 2) What the heck is the point of me here, in this D4 world? 3) Why should I give a rat's rump about those helltides, if they, unfailingly, just go away by themselves? And I had no answer to any. Then I logged off.
I've never understood why they can't look at a game like D2R and understand that formula. Diablo 2, at least since LOD, has always been easy to get a character through to NEAR end game. Realistically, you can get a character that's good for MF through to 80+ in a night if you work at it. At that point, except for the ubers later in the life cycle, you had a chance to play and try to gear multiple characters. D4 you're stuck grinding a LONG levelling and build process, and the gear you're getting really only applies to your current character. Let characters MF for other classes, ENCOURAGE trading, and don't make the levelling grind such a slog
I strongly agree with enabling people to easily swap between builds. It would be cool if you could save a build, similar to how you can save an outfit at the wardrobe. This will give you a lots more to do end game. I can easily see myself wanting 3 to 4 different builds, for which I need different skills, paragons and gear. I can imagine having a normal all round build, a boss killer, and a PvP build at least. Regarding damage numbers, I'd much rather see some number in the UI that shows total damage done in the last 5 seconds. Otherwise it would be too hard to compare builds with different attack speeds, or single target vs AoE.
pausing after 28 seconds to post this: Out of all YTers to chime into different discussion in topics they are knowledgeable about, you are always the most welcome to me. Long, detailed accounts and opinions not short clickbaity hitpieces. Thats a very good style to chime in with :D
They tried to turn Diablo into World of Warcraft, went only part way to cloning WoW, and pissed off both those who like WoW and old school Diablo. The fact that Diablo literally isnt in D4 is the best example to give as to why and how D4 just isnt Diablo anymore.
Its painful to see countless content creators pointing out all these obvious flaws while the developers show very obvious signs of professional incompetence. We should remind ourselves that creating games for a billion dollar company requires any member of a development team to bring in state of the art skills in their respective profession. There are actual professors or lecturers and even textbooks in the field of game development out there who would agree with 99% of the ongoing criticism about D4, so that tells us something very important, doesnt it? The employees at Blizzard do not have the required skills to meet our expectations because if they had them they would apply those without hesitation in order to "do a good job". Instead they are still in trial phase for so many basic game mechanics and systems more than 2 months after release and 6 years of development, 11 years after D3 and 30 years into the series. Anyone who plays D4 at an engame lvl immediately recognises alot of its problems which tells us the neckbreaking truth about Blizzard, they do not play their own game at the same level as their audience does and they do not apply decades of experience with the franchis. It must be like that because if they ever did there could not be so many prevalent shortcomings in their final product.
I'm going to echo what a lot of people have already said: D4 is a beta in its current form. What's more the devs obviously don't play their own game. I watch these videos because I still play D4 and love theory crafting. The game has a really good foundation and I need something SIMPLE to scratch my ARPG itch - but POE2 looks like everything D4 should be and more. This is the 2nd video today that's offered ways to improve the game; maybe we'll see it in Season 29.😁
At least now we know why many things in the game work (or don’t) the way they do, based on Blizzard’s latest video fiasco. I wonder how many more of their developers, level designers, coders, artists, programmers don’t actually play their f-ing game.
Wow... I think you nailed the technical arguments for why I'm not having fun. I'm a sorcerer at level 42, and I'm stuck at the Act III boss. I'm just not strong enough despite using the "best" gear I could find, grinding side content, finding some altars of Lilith, and using a levelling build I found online. I just never feel powerful. No gear I pick up seems to change that, and no stat points seem to have any effect, because the enemies get stronger with me as I level. I even had a hard time figuring out the other stuff - like levelling up your potions, which my friend had to show me. I just don't think anything in the game is explained to you, and that includes the core combat, status effects, and so on. I don't need a lecture, but I need to know where I'm going wrong. Because I don't quit a boss when I die once, but if after 10 deaths I'm no closer to winning, and I cannot tell why, then I am going to quit - and I did quit this game, twice (level 33 and level 42). It's not fun when you cannot tell what is going on. For context: I'm a Diablo III veteran and I took all 7 classes through the campaign and into the end game and did some light end-gaming up to Torment II. I cannot for the life of me figure out why I "suck" at Diablo IV. I have died more times in Diablo IV in the ~20-25 hours I put in, than in the ~200 hours I put into Diablo III. Almost nothing I read in any guide seems to help, and the game just feels like a slog. It just feels like too much work to be good at Diablo IV, which every reviewer ever keeps saying is "casual friendly". I want to punch everyone who says it's "too easy" or "casual friendly" because this is one of the most pointlessly convoluted and therefore hard games I have ever played. It's like it was made to please the hardcore audience first and foremost and the "casual player" (me) was an after-thought.
What I fundamentally don't like about this game is just how much crap is on screen when you're fighting multiple enemies. It's exhausting to be eye-spammed with lights/blood/numbers/words. Hullo... UI Design... it's actually a thing!
They need to upgrade their mission statement...and keep the mechanics simple, improve QOL, add a public in game board to group like poe and D2R, change the battlepass from intentionally screwing more $$ out of us when we paid alot for the game.
Great video. I love all your suggestions and really enjoyed the constructive manner you went about it rather than just jumping on the “drama farming” which there is way too much of these days. I am absolutely having a blast with Diablo 4 but would love it if all of your suggestions got implemented. Hopefully this vid gets shared everywhere as the right way to critique a very new game that I know will only get better in time because of content creators like yourself. Liked and subscribed.
21:00 "The devs say they want us to have fun and I genuinly believe them" - that's the reason why you are confused. If you look at it from perspective of them trying to milk as much playing time out of us and make most money, suddenly all the actions they took will make legitimate sense to you, If you think they are trying to make a good game however, you will be confused. I don't care what anyone says, I care what they do. So... Devs can keep saying they wanna make game fun, but until they keep doing everything for it to be anything but fun, I don't care what they say. Sadly, til this point, instead of trying to make a good game that people will play for that fact, for it beeing fun, they have used all "tricks" of how to achieve that instead. Also the dark pattern 1 click battle pass activation - do I need to say more? Inventory is big issue, let us introduce new season that makes it even worse without any solution to it. I don't believe that no one out of 9000 people, while developing game about loot hoarding did not notice inventory and stash space issues in 6 years of development - I am not that stupid and I don't believe they employ such a horrible devs, that's not what's happening here, it's intentional so you waste more time micromanaging inventory (BAM, makes sense now why it's such a issue for such a huge team to do anything about it in a MONTHs since player base has been crying for more space, and still nothing except stupid excuses, because they don't want to, it's the target design, it's a goal for there to be inventory issues...). Until blizzard stops trying to trick players into playing D4 and attemps to get them involved in the game via good QoL and fun gameplay, it won't be good ever and we as players need to show them that we won't eat up all their trick BS by simply not playing. Imagine this, everybody (and I mean everybody) stops playing and mentions ridiculous inventory and stash space as reason - do you have any idea how quickly it will suddenly be fixed? It's because on their TO DO list are things and those that are there "marked" as "for profit" have a priority and everything else is in backlog, that's it. Once player base shows them "YO, THIS is priority, otherwise play that garbage yourself" it will never get priority, because y'all pissed but keep playing so they can just promise "yeah, we know it's important, but it'll get fixed in a year or so, maybe, cause it's (cough) complicated (cough)"... F* blizzard, it's just activision puppet at this point, it's a sad fact we all can see
13:25 - The mount and camera issues... First GTA top-down camera was zooming out the faster you were moving. R* solved this issue in 1997. Camera in Project Zomboid moves towards the direction you are driving and the game allows you to zoom out manually. I cannot wait for the devs to explain how hard game development is and make a bunch of excuses. This is pure incompetence. Also whatever topic you touch on is pure gold. Every video you make is so well made I watch them even if I don't care at all about Diablo VI.
I liked the video, but i would argue that a even more core reason is how the game calculates damage, by putting it in to buckets, their last attempt at balance was nerfing vuln damage, where this nerfed the overall damage sure, it failed to do what they intended to do, they wanted to lower the focus on vuln damage, and that goal failed completely, it only gives players who knows how to game works less damage, and people that don't know how it works even less damage then that. Also how stash tabs are implemented, and don't get me started on resistances .... There is fundamental issues in the game before players even start playing, As someone who has loved diablo since diablo 1, i can't get myself to play diablo 4 and it kinda breaks my heart. Also i hate renown grind, if they wanted us to do it at least make it work like a exp bar you level as you just play and have fun doing whatever you want.
