James Hong voiced Covetous Shen, Chi-Fu from Mulan and Sr. Ping from Kung Fu Panda (David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China) this man is a legend.
@@amafi_poe Respectfully disagree, but it's funny you mention Gauntlet since it was specifically handled in an extremely anti-consumer fashion. The game was a revamp of an extremely well known, huge IP which they capitalized on to draw in players, only to drastically cut down the amount of content that was promised, release a paid DLC, and then abandon the game within less than a year.
The problem with D4 wasn't because it was overwhelmingly complicated. Everyone knew what stats added survivability and damage. The problem was that most D4 stats was overwhelmingly useless for your character. The pool of stats was so large that people had to sometimes accept sub-sub-optimal gear that only worked under specific conditions. It wasn't complex, it was tedious.
Exactly this, it wasnt that D4 was too complex and they had to shrink them..its that alot of the stats they had in the game were just filler stats that did nothing and didnt need to exist and thats why they cut them.
The “damage bucket” system and their damage calculation on launch was extremely flawed. I found a Reddit post or a forum post that was posted during open beta that literally laid out exactly what was going to happen. That crit and vulnerability were going to be the only builds that would function at a high level.
@@madhatten5123 Any time you have a 20+ additive stats in one bucket and one or two in another, the second bucket will always be more valuable because it's a separate damage multiplier. How they didn't think this was a problem is beyond me.
is it just me that feels as though all of the skills are just not fun, never mind stats just sheer builds are boring, then i'm expected to be remaking characters every season, when i'm just repeating boring skills and classes.
this is the first time i've heard a D3 dev has actually said the auction house *did* impact how they tuned and designed things. This has been something blizzard devs have denied in the past.
It's not really up to them. Its a publicly traded company in a capitalistic nation. You think game devs get to tell the people who fund them that they get to do whatever they want and they should go kick rocks?
Yep i really dislike that term and i get worried when i hear devs talk about "complicated" when it comes to POE and even LE. It is not complicated, it is as you say very in-depth. Huge difference, but relateable.
Yeah. D4 is moderately complex and extremely shallow. Last Epoch is moderately complex and moderately deep. PoE is extremely complex and extremely deep.
@@RhebelGamingPOE needs a PhD to work. That thing is as complicated as my daily job, that does not make sense. If I want to play a game as complicated as my job, I will just go and work and make more money.
Considering you do some for other games like helldivers... is there a chance you'd do "why we couldn't make Path Of Exile" talks too? lol that be fun to see your perspective on that game vs diablo.
Diablo 4 didn't feel complicated to offer flexibility. It felt complicated for the sake of being complicated. The nonsense of stats that only did something when 3 different obscure conditions were met was just bloat to give the affix pool more things to randomly choose from. +2.5% damage when attacking an enemy wearing a tuxedo but only if the moon was full and you were indoors.
It's crazy they focused so much on how complex or simple the systems of the RPG elements of the game were instead of making the game more approachable in other ways such as types of content or ways to learn those said systems...
CEO/investors want more money -> need more customers -> try to make a game that appeals to everyone -> make a generic game w/ uninspired design that doesn't heavily appeal to anybody kinda what i was expecting tbh; typical corporate blizz 🤑🤑🤑
It's more like this: passionate gamer devs which want to create a good game were replaced with DEI hires with bare minimum requirements. -> passionate gamer devs can't make changes / influence the game they create anymore since the teams got way to big and now they have to "babysit" the DEI and contractors which makes them burn out -> more DEI hires and contractors until no more passionate people are left just people which view it as a job and couldn't care less what they create. Many DEI hires only care about spreading their political idiology which in turn make the game more Woke and therefore increases the companys ESG score the same with DEI hires. Big ESG money but in the long run your company can't create good games anymore since the "heart" got replaced with something souless. This happened in the last 10 years and it reaches way beyond gaming.
@@KazaiTVWhat a load of bull crap. As much as dei hiring is stupid and unfair the problem with blizzard games boils down to greed and the fetish for increasing shareholder value as the parent comment states.
@@qdlaty23 exactly they don't care about the consumer at all. For example Blizzard was under fire for shit that arose in the ow 2 dev team so they made 2 characters gay and suddenly what controversy? It blew over so quickly it was hilarious how snowflaked and simple minded people are to think a mega corp actually cares about them
Darth is wrong that people wanted less complicated stats in D4. No, they wanted to get rid of stats that didn’t doing anything and were just filler and ended up diluting the stat pool. By all means have a complicated stat system but when 99% of the player base won’t ever use that specific stat it’s time to rethink your stat design.
100% agree and was surprised he didn't catch that point. Damage vs far and damage vs close. How stupid. Those aren't stats lol they are artificial filler.
It definitely is something thats a bit of a regret, after playing Last Epoch, while it isn't complicated by any means, the customization with just a small bit of extra systems is wild compared to D4's current state.
building* customization is mid as of right now, half of the gear is ugly or looks the same as something else, even some high end loot like uniques look terrible
@@erastalohh… so comparing a game that’s been out for over five years to one less than a quarter of that time? I love LE, but gathering data for appropriate criticism and comparison is important otherwise it’s erroneous and hypocritical. Was the crafting system in LE the same now as it was at launch? Nope, took 3.5 years after the game came out to update crafting to what it is now.
All this institutional knowledge and experience learned from Diablo 3, and yet Blizzard utilized mone of it for Diablo 4's development. Likely because Blizzard prioritized shareholder profits rather than its employees. Its no secret that the Diablo 4 dev team basically started from scratch, and it's clear no one on the team were around to learn the lessons of Diablo 3. Imagine how much better Diablo 4's launch would have been, had Blizzard kept these people on and learned from the mistakes made during Diablo 3's development.
Blizzard rushed the launch of D3 and D4. Last epoch was in testing for years, beta was 2019 and it just fully launched now, nearly 5 years later. If you gave that much time to a blizzard team, they'd have a pretty good and polished product as well.
Why do games NEED a broader audience? That's how you get homogenized bland gameplay. It's about the money. Companies should be making games they want to play, not what everyone else wants to play. That's why EHG, GGG, and Fromsoft to a greater spectrum, retain their audience and that's why they get such high praises within the gaming community. (Fromsoft being the highest of praise from the ones I mentioned.)
These broad appeal games are genre building. PoE never gets made without D2. D2 doesn't get made without D1. Could you imagine if PoE released to an audience without D2? It'd be a colossal failure. As this designer mentioned, make it too complicated and players just bounce off - which already happens to PoE to a large extent.
@@dirtypawse having a smaller audience for a way bigger budget game is also not sustainable. Bigger budget games need a bigger audience to be successful.
The trick of last epoch system is that it is super complicated, but the respec system, skill leveling, etc is super forgiving. Coupled with fully customizable loot filters and the trade system you can freely experiment with rapid feedback which makes the skillup on the systems easier and more intuitive
Super complicated? C'mon, man! We all know what is what and what it is you have to do in an ARPG like Diablo. It's not like there are a ton of gamers out there that never played a Diablo game or Diablo clone game and got now into ARPGs with Diablo 4. What they are saying about it that it is for a broader audience is our fault, we the gamers said that and they took it and use it as a scapegoat for everything they did wrong in D4. Compared to POE, which I had years in not playing before I started at least trying, LE is not complicated AT ALL, the story is good and different than Diablo and POE, is something new with the ERAS.. Even if you play it from the perspective of a guy with 2 hours of gameplay in 3 days of the week, because of job and family, it is not complicated at all. And I speak from experience. I have a family and a job, I maybe, just MAYBE, play a game with 2 or 3 hour a day, 2 or 3 days a week, so I am not a gamer that plays hours upon upors of a game and I reached the monoliths endgame with a decent character and items in LE. This game has a faster learning curve than POE, which took me years to like and try. Compared to D4? There is not comparison. Diablo took the mobile route with Diablo Immortal and now they expanded on that idea with D4. And funny thing is now there are on mobile, even better ARPGs than both these Diablo games.
@@ScarlettSpitfyre I think LE is more complicated than PoE (at least in character building). Just looking mechanic by mechanic it's incredibly in-depth. Its presentation makes it approachable. PoE is also very deep, the difference is the presentation is unapproachable. The learning curve difference isn't because of complexity, it's presentation. I would challenge you to find anything in PoE that resembles the complexities of an LE Rune Master. Nearly every spell can change its elemental type (which of course you can do with gems in PoE) - but - the order in which you cast them enables one of 46 other combo spells - unless you have another talent that fixes the combo'd spell to the first three elements on your action bar - which is another variant all together. And then you're building synergies across 8 different skill trees. That's 1/15 classes that are unequivocally more complex than anything outside of a ward loop. I struggle to find ANYTHING in PoE that doesn't have a nearly identical comparison in LE. Strength stacking, int stacking, cast on hit, cast on crit, element shifting, dots, minions (which LE does WAAAY better), trading (also way better in LE). I came up with crafting and vendor recipes. So, I'd be curious to hear where you think PoE has this hidden complexity. Edit: I also think PoE is a better game, it feels better, it plays better, and the endgame is way more fleshed out. I only argue that it's less complex than people are making it out to be. The complexity is in presentation.
You can play LE just beelining down a few trees and get to end game. Definitely not complicated but does give you a lot more choices than one beeline D4 provides. If you think LE is complicated, then what is PoE?
@dirtypawse I played Runemaster and just focused on everything fire- very simple. You can go down "complicated" paths or you can do simpler things. It's complicated if you want to make it complicated but a casual can just as easily pick up the game and play without needing to understand it all. Definitely Blizzard wants to protect their image by saying LE is complicated lol. Diablo is also complicated if you bust out the spreadsheet 🤦
@@rogerh2694 You just described PoE, too. Unless you really think building resists is a super complicated game loop. PoE is more challenging, but, challenging != complexity. I've already said PoE is not complex it's obfuscated.
6:35 I think the favourable change for D4 items to a more simple is not that the original system was too complex, but that it lacked impact. it is better to have less choices that have far more impact of those choices, than complexity for the sake of complexity if they don't do much or anything.
It seems like problem is that they could only imagine complexity as being a POE type situation where there are hard build-craft failure states. They didn’t imaging a LE situation where you could recover from a bad choice without too much friction.
It's not just the ability to recover, it's also less overwhelming. The skill trees for LE add enormous complexity and player choice (when done well, not all the trees are), but feel very approachable. By breaking down the complexity into pieces that can each be held in your mind in their entirety, it makes it much easier to grasp.
@@ener11454 its not a simple game either. compare it to the OG, Diablo 2, which is a fair comparison since its what everyone compares future ARPGs to. its far, far more complicated when it comes to builds.
@@Fest_ This is a good thing imo, LE has hit the sweet spot where it has plenty of depth without being complex. Skill trees are intuitive and the game has a great built in guide. You don't need to spend 10 hours in PoB, you can just run your build and it generally works.
While I didn’t find LE’s skill System too complicated, my more casual friends took a good bit more time to understand it, for example, why they weren’t doing enough damage. The nice thing is that LE doesn’t punish them for learning, which allows them to grow at their own pace, which is great.
Man, when he described the mindset of a D2 player I was like yep that's me 100%. Probably why D2 is my favourite diablo. I am deffinately more of the type of player to go find better gear to overcome the challenge. I find myself doing that in PoE a lot aswell. Especially in affliction I remember farming mana reservation charms to solve my mana problems before going to red tier maps.
That's why most people don't care that much about PoE, especially any time that someone wants to say that its a hard game. Because you can just outgear the crap out of any challenge. Plenty of Diablo players would actually try to beat the challenge instead of run away and look for more powerful gear to breeze through that challenge. That's what games need more instead of just "outgear that shit and make it a 10 seconds burst fight". There is the normal gearing to match the power of the challenge and there is outgearing the hell out of it. All the talking about the Echo of Lilith fight being super hard and only for the best went away when it was possible to just outgear that shit into a 10 seconds spam one skill fight.
@@CRVSE I think in terms of PoE that's the point though. Due to the depths of the builds, the challenge comes from farming & crafting the gear that works for that build. You can't out-skill mana-reservation problems lol. The skill comes from being able to put your build together in a way that can overcome the fights that you get into. Sometimes that's being able to just barely beat it without dying, or in extreme cases if you have enough skill to make your build good enough, makes them 10 seconds.
@@CRVSE what are you talking about? You can’t outgear and outlevel in PoE. It just doesn't work like that. The gear you're talking bout is 99% one that someone spent hours to craft, divines to earn it or grind the juice to craf it. You have to actually plan a good build to defeat pinnacle bosses and a good farm strategy to grind the currency to make that build possible. Obviously, there are people who can afk Uber Shaper in 20sec, but these players are OUTLIERS spending 10h a day to play the game.
The problem the Diablo IV team was getting after was not the complexity of the stats and simplification to the stat system, it was that too many stats were CONDITIONAL. A wider set of stats to create more unique builds and creativity would be great, the difference between D4 stat system and good stat systems is stats should create permanent and constant upgrades in the direction you want your character to go. If I want a frost (insert class here) frost damage, freeze chance, damage to frozen, etc all build off each other where “Chance to do more frost damage to enemies on Tuesday with a 10% chance to freeze on Wednesday” feels bad.
Now add in the fact that everything has to scale off of weapon damage because those specified stats don't exist and you have mages shooting fireballs with a two handed sword. Or like I was doing in D3 a witch doctor with whatever the strongest two-hander is at the time. Then oh no, dust devil does no damage because there's no way to scale these numbers. Well I guess the solution is to make it scale with weapon damage because the entire game revolves around this one stat.
