Thats because areas have "floor" levels, but if you aren't below the floor they then begin scaling up with you. Seems like you haters don't actually know how the game works. So there are hard areas you need to level too, they just don't sit at that fixed level once you are strong enough. Imagine wanting to go back to a level 5 area and kill level 5 monsters instead of getting experience that will actually be meaningful at your level. Again, go learn how it works first. Act Man is an idiot
Yeah that was funny. But at least it proves that scaling was an after thought. They must have felt also that the world is empty, and it was their way of implementing some life into the game.
I was overleveling some main quest areas actually. In Scosglen mobs were 35 when I was closing 40. Final quests areas were 50 when I was 52. So there was some static parts in the story areas. After story was complete in that area the mobs scaled up to your level. They could have just kept the whole areas that way and once you complete the campaing the monsters would scale to your level. If you don't play story (in seasons I guess) they could just give each area a maximum level the monsters would scale up to.. though with the scaling system you are able to skip to the dungeons you need aspecs of etc.
@dougfoster445 level scaling doesn't take into account your paragon board or skill points which is 90% of the characters power. You steamroll everything in open world if you run a proper build
Nah mate. I literally got bored of the game during stress test, when I reached the 1st proper town and handed over the whatever talisman Lorath gives you to the shopkeeper. I quit the game there, and uninstalled the beta. So for me, the game lasted less than an hour. And right after that, I launched D2R
I got bored of the game when I saw the initial gameplay footage. Outside of the more gothic design, it is too much like diablo 3 . And I hated diablo 3.
This is also what happens when you believe DEI is a more important hiring basis than merit. But don’t worry about it. But hey, at least the game was debugged by a trans lesbian dwarf of color who identifies as a competent game developer. Because that’s something players are begging for, not a quality game created by a passionate and talented team that actually has reverence for the franchise and an emotional investment in the final product being a reflection of the absolute peak of their capabilities. Support indie studios and devs. Making an MMORPG is ambitious at a level that makes it almost untenable for anyone but a AAA studio to take on, but I would take an indie made, crowd funded, loot-centric MMO with Diablo 1 level graphics, 1/4 of the characters & mechanics of D4 and a decade long Early Access phase over the fucking garbage Blizzard is putting out today. Glad I passed on Diablo 4. Never even touched it out of a fear that it would hook me in and disrupt everything else in my life for a year like Diablo 2 did, but it looks like that was never even a risk with this entry lol 🤡🌏
It's funny, level scaling games are one of the only times I've seen players groan because they leveled up. The other was 3.5 D&D, because the amount of work at higher levels could be a nightmare. (That experience is also why I stopped DMing 3.5, much as I respect it.)
I actually like the scaling. You can choose the path you want to take in Diablo 4, so it's good that as I get stronger, so does the game. Otherwise, it would be too easy.
I like the scaling in Diablo 2.. you work towards meaningful numbers and not numbers that have to be abbreviated with a B or a T, negating the importance of literally 7 or more digits in the amount of damage that a character does. Doing 2200 damage in Diablo 2 feels pretty damn good.
And even the strange experience penalties make a lot of sense and work quite well overall. And just doing 20 dmg instead of 9 feels great already because things actually die faster and you live longer. Getting more health doesn't just make it so you survive more and stronger attacks, it changes how pots work and how much dmg it will take to put your character in a hit recovery animation, potentially stun locking and killing you if you're surrounded by extra fast tiny little #%$*#ing... RAKANISHUUUUU! :P But you don't need a skill to get out of that. You just need to at least level once, not get surrounded and not spam an attack on Raka himself while they're close. Just your brain and you'll get out of it just fine. (until you finally have WW and try it on Nightmare beetles in act 2 and learn some interesting game mechanics :p It isn't nearly as impressive in LoD or Resurrected because you hit a lot less but it was really messed up in classic if you played single player untwinked, and exponentially more deadly if they're enchanted with fire or cold XD) Like Llama keeps saying, it's all these little things that some games did right and D4 and D3 just never did at all or messed it up or pretended to do and mess it up or not do. But I think that a thousand papercuts is lowballing it. I think that Llama is far too generous because he hates being mean even when he should be. I think it already adds up to several thousands of nasty paper cuts.
Same I quit after like 3 weeks I got borde of farming nightmare dungeon + seasons kinda made me quit I find it pointless to grind and create a build when in 3 months were going to make a new characters and grind same thing over and over
@@ambridge6645his point again. Yes those are repetitive as well but those can actually be rewarding, unlike the nightmare dungeons that basically drop nothing, where in the endgame you just run then for the sake of running. In D2 you can do a hell meph run with a sorceress along with a p8 lower kurant chest run in under 5 minutes with no “grab box here, bring box there” chore megchanic that’s only there to waste your time to unlock a boss fight where the boss is actually easier than a trash mob in the dungeon (above nightmare tier 80 especially where a quill rat 1shots you while having full barrier but you can just facetank the boss).