It’s ok to be disappointed, Veritas. They f’ed up. if we had the ability to pull back all the curtains, we’d find the exact reasons why the game is a broken mess. Blizzard is a shell of its former self and we don’t owe any corporations our loyalty. They put out a terrible product that is only enjoyable while you’re still unaware of the mess it really is and the real kicker is that the devs or people responsible for final dev decisions have too big of an ego to listen to the real issues and do anything about them (stash tabs, horse issues, gem stash, inventory management solutions, paragon respecing, broken resistances, always having fresh micro transactions ready, terrible mob diversity, etc.) in a timely fashion. I put 300 hours into Diablo 4 and I can’t justify dungeon crawling anymore due to feeling like I’m just another consumer for them to farm. Rise up gamers.
They also need to change the unique system my friend played a Druid up to level 80 and didn’t get that one specific unique peace of gear for the wolf storm build, Uniques and of course Uber unique are just pointless to think about it sucks it’s centered around rng and can’t really perfect some builds without them, it would be nice if they implemented new ways to earn, The Unique’s by saving up certain shards/points from completing certain weekly quests and bounties that include pvp bounties, like they do in destiny with Xur, they can have a special sells man that sells uniques with guaranteed new rotation each week with good stats for each class, also I believe pvp needs some rebalancing maybe level doesn’t matter and maybe their are just good players level 50 who can mop the floor with someone whose level 100, but me personally it shouldn’t happen in my opinion because they need to grind like others did to level 100, make it where they can only do damage within level range by 5 to 15 levels, or just find a way to create separate phases with level brackets, but if you 20-90 level’s above someone you won’t see them in pvp you’ll only see people whose in range of your level but I think it’s to many 1 shot pvp builds…although elden ring is a different game with slow dlc updates, at least they they tried to balance it by having brackets it’s just not shown in game…..
Right on the spot. As a UI Designer, I agree 100% with your criticism! I actually watched this on my TV, but made sure to come over and leave a comment, because you rarely find constructive criticism that is more than "hurr moar monster density" or " durr moar barb buffs". Apart from the UI and convoluted stats, there's another "obvious" point that affects the experience and motivation to play D4 -> Shop. Yeah, selling transmogs is actually damaging to the game. How you look like was previously the "reward" of being good at the game, now not only you can buy badass looks with money, but most of the cool stuff is locked behind an extra paywall. Currently, a level 1 character can look more badass than a level 100 that has spend hours grinding the game. This is by design, bad design that gives you blue balls and an easy, paid solution to feel accomplished. It also destroys the need to play the game, because you can buy the reward, aka the look, without the need to work for it.
I'm starting to see a pattern that I didn't realise until now (mostly because I don't play games that are a "service"). These games as a service, their main objective is to keep you playing, it doesn't matter if it's by the fun factor or just wasting your time slowly without any good reason; so I'm pretty sure they fulfill their games with so many "mechanics" or "attributes" to make you believe the game is huge and full o possibilities. In the end, it's just a full bag of useless information that, again, only makes you waste your time without any good/fun reason
By the way one thing that I disable in roughly every single game, if not all by this point, is the damage number and other pop-up text. In practice 98%+ of the time are telling you something you already know can see from your stats, game effects, UI, your/enemy life bar, and in practice just drown your screen with that constant useless "information". On top of making it harder rather than easier to play, it actually detracts from immersion as you feel more like scrolling through a Bloomberg terminal than looking at graphics of a video game.
D3 has the right stick dodge roll that is absent in D4, it also has a proper inventory sorting UI; both on console version but boggles the mind why they didn't build up off that with D4
With a little research players can learn most of the stuff noted. However you are correct that some of the systems are pretty difficult to fully understand. Dmg output seems easy when you understand multiplicative > additive.. as far as how the map faces you is just crap in this game. The horse... why give us a useless horse, I think it may be the only horse in history that cannot even carry a single item. Has anyone ever played Torchlight? man its funny that a tiny game like that figured out all these issues before their launch, but this game cant? frustrating. If any of you do not have an 80-85+ character let me explain end game content for you.. STORAGE MANAGMENT.
Low number of builds, boring loot, mob scaling issues, stash issues, lack of endgame... I give it up. Nothing can repair this game, since gameplay roots are so bad. Blizzard is dead (OW2, D4, WC:Reforged, D:Immortal, etc. : they f.cked up everything).
18:52 I enjoy these moments because they give our choices on affix combinations more weight Imagine if in hc mode they didn't allow us to use the shared resources
While communication may be an issue in the game, it is far from the most important one. The reason I say this, is mainly because even if the ingame communication issues were "solved", and information was perfectly presented to the player, the game would still be bad, mainly due to the content itself (dungeons mainly), as well as progression systems (skills, aspects and paragon board). Itemization itself needs work, and is intertwined with these issues with its poor affix design. These need to be fixed asap.
thanks for analyzing what is normally an unlooked at area of the game. Personally I just noped out of d4 after trying one of the open beta's, and thats saying something as I am a huge diablo fan since D1. My reasoning was simply the game is less than the sum of its parts. To me it felt like the various elements of D4 detracted from each other, the story / cinematic elements like waiting for a janky NPC to do his thing or a beautiful looking world that is sparsely populated served more to break my gameplay flow (one of the most important aspects of an ARPG) than to be an enjoyable story, the MMO elements like auto level scaling to your level crushes the enjoyment of your own power creep and progression, the ARPG elements take the first "M" off "MMO" so that MMO elements are more or less pointless and so on... The conclusion I came to was D4 is fundamentally flawed and it would take a very radical shift is design philosophy to correct, something I do not see modern Blizz doing
YOU DID IT !! You've put in words everything I am personnaly complaining about the game / gameplay / experience and shared by a LOT of us, giving to all we think a lot more visibility ! I'd just add some UI/UX improvement for gamepad users, for better readability and smoother experience in the several interfaces the game provides, which are often a pain to handle (like in the inventory, when both the gears in your bag and the corresponding equiped one are highlighted, sometimes leading to imprinting/upgrading/selling/destroying the wrong item, for instance...) I hope those issues will reach them and will eventualy be addressed and improved ! Thank you !
I am simply unable to fathom or understand what each attribute means or does. The time I have to spend on Diablo 4 is about 3-5 hours a week and most of the time I have no idea what to keep, what to sell/salvage. It is extremely overwhelming English is not my native tongue and having a video guide or set of video guides EXPLAINING IN DETAIL what each attributes does, what works with what, what influences what and how, has the potential of guiding my old stupid brain out of the Fog of Ignorance, what my Diablo 4 play sessions in essence are. tl;dr: explain this to me like I am four.
having to keep using default attacks and no "mana" potion really feels like im playing a game made by people who've never made an ARPG before
I wish Blizzard would watch this. You have nailed it. The look and feel and combat are great, but so many things are half baked and get very annoying over time.
Just play poe already.
@@Fabric_Hater would play it a long time ago if it weren't so graphically unappealing
@@EternalGaze8Given all the changes they are making based on player feedback it's kind of silly to say that. Even if they only care because their player count has tanked and they're making less money now, they clearly care.
A good example of "half-baked" to me is the frozen orb animation. I know it's a cut-paste from D3 but even then, I imagined they put an intern in charge of it and they got the basic idea of "swirly thing that ticks damage and then goes boom" but it's a crude superficial approximation.
And that's kind of how I feel the entire game design philosophy went: replicating the success of a franchise by pasting together ideas that SEEM to have made it successful without actually understanding why.
Personally if I want combat gameplay and flashy skills I'll go back to Lost Ark... better bossfights anyway...
@@wc1hater Frozen orb looks pretty cool to me.
I do agree that these are real reasons why D4 is bad, but theres also a million other reasons
Yeah, The itemization overall is so boring and filled with pseudo complexity none of this really matters.
Yet it sold better than any game first week and had 2.5 million concurrent daily players. So bad. 😂 Not to mention players have got hundreds of hours out of it. "bad" isn't the correct term
@@INFJ-ThaneTr Cope harder!
@@INFJ-ThaneTr No shit it sold well. A huge realease by a huge company.