"level of complexity" is a matter of perspective. If you aren't used to the systems, it'll be complex. How complex is our game = Who are we expecting to play the game
Soon after the launch of D3 I remember feeling like D3 wasnt even in the same franchise. They took all the complexity out of D2, watered down nearly every mechanic in the game, made the graphics cartoony and colorful, removed the classic skill tree and made the game piss easy all in an attempt to widen the potential audience. And they continued with D4. "we made the game for dummies so more people could play" Am I supposed to applaud or something? At least I feel vindicated. After the terrible D4 launch, I played PoE for the first time and wanted to punch myself for not playing it sooner. Within 30mins of playing I realized this was the successor to D2 I had been waiting for for 15+ years. Now im enjoying Last Epoch. Too little too late Blizz, Poe 2 will come around and id be surprised if people dont forget D4 existed. Id say let this be a lesson for the future but the AAA industry has been a hollowed corpse for 5-8 years. Its weird they keep pushing for live service games with years of incoming content but cater gameplay to the kinds of people who play video games for 1 hour a week.
As someone who played Diablo 2 for thousands of hours, I don’t get saying Diablo 4 is made for simpletons or is easy mode. Diablo 2 is basic and simple AF. My main was a sorceress and went from spamming firewall to spamming frozen orb. I’m leveling a Druid right now. I’m using 8 buttons pretty regularly. In Diablo 2 it was like one button. 🤣
How was Diablo 4 launch terrible? There were millions of people playing at the same time on multiple platforms and it worked fine. The first campaign walkthrough and exploration was absolutely amazing, one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. The last time I had this feeling was back in 2015 when Witcher 3 launched. And I say this as a long, long time D2 veteran and currently a D2R player. Now, the endgame sucks ass, but I am sure they will improve it in Vessel of Hatred and season 4. PoE has definitely some interesting systems and solutions, but calling it a D2 successor is a blasphemy, please. It has players looking like walking christmas trees with faerie wings and ten thousands auras like in a cheap korean mmo. It has not much in common with Diablo. PoE 2 will be no different, because it will be free to play.
I disagree with his opinion on complexity. LE is not POE. It really isnt that complicated. Its just not as shallow as a puddle, like D3. It goes to show how the direction of a game is directly affect by those who are leading.
This is a great Dev insight video. I wish we had more of this stuff across the board. The only conclusion that I can come up with is the NDA expired or Blizzard is going to destroy this guy for speaking so plainly.
I think the normal gold AH in D3 was fine. the problem was that drop rates were so abysmal your only chance of getting new gear felt like going to the AH. with reaper of souls, they fixed the drop rates but then they also removed the AH which would have been fine at that point.
An arpg without trading can't have properly rare items, since you'd never find them, and if it does like D4 did it's like they don't exist, like shako in season 1.
Trade and meaningful loot can never exist because either you make the loot too hard which facilitates trade and kills the base gamefeel ... Or you make it easier and there's no need to trade and trade dies So separating it was the best thing
I always wondered how much money Blizzard made putting items on their own auction house. The drop rates with perfect rolls were so bad I swear Blizzard had to be selling made items.
The biggest issue was rampant gold and item inflation, anything under god roll was worthless. Also everyone was chasing the same like 8 pieces of gear.
Wow I remember when this first came out and the wasps in act 2 owned me so hard and inwas like wtf, even the running out of money for repairs wow that brought me back. So cool to hear I wasn't insane or just sucked super bad
Last Epoch was on my wishlist. But after watching the gameplay and graphics here I am rethinking that. It looks dirtier than POE1, which is shocking. Interesting to hear thoughts from a developer though.
Nah thats Not the Story its just one scene. The Story is good, pretty much the best of any arpg, together with D2. Meanwhile Last epoch Story: someone tries to destroy the world? Or rule it? I dont even know. U just Jump between epochs and kill everything? No idea why, just confusing imo. And thats After leveling multiple chars. Amazing story there.
@@Steph1 I would say it is better than base D3. It isn't great but it is serviceable (and imo I preferred parts of the beta/early access versions of LE's story to the launch version). Base D3 was actively bad.
"the end game is an ever moving target" is the definition of what's wrong with current development style. They work hard to create a hamster wheel for you to run on, assuming that's what people want. But people only enjoy the journey and effort if they can see themselves finishing it, get to their goal. Once it's "ever moving" there is no fun in the endless chase. Developers need to change to a mentality of: achievable, final, goal. Where the fun comes from the journey. The 'end game' should not be the most important part, but rather a small treat you get to emphasize the journey. People should play a game and finish it. And if the experience was fun they will remember it fondly. They will also be more inclined to buy the next expansion/game from that developer. Hell, they will probably be more inclined to buy some micro-transactions.
I recently went back to play D3 and I really enjoyed it. The Monk is still my favorite ARPG toon in any game. I haven't played other games where you can grab everything around you, drag them to you, then detonate around you. I found it unique and very fun.
Crafting is one of the reasons RUNEWORDS in D2 were so fun and popular and many players wanted them to come back in both D3 and D4, it also gave purpose to "Junk" items because there were used as BASES
As a casual player the things that resonated most was when he mentioned how players played by trying the content again rather then to go to a lower level to upgrade, and how important should the skills/movement feel in the battle and shouldn’t feel any bit clungy. I am also surprised how developers like him wasn’t brought back to consult on D4 😅😅😅, felt like D4 had to relearn quite abit.
This diablo dev was super honest and clarified a lot about game design. D3 gets so much hate because it is actually one of the most loved games of the decade.
min 14 here: on the auction section the point is not that the auction house was like "cheating". The problem there is that the itemization was crap. If you have a crap itemization the auction house feel like renting and then swap when you are bored.
One thing to consider is how open early access development shaped last epoch. They allowed the players to submit ideas, 100k heads are better than 100. This is why i think early access is very beneficial and important to the gaming community, it almost always ends up a better game, as long as everyone is communicating and devs are listening
I fully disagree with his point at 30:30 He paints it as Last Epoch dropping all of its systems on you the second you log in, but if we break it down, you don't unlock passives until level 2, and even then while there is a lot of raw information, your masteries are locked, so you have a trinary choice of where to put a single passive. One of three places. Next, you don't get access to your skill customization until level 5, by that point you've put 4 passives into one screen, so you know how passives work. And you don't get introduced to Crafting until you're in chapter 2, even then you're not outright told in an MSQ to interact with the crafting until you get to the camp in the imerial era in (I think) chapter 3, hours into the game. I think his point about LE dumping all of its info on you at the start is disingenuous, and speaks more to how *HE* played the game (testing his keybinds on the first screen and seeing all the info pop up) than how the game presents it to you.
Honestly, I played D1 and D2 as a kid and I was the type of player back then that killed the end bosses on the first couple of difficulties and then moved onto other games. D3 for me was a game I played casually most seasons and I found myself coming back over and over. I even considered going back to play it when D4 came out but instead played LE and POE. I enjoyed how casual friendly D3 was.
he didn't even touch on the fact that the RMAH is what they used to require you to be online to play - where outside of RL friends I never played d1 or d2 with other people - yes there was a large online community - but some of us were happy running private games with friends/family without needing to be always online. It's amazing how one system had so many bad feels moments tied to it.
It’s very confusing that everyone thinks he worked on D4. I’m pretty sure Andrew Chambers only worked on D3 as such the context of this video has less to do with D4
I had to chuckle at his comments about enemy factions being some kind of brilliant new idea they came up with. Text MUDs had that in the early 1990s. D&D itself had that in the late 1970's. If the designers had been gamers, rather than smart people doing game design in their bunker, they'd have found many of their innovations had already been done before.
"We can't make Last Epoch, because dads and average Joes prefer simple entertainment". All the rest is just insignificant bullshit, everyone with half a brain knows why they didn't make the second LE or PoE. Depth in ARPGs is not what they were/are going for, and D3 was clearly made with console Andies in mind to sell as many copies as possible to casuals, which he pretty much confirmed at the beginning of this video by saying they wanted to reach broader audience and get "new" players to the game. D4 is just a continuation of this, sadly but not surprisingly. I am very curious about D5 and how braindead it will be, lol.
The issue for me is not even about how complicated or deep an ARGP is. I can easily enjoy something simple, but it needs to be good and this is where D4 failed in about every way. Diablo 2 also wasn't that deep honestly. Not even after they added synergies. But the game was super fun and innovative back then. D4 has nothing of that. It has like no build variety, at all. It's itemization is utter garbage (lets wait and see if that actually changes with S4 but I only believe when I see it). The endgame is one of the worst I have seen across all ARPGs I have ever played and I played a lot of them. And on top of all that, theg ame was in an abysall state on release, like resists not working.
The Rune system for Diablo 3 was actually included in the pre-release demo of the game that I got to play. It not being included in the finished game and instead replaced with fixed progression is one of the main reasons why Diablo 3 was the last Blizzard game I ever bought - what was even the point of the demo if the finished product doesn't play anything like the demo?
Simplicity brings you players on release Complexity makes you game relevant for years to come For me, the biggest issue with diablo as it stands now, if that they only scale the numbers (greater affixes/ancients/primal/blabla). Make it just a case of "number goes up because %dmg goes up" PoE/LE have horizontal ways to scale the damage (extra hit, extra curse, slow action speed, etc etc etc), which means that you have inventive and innovative ways to scale damage by combining elements. Not just looking for a slightly better version of an item you already have to hit a monster that has slightly more hp slightly more efficiently.
LE's real win re:Complexity is that it doesn't punish you for 'bad' choices. You're only ever locked into a subclass. Every other choice you make can be undone. Yes it is 'complex' bit that complexity isn't a barrier to entry, it's an arena for exploration.
I think the designer was right on the runes not being an item with variation to chase and he's wrong to regret it, aspects are exactly that in D4 and it's trash that do take all your inventory space and the new itemization aim to kind of fix that with the codex. Being able to changes runes in D3 was great for trying different things or adapting depending on what sets/legendary items you find.
They could have had a similar support gem system like with PoE instead. The issue was that there were 7 tiers of each one for each skill. Instead of looking at it as a tool for a build they looked at it as chase items to bloat the drop pool. That was the mistake. Build tools/skill functionality should not be chase items unless it's a unique or single endgame glyph. The other issue is that each glyph was unique to the specific skill. Instead of making a support that affects all projectile skills, they ended up making hundreds of unique effects. (just like the current aspect system in D4) The same glyph that made a fireball create 3 fireballs could have also made an axe throw launch three axes. But they didn't do that... And D4 still isn't doing that either with their item rework.
every time i hear people use the terms "complicated" and "overwhemling" for game systems i just face palm. They are always straight forward. Like if you can cross the road with out getting hit by a car you can figure out a game system in a few min. Games really are not that complicated, the only time something is complicated is when there is no description of something that has a shit icon but comes down to proper UI and explanation - not complexity really.
I don't think the problem with D4 stats was that it was too complicated, it's that there was way too much stuff that had ludicrous requirements that made it the stat only come into play 5% of the time or less for most players
I feel like this guy is coping hard when he says "that's why D3 was as successful as it was". If you mean did it make you money then sure, if you mean was it a respected and beloved game that will stand the test of time then he is 100% wrong. In fact, D3 was so bad that it inspired people to make their own, considerably better ARPGs (PoE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn). I also take issue with his "larger audience" comments. The reason Diablo games have the audience they do is on the strength of D1 & D2, NOT because devs dumbed it down for mass appeal (and in fact in many situations they did the exact opposite by tuning the difficulty very high, especially in the "we doubled it" episode of D3). I think it's very obvious from the big successes of the past 2 years that it's quite important for a game to have its own distinct flavor and if the game stays true to that without excessive bullshit added on top, then success will follow (Hogwarts Legacy, Palworld, Helldivers). That being said, the dev is mostly correct in the points he's making, but the strengths of D3 / weaknesses of Last Epoch matter ONLY on the first playthrough and then become irrelevant: - I intensely disliked the story in Last Epoch (at least until the ending part when Heorot is killed, after that I enjoyed it, it became more narratively cohesive). However, will I care about this on my 2nd, 3rd, etc. character? No, I'll just power level for a while then go to monoliths. Same with D3/D4, no matter how good the story is, there's only so much enjoyment that you can get out of it before it becomes repetitive. - The systems in Last Epoch were a bit overwhelming on first contact, but now that I understand what they're supposed to do I don't find them complicated. Again, Diablo does make it a point to stagger their systems much better so that its way easier for a new player to digest BUT does that matter on your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. character? No, you already know them by then and you can customize your journey. As far as stats go, I'm a strong believer in stats being IMPACTFUL (for at least 1 class/1 build) and INTUITIVE: - If the stat doesn't make a NOTICEABLE difference in damage or defence in at least 1 build then it should not exist. I also dislike the D4 stupidity of making pointless stat copies (damage to chilled/damage to frozen, damage reduction against close enemies/damage reduction against far away enemies, etc.). - It should be easy to understand the big picture of how the stat works (exact formula helps but it's usually enough to know that armor has a roughly linear/quadratic/etc. impact and if there are hard/soft caps. Hard no on bullshit like stacking armor gives resistances but stacking resistances actually results in a much lower resistance number being added to your stat sheet.
By trying to go beyond the Diablo customer base, they ended up missing both groups on the whole. Everyone has a "first time" playing Diablo. I started from someone else suggesting it. Same with LE and POE. A good game will do that.
Gaming companies the more they grow, the more they treat their customers like they are dumb idiots for some reason. Diablo 2 is one of the biggest games of all time and its really complex for its time.
