Activision Blizzard is a hellhole of a workplace owned by Bobby "Satan" Kotick. They have been sued and settled multiple times for toxic work culture and serious sexual harassment allegations. Blizzard want to charge me $20 to be able to play the game one week early. The game is $70, and can go as expensive as $100 with battlepass. There will be ingame monetization. The game is MMO-lite and basically a grindy slot machine.
All I want is to go for an adventure, go dungeon crawling with my pet wolf frens, and you'd be surprised there is literally not that many games that allow us to do so.
Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Lost Ark, Torchlight, Wolcen, Last Epoch, Baldur's Gate
Lost Ark
The initial leveling experience is fun and core gameplay is super solid, unfortunately after that it becomes ultra-grind P2W hell. The devs literally expect you to grind 5 alts daily and send the mats/money you get from them to your main to progress "optimally". Such a huge disappointment
I think I got to like level 30-40 in Lost Ark and started seeing the writing on the wall.
Also Grim Dawn and Torchlight II (the superior Torchlight imo) are like $20 full price, the rest of them were like $40-$50
E) Also big shoutout to Titan Quest, 18 y/o game still supported by devs (new update last year) with a really clean mobile port to boot.
E2)
All I want is to go for an adventure, go dungeon crawling with my pet wolf frens
In Titan Quest the Nature mastery gives you your wolfos, you can take them with you while you explore Greek mythology and beyond!
Graphics in TQ was wayy ahead of its time. I remember being in awe of that back when it came out. I also like that it's one of the few ARPGs where melee doesn't feel like it's always worse than ranged.
I only played Wolcen for like a month when it first came out and thought it was pretty meh, has it gotten a bit more meat on its bones that you'd recommend it with the likes of PoE, Torchlight, and Grim Dawn?
I was very much a “PoE is too complicated” person and wrote it off for years. It is now my favorite game and I can’t see myself playing Diablo because it just seems so shallow in comparison.
It also cops so much from D2 and LoD the first time I played through the campaign it was hitting all those nostalgia buttons. Moreso than D3 ever did.
I am currently level 66 playing mostly solo in torment, so I have quite a bit of hours poured in already. My current opinion on the current endgame loop is that it has too much intentional downtime and unfun elements so that the grind is just too unfun. Let's get to the reasons:
Towns are intentionally designed so that you spend as much time as possible just on basic inventory management, everything is on opposite sides to waste your time.
Nightmare dungeons (tier 25ish ish is my current progression)are very boring in design, there's not enough action or density and simply too much walking simulator, and some of the affixes are horribly overtuned. Having to run to the dungeon every single run is just so much forced downtime and becomes extremely exhausting fast. Run 3mins for a 10min walking simulator in fairly empty dungeons. Rewards are mid.
Respec to try different builds is almost impossible, the game is balanced around you having every slot with appropriate legendary power. But you have to scrap almost every legendary just to have enough mats and aspects for your main build.
Nothing changes combat wise after level 50s when you have your uniques+aspects+skill tree done.
Costs to do anything like extraction and enchantment is so high that it forces you to pick up every single piece of trash on the ground and vendor it and then you end up using millions of gold in seconds.
No loot filters for an arpg in 2023 with almost no good loot that drops but forces you to pick up every drop to vendor.
Mount mechanic sucks, whoever designed this doesn't know what arpg players want. I don't want to use a horse that dies in one hit to have a 30s cd, be clunky asf movement wise(feels like it gets stuck on everything), and just be very unfun movement wise.
The forced picking up of every single piece of garbage loot is so bad for hand health.
No search functions or qol in stash or map or skill tree, the stash is worse than anything I've ever seen. The skill tree has no real search bar.
The loot is so bad because there's no crafting that at a certain point you just give up on upgrades, the gameplay loop isn't engaging enough. Even if you get a really good piece with 3 bis affixes you run out of gold on enchanting in 3-4 tries(on my weapon I'm at 3m gold per try and it's just a bricked item)
Tl;Dr: the current endgame of Diablo 4 is the game trying at every turn to make me play less and kill less monsters.
I feel like people shouldn't be this good at games. This level of analysis shouldn't be able to be thought up.
Spend most of your life playing games and you start to notice trends while your threshold for bullshit like "Why do I have to run everywhere when I have 2 hours in the evening to play this" is much lower. I was playing Torchlight 2 recently with an overhaul mod that absolutely vomits loot everywhere and the sheer amount of it rapidly killed any enthusiasm I had to continue.
Skinner figured out that if you give the rat too many or too few rewards it loses interest. You've got to hit the right tempo of rewards, without being too predictable, to get that really maladjusted addiction loop going.