The real issue is, they are making games to maximize profit, not to create actual good games.
@christopher9744 Bad argument. Just because something sells a lot doesn't automatically make the product good. It's all subjective, pop music sells a lot, so does that make pop music automatically good?
I think the fundamental problem with D4 is motivation, theres no reason at all to create a character and go out and grind, the whole purpose of an RPG is progression, and D4 killed every sense of it with level scaling mobs and items.
Why would I go explore the huge map if I right where I start I can repeat the same dungeon till level 100, literally, and it wouldnt be much worse than the best way to grind to max level either. Wheres the motive to level up and get stronger to move to the next area? A huge beautiful map and I almost dont need to step out of town to get to max level.
With level scaling, all monsters lose personality, all regions lose reason to exist, all items become boring since the next one you find will be higher level and thus better...
I know they did it so all content stays relevant no matter what, but in the end, who does overworld anyway? Its purely cosmetic, no reason at all to explore the map.
Using fyodor as a target dummy is absolutely brilliant. I hope someone with some authority on the D4 team catches wind of this.
Make Joe, Joe, & Adam the test dummies.
Adam is too woke. Lost cause.
Regarding player highlight, it only works when you have one large character that is blocking you from view, like a large elite or boss. It needs to be tweaked that when too many enemies and too many damage numbers appears to also activate and needs to stay activated for a period of time (preferably variable) after all the obfuscation is gone to allow your eyes to be able to keep focus on your character.
That’s so strangely limited. I guarantee that play testers let them know that there were other scenarios where the highlight would be helpful. It just happens too often for it not to have been discovered months or even years before the game was even released
Much of what you communicate here is true however the major issue is that I have not had an upgraded sword (1250) for my rogue twisting blade build since level 70 and I'm currently at 97.
Additionally, virtually all of the rest of my gear is not been upgraded either.
The biggest issue in this game is there is no high-level gear, I am unable to tackle anything above a level 50 nightmare Signet dungeon.
There is a major lack in player ability to feel powerful and accomplish high-level goals due to lack of gear and power nerfs.
Lesse...
- Ability to resize the UI "scaling" so its not taking 1/5 of the bottom of my screen would be nice. Also ability to move it from Center, far left or far right.
- Have a "Compendium" book that's basically a F1 HELP feature. Book will go into details on how resistances work, Lucky hit Chance explanations, show the distance of Close enemies vs far, etc. Basically its a handbook for players to understand the full detailed mechanics of the game.
- Fix the stash... I cant believe that for a game that primarily is a equipment hoarding game, you have very limited Stash inventory.
- Fix the rerolling affix. Everyone knows its bugged and not "Random" it makes equipment crafting a waste of time.
- Give players for options for higher end content. Grinding dungeons over and over and over again is boring. Add Major City seiges during helltides where players have to defend the city against demons trying to overtake it!
- World bosses loot drop is pretty trash. Make uniques have a very high chance of dropping.
- Do something about the 10,563,264,251 gems that are in my bank. Completely useless at high end. Maybe use them as a currency of sorts?
This video is spot on. A lot of us Diablo veterans and those of us who put in unreasonable amounts of time overlook how easy it is for new players to be mislead by how information is presented in D4. Even though its a sequel, the devs need to approach it like it's the first game of its kind and oeep that mindset when implementing how information is relayed to the players.
The fundamental problem with this game is that it's not based on Diablo 2. It's based on Diablo 3. A game that should have never existed in the first place. It's got all of the problems with D3 and a few new ones of it's own.
I'm out. The Diablo franchise was flushed down the shitter a long time ago and Blizz has no intention of rectifying that.
You said the video is spot on which is true, but your comment is also spot on 👍
2:10 "Money" is at the heart of everything we do at Activison Blizzard, is more of an accurate statement. They so wanted to make this pay to win just like Immortal.
Next-level content, per usual. It just oozes detail and clarity.
@@stu.chainz VeritaS is MonkaS
He's not gonna sex you bro...
D4 has excellent graphics. Although they toned the graphics down in D4. Why you see a constant monotone grey in most areas of the open world. Which is there to keep particle collision to a minimal in a open world area.
As to D4 that is mainly about it.
In D4 your inventory and stash are limited. Unlike both Grim Dawn and Path of Exile. In Diablo 4 the stash is so limited you barely have enough space to save gear for a alt character.
In Grim Dawn when a loot item drops you can compare that item while it is on the ground to what you are currently wearing. So you can see if you want it or not. D4 forces you to pick up multiple items. Then individually search through them just to see if you have a item that is good. While at the same time filling up your limited inv space. There are also loot filters for Grim Dawn.
In both Grim Dawn and Path of Exile boss fights are extremely fun and can be difficult. In D4 even in Nightmare they are basically the same minus Lilith and Butcher. When you beat a boss in POE or Grim Dawn you "feel" that character progression. This is limited with D4.
In Grim Dawn you can hot key up to 16 skills between the two hotkey bars. Of which every skill is viable for your characters build. The Devotions(Paragon) tree is multi-faceted. Each devotion offers a variety of build styles and even procs for your character. In POE you can spend a lot of time setting up that perfect character value you want. In D4 it is more linear with limited growth potential. But then again you have a game that allows only up to 6 hot keys.
In both POE and Grim Dawn loot is useful. You also get alot of it. Itemization works for both of those titles. A item that has resistances actually has resistances that work and are noticed when equipped. The crafting system for both Grim Dawn and POE are off the chart compared to D4. So many components and things to craft to improve your character.
What I mentioned above are just some of the differences between POE , Grim Dawn and D4. In comparision, Diablo 2 is a much more solid game overall than D4. It is almost like Blizzard made a crappy game expecting those of us to live off the nostalgia that was Diablo 2.
10+ years in ARPG genre and everything is big step backward ,excluding visuals.
How hard is it for the devs to just be blunt and display actual numbers? Stop with the charade!
Love the idea of pervert as target dummy. Very creative solution. On the other hand, they could just do what other games have done, and provide a section in the UI where you can go through your skills, and see how their actual hit damage changes in real-time when swapping gear/points/etc. I would suggest though, that they don't actually want player choice. They want players to be able to choose between acceptable playstyles they've decided on ahead of time, and that is the definition of the illusion of choice.
The problem is:
-Too many people working on a game
-People who propably dont communicate with others about mechanics and other stuff just "do your job"
-Rushing a game because shareholders
So basically bad managment of a project it all started there, at the begining and because of that now we have this "clusterfuck" not a game also patch 1.1.0 showed us that lead devs have no idea about games like this.
And recently they were looking for senior level designer or something like that? You people are just looking at the fruits and not the roots.
There's a point at which you feel like the devs never played their own game.
From a player prespective, you are absolutely correct. But since Blizzard is a company, they cannot throw all the good ideas at once and risk maximum profit. You'll see they give us droplets of QoL updates, and now they've announced they want to release annual expansions, no point of the game anymore until the next big update.
Another thing I never hear anyone mention, but has been driving me crazy is the the Legendary Aspect system and how it kills any joy I get from finding new loot. If you find stronger gear but it doesn't have the Aspect you need for your build you have the option of ignoring the gear in favor of maintaining your build, or you can extract the power and imprint it on your new gear. But this costs you gold and resources, and you can't re-extract an imprinted power. So you could very well imprint it, and then find a better piece of gear two dungeons later. So the other option is to ignore all gear upgrades for that piece for the rest of the game until you get a duplicate of the power with max roll.
Once again this kills the joy of getting loot drops.
yes,
Yes this he did not bring it up but this is me all time aspects should upgrade in codex as we extract higher level ones it would help. I have 4 tabs of inventory I keep just in case and also make having a alt possible.
System is a lot better than what it is in other games of the genre; you get the legendary power you're after but the equipment rolled completely trash affixes.
Remember, D3 didn't have the QoL it has now with the library of powers and such; it was just as bad. Worse even with most of the legendaries doing basically nothing special at all.
I'm glad the Codex is there to keep a build at least functional, but I do think it should at least let you add to the Codex the minimum value of EVERY discovered Aspect beyond just the dungeon ones.