@@zilliq and lost 80% of players in less than 2 weeks after launch. if it wasn't named Diablo (and it shouldn't be, cause the game is very generic) if wouldn't have sold so much. and it flopped cause the more one plays it, the more they realize it's just a failed game.
@@fabioc.9682 It's the tactic almost all big companies with established IPs are doing: "We have a name and marketing, easy money!". Just look at everything Movies, Series and Games with established IPs. It's dogshit. Some of it is barely even tangential to the original idea of the IP. It's rinse and repeat for them. If any of the things that have had huge budgets with no payoff didn't have the IPs attached to them, no one would even know they exist.
For me I got to level 91 in the game just bored me. The itemization is bad as well as the scaling. No loot excited me at all. Was just a very boring game. Seems to me they tried pleasing everyone and did not focus their game. And where is the trading? But really there is nothing worth trading
There are things worth trading for like Uber Uniques. Your chances of legitimately finding one are astronomically low and your best bet at getting one is via trade. But they aren't tradable which is asinine.
More like the goal was to give a great first impression and promise the world so people would jump the pay wall to buy the hype rather than spend the extra effort to craft better systems and content that actually strives for player retention and longevity.
@@mickpratt8327 and what exactly do you plan to trade for one? you think someones going to give you $10,000 if you give them $1? the whole system is a joke, making it tradable fixes nothing when there is nothing worth trading in the first place
When all future D4 patches just remove more and more of the open world "existing" like Llama says, it just goes to show that Diablo should never have been open world in the first place. Imagine if all that wasted dev time actually went to itemization, or monster/build variety. Or god forbid....actually made the dungeons unique.
Bro ur so right! I actually can’t even imagine how awesome the game would’ve been if they focused on all the good stuff instead of purposely making it a grind. D2 grind was good because the game was good. They didn’t make it a grind for the sake of making it a grind. Devs and game produced have no vision for the game outside of making it as dull af. This is a problem with blizzard, they’re so afraid of imbalance that they balance their game to the point of dullness. There’s no stregnths and weaknesses. A sorceress is suppose to be super fucking powerful but easily killed and the barb opposite. And that is something which is lost on blizzard. They don’t want imbalance in their games and that’s why they’re all dull now.
@@yt_nh9347 cross platform nothing to do with it and what complicated system in d4 you mean items that have a bunch of useless stats just to make it appear "complicated" ?
I play ps5 and one of the first things I said about d4 is why can't we just hold one button and have a second bar of moves like resurrected? Give us this giant skill tree But limit us to 5? I don't get it.
Early on in my D2 days, Duriel used to wreck me every run. I used to dead body spam to chip away his health. I just assumed that was normal until I learned how to build properly.
the first time i had ever beaten Duriel easily in my entire life was D2R launch. that creature had been the bane of my existence for 2 decades, turns out i was just ass the entire time. you really feel actual growth in both your skills and game knowledge with D2, something completely missing from D4
@Ronbotnik The only redeeming thing about D3's challenge level is that you can change the difficulty in the fly. D4 does get challenging when you get to World Tiers, but that is really late in the game.
@@RonbotnikDuriel in D2 and Butcher in D1 are so incredibly difficult for new players. Such memorable fights! Nothing in D4 comes close. Even Lilith in the campaign is kinda easy.
@@VicJang It was boring. By the end of the story I was rooting for Lilith and would have rather joined her than continuing on with my character-less brain-dead allies in the story.
The open world was an initial draw for me, but then when I played it felt like it was big for the sake of being big, not because there was so much stuff to do that required it to be big. It's obvious it was just to add horses to have something else to sell to people. They could have condensed a lot of the areas to focus on making unique world events for each one to make the game immersion better.
Diablo 4 only has the illusion of being big. The game has barely any content at all. There are only 23 monsters and 54 uniques in TOTAL. That is absolutely embarassing.