@@bobbobb5759 Yeah because they are banking on the diablo 1 and 2 launches and the franchise got huge, they could release a turd named diablo it would still make money.
what did they miss exactly? sales wise its over 10m close to 15m now but the internet hates it so everyone needs to pretend this game was some sort of massive failure
@@Freestyle80Selling a lot doesnt make a game good. Look at oreos and chips ahoy, they are objectively lower quality than in house baked cookies and the price is comparable, but one sells more by virtue of marketing and brand name.
The only thing I don't like about diablo now a days is that you can't target farm unless it's from gambling. In many other looters you can target farm eventually even though there's still rng involved with getting what you want to drop finally. In diablo I spent 3hrs looking for a specific vampiric aspect to gear leap me from wt3 to wt4, and it took hours of just randomly looking. That in my opinion is the biggest issue. The stats work fine.
We can't make a quality game because we are not a quality dev team. We only know how to update our 25 year old MMO because we were actually good at developing 25 years ago.
A bit harsh to put all the blame on "the devs". There are a lot of people impacting a game's design, before the developer implements the features that designers and architects have decided upon. It's like blaming the construction worker for building a house that looks like something the cat threw up, when it was the architect who drew the house to look like that.
@rasmusmathiasjuuljakobsen2980 perhaps, but if a soccer team has low income and bad management and can't win games, what do you call them? I didn't say the devs are bad as individuals, I said the team was. Blizards only good game release since WoW was D2 resurected. Even D3 took years to fix and us still incomplete. They never put in the pvp arena that was loudly boasted and promised.
Good video! Now, what I would really like to see next is an indepth analysis of the design philosophy regards to the glyphs and paragonsystem in D4. Becouse now, after the season 4 patch ( which is quite good), the biggest problem in D4 is the paragon system and the glyphs. Its so bad and such a miss becouse it could and should be something totally different. Maybe more like a second skilltree that opens up after level 50? The whole system around NM-dungeons, paragonboard and glyphs needs a total revamp
Picking up every single item and analysing its every damage bucket stat (Close, Vulnerable, Overpower, Distant, Flat, Crit Rate/Damage, Cooldown Reduction, +Rank to Skill, item power etc) then all the variability in their rolls to discern whether said item has any real value at all wasn't in-depth or complexity. Having such low drop rates on "Uber Uniques" that players couldn't feasibly obtain one in their lifetime, let alone the one they actually wanted in the span of a Season, ensured that those items functionally did not exist. Every player understood it, and they understood it to be boring to the point of nausea and tedium in video game format.
I think opening up the complexity early on is a good thing. Even when its overwhelming it has a similar effect as seeing a difficult enemy and being able to conquer it over time and then having that sense of accomplishment when you start to use all the functionality that didnt make sense in the beginning.
When you try to appeal to everyone - you end up appealing to no one. Because there will always be a game that does every part of your wide-appeal game better by hyper specializing on that aspect. And there is no need on the market or demand by the customer for a game that does everything well when we have 15 games that do those things perfectly. The sooner the industry learns that the better. You are trying to cook a dish that is simultaneously a perfect breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snack AND a drink. And you end up with a repulsive slop and wonder "Why the hell nobody likes it? Why are they all eating steak over there? We have put steak in our dish too, right after the ice-cream and watermelon!"
I think the real trade-off here is budget vs target group size. As an example, PoE and D3 were definitely developed with the same audience in mind, fans of D2. For better or worse, we all know D2 is a simple game. The systems are more complex than those of D3, but by a very small margin. PoE, being developed by what was then a small studio (probably the same size as EHG, give or take 10%), could bank on developing a game for a more niche audience, due to the investment into it not being immense. D3 on the other hand, had a GIGANTIC³ budget, and therefore catering to a smaller audience became impossible, because a small audience of hardcore players could never pay back that investment. Fast forward to D4, and it suffers from the exact same problem. The budget for the game is beyond monstrous, if we assume it was 50 million dollars (and let's be real here, it was much more), Diablo 4's budget could supply some countries' entire GDP for 2023. The cost of a game, the equivalent of an entire nation's. Now imagine they cater that 50M to a very small subset of hardcore ARPG fans, the game would never pay for itself. It's unfortunate, but it's a reality of gaming nowadays, that the more expensive they get, the more homogeneized it has to be pay back it's dividends. And the more controlled the investments into a game are, the more it can be targetted to specific players looking for a particular experience.
He got some really good points. The only character that stuck with me from D3 is Cain. As in D2 as well together with many others like Charsi etc.. In Last Epoch none have stuck but i must say that in POE Einhar made me laugh when he said something like "This might come as a suprise, but the people in town dont like me very much". Lily Roth also stuck.
What's the point or fun in having BiS gear and killing everything instantly? The fun is you created a God and the fun is God mode. The real game begins when you have BiS gear and can do anything you want because you are a God. What about the journey after BiS gear and what you do as a Godly char? Personally I like games where I get to be Thanos and can snap my fingers and do anything. That is fun. More games should get you to where you can do that. It's fun to have super broken Godly characters that are immortal.
really recommend death must die, really fun game, its like a ARPG like poe with permanent gearing but u go into a session of fighting mobs/bosses for 20 min that gets harder and u gain powers when u lvl up
The largest problem of Blizzard is they don't make games for their players, they try to make games for people who don't give a shit about their games. It's not a difficult concept: they do it with WOW they do it with D4 they do it with everything they do. "We want the most number of people possible to play this, so we have to design something that anyone can play." I honestly don't think this is a bad goal, but the problem has never been "Too complicated, won't play", the problem is always "Game doesn't provide enough runway to understand it, won't play." Time and time and time again for the last 20 years I've heard Blizzard talk about how they dumb down the systems of their games to try to get more and more players...and it's just the wrong way to do it. First, at some point a person who doesn't understand the systems you are implementing in your game aren't people who play games. These people aren't going to randomly go to a program they don't install (steam, blizzard launcher, epic, whatever), install this program, then go find and buy your game just because...it exists? Because you've marketed it broadly enough? My wife (God love her) is not a gamer, and she's never been tempted by a WoW or Diablo marketing commercial to download a launcher, buy the game and play it...and she never will be. She is not a video game player, she has no interest in playing video games. Trying to design a video game that she can or wants to play is a fool's errand, there isn't a game, no matter how simple or extensive, that she wants to play. She isn't your audience, stop pandering to her. Secondly, "stupid easy" is an insult. Going back to my non-game playing wife, if she WERE to want to play a game (and she doesn't, your design, marketing, attempt to pander, attempt to design for, etc. all do not produce anything she wants to play because she does not want to play, and I cannot stress this highly enough), designing something that is not challenging or mentally complex is insulting and drives away people who find something intriguing. Many times she's come down stairs to my office, watched me level a WOW Character for a few minutes and asked "why do you play this? This looks boring, you're not DOING anything and nothing looks like it challenges you in any way?" Determining that the reason people don't want to play your game is because they're TOO DUMB to understand you is the height of hubris. Trust me, just because you work for Blizzard doesn't make you a SUPRA-GENIUS. The failure of a person to understand the complexity of your game is YOUR fault...introduce new systems slower with more clarity and design your UI/UX to help players understand the system and you don't HAVE to create a "more friendly" game. Gamers aren't stupid, non gamers aren't morons...people don't want your complex game because your game and your design SUCKS as teaching them how to play, not because they're just too dumb to learn. The failure is YOURS not OURS, quit blaming gamers for your failures. Lastly, how many more games are we going to get Blizzard devs get on RUclips and cry to the world about not being able to make? When Baldur's Gate III was the most popular game of the day Blizzard made sure to stand up publicly and explain just how impossible it would be for a AAA game company with 15 years of WOW money and a studio 10x the size of Larian to produce a playable game. "Oh God we can't produce BGIII, it can't be a new expectation in the market because AAA studios who care only for the financials of a video game can't get approvals to produce something like BGIII, it simply wouldn't make enough money, and thus it's impossible for Blizzard, a company with hundreds of millions more dollars than Larian ever had, to do so!" (Queue: "Think of the children" whine here) THINK OF THE INVESTORS!!! And here we are for the next episode of "you can't do that at Blizzard Entertainment" featuring Last Epoch a game so similar to Diablo that it feels like changing a few lines of code and a couple of images would get you there. Here, again, we have Blizzard Entertainment programmers dev-splaning how and why a company as large and talented as all of their devs say it is can't do something as simple as produce a good game that players like anymore. But it's ok folks, because it's actually our fault...I mean we all have phones right? You can't build Last Epoch because your parent company doesn't have the balls to build games for game players. They don't have the balls or the creative talent to design anything that is of enough complexity to hold players interest, and they hire people who's lack of UI/UX creates artificial complications such that the only option you have is to blame players for just being too dumb to understand you. The first step to correcting a problem is accepting there is a problem and that you are culpable in that problem. All we ever hear is how, to get more players, Blizzard has to design more generic, unplayable, and boring games...if their players just weren't so f***ing mouth breathing cousin humping dung throwing monkies, the geniuses could write in more than single syllable sentences for the idiot masses and people would enjoy their games. I'm here to tell you, the problem is you, not us, and until I hear a dev say "we can't make a game like Last Epoch because our company doesn't have the balls or the talent to make the game...we simply aren't talented enough to design clearly enough for players to understand the nonsense systems we think will make us the most money, and we don't have the risk acceptance in the company to make a unique product that people want to play but which might turn away a half dozen people in the process", your company is hopeless and a large portion of your prior gaming population - your prior fans - would like to see you go down in flames, entirely and completely. Quit trying to put lipstick on the pig. Activision cares only for profit and has no interest in or care about the people who provide that money. Your parent company wants to turn blizzard entertainment into candy crush and make wow players pay per death in micro transactions. You're a gatcha game producer in a AAA business suit. Of course you can't produce Last Epoch or anything else of interest because doing so requires spending money and time your parent company isn't willing to spend because it cuts into profits. You can't design Last Epoch because you're too damn busy spending your development hours designing your next real money in game currency obfuscation system to bilk the 10 players who will stay with your game long term of everything they can spend and hopefully snag a few hundred dollars off some poor dad's credit card through a system of hidden mathematics that your players can't understand. You can't make Last Epoch because you work for a company that has no interest in creating Last Epoch or anything else of entertainment value. Come to terms with that.
I love the skill system in LE so much... just the right level of complexity for a filthy casual with a lust for experimenting with builds. Now I wish we could frankenstein this onto the graphical and auditory fidelity and smooth, impactful gameplay of D4.
Honestly, after playing D4, Last Epoch's complexity was VERY digestable. There's not a lot of friction for changing up your build on the fly. You can completely switch your build by just loading up an exp echo, then visiting an NPC. The crafting is very intuitive as well so you can dive in easily without needing to know all the nuances. After about 200 hours in LE, now I PoE feels a lot less overwhelming to play.
Complexity just for complexity's sake can get tedious, but LE handles a pretty fair degree of it quite well. Trying to get into it, 'cause it hasn't quite hit the mark for me for some reason, but even after 30odd hours I've got a glimpse of what the game can offer in terms of customization. D4 reducing the number of useless stats and amplifying the not-inconsiderable number of useful ones is definitely a step in the right direction. Here's hoping it gets better, I want to like D4.
OK first off I wanna state, I applaud this man for being honest and making a video demonstrating what could have been and what was not done for developing a game.. so for that being said i wanna say a lot of what he said to be really upsetting... with the developing time and although the devs don't get the time or authority to implement what they think they should and it really comes down to the company to make broad decisions, This man really shines a light at a glaring issue. I wanna state he said we took the format of a older game and expanded on it and the time between diablo 2 to 3 was massive so why would they hinge everything the fact of replicating something on a older style of game play but do it worse? now i get there always a game for everyone and that casually something as a ARPG may be fun without taking into account the end game and endless progression but he stated they took the old model and just stuck with it... To me that scream laziness and that goes for diablo 4 too years and years with many other games to take inspiration and they are lost right at launch... you can not tell me they are the best devs to work with when they blindly made all the same mistakes that made diablo 3 so hated.. you could break the mold and be something and expand but instead you were so focused on longevity and money that anything to suit the live service model was more important then actual fun. All this statements about diablo 3 which he admits its colossal failures it took Years for people to just shrug of the stain that started with.. that's not good to be like oh now the state it is in what we were aiming for... I HATE this notion... that goes for d3 venturing into d4!! you saw the failures, you lived them and you even created some and yet the same company still struggling to find an identity for the game after YEARS AND YEARS of development.. Path of Exile has paved numerous roads and constantly fail and succeed but yet no other company cares to tread that water and its like why? its not copying, its not tasteless! we just want a solid game and for the price we pay it should FEEL COMPLETE!!! you can always expand on it and pave the road for expansions thus has been blizzards model but now it feels so soulless and dire and empty and desperate for anyone to stay within their game... Why is the biggest question I now reserve myself today that I constantly trust the companies i grew up with to deliver something promising and memorable but now i have to wait years after to release to get the slightest of dopamine highs... Nothing against this man and his honesty but him and his team are lazy and out of touch and lack everything a good team should do and that's reading the fucking market they are trying to fill.. its that simple... hindsight is always the great to say but its to late .. Also idk wtf he was on about skill responsiveness when he was showing us a player that just hitting mobs and trillions of damage was being done.. and nothing was dying.. WTF how is that fun? Anyways anyone that reads this cheers and i hope you enjoy all your games and im glad this guy did this but this puts a major spotlight on why games are so shit now and days.. they really did the bare minimum to understand the genre and they wanna recapture what was back then without understanding that players are so expansive..