Season 2 is going to have some form of target farming, so that will definitely help; even indirectly. I've been unable to find a single Shepard's aspect (I think that's the name) for Druid beyond the Codex one. It would be a HUGE boost in my power if I could, but I just get nothing but helm, body, legs, boots; things that can never roll with the aspect, lol.
i think you nailed it with your review and comments. Everything is TOO punishing. Respec, Testing, then shadow surprise nurfs that breaks your build or viable and having to start over. A lot of time and money wasted. They should have a option to transform into 3 pre set Paragon and Skill setting. You pay for those 3 boards/skill tree but takes few seconds like TP to change.
Isn't POE2 doing that with weapon sets?
Great video. I agree about the damage numbers just blocking everything from visibility I love the damage threshold idea or being able to turn off certain damage numbers (Burning damage from firebolt enchant as an example). One thing I want is to be able to format the damage numbers that do come on screen. Instead of say 7,500,000 it comes up as 7.5M. Another thing I'd want is an option to take your character stats window (the one that has all your crit chance, crit damage etc) and have it as a pop out window that we can put on the side of the screen and be resizable. Mount's are completely useless when your character a lot of the time runs at 150% or higher. Also please give us a way to plan out our paragon in game I don't know like highlight certain nodes.
Borderlands does damage numbers right. It’s not 17000 it’s 17K. It’s not 13 000 000 it’s 13M.
@@ermagherd1204
D3 dose this also, its odd that it did not carry over.
Man i been saying the same thing on the d4 fourms. The game systems are designed not to allow you to experiment with new builds and it kills the enjoyment and replayability. I felt locked in and pushed for trying my own builds. But the comments i get on the forum are like stop crying, how many times a day do you respec, bruh i have billions of gold why you crying.
It destroyed all the fun and freedom.
This is the best thing d3 did you had freedom you coule try out new builds you got excited when items dropped that weren't for your build in d3.
Not in d4 i felt forced to follow meta builds and all the extra garbage of have to respec re paragon re roll re imprint just made me lose all interest in trying new builds.
Always enjoy watching your feedback / critique videos for a game. Not many people take the time to really think about the issues and express them well. Really hope the D4 devs take something like this into consideration more than the incoherent thoughts on reddit.
Blizzard might as well lie and say diablo 4 was the first game they ever created as an excuse because there's literally no valid reason behind what they did with the game. It's truly sad.
Hmmm, dont know if i agree with all your take here. Im playing every character offered in D4 and the only time my character makes a diference with attack power is when i of course raise "attack power". Certainly doesnt mean that the rest of what you brought up doesnt play a factor but as a casual player i would much rather have a "D4 for Dummies" approach to this game rather than trying to mathematically decipher what other factors does x, y, and z. None the less, very informative video but i highly doubt the Devs will bother to view or even listen at this point.
How about a battle log we can parse or use to see what kind of damage we receive or how our damage was computed?
They say it's bad because it's bad, not because they are bad or because they don't understand how they are bad... the game is bad. The itemization is terrible because it's terrible, not because people don't understand it. Larian set out to make a good game for people to enjoy. Blizzard set out to make an app that could facilitate long term revenue stream from battlepass nonsense. Results are obvious.
Calling a bad game bad. Doesn’t bring any attention; Or drama, views, subs, or traffic to content creators. Nobody gives a fuck if someone calls Crime Boss: Rockay City a bad game. Or criticizes Madden & COD for being the same game every year. Nobody cares. And Not provocative. Calling D4 bad Sells$$$ (for now)
Love seeing the passion about Diablo you have. So good seeing you express yourself and enjoying it.
he's not gonna sex you bro...
Few things I would love to see with regard to inventory management 1. Larger inventory in general, maybe double what we can hold now so after every dungeon you don’t need to go back to town right away, 2. Let me favorite an item so I don’t accidentally get rid of it and can easily identify the item as something I need to keep, 3. When I hit sort inventory I wish I had to option to have it sorted where all ancestral are one after another and then all sacred and then everything else. Or at least make the sacred and ancestral gear more identifiable in the inventory. Theres probably a few more but just a few qol changes that would be nice.
It’s wild that a lot of problems are macro design choices. The game is bad because they design it that way.
I'm not your subscriber, i haven't watched any of your videos nor i knew about your channel. I just randomly clicked on this video. I have to say i found a gem. Many youtubers complain about this game but no one has explained why it is bad, as clear as you.
Paragon loadouts for build changes would be the absolute best.
I tend to hold of on a build change until I have all the alternate items ready to go, but the hassle of having to save and reset my paragons then path through again is not my idea of fun.
I wasted million upon millions of gold trying to find new fun builds to play, to only find that none of them were worth a fuck and then I was broke and couldn't return to the build I had before. Also spent all my mats on building multiple gear sets for these multiple builds so I could get a fair shake if they were good or not, to again be broke as fuck. Then I got bored grinding on a gimp and left to play BG3!
I'm not in the "D4 bad" camp, but I would say "D4 frustrating". There are just a thousand QoL features great and small that the game needs to be less annoying. I think most of this will be fixed with time, but it shouldn't have launched like this.
frustrating and annoying, mostly noticeable in the endgame
The biggest issue IMHO is that Blizzard don't know what their game is supposed to be, who it's supposed to be for and what they were actually trying to create.
They want everyone to be happy and that just don't work. They want a game that works for people that barely play and people that live their whole life inside the game. Balancing for that is impossible. After the last video where the two level designers played we know that the level designers aren't gamers, they don't understand or care what makes a good dungeon.
I agree with most of the things you said in the video but there are sooo many other things.
Well researched and presented state of Diablo IV. As a casual player the only real stat I understood is how much disk space I freed up by uninstalling the game
The stats can be very confusing, I recently found out that my frost sorceress wasn't benefiting from damage to slowed and I had it on several pieces of gear. I figured, chill slows enemies so that should allow me to benefit from damage to slowed. Nope, damage to slow only benefits from skills that apply the actual debuff named slow.
You have thought about D4's game mechanics 10 Times more than anyone on Activision Blizzard ' s devs team.
Weird times we live in,
When consumers know far more about the products than the pro who made it.
Thé vidéo game industry is one example of many .
I do not believe them about their mission statement. I call them out directly for lying. They have no intention in giving players choice by balancing the game. Nothing is balanced about the classes. 100% uptime on vulnerabilities has to be met to be able to complete high level nightmare dungeons. For a sorcerer that means ice is the only viable build. I refuse to build , only what they allow. I tested my level 98 fire sorc in a tier 60 nightmare dungeon yesterday. I beat one, barely. I only have one ice skill in an enchantment slot, for the vulnerable. I want to see how balanced they claim to be. Without vulnerability constantly going off. Can’t do the dungeons they put in the game. At the highest level. Give meteor or fireball vulnerability at least. It’s stupid. Rouge can die and make enemy’s vulnerable.
BEST CONSTRUCTIVE VIDEO FOR DIABLO 4 I HAVE SEEN TO DATE. THANK YOU SIR FOR BEING SENSIBLE AND UTILIZING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS. YOU KNOW INSTEAD OF JUST CRYING AND WHINING ABOUT SOMETHING THEY DONT UNDERSTAND AND SIMPLY DONT TRY TO
I regret spending 90 bucks on this. Ive only got myslef to blame honeslty
2:14 yeah rpg are about something, but then you look at dmg calcs/scaling you see no othe does what d3/4 does, which to me is the CORE and fundamental mistake, that not only was done ONCE in D3 but they decide to continue it with d4. The moment i saw that was the way in the free beta i was adding more 1000% into my "i won't play this shit".
Want to make a better game ? start with d2 and go from there, 50% better already.
Hate to be that guy but would love to see you do some POE content. So many of its content creators dont even attempt to be as thorough as you on a game thats 1000x less complex. Youd be a godsend to that community. GG once again dude.
Best D4 video of season one. Well said. Here’s hoping the devs can internalize and resolve some of these issues in less than the two years it took to make D3 enjoyable.
Once again Veritas is on point. What's the point of experimentation without testing? What's the point of testing without data? This is exactly what Diablo needs to survive.
...I do NOT understand why these sorts of games REFUSE to include target dummies. Such a simple and basic tool, yet the developers seem to be actively spiting the players by their conspicuous non-inclusion.
Problem with d4 is its a class based game, not a build based game. Will always fall short.
I never felt like playing to paragon levels because the game was so deeply underwhelming. I love that even content creators trying to deep-dive basically couldn’t because the stats were a mess to understand.