You could say that about a lot of things tbh :shrug-outta-hecks: While not unique to the hobby, people start to hit a wall after a certain point where vidja games provide increasingly sparse returns in dopamine and serotonin and it's just more glaring when you see the bullshit that developers shove into their products or rip from other franchises. Had a friend that urged me to play Horizon Zero Dawn and I got maybe 20 hours into it and realized that I had essentially already played this game multiple times and didn't need to go through Far Cry 3 but with robot dinosaurs again.
Ngl it comes across as a little condescending when you state that you've already grown bored of something so therefore other people need to move on as well. I have branched out to other activities like gardening but I never seem to hear "No one is meant to grow so much. You need to move on from plants."
Why? The money management with upgrades is the sort of problem one could solve with highschool math. The execution required to clear and the memorization of enemy patterns is almost entirely practice
Haha sounds like a trash game. I'm a fairly casual player, probably just gonna play for the singleplayer story content on easiest difficulty. As I said, I'll probably just buy the disc console version used, play it for a weekend and then sell the disc back at a loss. I absolutely have no interest in endgame loot grinding
I read some of the comments though and it comes down to whether you appreciate PoE style uber convenience enough for this to be a deal breaker.
Personaly I only played a bit of PoE years and years ago so D3/4 are not for me either.
I think it says a lot that I though PoE meant Pillars of Eternity and was very confused.
I know, I'll probably just play the 20-30 hr campaign. I might actually consider just wait out the hype train, buy the PS4 version used for $25, and then resell the disc for $2. I'd rather give Gamestop $23 than Bobby Kotick $70 + tax
:todd: There's only one video game you should be spending your money on
All I want is to go for an adventure, go dungeon crawling with my pet wolf friends
Dwarf Fortress adventure mode lets you do this, and it's free.
Activision Blizzard is a hellhole of a workplace owned by Bobby “Satan” Kotick. They have been sued and settled multiple times for toxic work culture and serious sexual harassment allegations. Blizzard want to charge me $20 to be able to play the game one week early. The game is $70, and can go as expensive as $100 with battlepass. There will be ingame monetization. The game is MMO-lite and basically a grindy slot machine.
what is that ? This post is weak bullshit. Just Dont , what is this arrogance "talk me out of it"
how important du you consider yourself , that you can not just not do it ? That you demand us to tell you ? Convince you ?
waiver
renunciation
abandonment
resignation
renouncement
sacrifice
relinquishment
abdication
abnegation
see ? it all sounds like Dablo Shit anyway..
This is not how human psychology works. "Willpower" isn't real, it's mostly dopamine regulation, social pressure and/or support is real and helpful, games are specifically designed to exploit people with poor impulse control, and everyone is lonely and miserable and wants distractions from capitalism hell.
When I played the private beta I thought I'd have to buy it but after some time I don't really feel that way anymore. It was relatively fun but my views on it have gotten less positive, like the mount is needless and clunky and the lack of an overlay map is just bad design. The skill tree is just ok, it feels like what d3 should've had and I think this game should have something more along the lines of Grim Dawn + Epoch. I also feel like they're just going to go the poe route and shit out mediocre ladders every few months until the game is a bloated, convoluted mess. It's also online only again.
I've pretty much reverted to the same stance I've had since aroud 2016: if I want to play an arpg I'll play Grim Dawn again. If you're anything like me than you just need some time to pass and you'll be fine without d4.
I'm a huge fan of the original Titan Quest, but I never got the groove with Grim Dawn even though it's measurably better in every way. I had to realize I just loved the whole sunny beaches and familiar mythology that wasn't just invented for the game and not so much the gameplay. I always thought I liked gameplay but I guess I like the whole mood of a game and the story and characters more. I didn't know.
It feels like they just copied most of Lost Ark with a Diablo veneer.
I mean there's other ARPGs, this isn't 2001 anymore. I played the D4 beta and was thoroughly underwhelmed, the skill tree is janky as fuck and was seemingly ripped from recent iterations of WoW. Also they had a hotel suite called the COSBY ROOM.
Also they had a hotel suite called the COSBY ROOM.
There is no limit to the depravity some people will sink to with even just a little power granted by the illustrious chimera Activision-Blizzard-Mammon.
Game is always online. Might take a while for it to get cracked/spoofed server. Took them literally 10 years to get a server emulator for Diablo 3
Honestly, I've yet to find a Hack and Slash that beat Dungeon Siege 1/2.
I love this place because everyone likes the same old-ass games as I do.