Yeah, that part about people expecting to play Diablo 3 like it was Diablo 2 was funny after hearing it several times, because they were obviously allergic to everything that Diablo 2 was, so of course the way people would play D3 would be different.
Hard disagree on D4 not feeling as good D3 to play. The one thing that D4 does better than any other ARPG on the market is how it feels to play; the animations, the responsiveness. I've never had more fun or a more enjoyable time playing an arpg character than playing a fully leveled and kitted out charge/hota barb in S3. Content aside, just charging around and smashing enemies never felt better.
The end-game part is what worries me the most with some of these "lessons learned"... Blizzard made great games but also amazing stories and lore with Warcraft and Diablo. I hope they don't lose that ever, the amazing cinematics and lore was what made Blizzard games special. I'm 45 now and I remember taking the manuals with the maps and lore written in them and just looking at the art and reading them when I couldn't play (like at grandma's house and stuff) so please Blizzard don't just make games, make worlds where the games live. That's what made you great.
WOW Auction House > Last Epoch Merchant Guild The searching of both can be greatly improved especially in WOW. Many locations to trade all items works well. But being able to search is great in LE, but the market became flooded making it hard to get items.
I am playing D3 as we speak and as an avid gamer it is by far the game that I have played most in my life. As hard as he is on the game and himself, I actually LOVE the game that he created. Sure 10+ years later he can poke holes in it and compare it to a game that has greater evolved. But don't sell D3 short, it was a great game especially for its time and continued to get better. I actually loved the real money auction house. Anyway, great video for a great game.
Last Epoch skills are "complicated" but they are easy to understand. So you can read what they say and think of a way of slotting them into your jigsaw of the build you are thinking of. There are definitely interactions that you will discover through other people's findings or through experience, but most interactions are accessible, they are not hidden behind some trick you wouldn't know unless you extensively test or datamine something. For example Darktide has so many hidden mechanics, even though objectively it has simpler trees than Last Epoch, that it is easy to fall into a trap when selecting your talents. I know, different games, I am talking about a specific part of Last Epoch that other games have in common. Even though you get more talent trees per character than WOW Retail for example (I know they are different games), it is easier to predict whether something will belong to a build and will increase performance. Maybe part of this is also that less people work in groups in Last Epoch in this case, so if you run with something suboptimal, you are not affecting anyone else, so you are not getting flak. Anyway, LE really is not THAT complicated. Do I want my Smite to do void damage? I will go pick up the void talents. And then you pick up other things that enhance that damage. That's it. It won't be the case that the entirety of the tree presented to you will apply. Only part of it will and it is easily discernible.
I'd like to make a counter argument to all the players claiming the system of Last Epoch isn't complicated. For you and me, this is true. Because we play a lot of games. The vast majority of "gamers" are casual that plays a game 20-40 hours at max. They don't spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours, becoming an expert on the game and its mechanics. This is partially a reason why most games loses a big chunk of their playerbase the following months after launch. It's not because the game is bad (though that can help), but because players are done with the game. Most players don't read the forums, the Reddit, follow game content creators etc. They are blissfully unaware of most issues with a game. Think your parents trying to connect a printer, or resetting the router. That's an average gamer. Not the top 1% of grinders like us.
And that's why I like Diablo. Tons of people like Diablo for what it is, this doesn't make LE or POE better in essence, they're your preference. Making Diablo 4 into POE or LE is asking Blizzard to just have less players, and if you were in control of that, would you say yes to that?
@@StrongArmEntertainment Where in the world are you getting that. The numbers on LE and POE are nowhere near Diablo 4 numbers, GGG publishes their earnings, there's absolutely no way POE even compares to Diablo. There might be more hardcore players who play the other games regularly, but Diablo has way more players overall. Blizzard isn't doing anything desperate for the casual players. They have them, they're doing things for the hardcore players for the past 3 seasons.
This was an amazing video. I wish this guy was the spokesperson for Blizzard for Diablo 4. He buys so much goodwill by just being honest and explaining things so we understand the decisions of why this or that can't be in the game they put out. So refreshing.
maybe with the auction house they should of added bind once u buy the gear, and you have to max out a character each season before you can use the auction house.
With regard to expectations of purchase driving difficulty, this is why a currency in-game that has intrinsic use is so brilliant, people are more hesitant to use that currency as money, and might hold on to it for later, showing a deep understanding that no one cares about the acts of PoE once they stop being new, it's strange to see them take the view of completing a character in a game that intrinsically resets characters as a bad thing, it's bad in wow, it's good in a seasonal game
What I get from this is that like many game designers, blizzard gets stuck distinguishing between complexity, difficulty and transparency. And that very few of the lessons learned with d3 transferred to D4.
what drives me absolutely crazy when i hear "we wanted to bring more players into 'x' game, not just the same audience" is that the only reason the game was popular before is because you werent trying too hard to cater to a certain type of audience or make things too approachable. Diablo 2 was a fucking amazing game. It became THE game that defined the genre not because of anything it did differently than other games but because it was just a good game. Let your work speak for itself. Make a game that has complex mechanics and depth to its systems. If its a good game, people will flock to it and figure out the systems because they love to play it. If you dumb things down too much and make your old playerbase feel abandoned, you will lose them and thats when you really fail as a developer in my eyes. Imagine what diablo 3 and 4 could have been if they just expanded on the foundation that was laid out by D2 or even other games of the same genre moving forward. tl;dr is if the game is good enough, people will play it regardless of how complex it is, people will want to try it at least. Trying too hard to appeal to everyone is how you lose customers.
31:05 I think showing everything upfront makes the first play for the player mentally overloading. Players in ARPG try to optimise their decisions as they progress. Showing all the possibilities puts lot of pressure on the player to choose wisely at the beginning, when he just barely started playing. Eg. In D4 expertise and paragon board in not available for low level, because it doesn't have to, it doesn't matter for the player. However seeing the whole skill tree in PoE scares me (the time it needs to learn everything, so I can chose the optimal decision). Share the necessary info for the player and no more. I can write it further, but that would be too long. I think you get the point I'm thinking about. Edit: I watched it further, he basically explained the same thing.
People praised Last Epoch and shilled for the game so hard and now it stands at under 20k concurrent. You may not like it but the Diablo way of doing things is the better way. The sweats are playing POE, casuals are playing Diablo 4 and a few inbetween begrudged people are playing LE. Diablo knows what it's doing and I hope that the new systems added on the PTR won't deter people who played it casually to engage with the game. Complexity doesn't equate to being good, even more so from a financial perspective.
I think a core problem with D3 and D4 if that your power mostly comes from you gear instead of stats and skills. This leads to the perpetual grind nature of the games looking for perfect items. Going back to DnD, your gear was maybe 50% at really high levels and way lower for most of a campaign, so the focus is on developing your character. Diablo 1 & 2 were much closer to this. The gear didn't matter nearly as much. Obviously, this is intended to keep people playing, but it just cheapens the progression and leads to the balance issues D4 has had.
ARPGs are Loot hunting/Trading games and that is the End Game. I think D2 has the best End Game to this day. BoE(bind on pickup) have NO PLACE in a loot hunting trading game. You should be able to wear an item, drop it for a friend or trade it for insane amounts when you are done when you get an upgrade. I also think it's awesome if you find a priceless item and sell it for 1,000s of cash. I loved the RMAH in D3 and it was exciting to log in farm loot and sell it. That is amazing fun and captures the essence of what an ARPG is about. It's just fun to find an ultra rare item and it's actually worth something. ARPGs are successful when the loot matters and it's worth something. I quit D3 when they ruined trading. I still play D2 instead of D3-D4 when I want to play Diablo. Really enjoying LE now too.
2 uncomfortable truths online warriors refuse to accept: 1) Gaming is a business. Business is about growth. That you were part of the small group that put a game on the map does not matter in the grand scheme. Franchises can only go so far purely catering to 1 base. Growth is seen as necessary evil. One that creates jobs. Saves jobs. & ultimately keeps a lot of lights on in a lot places. It's not meant to be personal. It's just business. 2) (This is the bigger one imo)...despite what your favorite streamer would have you believe, your impact in being vocal does not have the impact you believe it does. Understand that most content creators live their lives in their own bubbles. With no sense of reality whatsoever. No matter how many different social media sites or forums you either post on or read at...what always appears to be a loud majority in reality is nothing more than a fly on a windshield. The big wigs & execs could not care less how angry you are in your feedback. If the numbers/data they see are telling them that you are being out voted...simply put, you are being out voted. There is no such thing as a dead game that continues to receive updates & content. No game is truly dead, until it is truly dead. & just because you &/or your favorite content creator decided a game wasn't worth your time...that does not mean the larger audience within said game also came to the same conclusion. Money decides all. It's something to keep in mind when hearing this dev share his insights on decision making. Simply put, if it's working, they will keep doing it. & no amount outrage over the internet is ever going to change that.
Because "seasons" didn't really exist back then. The closest thing to a "season" we had was ladder resets, and those were primarily done to wipe off hacked and duped items. I'm talking about Diablo 2 resets. Blizzard didn't think they would need "seasons" based on how Diablo 2 performed. They stopped innovating in the ARPG genre after LoD.
@@MrJramirex they didnt stop innovating.. they took 10 steps back. I enjoy d3 now days as a fun popcorn game, but as a arpg that is supposed to be a sequel to D2, its absolutely terrible. D4 at first i thought was pretty good, but once you spend enough time with it and you finish the campaign you start to realize how shallow and boring it really is and that they somehow took even more steps back from d3.
@@MrJramirex Primarily, maybe for the devs? For players it was a fresh start and 100% necessary aside from the small minority of people who wanted to play their NL characters forever. In fact a majority of the player base always leave until the next reset, it's been this way since D2 classic. Peaks and valleys. D3 needed the same thing from the start and was the perfect time to add Solo Self Found ladder which people had been asking for since Diablo 2 classic. File it with loot filters or any of the other dozen things we've asked for since CLASSIC.
@@MrJramirex Which is weird. A big reason D2 didn't continuously add more content was likely because a) at the time you could only make money by selling an expansion or a new game b) it was pretty difficult to patch in new content But you're right PoE is the one to popularize the idea of using seasons as a testing ground for new content and events. I remember them being pitched more as a way to experience new content before it would go to standard rather than a unique standalone event. Again Blizzard is learning the wrong lesson from other games since they don't truly add back the events from the seasons.
D3 and D4 seem to have historically suffered from a lack of cohesive vision from the team leadership, which is why they're kind of a hodgepodge of shallow, oversimplified systems that don't work well together and don't feel very satisfying to use. Or in the case of D3, pursuing something like the auction house with apparently nobody in a position of authority who was able to think through any of the implications or problems. I think D4 leadership was very volatile over the years and would be one contributing factor as to why they had no vision to adhere to. You can only hope the current leadership sticks around long enough to rework the game per some sort of cohesive image. But it's going to take a couple expansions, and I'm not sure they'll stick around that long.
live daily: www.twitch.tv/darthmicrotransaction
OG Video Diablo dev on blizzard: ruclips.net/video/Qyk_V5xN9ZQ/видео.htmlsi=bOUPTh2MoZs73Dp9
Hi DM, have you checked Chris Wilson's GDC talk back in 2018? How Path of Exile Is meant to be played forever.
James Hong voiced Covetous Shen, Chi-Fu from Mulan and Sr. Ping from Kung Fu Panda (David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China) this man is a legend.
Best quote i've heard so far is
"a Game for everyone is a Game for no one."
-Arrowhead studios
It's even better if you know about Aristotle's quote that inspired it: "a friend to all is a friend to none"
to be fair, Arrowhead made a bunch of shit games before Helldivers 2 so they only know that from experience and fucking customers for years LOL
@@TraceofHatred Eh. Outside of Gauntlet every one of their games has been a lot of fun. I still play co-op magicka once in a while
@@amafi_poe Respectfully disagree, but it's funny you mention Gauntlet since it was specifically handled in an extremely anti-consumer fashion. The game was a revamp of an extremely well known, huge IP which they capitalized on to draw in players, only to drastically cut down the amount of content that was promised, release a paid DLC, and then abandon the game within less than a year.
The problem with D4 wasn't because it was overwhelmingly complicated. Everyone knew what stats added survivability and damage. The problem was that most D4 stats was overwhelmingly useless for your character. The pool of stats was so large that people had to sometimes accept sub-sub-optimal gear that only worked under specific conditions. It wasn't complex, it was tedious.
Exactly this, it wasnt that D4 was too complex and they had to shrink them..its that alot of the stats they had in the game were just filler stats that did nothing and didnt need to exist and thats why they cut them.
The “damage bucket” system and their damage calculation on launch was extremely flawed. I found a Reddit post or a forum post that was posted during open beta that literally laid out exactly what was going to happen. That crit and vulnerability were going to be the only builds that would function at a high level.
@@madhatten5123 Any time you have a 20+ additive stats in one bucket and one or two in another, the second bucket will always be more valuable because it's a separate damage multiplier. How they didn't think this was a problem is beyond me.
@@dizk8488 exactly. It was really funny reading that post after the fact and seeing that the dude was exactly right.
is it just me that feels as though all of the skills are just not fun, never mind stats just sheer builds are boring, then i'm expected to be remaking characters every season, when i'm just repeating boring skills and classes.
this is the first time i've heard a D3 dev has actually said the auction house *did* impact how they tuned and designed things. This has been something blizzard devs have denied in the past.
"We're not looking for gamers, we're looking for money" is how this whole thing sounds
Believe it or not. Some people have more Money than Time
It's not really up to them. Its a publicly traded company in a capitalistic nation. You think game devs get to tell the people who fund them that they get to do whatever they want and they should go kick rocks?