GG blizzard, time to pack it up
The lack of a Debuff bar is annoying, no indication of being CC is annoying to play around.
"You can literally see the confusion on my face"
*exact same face as normal*
I'll take your word for it, I'd be confused too in that situation.
D4 is a stellar example of MVP. Game design by committee and shareholders. I'm pretty jack of it and despite getting more or less my "moneys worth" out of it in time invested before uninstall, am still pissed off and feel like I was deliberately lied to. Hacktivision Bullshit has no excuse for releasing barely complete games. I paid to beta test their game. Woulda been cool with that if they were honest about it. I had to pay for a fucking battlepass for that to become completely clear. Fuck that noise. If anyone, at this point, still believes that their top priority was "making the game more fun for players" I have a bridge to sell you.
Who made you pay for a battlepass that only includes skins? If you want skins you gotta pay for them, simple as. You're not missing out on ANY content if you don't buy the battlepass.
Also, I played the public beta and then waited a month after release to by the game. I don't feel like I'm play testing a beta. Rather, I'm playing a finished game that has so many systems that interact with each other, that balancing them all takes a long time and loads of player feedback. Something that I witnessed during D3s lifetime. It takes time and many patches to get a game to such a great state as D3 is now. I expect the same thing for D4.
Way to bend over for Blizz. Hope you're proud of yourself.@@ZeroKey92
I started my Hack and Slay carrer with Diablo 1 back in the days. Played it a lot and loved it.
I played a lot of Diablo 2, hundred upon hundred of hours Diablo 3 and Diablo 2:R.
But Diablo 4 managed to bore me to death after only a few hours of playing.
I played in the Beta until I reached levlel 20 (and the last few levels I was already quite bored).
The server slam I used to play another char and I reached lvl 12 IIRC.
The combat system is great and combat itself felt good.
I liked the art style of the game and the voice actors did a great job.
But everything else I just disliked. Because of the scaling you never felt more powerful with level 15 than with level 1 (just compare this to D2, where you couldn't even run for a longer time at low levels...)
The game was huge - but totally empty, it just felt bloated.
The world itself felt just bloated and boring, I had 0 interest to explore anything - and why should I, there was not a single soft gate that kept me from just going forward.
Try to go in Level 7 e.g. in Diabo 1. Or go to the River of Flame with an underleveld Char.
In Diablo 4 the scaling made you feel exactly as strong on Level 1, as on Level 20, in the starting zone as well as in a zone way later.
The story started interesting (the poisoning in the village), but fell of a cliff immediatly after and I can't remember most of it anylonger. Lilith I knew from the sin war book trilogy, and then the story was something about me and a youg girl (no idea how she was called) going after the girls mother and dispelling one seal aftter the other.
All seals where put up but immensly powerful beings (Lilith, Horadrim, I remember them at least...) - and all it took was a young girl to take those down in 5 seconds.
Yeah, very interesting.
I played Diablo 1 30 years ago but I still remember Grisworld, Wirt, Adria, the Butcher...
Luckily I got to play the Beta and the server slam and I realized I did not have to buy Diablo 4.
And what I have heard from the new patches, the news season, Diablo 4 is not getting better but is getting worse and worse.
IMO Diablo 4 will continue to exist of course, and there will always be some players.
But I do not really see much of a chance for Diablo 4 to get anything of a playerbase like Diablo 2 had. Hell, even Diablo 3 will be played by more players I guess.
Diablo 4 will possibly be totally obsolete when PoE 2 comes out next year.
The best part of Diablo 4 is searching for items, creating a new build and leveling to lvl 70 or 80. After this there is no meaning to continue playing that character and just go and test other class.
The legendary items only exist to extract their powers and imprint them into a rare item. Otherwise they are just material. There is no need for you to be exited for finding a legendary item because there is a high possibility that item is trash. Is just bad design on the items, who thought that it would be ok to have aspects on the items and work around them ? Diablo 3 had the system "set items" that worked and they just moved the damage numbers so the builds would be viable in one way or another, and you just had to switch the item to test builds (this was way before we had loadouts in D3). They wanted a new way to build characters and somehow we ended with the worst possible version of items, this needs a complete overhaul of the current system that wants you to farm forever to find new items for your next build (unless that's what they want you, to farm 24/7) .
Now the unique items like tempest roar are just a myth, like an exotic creature. The current uniques are the legendaries from D3. You can theory craft a build based on an unique, but just throw it to the trash is just pure luck to find it.
Back in the day D3 had the ancestral primal items, everybody was exited for those items, but guess what? the drop rate for these items was atrocious. So the devs in that game decided that you can craft ancestral primal (maybe upgrade a previous item) if you have the enough materials. They balanced the mistake of the drop rates by promising "you can have the item if you have enough resources" and it worked. We only craft gems in D4 and they are so expensive so better save some gold when you re-spect your character.
Also the devs don't understand the cost of rerolling items, imprinting items because they just don't play the game as we play it. We thrive for competitive, we want the best character possible, to go to Torment when we are lvl 50 because we like the challenge; the devs lean down their couch and play a couple of dungeons with some random items and call it for the day. So how can they fix something that they don't even know how broken is? They know that they will be on lvl 100... sure in 5 months... meanwhile we have people over discord server doing dungeons leveling to 100 to fight uber lilith.
Now related to their nerfs in damage, in my opinion D4 shouldn't have ancestral items on release. The amount of crit, vulnerable and luck hit that you get from a lvl 800 ancestral vs a lvl 700 sacred is that big that it makes sense to invest your resources in the ancestral item. Now you are so powerful that you alone can oneshot the world server... ask the bone spear necromancer before the damage nerf. If you give to the people an ancestral item, they will find the ancestral item and your damage will be all over the place. If they just had the sacred items and in season 3 or 4 they release the ancestral items out damage would be more balanced and I bet there would be balance in other parts of the game that have a higher priority.
Overall me as a player I don't feel that there is someone who is taking ownership of the game and makes the decisions regarding what is the route thay we want to follow, they have this group of people with other group of people that talk to each other and take decisions based on their believes not based on someone who actually decides what we want the game to be. Take Yoshi-P as an example for Final Fantasy, he know what they want for the game so he takes most of the decisions on it... who is this figure in Blizzard? those three guys that sit on the campfire streams?
Diablo 4 has potential to be fixed, as they fixed D3 during four years of updates and seasons. So In 2028 Diablo 4 will be balanced... see you all there!
Edit: good video tho, I followed you until the end. Maybe is me, but sometimes when you switch topics I didn't notice that we are in a different topic, maybe add like a text on screen when you switch topics with the title of the topic? just a suggesting not a big deal
Great video! Btw you can move the skill bar from the bottom middle to the bottom left corner 😄 it’s in the settings menu somewhere.. maybe graphics or accessibility?
Zup, this is the best video I’ve seen explaining absolutely everything on point. I made the mistake of focusing on “attack power”, I’m lvl 83 and still have a weak necro class. Don’t fully understand the stats and fallow what Maxroll suggested as a great build for the Necromancer. Thanks for the video, makes me feel I am not alone, as a casual player, been frustrated with the game, that I like a lot. I’m trying to understand, even take notes. Lol. Keep those videos coming bro. Shalom!
I'm glad you go through the issues then give some actual solutions rather than just bitching endlessly about things. I have stopped playing the game for a ton of reasons but lots of the reasons are in this video.
Always appreciate your perspective.
The D4 community needs more constructive and based takes like this.
but... one of his points was "WHAT community?"
move on. anything published by EA is toxic.
Great video!
--Rant
I'm just tired of games that don't think about things like this video points out. Seems like many games these days focus on the wrong things and always miss the mark. I don't have away to describe what I want, it's a "I know it when I see it" kind of thing for me right now. This video is the "I know it" part. This video has the ethos that I wish more game developers would have. I wish game developers would realise "don't focus on making a cash grab, focus on a good game as that will bring the money".
Bad/Hot take: Wouldn't it be wild if game studios brought a bunch of "gamers" in early on development kind of like wireframe time of game to test mechanics. Games don't seem to be made by actual gamers.
Immediate response to the premise of this video: assuming the breakdown not the devs communicating with the public (stated that they're actually doing pretty well at it), but that the breakdown is the communication between the game UI and the public.