Diablo 2 had very intentional level and challenge design. You can tell the developers in D2 were thinking hard about ways to throw the player curveballs and variations on the system to make players overcome and solve the challenges that arise out of those variations. For instance “what if we made a cave where you had no room to move” (maggot lair), “what if we filled this area with fast to move exploding enemies”, “what if we made this boss force you to beat it without going back to the town to restock on potions (3 ancients) etc etc etc. Diablo 4 loses this sense of intentionality in its level design
diablo 2 devs were most likely thinking, how do we get people addicted to this game. lets take casino winning chance dopamine and a video game that kills monsters and combine them...thats all it is...basically a legal crack addiction to a video game for us when we were 11-13 years old
@@jimmyscoggins2209 Well no - D2s main work ended after LoD and a couple of patches? Even D2R doesn't address end-game or change fundamental mechanics. This is why D3 was a disappointment to many D1/2 fans as it didn't deliver a D2 sequel to plug the holes in D2, it went in a different direction. The challenges mentioned by stone301 were there from near the start/LoD - way less than 20 years of Dev. Also, D4 had ~8 years - that's enough to get the basics right and also learn from the previous games
Yeah as a D3 fan, it makes perfect sense to me that D2 fans hate the game. I genuinely think D3(In its current state) would be beloved if it wasn't a Diablo game. Like I love the game for being an over the top hack and slash with many cool builds, but it just isn't Diablo at all.
Like it said in the video D2 was made for teens in the early 2000s we wanted hard games that changed us and were fun to us. In 2011 ish D3 was made for those teens who grew up up Micky Mouse Cub House. Now D4 is made for 2024 teens who grew up eating Tide pods!
I loved d3 but only playing harcore and agreed that it wasnt hardly like D1 and D2 at all. But I loved d3 hardcore mode. Hated normal mode.@@spookzer16
He nailed the point: the game feels like a chore. I need to constantly remind myself: hey wake up concentrate this is the mf Diablo 4 the game you've been waiting a decade for and spent 70 bucks on, must play, must enjoy!
YES! The game was not fun at all. As soon as I started to play another game after I beat D4 I was reminded what fun was in video games! D4 is so terrible.
@@coopstain1728 I constantly drift to other games while playing D4. Last week I was glued to Darkest Dungeon 2, so much so I barely touched D4 and felt somehow a bit guilty about it lmao
It does feel like a chore and it feels like the game was designed to be as annoying as possible. Road blocks out of nowhere, monsters that can crowd control you for 5 seconds, every monster dies and either explodes or leaves pools of poison on the ground, or dies and spawns 50 spiders out of it. It’s beyond ridiculous.
I think his entire point is; why do you have to invest "Insert X amount of time" for a game to become fun? It shouldn't matter if you play the game for 30 hours as he did, or if you have played for hundreds like many of us. The game should be fun from start to the end game.
@@sdotwallace idk about that. Not everything need to high adrenaline and action right from the first hour which doesn't take long regardless in DQ 11 imo
@@sdotwallace Why look further for JRPGs? Diablo itself was a franchise known for intriguing players from the get go(when it comes to gameplay and progression at least) Then D4 f it up. What's your point here?
Yep. Since they made that shift in D3 I haven't liked it. D1/2 style is much better for me. There are solutions to the inventory tetris problem if you see it as a problem; auto sort button, etc.
@@ToxModbut the game is about loot and items man. You want that shit to look awesome. It all looks the same. Not to mention it makes inventory management a nightmare also
thank you for pointing out the one thing i hated that act man didn't cover; the sprawling, fungal patchwork of the "map design". i kept waiting for an open field, a river, a vast canyon, or to run upon the facade of a giant cathedral... anything substantive to world building. but no.... just a landscape of spaghetti. the jackson pollock map here isn't going to be memorable at all. also, when the devs said "there's always going to be new & exciting things for players to find in every playthrough", what they mean is "please kill 3 macguffins to lower the barrier to the super macguffin". gg
there is an obvious reason it exists in the game. there was a time before all the good designers quit where the game didn't have level scaling. And then when they changed that, it would have taken up a lot of manhours to remove it so they just did not remove it.
@@WildFungus Yeah, I didn't think about it until I saw Actman point it out, but once he did my first thought was this game was developed from people who were just not on the same page. Probably multiple different teams that had different ideas of how the game was going to play out and it just ended up this bland mismatch of half-assed ideas
@@Joseph-R whenever I see developers in a promo for a game talking about the games 'features' with the sort of bland enenthusiastic ennui that you see with this game it feels like this is the checklist of features administration told them they HAD TO HAVE to make the game have money while also telling them if the game didn't sell very well they would be being laid off later where they had a no win scenario going off like these mandatory features don't make the game good and the game also has to be good, (think like redfall, gotham knight) hehe.