@@gringoboy701 lol
@@kevinfinnerty8414 poe can be played casually. and its 100% more fun that d4 or le
@@DeputyFish but its not for everyone. I did not enjoy the systems of poe and left it. Diablo and LE feel better to me
Confusing "in depth" with "wildly complicated" is the biggest sin here.
Yep i really dislike that term and i get worried when i hear devs talk about "complicated" when it comes to POE and even LE. It is not complicated, it is as you say very in-depth. Huge difference, but relateable.
@@RhebelGaming POE is not very in depth, when you choose a build there's one road and that road is extremely broken and bloated
Yeah. D4 is moderately complex and extremely shallow. Last Epoch is moderately complex and moderately deep. PoE is extremely complex and extremely deep.
@@RhebelGaming you are right, i would not call PoE complicated as well, i would call it "convoluted in many places without any reason"
@@RhebelGamingPOE needs a PhD to work. That thing is as complicated as my daily job, that does not make sense. If I want to play a game as complicated as my job, I will just go and work and make more money.
Thanks for checking it out mate.
hey man great video, if you ever want to chat please hit me up. thanks for the background information was very interesting
eyyyy my man is here
Considering you do some for other games like helldivers... is there a chance you'd do "why we couldn't make Path Of Exile" talks too? lol that be fun to see your perspective on that game vs diablo.
Thee need to become an advisor to the Diablo 4 developers so that they do not repeat the same mistakes :)
@@dmdiablo4 thanks mate. Might do a video about my time on WoW at some point. See how i feel about it.
Diablo 4 didn't feel complicated to offer flexibility. It felt complicated for the sake of being complicated. The nonsense of stats that only did something when 3 different obscure conditions were met was just bloat to give the affix pool more things to randomly choose from. +2.5% damage when attacking an enemy wearing a tuxedo but only if the moon was full and you were indoors.
That's a perfect summary of it all
*"More damage to frozen enemies that are moving"*
"More damage to your mom on the weekend mornings while she's burning and frozen and your dad comes back from the convenience store"
@@SilversTaurus A Frostylaroo fan i see
It's crazy they focused so much on how complex or simple the systems of the RPG elements of the game were instead of making the game more approachable in other ways such as types of content or ways to learn those said systems...
CEO/investors want more money -> need more customers -> try to make a game that appeals to everyone -> make a generic game w/ uninspired design that doesn't heavily appeal to anybody
kinda what i was expecting tbh; typical corporate blizz 🤑🤑🤑
It's more like this: passionate gamer devs which want to create a good game were replaced with DEI hires with bare minimum requirements. -> passionate gamer devs can't make changes / influence the game they create anymore since the teams got way to big and now they have to "babysit" the DEI and contractors which makes them burn out -> more DEI hires and contractors until no more passionate people are left just people which view it as a job and couldn't care less what they create.
Many DEI hires only care about spreading their political idiology which in turn make the game more Woke and therefore increases the companys ESG score the same with DEI hires.
Big ESG money but in the long run your company can't create good games anymore since the "heart" got replaced with something souless. This happened in the last 10 years and it reaches way beyond gaming.
@@KazaiTVWhat a load of bull crap. As much as dei hiring is stupid and unfair the problem with blizzard games boils down to greed and the fetish for increasing shareholder value as the parent comment states.
@@qdlaty23 exactly they don't care about the consumer at all. For example Blizzard was under fire for shit that arose in the ow 2 dev team so they made 2 characters gay and suddenly what controversy? It blew over so quickly it was hilarious how snowflaked and simple minded people are to think a mega corp actually cares about them
its called DEI and diversity. they are hiring bozo clowns in the name of diversity. they need to hire the best people.
You’re delusional 🤣
Darth is wrong that people wanted less complicated stats in D4. No, they wanted to get rid of stats that didn’t doing anything and were just filler and ended up diluting the stat pool. By all means have a complicated stat system but when 99% of the player base won’t ever use that specific stat it’s time to rethink your stat design.
100% agree and was surprised he didn't catch that point. Damage vs far and damage vs close. How stupid. Those aren't stats lol they are artificial filler.
People want "double damage on Tuesdays" type stats, they also need to be able to make 5 days out of the week Tuesday for a game to succeed.
@@JHeezy0109 That is such an apt analogy. Nicely put.
It definitely is something thats a bit of a regret, after playing Last Epoch, while it isn't complicated by any means, the customization with just a small bit of extra systems is wild compared to D4's current state.
building* customization is mid as of right now, half of the gear is ugly or looks the same as something else, even some high end loot like uniques look terrible
Blizzard just need poo poo brain peoples in their games, to farm some money from them.
@@Reezico we are comparing it to diablo 4, you should do the same
@@Reezico Build diversity > shiny.
Only the low IQ think shiny is better.
@@erastalohh… so comparing a game that’s been out for over five years to one less than a quarter of that time? I love LE, but gathering data for appropriate criticism and comparison is important otherwise it’s erroneous and hypocritical. Was the crafting system in LE the same now as it was at launch? Nope, took 3.5 years after the game came out to update crafting to what it is now.
All this institutional knowledge and experience learned from Diablo 3, and yet Blizzard utilized mone of it for Diablo 4's development. Likely because Blizzard prioritized shareholder profits rather than its employees. Its no secret that the Diablo 4 dev team basically started from scratch, and it's clear no one on the team were around to learn the lessons of Diablo 3. Imagine how much better Diablo 4's launch would have been, had Blizzard kept these people on and learned from the mistakes made during Diablo 3's development.
Blizzard rushed the launch of D3 and D4. Last epoch was in testing for years, beta was 2019 and it just fully launched now, nearly 5 years later. If you gave that much time to a blizzard team, they'd have a pretty good and polished product as well.
I’m that player who does not care about an auction house. I don’t trade at usually. Love that LE supports me in that.
Why do games NEED a broader audience? That's how you get homogenized bland gameplay. It's about the money. Companies should be making games they want to play, not what everyone else wants to play. That's why EHG, GGG, and Fromsoft to a greater spectrum, retain their audience and that's why they get such high praises within the gaming community. (Fromsoft being the highest of praise from the ones I mentioned.)
The guy said that the diablo audience is too small
@@kevinsims5791 I'd prefer a small audience than no audience.
@@theknave69 i dont think there is a no audience. D3 still got seasons even after d4 launched. Shareholders dont want a small audience.
These broad appeal games are genre building. PoE never gets made without D2. D2 doesn't get made without D1. Could you imagine if PoE released to an audience without D2? It'd be a colossal failure. As this designer mentioned, make it too complicated and players just bounce off - which already happens to PoE to a large extent.
@@dirtypawse having a smaller audience for a way bigger budget game is also not sustainable. Bigger budget games need a bigger audience to be successful.
The trick of last epoch system is that it is super complicated, but the respec system, skill leveling, etc is super forgiving. Coupled with fully customizable loot filters and the trade system you can freely experiment with rapid feedback which makes the skillup on the systems easier and more intuitive
Super complicated? C'mon, man! We all know what is what and what it is you have to do in an ARPG like Diablo. It's not like there are a ton of gamers out there that never played a Diablo game or Diablo clone game and got now into ARPGs with Diablo 4. What they are saying about it that it is for a broader audience is our fault, we the gamers said that and they took it and use it as a scapegoat for everything they did wrong in D4. Compared to POE, which I had years in not playing before I started at least trying, LE is not complicated AT ALL, the story is good and different than Diablo and POE, is something new with the ERAS.. Even if you play it from the perspective of a guy with 2 hours of gameplay in 3 days of the week, because of job and family, it is not complicated at all. And I speak from experience. I have a family and a job, I maybe, just MAYBE, play a game with 2 or 3 hour a day, 2 or 3 days a week, so I am not a gamer that plays hours upon upors of a game and I reached the monoliths endgame with a decent character and items in LE. This game has a faster learning curve than POE, which took me years to like and try. Compared to D4? There is not comparison. Diablo took the mobile route with Diablo Immortal and now they expanded on that idea with D4. And funny thing is now there are on mobile, even better ARPGs than both these Diablo games.
@@ScarlettSpitfyre I think LE is more complicated than PoE (at least in character building). Just looking mechanic by mechanic it's incredibly in-depth. Its presentation makes it approachable. PoE is also very deep, the difference is the presentation is unapproachable. The learning curve difference isn't because of complexity, it's presentation. I would challenge you to find anything in PoE that resembles the complexities of an LE Rune Master. Nearly every spell can change its elemental type (which of course you can do with gems in PoE) - but - the order in which you cast them enables one of 46 other combo spells - unless you have another talent that fixes the combo'd spell to the first three elements on your action bar - which is another variant all together. And then you're building synergies across 8 different skill trees. That's 1/15 classes that are unequivocally more complex than anything outside of a ward loop. I struggle to find ANYTHING in PoE that doesn't have a nearly identical comparison in LE. Strength stacking, int stacking, cast on hit, cast on crit, element shifting, dots, minions (which LE does WAAAY better), trading (also way better in LE). I came up with crafting and vendor recipes.
So, I'd be curious to hear where you think PoE has this hidden complexity.
Edit: I also think PoE is a better game, it feels better, it plays better, and the endgame is way more fleshed out. I only argue that it's less complex than people are making it out to be. The complexity is in presentation.
You can play LE just beelining down a few trees and get to end game. Definitely not complicated but does give you a lot more choices than one beeline D4 provides. If you think LE is complicated, then what is PoE?
@dirtypawse I played Runemaster and just focused on everything fire- very simple. You can go down "complicated" paths or you can do simpler things. It's complicated if you want to make it complicated but a casual can just as easily pick up the game and play without needing to understand it all. Definitely Blizzard wants to protect their image by saying LE is complicated lol. Diablo is also complicated if you bust out the spreadsheet 🤦
@@rogerh2694 You just described PoE, too. Unless you really think building resists is a super complicated game loop. PoE is more challenging, but, challenging != complexity.
I've already said PoE is not complex it's obfuscated.
This whole thing is a masterclass in business management and design vision. Maybe my favorite video to date. Thanks!
6:35 I think the favourable change for D4 items to a more simple is not that the original system was too complex, but that it lacked impact. it is better to have less choices that have far more impact of those choices, than complexity for the sake of complexity if they don't do much or anything.
It seems like problem is that they could only imagine complexity as being a POE type situation where there are hard build-craft failure states. They didn’t imaging a LE situation where you could recover from a bad choice without too much friction.
It's not just the ability to recover, it's also less overwhelming. The skill trees for LE add enormous complexity and player choice (when done well, not all the trees are), but feel very approachable.
By breaking down the complexity into pieces that can each be held in your mind in their entirety, it makes it much easier to grasp.
LE is not a complex game.
@@ener11454 its not a simple game either. compare it to the OG, Diablo 2, which is a fair comparison since its what everyone compares future ARPGs to. its far, far more complicated when it comes to builds.
@@Fest_ This is a good thing imo, LE has hit the sweet spot where it has plenty of depth without being complex. Skill trees are intuitive and the game has a great built in guide. You don't need to spend 10 hours in PoB, you can just run your build and it generally works.
Their LE situation was Diablo 3. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me once, there ain't no more fooling after that.
While I didn’t find LE’s skill System too complicated, my more casual friends took a good bit more time to understand it, for example, why they weren’t doing enough damage. The nice thing is that LE doesn’t punish them for learning, which allows them to grow at their own pace, which is great.
Man, when he described the mindset of a D2 player I was like yep that's me 100%. Probably why D2 is my favourite diablo. I am deffinately more of the type of player to go find better gear to overcome the challenge. I find myself doing that in PoE a lot aswell. Especially in affliction I remember farming mana reservation charms to solve my mana problems before going to red tier maps.
I believe going for a D2 approach would have been better. At least in some aspects.
my fav part of poe is just farming dank drops i can sell so i can buy dank items for myself.
That's why most people don't care that much about PoE, especially any time that someone wants to say that its a hard game. Because you can just outgear the crap out of any challenge. Plenty of Diablo players would actually try to beat the challenge instead of run away and look for more powerful gear to breeze through that challenge.
That's what games need more instead of just "outgear that shit and make it a 10 seconds burst fight". There is the normal gearing to match the power of the challenge and there is outgearing the hell out of it.
All the talking about the Echo of Lilith fight being super hard and only for the best went away when it was possible to just outgear that shit into a 10 seconds spam one skill fight.
@@CRVSE I think in terms of PoE that's the point though. Due to the depths of the builds, the challenge comes from farming & crafting the gear that works for that build. You can't out-skill mana-reservation problems lol. The skill comes from being able to put your build together in a way that can overcome the fights that you get into. Sometimes that's being able to just barely beat it without dying, or in extreme cases if you have enough skill to make your build good enough, makes them 10 seconds.
@@CRVSE what are you talking about? You can’t outgear and outlevel in PoE. It just doesn't work like that. The gear you're talking bout is 99% one that someone spent hours to craft, divines to earn it or grind the juice to craf it. You have to actually plan a good build to defeat pinnacle bosses and a good farm strategy to grind the currency to make that build possible. Obviously, there are people who can afk Uber Shaper in 20sec, but these players are OUTLIERS spending 10h a day to play the game.
The problem the Diablo IV team was getting after was not the complexity of the stats and simplification to the stat system, it was that too many stats were CONDITIONAL. A wider set of stats to create more unique builds and creativity would be great, the difference between D4 stat system and good stat systems is stats should create permanent and constant upgrades in the direction you want your character to go. If I want a frost (insert class here) frost damage, freeze chance, damage to frozen, etc all build off each other where “Chance to do more frost damage to enemies on Tuesday with a 10% chance to freeze on Wednesday” feels bad.