That's automatically wrong. The UI is actually pretty decent. The UI's job is to be a user interface that is pretty and easy to read. Your first comment is about attack power being wrong. That's not a UI issue, that's a dev talking communicating to the public issue. Devs are failing to properly calculate what attack power is, and so are failing to show what attack power is. The UI accurately states what Devs want you to think attack power is. In that sense, the UI is 100% functional. Additionally, attack power is based on your non multiplicative stats. Anything that's additive is included. The % damage increase you get from skill point attributes, and crit dmg and crit strike are multiplicative and aren't a part of attack power. That much is pretty clear and is accurately displayed. I DO AGREE THAT A DIFFERENT ALGORITHM SHOULD BE MADE TO INCLUDE ALL ATTACK POWER RELATED STATS AND NOT EXCLUDE THOSE MULTIPLICATIVE STATS, but that's a big issue for them to try to fix. Not sure we'll ever see that... Either way, that's still a Dev issue, not a UI issue. The Devs decided that's how the UI would be designed, and the UI works as intended.
"Communicating character state" us then directed mostly at devs not communicating changes in the game via patches. A specific example used was "changes to items only being applied to items picked up after the patch". I'd argue that is correct, devs should have blasted that on patch notes, but the you of a few minutes ago would have argued otherwise, because Devs communicated clearly in campfire bullshjt sessions that this was going to be the case.
Talking about bugs you should be reporting or intentional interactions you should be using, that's across the board. Devs have had such a bad idea of how the game is being played that they find bugs that players (after data mining and testing think are legit) use are actually exploits, while at the same time shit that players think are bugs are actually how Devs intended the game to function.
Fixing player highlighting: I think your point here is valid but would t really fix the issue. If player highlighting worked WELL instead of not working at all, you'd just see am ugly visual. Debuffs would still be hard to point out and getting 1 shot would still be a thing. Actually fixing this problem involves a ton of damage and HP Bala ces changes to make monsters a d players tankier and deal less damage. Dying to chain CC is usually either players not paying attention or getting 1 shot by those CC effects. Clearing 98% of a dungeon while easily tanking all damage but then getting 1 shot by a cold enchanted monster is a clear indication thag damage to ho ratios are imbalanced. Resistances is a part of the issue, but not the whole issue. Some mobs need less hp, others need more hp, some need less damage, others need more damage. The balance is currently very wrong.
Horse and zoom problems: 100% agree on the zoom. Devs have already said they most likely won't change the zoom because it's "too hard wahh". I disagree about the horse problems though. The horse just gets stuck on anything, visible or not visible. Horse issues have (almost) nothing to do with the camera zoom. Being able to go faster or slower is a perk of keyboard and mouse that you don't get on controller. It's clunky for sure (mostly because of the zoom) but it's not why most of the horde interactions suck balls. That's all much more easy to fix horse mechanics that Blizzard just fails to accomplish. Even though I don't attribute horse problems (which are rampant) to zoom, I 100% agree thay zoom is a huge problem in the game.
Scrolling zoom on the minimal will never work on console and so it's 100% not an option.
Hit boxes and timing I think work much better in D4 than most other games. They certainly have room for improvement, like you said, so I don't disagree. I also completely agree that unlimited evades should just be a thing. The Teleport sorcerer enchantment can easily be changed to accommodate that.
Player choice, I don't think the gold cost associated with rerolling is annoying. Having to individually delete paragon or stat trees is annoying. Your build not working was a result of Devs not play testing the changes they were rolling out. The entire section of you complaining about damage numbers and builds is 100% attributed to Devs failing to program the game correctly alongside Devs not being knowledgeable enough about the game mechanics to develop them for players. I don't think the spend system to change your build is bad at all, its just that the bukd you want to try out is broken because the Devs suck.
Lots of talking points I didn't mention, because I didn't disagree with them at all. Your video was great, and even if you said something I personally disagreed with, I could be totally wrong. At the end of the day you're providing an opinion that you hope will be beneficial, and that is a 100% positive. Thanks for the good content, keep it up bro man. Sorry if I sounded too negative.
Most of your comment made no sense, and most of us are a little dumber for having read it. You are awarded no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Regarding visibility: I came to D4 from D3 with 1000s of hours playtime. I'm one of those players that loved D3 from the day it was released and only skipped two seasons since release. I knew from the start that any help to increase visibility would be sorely needed with all the effects, numbers, item labels and mobs on screen, which is why I turned the "always highlight" feature in the accessibility tab on before even making my first character. It still isn't good enough but it certainly helps. If you can stand the fact that your character always has a green shine to it, you should give it a go and see if it does anything for you. While you're at it, take a look at the other accessibility features that help with visibility, like reducing screen effects, camera shake etc.
Regarding all your other issues, I fully agree. I don't even get why refunding skills should cost anything. That's what made changing builds in D3 so much fun. You just hit the reset all button, respec and go try it out. If it sucks you just TP back to town and respec again, until you find a build that works and is fun.
The complexity of item affixes, stats and their effect on your build as well as lack of communication or rather bad communication in the case of attack power were already a thing in D3 but at least your damage number would change dynamically with all the buffs you had active. You couldn't really keep track of it because the value would sometimes change for only a few frames but it was a thing. Aiming for certain item affixes was a lot easier in D3 since there weren't that many different roll combinations you could get and the only "advanced" priorities were elemental and skill damage. Meaning the average player could simply aim for crit chance, crit damage, attack speed and flat damage+. If you wanted to really min max you also had to consider elemental damage and skill damage but even if you didn't, you could build an extremely powerful character that was fun to play at the highest difficulty.
All in all D4 is a great successor to D3 with faaaaaaar more things to change and do. They learned from many of their mistakes in D3 but they massively increased the affix complexity, skill system and paragon system (I'm still overwhelmed by it. So many choices and if I get something wrong and only later realise I have to spend tons of gold to fix my mistake, WHY?!) but in many cases tried to stick to the simplicity of D3. Their level of communication to the player is nearly identical to D3 while D4 is about twice or even three times as complex. That simply doesn't work, at least not for players new to the franchise or even returning players that are more casual players. Which represent, as you said, the vast majority of the D4 player base.
For players like me it wasn't too much of a challenge, because we are used to D3s shenanigans and we were the ones coming up with the new meta build for the season that then was copied by thousands but that isn't a good thing. I don't want to be in that situation and I don't want the game to be in that situation. Sure, there will always be a group of players that will figure out the absolute min/maxed perfect build that is another step above everything else but there should also be a way for the more casual players to just build a char that is powerful and fun to play with a few easy stats, like in D3. Like, in lower lvls, just go for main stat and flat damage and then in the late game also pay attention to crit chance and crit damage and you're good. It's not the right way to describe it but something like a lowest common denominator. A "do this and your char will be strong" basic bitch build that is strong enough to play on medium or hard and have fun but if you want to play torment and fight uber bosses you need to spend the time and figure out a proper build with the right affixes.
Anyways, I'm starting to rant and ramble. In summary, I agree. D4 needs more work but they already have a decently fun foundation.
I agree with your points. Technically, all your suggestions are valid thoughts on how to make the game better. However, there is a difference between making Diablo IV technically polished and making it into a great game. The final ingredient here is a reason for a player to log on! When I log on to D4, I do it to kill off some moments of my spare time...but there is no carrot stick, no drive for me to progress.
The story line of D4 is so boring, so tedious, so poorly delivered that I was in agony waiting for that drudgery to go away. With the best graphics of the four games to push it along, instead of being the drive to improve and build your character, the story is the worst part of any of the four Diablo installments (D3's story was subpar, but I never wanted to bleed from my own eyeballs while trudging through it). Then, at long last, the agony was over. Donut (read: Donnan) had died the death of a tourist (you know, after not bothering to bring any armor or weapons with him and poking at demon-clad pillars during his lunch break). The other utterly pointless, irritating npcs went off screen somewhere to my thorough delight, allowing me to forget their names instantly. I killed Lillith against my actual better judgement, not because I wanted to but because the game made do me so just so that I could finally play the Diablo 4.
And I did for a time. I played around with some paragon grinding, some builds...yet, eventually, I asked myself a series of questions, three of which I present to you here:
1) Why did I need to spend all those hours being tormented through that mindless clicker fest of a "story", if it had no bearing on the game itself?
