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.

  • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I saw this on r/all

    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.

    • femicrat [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I feel like people shouldn't be this good at games. This level of analysis shouldn't be able to be thought up.

      • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

              • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]
                ·
                1 year ago

                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."

      • Blep [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        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

    • micnd90 [he/him,any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      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

      • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Mardoniush [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I think it says a lot that I though PoE meant Pillars of Eternity and was very confused.