Now add in the fact that everything has to scale off of weapon damage because those specified stats don't exist and you have mages shooting fireballs with a two handed sword. Or like I was doing in D3 a witch doctor with whatever the strongest two-hander is at the time.
Then oh no, dust devil does no damage because there's no way to scale these numbers. Well I guess the solution is to make it scale with weapon damage because the entire game revolves around this one stat.
My favorite thing about last epch is the offline mode
"level of complexity" is a matter of perspective. If you aren't used to the systems, it'll be complex. How complex is our game = Who are we expecting to play the game
Soon after the launch of D3 I remember feeling like D3 wasnt even in the same franchise. They took all the complexity out of D2, watered down nearly every mechanic in the game, made the graphics cartoony and colorful, removed the classic skill tree and made the game piss easy all in an attempt to widen the potential audience. And they continued with D4. "we made the game for dummies so more people could play" Am I supposed to applaud or something? At least I feel vindicated. After the terrible D4 launch, I played PoE for the first time and wanted to punch myself for not playing it sooner. Within 30mins of playing I realized this was the successor to D2 I had been waiting for for 15+ years. Now im enjoying Last Epoch. Too little too late Blizz, Poe 2 will come around and id be surprised if people dont forget D4 existed. Id say let this be a lesson for the future but the AAA industry has been a hollowed corpse for 5-8 years. Its weird they keep pushing for live service games with years of incoming content but cater gameplay to the kinds of people who play video games for 1 hour a week.
As someone who played Diablo 2 for thousands of hours, I don’t get saying Diablo 4 is made for simpletons or is easy mode. Diablo 2 is basic and simple AF. My main was a sorceress and went from spamming firewall to spamming frozen orb.
I’m leveling a Druid right now. I’m using 8 buttons pretty regularly. In Diablo 2 it was like one button. 🤣
How was Diablo 4 launch terrible? There were millions of people playing at the same time on multiple platforms and it worked fine. The first campaign walkthrough and exploration was absolutely amazing, one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. The last time I had this feeling was back in 2015 when Witcher 3 launched. And I say this as a long, long time D2 veteran and currently a D2R player.
Now, the endgame sucks ass, but I am sure they will improve it in Vessel of Hatred and season 4.
PoE has definitely some interesting systems and solutions, but calling it a D2 successor is a blasphemy, please. It has players looking like walking christmas trees with faerie wings and ten thousands auras like in a cheap korean mmo. It has not much in common with Diablo. PoE 2 will be no different, because it will be free to play.
My biggest problem with Last Epoch is that the game fails to keep me in party chat.
I disagree with his opinion on complexity. LE is not POE. It really isnt that complicated. Its just not as shallow as a puddle, like D3. It goes to show how the direction of a game is directly affect by those who are leading.
This is a great Dev insight video. I wish we had more of this stuff across the board. The only conclusion that I can come up with is the NDA expired or Blizzard is going to destroy this guy for speaking so plainly.
I think the normal gold AH in D3 was fine. the problem was that drop rates were so abysmal your only chance of getting new gear felt like going to the AH. with reaper of souls, they fixed the drop rates but then they also removed the AH which would have been fine at that point.
An arpg without trading can't have properly rare items, since you'd never find them, and if it does like D4 did it's like they don't exist, like shako in season 1.
Trade and meaningful loot can never exist because either you make the loot too hard which facilitates trade and kills the base gamefeel ... Or you make it easier and there's no need to trade and trade dies
So separating it was the best thing
The drop rate wasn't low. The problem is the the AH is just an infinitely better way to get gear, because of how markets works.
I always wondered how much money Blizzard made putting items on their own auction house. The drop rates with perfect rolls were so bad I swear Blizzard had to be selling made items.
The biggest issue was rampant gold and item inflation, anything under god roll was worthless. Also everyone was chasing the same like 8 pieces of gear.
Wow I remember when this first came out and the wasps in act 2 owned me so hard and inwas like wtf, even the running out of money for repairs wow that brought me back. So cool to hear I wasn't insane or just sucked super bad
Same.. wasps and those jumping things right at the start of the act!
@@grantpatterson6436 yep
the last few minutes absolutely confirmed the backdoor insults!!!!
Last Epoch was on my wishlist. But after watching the gameplay and graphics here I am rethinking that. It looks dirtier than POE1, which is shocking. Interesting to hear thoughts from a developer though.
I try 3 characters and I just got bored before I maxed each one 🤷♂️
D3 story: purple butterfly kills beloved character in totally unemotional and valueless scene
D3 story doesn’t deserve credibility after that..
Oh i was SO MAD Back in the day when it Came Out and i played it the First time. What a piece of Shit of a Game it was.
A disgrace to the IP
Nah thats Not the Story its just one scene. The Story is good, pretty much the best of any arpg, together with D2.
Meanwhile Last epoch Story: someone tries to destroy the world? Or rule it? I dont even know. U just Jump between epochs and kill everything? No idea why, just confusing imo. And thats After leveling multiple chars. Amazing story there.
@@AIunstoppable just for completeness: I didn’t say LE story was better 🙂
@@Steph1 I would say it is better than base D3. It isn't great but it is serviceable (and imo I preferred parts of the beta/early access versions of LE's story to the launch version). Base D3 was actively bad.
"the end game is an ever moving target" is the definition of what's wrong with current development style.
They work hard to create a hamster wheel for you to run on, assuming that's what people want. But people only enjoy the journey and effort if they can see themselves finishing it, get to their goal.
Once it's "ever moving" there is no fun in the endless chase.
Developers need to change to a mentality of: achievable, final, goal. Where the fun comes from the journey. The 'end game' should not be the most important part, but rather a small treat you get to emphasize the journey.
People should play a game and finish it. And if the experience was fun they will remember it fondly. They will also be more inclined to buy the next expansion/game from that developer. Hell, they will probably be more inclined to buy some micro-transactions.
I recently went back to play D3 and I really enjoyed it. The Monk is still my favorite ARPG toon in any game. I haven't played other games where you can grab everything around you, drag them to you, then detonate around you. I found it unique and very fun.
Crafting is one of the reasons RUNEWORDS in D2 were so fun and popular and many players wanted them to come back in both D3 and D4, it also gave purpose to "Junk" items because there were used as BASES
If the game is good, people will put in the effort to learn it.
Or in my case, out in the effort to search the Internet for a build, lol.
As a casual player the things that resonated most was when he mentioned how players played by trying the content again rather then to go to a lower level to upgrade, and how important should the skills/movement feel in the battle and shouldn’t feel any bit clungy. I am also surprised how developers like him wasn’t brought back to consult on D4 😅😅😅, felt like D4 had to relearn quite abit.
This diablo dev was super honest and clarified a lot about game design. D3 gets so much hate because it is actually one of the most loved games of the decade.
min 14 here: on the auction section the point is not that the auction house was like "cheating". The problem there is that the itemization was crap. If you have a crap itemization the auction house feel like renting and then swap when you are bored.
One thing to consider is how open early access development shaped last epoch. They allowed the players to submit ideas, 100k heads are better than 100.
This is why i think early access is very beneficial and important to the gaming community, it almost always ends up a better game, as long as everyone is communicating and devs are listening
The number one problem that happened to Diablo 3 was Jay Wilson, he WoW-ified Diablo.
daiblo holds ur hand. and there is always one meta not more than one. its a nightmare.
I fully disagree with his point at 30:30
He paints it as Last Epoch dropping all of its systems on you the second you log in, but if we break it down, you don't unlock passives until level 2, and even then while there is a lot of raw information, your masteries are locked, so you have a trinary choice of where to put a single passive. One of three places. Next, you don't get access to your skill customization until level 5, by that point you've put 4 passives into one screen, so you know how passives work.
And you don't get introduced to Crafting until you're in chapter 2, even then you're not outright told in an MSQ to interact with the crafting until you get to the camp in the imerial era in (I think) chapter 3, hours into the game.
I think his point about LE dumping all of its info on you at the start is disingenuous, and speaks more to how *HE* played the game (testing his keybinds on the first screen and seeing all the info pop up) than how the game presents it to you.
Honestly, I played D1 and D2 as a kid and I was the type of player back then that killed the end bosses on the first couple of difficulties and then moved onto other games. D3 for me was a game I played casually most seasons and I found myself coming back over and over. I even considered going back to play it when D4 came out but instead played LE and POE. I enjoyed how casual friendly D3 was.
he didn't even touch on the fact that the RMAH is what they used to require you to be online to play - where outside of RL friends I never played d1 or d2 with other people - yes there was a large online community - but some of us were happy running private games with friends/family without needing to be always online. It's amazing how one system had so many bad feels moments tied to it.
It’s very confusing that everyone thinks he worked on D4. I’m pretty sure Andrew Chambers only worked on D3 as such the context of this video has less to do with D4
I had to chuckle at his comments about enemy factions being some kind of brilliant new idea they came up with. Text MUDs had that in the early 1990s. D&D itself had that in the late 1970's. If the designers had been gamers, rather than smart people doing game design in their bunker, they'd have found many of their innovations had already been done before.
"We can't make Last Epoch, because dads and average Joes prefer simple entertainment". All the rest is just insignificant bullshit, everyone with half a brain knows why they didn't make the second LE or PoE. Depth in ARPGs is not what they were/are going for, and D3 was clearly made with console Andies in mind to sell as many copies as possible to casuals, which he pretty much confirmed at the beginning of this video by saying they wanted to reach broader audience and get "new" players to the game. D4 is just a continuation of this, sadly but not surprisingly. I am very curious about D5 and how braindead it will be, lol.
The issue for me is not even about how complicated or deep an ARGP is. I can easily enjoy something simple, but it needs to be good and this is where D4 failed in about every way.
Diablo 2 also wasn't that deep honestly. Not even after they added synergies. But the game was super fun and innovative back then. D4 has nothing of that. It has like no build variety, at all. It's itemization is utter garbage (lets wait and see if that actually changes with S4 but I only believe when I see it). The endgame is one of the worst I have seen across all ARPGs I have ever played and I played a lot of them.
And on top of all that, theg ame was in an abysall state on release, like resists not working.
I have 5 characters maxed in d3. I can’t get to max in LE before I get bored.
The Rune system for Diablo 3 was actually included in the pre-release demo of the game that I got to play. It not being included in the finished game and instead replaced with fixed progression is one of the main reasons why Diablo 3 was the last Blizzard game I ever bought - what was even the point of the demo if the finished product doesn't play anything like the demo?
Simplicity brings you players on release
Complexity makes you game relevant for years to come
For me, the biggest issue with diablo as it stands now, if that they only scale the numbers (greater affixes/ancients/primal/blabla). Make it just a case of "number goes up because %dmg goes up"
PoE/LE have horizontal ways to scale the damage (extra hit, extra curse, slow action speed, etc etc etc), which means that you have inventive and innovative ways to scale damage by combining elements.
Not just looking for a slightly better version of an item you already have to hit a monster that has slightly more hp slightly more efficiently.
LE's real win re:Complexity is that it doesn't punish you for 'bad' choices. You're only ever locked into a subclass. Every other choice you make can be undone. Yes it is 'complex' bit that complexity isn't a barrier to entry, it's an arena for exploration.
I think the designer was right on the runes not being an item with variation to chase and he's wrong to regret it, aspects are exactly that in D4 and it's trash that do take all your inventory space and the new itemization aim to kind of fix that with the codex. Being able to changes runes in D3 was great for trying different things or adapting depending on what sets/legendary items you find.
They could have had a similar support gem system like with PoE instead. The issue was that there were 7 tiers of each one for each skill. Instead of looking at it as a tool for a build they looked at it as chase items to bloat the drop pool. That was the mistake. Build tools/skill functionality should not be chase items unless it's a unique or single endgame glyph.
The other issue is that each glyph was unique to the specific skill. Instead of making a support that affects all projectile skills, they ended up making hundreds of unique effects. (just like the current aspect system in D4) The same glyph that made a fireball create 3 fireballs could have also made an axe throw launch three axes. But they didn't do that... And D4 still isn't doing that either with their item rework.
Yeah, I would argue that the Gem System of PoE is the rune system that D3 abandoned.
every time i hear people use the terms "complicated" and "overwhemling" for game systems i just face palm. They are always straight forward. Like if you can cross the road with out getting hit by a car you can figure out a game system in a few min. Games really are not that complicated, the only time something is complicated is when there is no description of something that has a shit icon but comes down to proper UI and explanation - not complexity really.
I don't think the problem with D4 stats was that it was too complicated, it's that there was way too much stuff that had ludicrous requirements that made it the stat only come into play 5% of the time or less for most players
I feel like this guy is coping hard when he says "that's why D3 was as successful as it was". If you mean did it make you money then sure, if you mean was it a respected and beloved game that will stand the test of time then he is 100% wrong. In fact, D3 was so bad that it inspired people to make their own, considerably better ARPGs (PoE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn).
I also take issue with his "larger audience" comments. The reason Diablo games have the audience they do is on the strength of D1 & D2, NOT because devs dumbed it down for mass appeal (and in fact in many situations they did the exact opposite by tuning the difficulty very high, especially in the "we doubled it" episode of D3). I think it's very obvious from the big successes of the past 2 years that it's quite important for a game to have its own distinct flavor and if the game stays true to that without excessive bullshit added on top, then success will follow (Hogwarts Legacy, Palworld, Helldivers).