2) What the heck is the point of me here, in this D4 world?
3) Why should I give a rat's rump about those helltides, if they, unfailingly, just go away by themselves?
And I had no answer to any. Then I logged off.
This game is excellent example of how not to design game, and how not to communicate with fans.
I've never understood why they can't look at a game like D2R and understand that formula. Diablo 2, at least since LOD, has always been easy to get a character through to NEAR end game. Realistically, you can get a character that's good for MF through to 80+ in a night if you work at it. At that point, except for the ubers later in the life cycle, you had a chance to play and try to gear multiple characters.
D4 you're stuck grinding a LONG levelling and build process, and the gear you're getting really only applies to your current character. Let characters MF for other classes, ENCOURAGE trading, and don't make the levelling grind such a slog
I strongly agree with enabling people to easily swap between builds. It would be cool if you could save a build, similar to how you can save an outfit at the wardrobe. This will give you a lots more to do end game. I can easily see myself wanting 3 to 4 different builds, for which I need different skills, paragons and gear.
I can imagine having a normal all round build, a boss killer, and a PvP build at least.
Regarding damage numbers, I'd much rather see some number in the UI that shows total damage done in the last 5 seconds. Otherwise it would be too hard to compare builds with different attack speeds, or single target vs AoE.
pausing after 28 seconds to post this: Out of all YTers to chime into different discussion in topics they are knowledgeable about, you are always the most welcome to me. Long, detailed accounts and opinions not short clickbaity hitpieces. Thats a very good style to chime in with :D
Please jump on my band wagon, daddy uWu
The cost of builds and going broke trying a new build hit home. Also build presets and paragon boards is definitely needed.
Like the old dev's said ''Old Blizzard is dead.''
Shame we have to suffer the new one.
They tried to turn Diablo into World of Warcraft, went only part way to cloning WoW, and pissed off both those who like WoW and old school Diablo. The fact that Diablo literally isnt in D4 is the best example to give as to why and how D4 just isnt Diablo anymore.
Its painful to see countless content creators pointing out all these obvious flaws while the developers show very obvious signs of professional incompetence. We should remind ourselves that creating games for a billion dollar company requires any member of a development team to bring in state of the art skills in their respective profession. There are actual professors or lecturers and even textbooks in the field of game development out there who would agree with 99% of the ongoing criticism about D4, so that tells us something very important, doesnt it?
The employees at Blizzard do not have the required skills to meet our expectations because if they had them they would apply those without hesitation in order to "do a good job". Instead they are still in trial phase for so many basic game mechanics and systems more than 2 months after release and 6 years of development, 11 years after D3 and 30 years into the series.
Anyone who plays D4 at an engame lvl immediately recognises alot of its problems which tells us the neckbreaking truth about Blizzard, they do not play their own game at the same level as their audience does and they do not apply decades of experience with the franchis. It must be like that because if they ever did there could not be so many prevalent shortcomings in their final product.
I'm going to echo what a lot of people have already said: D4 is a beta in its current form. What's more the devs obviously don't play their own game. I watch these videos because I still play D4 and love theory crafting. The game has a really good foundation and I need something SIMPLE to scratch my ARPG itch - but POE2 looks like everything D4 should be and more. This is the 2nd video today that's offered ways to improve the game; maybe we'll see it in Season 29.😁
At least now we know why many things in the game work (or don’t) the way they do, based on Blizzard’s latest video fiasco. I wonder how many more of their developers, level designers, coders, artists, programmers don’t actually play their f-ing game.
Wow... I think you nailed the technical arguments for why I'm not having fun. I'm a sorcerer at level 42, and I'm stuck at the Act III boss. I'm just not strong enough despite using the "best" gear I could find, grinding side content, finding some altars of Lilith, and using a levelling build I found online. I just never feel powerful. No gear I pick up seems to change that, and no stat points seem to have any effect, because the enemies get stronger with me as I level. I even had a hard time figuring out the other stuff - like levelling up your potions, which my friend had to show me. I just don't think anything in the game is explained to you, and that includes the core combat, status effects, and so on.
I don't need a lecture, but I need to know where I'm going wrong. Because I don't quit a boss when I die once, but if after 10 deaths I'm no closer to winning, and I cannot tell why, then I am going to quit - and I did quit this game, twice (level 33 and level 42). It's not fun when you cannot tell what is going on.
For context: I'm a Diablo III veteran and I took all 7 classes through the campaign and into the end game and did some light end-gaming up to Torment II. I cannot for the life of me figure out why I "suck" at Diablo IV. I have died more times in Diablo IV in the ~20-25 hours I put in, than in the ~200 hours I put into Diablo III. Almost nothing I read in any guide seems to help, and the game just feels like a slog. It just feels like too much work to be good at Diablo IV, which every reviewer ever keeps saying is "casual friendly". I want to punch everyone who says it's "too easy" or "casual friendly" because this is one of the most pointlessly convoluted and therefore hard games I have ever played. It's like it was made to please the hardcore audience first and foremost and the "casual player" (me) was an after-thought.
They lost me at always online. What BS.. Still play my D3 on xbox...OFFLINE
this video is a slam dunk piece of feedback, amazing job. 😊
Your suggestions probably won't work... coz Blizzard will say "The UI system is not designed for that!" or "wait for season 4".
Something like that.
Enjoying the Diablo content brother, and it's been nice to see you genuinely enjoying gaming again. I know tarky was taking it's toll. Keep it up.
What I fundamentally don't like about this game is just how much crap is on screen when you're fighting multiple enemies. It's exhausting to be eye-spammed with lights/blood/numbers/words. Hullo... UI Design... it's actually a thing!
They need to upgrade their mission statement...and keep the mechanics simple, improve QOL, add a public in game board to group like poe and D2R, change the battlepass from intentionally screwing more $$ out of us when we paid alot for the game.
For me the top 3 things i'd like to see fixed are 1.Paragon board changing +cost 2.Loot +item power scaling. 3. More Bosses with Boss specific loot.
Great video. I love all your suggestions and really enjoyed the constructive manner you went about it rather than just jumping on the “drama farming” which there is way too much of these days. I am absolutely having a blast with Diablo 4 but would love it if all of your suggestions got implemented. Hopefully this vid gets shared everywhere as the right way to critique a very new game that I know will only get better in time because of content creators like yourself. Liked and subscribed.
21:00 "The devs say they want us to have fun and I genuinly believe them" - that's the reason why you are confused. If you look at it from perspective of them trying to milk as much playing time out of us and make most money, suddenly all the actions they took will make legitimate sense to you, If you think they are trying to make a good game however, you will be confused. I don't care what anyone says, I care what they do.
So... Devs can keep saying they wanna make game fun, but until they keep doing everything for it to be anything but fun, I don't care what they say. Sadly, til this point, instead of trying to make a good game that people will play for that fact, for it beeing fun, they have used all "tricks" of how to achieve that instead.
Also the dark pattern 1 click battle pass activation - do I need to say more?
Inventory is big issue, let us introduce new season that makes it even worse without any solution to it. I don't believe that no one out of 9000 people, while developing game about loot hoarding did not notice inventory and stash space issues in 6 years of development - I am not that stupid and I don't believe they employ such a horrible devs, that's not what's happening here, it's intentional so you waste more time micromanaging inventory (BAM, makes sense now why it's such a issue for such a huge team to do anything about it in a MONTHs since player base has been crying for more space, and still nothing except stupid excuses, because they don't want to, it's the target design, it's a goal for there to be inventory issues...).
Until blizzard stops trying to trick players into playing D4 and attemps to get them involved in the game via good QoL and fun gameplay, it won't be good ever and we as players need to show them that we won't eat up all their trick BS by simply not playing. Imagine this, everybody (and I mean everybody) stops playing and mentions ridiculous inventory and stash space as reason - do you have any idea how quickly it will suddenly be fixed? It's because on their TO DO list are things and those that are there "marked" as "for profit" have a priority and everything else is in backlog, that's it. Once player base shows them "YO, THIS is priority, otherwise play that garbage yourself" it will never get priority, because y'all pissed but keep playing so they can just promise "yeah, we know it's important, but it'll get fixed in a year or so, maybe, cause it's (cough) complicated (cough)"... F* blizzard, it's just activision puppet at this point, it's a sad fact we all can see
100% agree! I never believe the PR BS, never drink the corporate Kool-Aid.
