I choose to start with Blizzard and Diablo 4 simply because Diablo, until this year was the only game I played. Why, because I am not a gamer and do not want to be a gamer. I have more in life I want to contribute to. For me, gaming is how I unwind and burn useless time having fun.
Blizzard, along with Grinding Gear Games with PoE 2 and even Eleventh Hour Games and Last Epoch; they all miss the point of casual gaming. Then again, what I define as casual gaming has long since been greatly redefined by younger generations.
All of these have a common theme today. You need to spend countless hours reading tutorials created by anyone but the game developer. So even your understanding of the game is through the lens of the site you choose to follow and learn from. Doesn’t matter if it is MaxRoll, Icy-Veins, WoW Head, Mobalytics, etc. You are learning to play the way the content creator you follow plays. Absolutely you are not, as in Blizzard’s infamous words about Diablo 4 “play your way”.
I have now played PoE 2 and frankly I won’t be playing again any time soon. Really? There are people out there who enjoy playing a game that is fight a boss 15 times before actually beating it. Where the theme for me in PoE 2 is nothing more than developers proving they can find infinite ways to kill your character off. I know people who play much more intense games than I enjoy, even enjoyed PoE 2 and then in the last update they never looked back. For them it wasn’t fun any more.
Last Epoch is another I played. A much nicer game play; however like with every other game out there, in the game there is no way to even begin to understand what all those skills are and the synergy meant to be there as you progress your character. You surely cannot read the aspects of something you pick up and know if you will benefit from it or not. At least not starting out.
Blizzard has taken random (RNG) to all new heights in Diablo 4. With RNG I feel every programmer comes from Wisconsin. When they release some new convoluted RNG, they are in a room and every programmer says “hold my beer” and they find a way to make it worse.
Blizzard introduced “tempering”. A system where you go to a blacksmith and select a group of items you want to temper onto your item. Click “Temper”, you can do that six times and still not get the temper your build needs. But oh there is more. Didn’t get it in six and have the perfect weapon; gone for that character. No matter it took you 200 hours to find it. With that problem Blizzard solved it by adding a reset scroll. Great, fantastic, now you have the enjoyment of bricking that perfect weapon TWICE.
Blizzard this is like going to the carpenter and asking for a solid oak bookcase. You pay them a cool 1 million in cash and they give you a section of a six inch diameter twig 12 inches high. But hey, give me another million, you might get what you want next time. Come on already add that “Better luck next time” to tempering already, then we can hear it more than we do from the Obols dealer. Add it to master working while you’re there too.
Last Epoch, well that is Diablo 4 on steroids in their crafting system. Here let us replace every aspect on your close to perfect weapon with complete random aspects. I converted amor to a set item using their crafting system; great maybe they will speed up getting what I can actually benefit from. Well, short lived hope. The item I got had a big red X as it cannot be used by the class I am playing. I mean really, it doesn’t have to be that “perfect” item but you need to RNG it so widely it is not usable by the class I create it with? I’m a programmer, I know better.
For all you programmers building game to kill players instantly, I would have hoped you learned in CS-101 to succeed instantly killing anything it is simply getTargetHealth() + 1, any five year old can do this math. I know you figured out how players cannot one hit anything, just don’t let any damage take all remaining health such as if (damage > getTargetHealth()) { applyDamage(damage * .9) }, there you go, monsters and never die and players die instantly. Clearly Grinding Gear Games has this math mastered. Eleventh Hour Games is trying to make things more fun for a casual player and Blizzard, well they cannot decide what they want to be when they grow up.
Eleventh Hour Games, why oh why has every drop I’ve gotten for Sorcerer been fire when I’m using cold? Are you telling me to switch to a fire build? Do I need to build a fire build so I can get cold affixes? No, I’m not going to spend 40 hours researching how to play the game.
Grinding Gear Games, no at present it will take an active community playing PoE 2 to confirm several times over I’m not going to die all the time in order to “progress”; that is absolutely no fun. And again, no I am not spending countless hours learning how to play be reading partner sites interpretations of how to play. I do not play their way or often even on the same device.
Blizzard, you have made some improvements but have not gone far enough. You still have not picked a lane and moved forward. A major change you have to make is STOP releasing bugs with every patch, game breaking bugs and even stupid bugs. With that, how did you break the infernal horde counter on a patch that did nothing to the infernal horde code? Just how did the simple display of cnt++ get broken? We know it was still working because eventually the infernal horde ended and we took out the council.
How did you release an anniversary deal, what you called an event where the event didn’t even show up after it was released? Just how does the one thing you are bragging about be the one thing that didn’t work? But hey, kudos; you fixed that fairly quickly without introducing another bug. So buy yourself a cookie on me. (yes, use your money and pretend it was mine like you pretend to help me temper my items)
Yes, I want a game I can read affixes and know at least rudimentary if it helps the character I’m playing. No it does not have to tell me everything; but some indication it is better or worse.
Blizzard tried to accomplish this with placing Item Power on every item you use. But what good is item power when something with a lower item power out performs another identical item with a higher item power?
Now look at that. Blizzard I can get Intelligence, Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction and even Ice Shards on several items. I can even temper plus to Ice Shards on an item even with an affix adding it. So this makes the main feature wanted in this unique helm being the affix that makes it unique. Yet, here we have an Item Power 750 that can only be master worked to 8 having a unique aspect better than that of the Item Power 800, ancestral items on the right? If item power is the defacto standard, then how can anything under 800 have better affixes? I know, someone said “hold my beer”