That being said, the dev is mostly correct in the points he's making, but the strengths of D3 / weaknesses of Last Epoch matter ONLY on the first playthrough and then become irrelevant:
- I intensely disliked the story in Last Epoch (at least until the ending part when Heorot is killed, after that I enjoyed it, it became more narratively cohesive). However, will I care about this on my 2nd, 3rd, etc. character? No, I'll just power level for a while then go to monoliths. Same with D3/D4, no matter how good the story is, there's only so much enjoyment that you can get out of it before it becomes repetitive.
- The systems in Last Epoch were a bit overwhelming on first contact, but now that I understand what they're supposed to do I don't find them complicated. Again, Diablo does make it a point to stagger their systems much better so that its way easier for a new player to digest BUT does that matter on your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. character? No, you already know them by then and you can customize your journey.
As far as stats go, I'm a strong believer in stats being IMPACTFUL (for at least 1 class/1 build) and INTUITIVE:
- If the stat doesn't make a NOTICEABLE difference in damage or defence in at least 1 build then it should not exist. I also dislike the D4 stupidity of making pointless stat copies (damage to chilled/damage to frozen, damage reduction against close enemies/damage reduction against far away enemies, etc.).
- It should be easy to understand the big picture of how the stat works (exact formula helps but it's usually enough to know that armor has a roughly linear/quadratic/etc. impact and if there are hard/soft caps. Hard no on bullshit like stacking armor gives resistances but stacking resistances actually results in a much lower resistance number being added to your stat sheet.
By trying to go beyond the Diablo customer base, they ended up missing both groups on the whole. Everyone has a "first time" playing Diablo. I started from someone else suggesting it. Same with LE and POE. A good game will do that.
Well no....they made more $ than POE or LE combined will ever make. and that was their goal.
Gaming companies the more they grow, the more they treat their customers like they are dumb idiots for some reason. Diablo 2 is one of the biggest games of all time and its really complex for its time.
@@bobbobb5759 Yeah because they are banking on the diablo 1 and 2 launches and the franchise got huge, they could release a turd named diablo it would still make money.
what did they miss exactly? sales wise its over 10m close to 15m now
but the internet hates it so everyone needs to pretend this game was some sort of massive failure
@@Freestyle80Selling a lot doesnt make a game good. Look at oreos and chips ahoy, they are objectively lower quality than in house baked cookies and the price is comparable, but one sells more by virtue of marketing and brand name.
The only thing I don't like about diablo now a days is that you can't target farm unless it's from gambling. In many other looters you can target farm eventually even though there's still rng involved with getting what you want to drop finally. In diablo I spent 3hrs looking for a specific vampiric aspect to gear leap me from wt3 to wt4, and it took hours of just randomly looking. That in my opinion is the biggest issue. The stats work fine.
We can't make a quality game because we are not a quality dev team. We only know how to update our 25 year old MMO because we were actually good at developing 25 years ago.
A bit harsh to put all the blame on "the devs". There are a lot of people impacting a game's design, before the developer implements the features that designers and architects have decided upon.
It's like blaming the construction worker for building a house that looks like something the cat threw up, when it was the architect who drew the house to look like that.
@rasmusmathiasjuuljakobsen2980 perhaps, but if a soccer team has low income and bad management and can't win games, what do you call them?
I didn't say the devs are bad as individuals, I said the team was. Blizards only good game release since WoW was D2 resurected. Even D3 took years to fix and us still incomplete. They never put in the pvp arena that was loudly boasted and promised.
Good video! Now, what I would really like to see next is an indepth analysis of the design philosophy regards to the glyphs and paragonsystem in D4. Becouse now, after the season 4 patch ( which is quite good), the biggest problem in D4 is the paragon system and the glyphs. Its so bad and such a miss becouse it could and should be something totally different. Maybe more like a second skilltree that opens up after level 50? The whole system around NM-dungeons, paragonboard and glyphs needs a total revamp
Fun fact: Last Epoch actually took a lot of inspiration from MU Legend yet nobody mentions that, only more minor correlations to other games
Picking up every single item and analysing its every damage bucket stat (Close, Vulnerable, Overpower, Distant, Flat, Crit Rate/Damage, Cooldown Reduction, +Rank to Skill, item power etc) then all the variability in their rolls to discern whether said item has any real value at all wasn't in-depth or complexity. Having such low drop rates on "Uber Uniques" that players couldn't feasibly obtain one in their lifetime, let alone the one they actually wanted in the span of a Season, ensured that those items functionally did not exist.
Every player understood it, and they understood it to be boring to the point of nausea and tedium in video game format.
I think opening up the complexity early on is a good thing. Even when its overwhelming it has a similar effect as seeing a difficult enemy and being able to conquer it over time and then having that sense of accomplishment when you start to use all the functionality that didnt make sense in the beginning.
When you try to appeal to everyone - you end up appealing to no one. Because there will always be a game that does every part of your wide-appeal game better by hyper specializing on that aspect. And there is no need on the market or demand by the customer for a game that does everything well when we have 15 games that do those things perfectly.
The sooner the industry learns that the better.
You are trying to cook a dish that is simultaneously a perfect breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snack AND a drink. And you end up with a repulsive slop and wonder "Why the hell nobody likes it? Why are they all eating steak over there? We have put steak in our dish too, right after the ice-cream and watermelon!"
I think the real trade-off here is budget vs target group size.
As an example, PoE and D3 were definitely developed with the same audience in mind, fans of D2. For better or worse, we all know D2 is a simple game. The systems are more complex than those of D3, but by a very small margin. PoE, being developed by what was then a small studio (probably the same size as EHG, give or take 10%), could bank on developing a game for a more niche audience, due to the investment into it not being immense. D3 on the other hand, had a GIGANTIC³ budget, and therefore catering to a smaller audience became impossible, because a small audience of hardcore players could never pay back that investment.
Fast forward to D4, and it suffers from the exact same problem. The budget for the game is beyond monstrous, if we assume it was 50 million dollars (and let's be real here, it was much more), Diablo 4's budget could supply some countries' entire GDP for 2023. The cost of a game, the equivalent of an entire nation's. Now imagine they cater that 50M to a very small subset of hardcore ARPG fans, the game would never pay for itself.
It's unfortunate, but it's a reality of gaming nowadays, that the more expensive they get, the more homogeneized it has to be pay back it's dividends. And the more controlled the investments into a game are, the more it can be targetted to specific players looking for a particular experience.
He got some really good points. The only character that stuck with me from D3 is Cain. As in D2 as well together with many others like Charsi etc.. In Last Epoch none have stuck but i must say that in POE Einhar made me laugh when he said something like "This might come as a suprise, but the people in town dont like me very much". Lily Roth also stuck.
What's the point or fun in having BiS gear and killing everything instantly? The fun is you created a God and the fun is God mode. The real game begins when you have BiS gear and can do anything you want because you are a God. What about the journey after BiS gear and what you do as a Godly char? Personally I like games where I get to be Thanos and can snap my fingers and do anything. That is fun. More games should get you to where you can do that. It's fun to have super broken Godly characters that are immortal.
Kanai's cube was by far the shining gem of Diablo 3.
It's the one thing that Last Epoch is missing in my opinion.
really recommend death must die, really fun game, its like a ARPG like poe with permanent gearing but u go into a session of fighting mobs/bosses for 20 min that gets harder and u gain powers when u lvl up
The largest problem of Blizzard is they don't make games for their players, they try to make games for people who don't give a shit about their games. It's not a difficult concept: they do it with WOW they do it with D4 they do it with everything they do. "We want the most number of people possible to play this, so we have to design something that anyone can play." I honestly don't think this is a bad goal, but the problem has never been "Too complicated, won't play", the problem is always "Game doesn't provide enough runway to understand it, won't play."
Time and time and time again for the last 20 years I've heard Blizzard talk about how they dumb down the systems of their games to try to get more and more players...and it's just the wrong way to do it.
First, at some point a person who doesn't understand the systems you are implementing in your game aren't people who play games. These people aren't going to randomly go to a program they don't install (steam, blizzard launcher, epic, whatever), install this program, then go find and buy your game just because...it exists? Because you've marketed it broadly enough? My wife (God love her) is not a gamer, and she's never been tempted by a WoW or Diablo marketing commercial to download a launcher, buy the game and play it...and she never will be. She is not a video game player, she has no interest in playing video games. Trying to design a video game that she can or wants to play is a fool's errand, there isn't a game, no matter how simple or extensive, that she wants to play. She isn't your audience, stop pandering to her.
Secondly, "stupid easy" is an insult. Going back to my non-game playing wife, if she WERE to want to play a game (and she doesn't, your design, marketing, attempt to pander, attempt to design for, etc. all do not produce anything she wants to play because she does not want to play, and I cannot stress this highly enough), designing something that is not challenging or mentally complex is insulting and drives away people who find something intriguing. Many times she's come down stairs to my office, watched me level a WOW Character for a few minutes and asked "why do you play this? This looks boring, you're not DOING anything and nothing looks like it challenges you in any way?" Determining that the reason people don't want to play your game is because they're TOO DUMB to understand you is the height of hubris. Trust me, just because you work for Blizzard doesn't make you a SUPRA-GENIUS. The failure of a person to understand the complexity of your game is YOUR fault...introduce new systems slower with more clarity and design your UI/UX to help players understand the system and you don't HAVE to create a "more friendly" game. Gamers aren't stupid, non gamers aren't morons...people don't want your complex game because your game and your design SUCKS as teaching them how to play, not because they're just too dumb to learn. The failure is YOURS not OURS, quit blaming gamers for your failures.
Lastly, how many more games are we going to get Blizzard devs get on RUclips and cry to the world about not being able to make? When Baldur's Gate III was the most popular game of the day Blizzard made sure to stand up publicly and explain just how impossible it would be for a AAA game company with 15 years of WOW money and a studio 10x the size of Larian to produce a playable game. "Oh God we can't produce BGIII, it can't be a new expectation in the market because AAA studios who care only for the financials of a video game can't get approvals to produce something like BGIII, it simply wouldn't make enough money, and thus it's impossible for Blizzard, a company with hundreds of millions more dollars than Larian ever had, to do so!" (Queue: "Think of the children" whine here) THINK OF THE INVESTORS!!! And here we are for the next episode of "you can't do that at Blizzard Entertainment" featuring Last Epoch a game so similar to Diablo that it feels like changing a few lines of code and a couple of images would get you there. Here, again, we have Blizzard Entertainment programmers dev-splaning how and why a company as large and talented as all of their devs say it is can't do something as simple as produce a good game that players like anymore. But it's ok folks, because it's actually our fault...I mean we all have phones right?
You can't build Last Epoch because your parent company doesn't have the balls to build games for game players. They don't have the balls or the creative talent to design anything that is of enough complexity to hold players interest, and they hire people who's lack of UI/UX creates artificial complications such that the only option you have is to blame players for just being too dumb to understand you. The first step to correcting a problem is accepting there is a problem and that you are culpable in that problem. All we ever hear is how, to get more players, Blizzard has to design more generic, unplayable, and boring games...if their players just weren't so f***ing mouth breathing cousin humping dung throwing monkies, the geniuses could write in more than single syllable sentences for the idiot masses and people would enjoy their games. I'm here to tell you, the problem is you, not us, and until I hear a dev say "we can't make a game like Last Epoch because our company doesn't have the balls or the talent to make the game...we simply aren't talented enough to design clearly enough for players to understand the nonsense systems we think will make us the most money, and we don't have the risk acceptance in the company to make a unique product that people want to play but which might turn away a half dozen people in the process", your company is hopeless and a large portion of your prior gaming population - your prior fans - would like to see you go down in flames, entirely and completely. Quit trying to put lipstick on the pig. Activision cares only for profit and has no interest in or care about the people who provide that money. Your parent company wants to turn blizzard entertainment into candy crush and make wow players pay per death in micro transactions. You're a gatcha game producer in a AAA business suit. Of course you can't produce Last Epoch or anything else of interest because doing so requires spending money and time your parent company isn't willing to spend because it cuts into profits. You can't design Last Epoch because you're too damn busy spending your development hours designing your next real money in game currency obfuscation system to bilk the 10 players who will stay with your game long term of everything they can spend and hopefully snag a few hundred dollars off some poor dad's credit card through a system of hidden mathematics that your players can't understand.
You can't make Last Epoch because you work for a company that has no interest in creating Last Epoch or anything else of entertainment value. Come to terms with that.
Dev calls his own game trash for 40 minutes. What a time to be alive.
I love the skill system in LE so much... just the right level of complexity for a filthy casual with a lust for experimenting with builds. Now I wish we could frankenstein this onto the graphical and auditory fidelity and smooth, impactful gameplay of D4.
I'm not sure why a game designer tries to explain what went wrong when we all know MAKING MONEY was the ultimate downfall for the Diablo series
Honestly, after playing D4, Last Epoch's complexity was VERY digestable. There's not a lot of friction for changing up your build on the fly. You can completely switch your build by just loading up an exp echo, then visiting an NPC. The crafting is very intuitive as well so you can dive in easily without needing to know all the nuances. After about 200 hours in LE, now I PoE feels a lot less overwhelming to play.
Complexity just for complexity's sake can get tedious, but LE handles a pretty fair degree of it quite well. Trying to get into it, 'cause it hasn't quite hit the mark for me for some reason, but even after 30odd hours I've got a glimpse of what the game can offer in terms of customization. D4 reducing the number of useless stats and amplifying the not-inconsiderable number of useful ones is definitely a step in the right direction. Here's hoping it gets better, I want to like D4.