Personally, I like the camera distance, but more options should be there. Also, the minimap should be much more zoomed out
13:25 - The mount and camera issues... First GTA top-down camera was zooming out the faster you were moving. R* solved this issue in 1997. Camera in Project Zomboid moves towards the direction you are driving and the game allows you to zoom out manually. I cannot wait for the devs to explain how hard game development is and make a bunch of excuses. This is pure incompetence.
Also whatever topic you touch on is pure gold. Every video you make is so well made I watch them even if I don't care at all about Diablo VI.
I liked the video, but i would argue that a even more core reason is how the game calculates damage, by putting it in to buckets, their last attempt at balance was nerfing vuln damage, where this nerfed the overall damage sure, it failed to do what they intended to do, they wanted to lower the focus on vuln damage, and that goal failed completely, it only gives players who knows how to game works less damage, and people that don't know how it works even less damage then that. Also how stash tabs are implemented, and don't get me started on resistances .... There is fundamental issues in the game before players even start playing, As someone who has loved diablo since diablo 1, i can't get myself to play diablo 4 and it kinda breaks my heart. Also i hate renown grind, if they wanted us to do it at least make it work like a exp bar you level as you just play and have fun doing whatever you want.
Thankyou for beta testing our $70 game for us - Blizzard
It’s ok to be disappointed, Veritas. They f’ed up. if we had the ability to pull back all the curtains, we’d find the exact reasons why the game is a broken mess. Blizzard is a shell of its former self and we don’t owe any corporations our loyalty. They put out a terrible product that is only enjoyable while you’re still unaware of the mess it really is and the real kicker is that the devs or people responsible for final dev decisions have too big of an ego to listen to the real issues and do anything about them (stash tabs, horse issues, gem stash, inventory management solutions, paragon respecing, broken resistances, always having fresh micro transactions ready, terrible mob diversity, etc.) in a timely fashion. I put 300 hours into Diablo 4 and I can’t justify dungeon crawling anymore due to feeling like I’m just another consumer for them to farm. Rise up gamers.
They also need to change the unique system my friend played a Druid up to level 80 and didn’t get that one specific unique peace of gear for the wolf storm build, Uniques and of course Uber unique are just pointless to think about it sucks it’s centered around rng and can’t really perfect some builds without them, it would be nice if they implemented new ways to earn, The Unique’s by saving up certain shards/points from completing certain weekly quests and bounties that include pvp bounties, like they do in destiny with Xur, they can have a special sells man that sells uniques with guaranteed new rotation each week with good stats for each class, also I believe pvp needs some rebalancing maybe level doesn’t matter and maybe their are just good players level 50 who can mop the floor with someone whose level 100, but me personally it shouldn’t happen in my opinion because they need to grind like others did to level 100, make it where they can only do damage within level range by 5 to 15 levels, or just find a way to create separate phases with level brackets, but if you 20-90 level’s above someone you won’t see them in pvp you’ll only see people whose in range of your level but I think it’s to many 1 shot pvp builds…although elden ring is a different game with slow dlc updates, at least they they tried to balance it by having brackets it’s just not shown in game…..
Right on the spot. As a UI Designer, I agree 100% with your criticism! I actually watched this on my TV, but made sure to come over and leave a comment, because you rarely find constructive criticism that is more than "hurr moar monster density" or " durr moar barb buffs". Apart from the UI and convoluted stats, there's another "obvious" point that affects the experience and motivation to play D4 -> Shop. Yeah, selling transmogs is actually damaging to the game. How you look like was previously the "reward" of being good at the game, now not only you can buy badass looks with money, but most of the cool stuff is locked behind an extra paywall. Currently, a level 1 character can look more badass than a level 100 that has spend hours grinding the game. This is by design, bad design that gives you blue balls and an easy, paid solution to feel accomplished. It also destroys the need to play the game, because you can buy the reward, aka the look, without the need to work for it.
I'm starting to see a pattern that I didn't realise until now (mostly because I don't play games that are a "service"). These games as a service, their main objective is to keep you playing, it doesn't matter if it's by the fun factor or just wasting your time slowly without any good reason; so I'm pretty sure they fulfill their games with so many "mechanics" or "attributes" to make you believe the game is huge and full o possibilities. In the end, it's just a full bag of useless information that, again, only makes you waste your time without any good/fun reason
By the way one thing that I disable in roughly every single game, if not all by this point, is the damage number and other pop-up text. In practice 98%+ of the time are telling you something you already know can see from your stats, game effects, UI, your/enemy life bar, and in practice just drown your screen with that constant useless "information". On top of making it harder rather than easier to play, it actually detracts from immersion as you feel more like scrolling through a Bloomberg terminal than looking at graphics of a video game.
D3 has the right stick dodge roll that is absent in D4, it also has a proper inventory sorting UI; both on console version but boggles the mind why they didn't build up off that with D4
With a little research players can learn most of the stuff noted. However you are correct that some of the systems are pretty difficult to fully understand. Dmg output seems easy when you understand multiplicative > additive.. as far as how the map faces you is just crap in this game. The horse... why give us a useless horse, I think it may be the only horse in history that cannot even carry a single item. Has anyone ever played Torchlight? man its funny that a tiny game like that figured out all these issues before their launch, but this game cant? frustrating. If any of you do not have an 80-85+ character let me explain end game content for you.. STORAGE MANAGMENT.
Low number of builds, boring loot, mob scaling issues, stash issues, lack of endgame... I give it up. Nothing can repair this game, since gameplay roots are so bad. Blizzard is dead (OW2, D4, WC:Reforged, D:Immortal, etc. : they f.cked up everything).
18:52 I enjoy these moments because they give our choices on affix combinations more weight
Imagine if in hc mode they didn't allow us to use the shared resources
The fact we have a "diablo drama bandwagon" is because there was a road to fail to lay tracks on.
While communication may be an issue in the game, it is far from the most important one. The reason I say this, is mainly because even if the ingame communication issues were "solved", and information was perfectly presented to the player, the game would still be bad, mainly due to the content itself (dungeons mainly), as well as progression systems (skills, aspects and paragon board). Itemization itself needs work, and is intertwined with these issues with its poor affix design. These need to be fixed asap.
Personally i'm really missing something like a loadout menu. Where I can save a build, with its perk points and items.
thanks for analyzing what is normally an unlooked at area of the game. Personally I just noped out of d4 after trying one of the open beta's, and thats saying something as I am a huge diablo fan since D1. My reasoning was simply the game is less than the sum of its parts. To me it felt like the various elements of D4 detracted from each other, the story / cinematic elements like waiting for a janky NPC to do his thing or a beautiful looking world that is sparsely populated served more to break my gameplay flow (one of the most important aspects of an ARPG) than to be an enjoyable story, the MMO elements like auto level scaling to your level crushes the enjoyment of your own power creep and progression, the ARPG elements take the first "M" off "MMO" so that MMO elements are more or less pointless and so on... The conclusion I came to was D4 is fundamentally flawed and it would take a very radical shift is design philosophy to correct, something I do not see modern Blizz doing
YOU DID IT !! You've put in words everything I am personnaly complaining about the game / gameplay / experience and shared by a LOT of us, giving to all we think a lot more visibility ! I'd just add some UI/UX improvement for gamepad users, for better readability and smoother experience in the several interfaces the game provides, which are often a pain to handle (like in the inventory, when both the gears in your bag and the corresponding equiped one are highlighted, sometimes leading to imprinting/upgrading/selling/destroying the wrong item, for instance...)
I hope those issues will reach them and will eventualy be addressed and improved !
Thank you !
They should add a test dummy in towns that you can bash on to see your damage numbers.
instead of bringing up the non meta builds to the meta level, they nerf builds DOWN, ie making it less and less fun
I am simply unable to fathom or understand what each attribute means or does. The time I have to spend on Diablo 4 is about 3-5 hours a week and most of the time I have no idea what to keep, what to sell/salvage. It is extremely overwhelming English is not my native tongue and having a video guide or set of video guides EXPLAINING IN DETAIL what each attributes does, what works with what, what influences what and how, has the potential of guiding my old stupid brain out of the Fog of Ignorance, what my Diablo 4 play sessions in essence are.
tl;dr: explain this to me like I am four.