OK first off I wanna state, I applaud this man for being honest and making a video demonstrating what could have been and what was not done for developing a game.. so for that being said i wanna say a lot of what he said to be really upsetting...
with the developing time and although the devs don't get the time or authority to implement what they think they should and it really comes down to the company to make broad decisions, This man really shines a light at a glaring issue.
I wanna state he said we took the format of a older game and expanded on it and the time between diablo 2 to 3 was massive so why would they hinge everything the fact of replicating something on a older style of game play but do it worse?
now i get there always a game for everyone and that casually something as a ARPG may be fun without taking into account the end game and endless progression
but he stated they took the old model and just stuck with it...
To me that scream laziness and that goes for diablo 4 too
years and years with many other games to take inspiration and they are lost right at launch...
you can not tell me they are the best devs to work with when they blindly made all the same mistakes that made diablo 3 so hated..
you could break the mold and be something and expand but instead you were so focused on longevity and money that anything to suit the live service model was more important then actual fun.
All this statements about diablo 3 which he admits its colossal failures it took Years for people to just shrug of the stain that started with..
that's not good to be like oh now the state it is in what we were aiming for...
I HATE this notion...
that goes for d3 venturing into d4!!
you saw the failures, you lived them and you even created some and yet the same company still struggling to find an identity for the game after YEARS AND YEARS of development..
Path of Exile has paved numerous roads and constantly fail and succeed but yet no other company cares to tread that water and its like why?
its not copying, its not tasteless!
we just want a solid game and for the price we pay it should FEEL COMPLETE!!!
you can always expand on it and pave the road for expansions thus has been blizzards model but now it feels so soulless and dire and empty and desperate for anyone to stay within their game...
Why is the biggest question I now reserve myself today that I constantly trust the companies i grew up with to deliver something promising and memorable but now i have to wait years after to release to get the slightest of dopamine highs...
Nothing against this man and his honesty but him and his team are lazy and out of touch and lack everything a good team should do and that's reading the fucking market they are trying to fill..
its that simple...
hindsight is always the great to say but its to late ..
Also idk wtf he was on about skill responsiveness when he was showing us a player that just hitting mobs and trillions of damage was being done.. and nothing was dying.. WTF how is that fun?
Anyways anyone that reads this cheers and i hope you enjoy all your games and im glad this guy did this but this puts a major spotlight on why games are so shit now and days..
they really did the bare minimum to understand the genre and they wanna recapture what was back then without understanding that players are so expansive..
Yeah, that part about people expecting to play Diablo 3 like it was Diablo 2 was funny after hearing it several times, because they were obviously allergic to everything that Diablo 2 was, so of course the way people would play D3 would be different.
Hard disagree on D4 not feeling as good D3 to play. The one thing that D4 does better than any other ARPG on the market is how it feels to play; the animations, the responsiveness. I've never had more fun or a more enjoyable time playing an arpg character than playing a fully leveled and kitted out charge/hota barb in S3. Content aside, just charging around and smashing enemies never felt better.
The end-game part is what worries me the most with some of these "lessons learned"... Blizzard made great games but also amazing stories and lore with Warcraft and Diablo. I hope they don't lose that ever, the amazing cinematics and lore was what made Blizzard games special. I'm 45 now and I remember taking the manuals with the maps and lore written in them and just looking at the art and reading them when I couldn't play (like at grandma's house and stuff) so please Blizzard don't just make games, make worlds where the games live. That's what made you great.
WOW Auction House > Last Epoch Merchant Guild
The searching of both can be greatly improved especially in WOW. Many locations to trade all items works well. But being able to search is great in LE, but the market became flooded making it hard to get items.
I am playing D3 as we speak and as an avid gamer it is by far the game that I have played most in my life. As hard as he is on the game and himself, I actually LOVE the game that he created. Sure 10+ years later he can poke holes in it and compare it to a game that has greater evolved. But don't sell D3 short, it was a great game especially for its time and continued to get better. I actually loved the real money auction house. Anyway, great video for a great game.
Last Epoch skills are "complicated" but they are easy to understand. So you can read what they say and think of a way of slotting them into your jigsaw of the build you are thinking of. There are definitely interactions that you will discover through other people's findings or through experience, but most interactions are accessible, they are not hidden behind some trick you wouldn't know unless you extensively test or datamine something. For example Darktide has so many hidden mechanics, even though objectively it has simpler trees than Last Epoch, that it is easy to fall into a trap when selecting your talents. I know, different games, I am talking about a specific part of Last Epoch that other games have in common.
Even though you get more talent trees per character than WOW Retail for example (I know they are different games), it is easier to predict whether something will belong to a build and will increase performance. Maybe part of this is also that less people work in groups in Last Epoch in this case, so if you run with something suboptimal, you are not affecting anyone else, so you are not getting flak.
Anyway, LE really is not THAT complicated. Do I want my Smite to do void damage? I will go pick up the void talents. And then you pick up other things that enhance that damage. That's it. It won't be the case that the entirety of the tree presented to you will apply. Only part of it will and it is easily discernible.
I'd like to make a counter argument to all the players claiming the system of Last Epoch isn't complicated. For you and me, this is true. Because we play a lot of games. The vast majority of "gamers" are casual that plays a game 20-40 hours at max. They don't spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours, becoming an expert on the game and its mechanics.
This is partially a reason why most games loses a big chunk of their playerbase the following months after launch. It's not because the game is bad (though that can help), but because players are done with the game. Most players don't read the forums, the Reddit, follow game content creators etc. They are blissfully unaware of most issues with a game.
Think your parents trying to connect a printer, or resetting the router. That's an average gamer. Not the top 1% of grinders like us.
And that's why I like Diablo. Tons of people like Diablo for what it is, this doesn't make LE or POE better in essence, they're your preference. Making Diablo 4 into POE or LE is asking Blizzard to just have less players, and if you were in control of that, would you say yes to that?
Lol what? D4 already has less players
@@StrongArmEntertainment Where in the world are you getting that. The numbers on LE and POE are nowhere near Diablo 4 numbers, GGG publishes their earnings, there's absolutely no way POE even compares to Diablo. There might be more hardcore players who play the other games regularly, but Diablo has way more players overall. Blizzard isn't doing anything desperate for the casual players. They have them, they're doing things for the hardcore players for the past 3 seasons.
3:20 "tade off" they traded loyal fans for FOTM fans
This was an amazing video. I wish this guy was the spokesperson for Blizzard for Diablo 4. He buys so much goodwill by just being honest and explaining things so we understand the decisions of why this or that can't be in the game they put out. So refreshing.
maybe with the auction house they should of added bind once u buy the gear, and you have to max out a character each season before you can use the auction house.
With regard to expectations of purchase driving difficulty, this is why a currency in-game that has intrinsic use is so brilliant, people are more hesitant to use that currency as money, and might hold on to it for later, showing a deep understanding that no one cares about the acts of PoE once they stop being new, it's strange to see them take the view of completing a character in a game that intrinsically resets characters as a bad thing, it's bad in wow, it's good in a seasonal game
What I get from this is that like many game designers, blizzard gets stuck distinguishing between complexity, difficulty and transparency.
And that very few of the lessons learned with d3 transferred to D4.
what drives me absolutely crazy when i hear "we wanted to bring more players into 'x' game, not just the same audience" is that the only reason the game was popular before is because you werent trying too hard to cater to a certain type of audience or make things too approachable. Diablo 2 was a fucking amazing game. It became THE game that defined the genre not because of anything it did differently than other games but because it was just a good game. Let your work speak for itself. Make a game that has complex mechanics and depth to its systems. If its a good game, people will flock to it and figure out the systems because they love to play it. If you dumb things down too much and make your old playerbase feel abandoned, you will lose them and thats when you really fail as a developer in my eyes. Imagine what diablo 3 and 4 could have been if they just expanded on the foundation that was laid out by D2 or even other games of the same genre moving forward.
tl;dr is if the game is good enough, people will play it regardless of how complex it is, people will want to try it at least. Trying too hard to appeal to everyone is how you lose customers.
31:05 I think showing everything upfront makes the first play for the player mentally overloading. Players in ARPG try to optimise their decisions as they progress. Showing all the possibilities puts lot of pressure on the player to choose wisely at the beginning, when he just barely started playing. Eg. In D4 expertise and paragon board in not available for low level, because it doesn't have to, it doesn't matter for the player. However seeing the whole skill tree in PoE scares me (the time it needs to learn everything, so I can chose the optimal decision). Share the necessary info for the player and no more. I can write it further, but that would be too long. I think you get the point I'm thinking about.
Edit: I watched it further, he basically explained the same thing.
People praised Last Epoch and shilled for the game so hard and now it stands at under 20k concurrent. You may not like it but the Diablo way of doing things is the better way. The sweats are playing POE, casuals are playing Diablo 4 and a few inbetween begrudged people are playing LE.
Diablo knows what it's doing and I hope that the new systems added on the PTR won't deter people who played it casually to engage with the game. Complexity doesn't equate to being good, even more so from a financial perspective.
I think a core problem with D3 and D4 if that your power mostly comes from you gear instead of stats and skills. This leads to the perpetual grind nature of the games looking for perfect items. Going back to DnD, your gear was maybe 50% at really high levels and way lower for most of a campaign, so the focus is on developing your character. Diablo 1 & 2 were much closer to this. The gear didn't matter nearly as much. Obviously, this is intended to keep people playing, but it just cheapens the progression and leads to the balance issues D4 has had.
ARPGs are Loot hunting/Trading games and that is the End Game. I think D2 has the best End Game to this day. BoE(bind on pickup) have NO PLACE in a loot hunting trading game. You should be able to wear an item, drop it for a friend or trade it for insane amounts when you are done when you get an upgrade. I also think it's awesome if you find a priceless item and sell it for 1,000s of cash. I loved the RMAH in D3 and it was exciting to log in farm loot and sell it. That is amazing fun and captures the essence of what an ARPG is about. It's just fun to find an ultra rare item and it's actually worth something. ARPGs are successful when the loot matters and it's worth something. I quit D3 when they ruined trading. I still play D2 instead of D3-D4 when I want to play Diablo. Really enjoying LE now too.
2 uncomfortable truths online warriors refuse to accept:
1) Gaming is a business. Business is about growth. That you were part of the small group that put a game on the map does not matter in the grand scheme. Franchises can only go so far purely catering to 1 base. Growth is seen as necessary evil. One that creates jobs. Saves jobs. & ultimately keeps a lot of lights on in a lot places. It's not meant to be personal. It's just business.
2) (This is the bigger one imo)...despite what your favorite streamer would have you believe, your impact in being vocal does not have the impact you believe it does. Understand that most content creators live their lives in their own bubbles. With no sense of reality whatsoever. No matter how many different social media sites or forums you either post on or read at...what always appears to be a loud majority in reality is nothing more than a fly on a windshield. The big wigs & execs could not care less how angry you are in your feedback. If the numbers/data they see are telling them that you are being out voted...simply put, you are being out voted. There is no such thing as a dead game that continues to receive updates & content. No game is truly dead, until it is truly dead. & just because you &/or your favorite content creator decided a game wasn't worth your time...that does not mean the larger audience within said game also came to the same conclusion.
Money decides all. It's something to keep in mind when hearing this dev share his insights on decision making. Simply put, if it's working, they will keep doing it. & no amount outrage over the internet is ever going to change that.
I really enjoyed D3. It was my first isometric ARPG
i love all the expert developers making comments here.
Wish he had commented on why they didn't have season's until ROS. I think that's a pretty integral part of why the game failed early on.
Because "seasons" didn't really exist back then. The closest thing to a "season" we had was ladder resets, and those were primarily done to wipe off hacked and duped items.
I'm talking about Diablo 2 resets. Blizzard didn't think they would need "seasons" based on how Diablo 2 performed. They stopped innovating in the ARPG genre after LoD.
@@MrJramirex they didnt stop innovating.. they took 10 steps back. I enjoy d3 now days as a fun popcorn game, but as a arpg that is supposed to be a sequel to D2, its absolutely terrible. D4 at first i thought was pretty good, but once you spend enough time with it and you finish the campaign you start to realize how shallow and boring it really is and that they somehow took even more steps back from d3.
@@MrJramirex Primarily, maybe for the devs? For players it was a fresh start and 100% necessary aside from the small minority of people who wanted to play their NL characters forever. In fact a majority of the player base always leave until the next reset, it's been this way since D2 classic. Peaks and valleys. D3 needed the same thing from the start and was the perfect time to add Solo Self Found ladder which people had been asking for since Diablo 2 classic. File it with loot filters or any of the other dozen things we've asked for since CLASSIC.
@@MrJramirex Which is weird. A big reason D2 didn't continuously add more content was likely because
a) at the time you could only make money by selling an expansion or a new game
b) it was pretty difficult to patch in new content
But you're right PoE is the one to popularize the idea of using seasons as a testing ground for new content and events. I remember them being pitched more as a way to experience new content before it would go to standard rather than a unique standalone event. Again Blizzard is learning the wrong lesson from other games since they don't truly add back the events from the seasons.
You need to work on having your video volume match your mic volume, too big of a difference here
D3 and D4 seem to have historically suffered from a lack of cohesive vision from the team leadership, which is why they're kind of a hodgepodge of shallow, oversimplified systems that don't work well together and don't feel very satisfying to use. Or in the case of D3, pursuing something like the auction house with apparently nobody in a position of authority who was able to think through any of the implications or problems.
I think D4 leadership was very volatile over the years and would be one contributing factor as to why they had no vision to adhere to. You can only hope the current leadership sticks around long enough to rework the game per some sort of cohesive image. But it's going to take a couple expansions, and I'm not sure they'll stick around that long.