D2 classes had passives like increased mana from energy for Sorceress and Necro, Barb can wield 2 handed weapons in one hand, etc that changed how they were played without plainly increasing damage. You are incentivized to play as a caster as sorceress but could still primarily pump into strength if you wanted that playstyle. FCR FHR Energy Strength etc are meaningfull to everyone but as soon you make the only passive "x attribute increases skill damage for y class" it destroys all meaningful itemization and build crafting because now you know x stat is the only one that matters. It increases damage numbers exponentially and thus you need to increase the health of monsters a ton which further makes it more difficult to try wonky builds like melee Sorc when there isn't anything that enables the variety
Yep, D2s skill/attribute and itemization combination creates so many weird "out of the box" playstyles that can actually be very strong. Huge replayability thanks to that
His gold cost at vendors point is completly valid. The problem is that during leveling the cold cost increase scales out the gold you found until then so hard, that you can't afford anything if you don't sell all on level items you found to make up for it.
I mean, that's probably intended. If they haven't done this already, they'll probably eventually introduce a pay-only currency with which you can purchase gold or items. Another advantage of always-online enforcement. You can completely fuck up the game via monetization patches weeks, months, or even years or decades after release and there's absolutely nothing that anyone could do to prevent the game that they've purchased and paid for from getting fucked after the fact.
@@nk-dw2hm Putting on my tinfoil hat, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that it's in preperation for soon-to-be-announced microtransactions. First, make people unable to afford anything, next provide "help" in the form of real money transactions in order to make it seem slightly less bad. Of course, this is entirely speculation, but I wouldn't be suprised if that's actually what they're gonna try to do.
agreed, drop all your money on an item that is insta replaced was my experience too. I played until level 70, at 60, i stopped looking at vendors altogether for items that you equip.
As soon as I finished the story I lost interest in D4. The main reason for this is that every time I leveled up (after around 60), is that it felt like my character was becoming less and less powerful. I couldn't find upgrades in world tier 3 and I wasn't strong enough for world tier 4. Every new level I reached, the enemies became stronger and I in comparison had a tougher and tougher time killing them. In Diablo 2, every level increased your damage output, and presumably health through the 5 attribute points you'd pop into health. It always felt like my character was progressing, not regressing. I absolutely HATE the scaled dungeons and world for this reason. I much prefer being able to out level zones if my gear isn't up to snuff.
Yep. The enemies just get more and more powerful and if you arent getting better items youre going to be getting weaker as you level up. And because everything scales with you you cant go back to a lower level area to level up. Very poor game design.
I like the scaling, as a barbarian I've not had much problems, you'll eventually find good gear and you'll smash anything pretty much outside the nightmare dungeons.
regarding respeccing in d4.... on higher level (65+/70+) i feel like i need to have a whole set of equipment for the new build in place before i even specc into it. if i just respecc without having any legendary aspects complementing the new build then killing stuff gets very tedious at the beginning. not difficult. just tedious. i guess level scaling plays into this as well.
Diablo 4 was lagging the other night... so I booted up Diablo 2 resurrected (which has offline as it damn well should Blizzard) and holy hell it just feels and plays so much better from menu to map to gameplay.
@@taruxyep this. D4 is the best *foundation* of a game they’ve had at launch. That being said it’s by far the worst RPG experience of D2-4 at current and it’s not even close or worthy of debate.
@@taruxy The fact that were all going back to a 20 year old game proves how TERRIBLE diablo 4 is. Shame on the developers, completely out of touch with its core audience.
It's bad because there is no trade economy. The entire game is 99.999% SSF, and there's very few "chase" items that massively change up gameplay. Give us bad ass rare unique items, and give us an auction house or trade site.
I'm glad you're reacting to this. I enjoy your take on Diablo. I tried to play a sorc (32ish) and a necro (20ish?). Both characters got bogged down with poor item drops and while I didn't die my TTK went from 1-2 attacks to 4+. The game is not fun for me, at all. If they had scaling for groups and static mob levels for solo I might come back. but as it stands now? I'm done.
D4 just makes me want to play D2, D3, or POE. There are aspects to all those games I enjoy more than D4. D4 just became too repetitive and boring after the campaign and into the 'end game.' They had so many good games to look at to reference like aspects of the other games I mentioned. I think they just wanted to poop this out, call it a final product, but make it better during seasons and hope to sell the season battle passes. Like Actman said at the start, I don't feel like I'm Blizzard's target audience anymore.
I think the devs obviously zoomed the camera in is that you can see the design of your char up to the details. So that when you compared it with others who bought battle pass, you may be envied to buy also to look more cool to your char. I think that is it.
I hate that people chalk everything about our love of Diablo 1 and 2 up to nostalgia and then when we complain about something being a boring tedious grind in Diablo 4, they say "well you did 5000+ runs of pindleskin and Diablo 2 has that as a boring grind so why don't you complain about that". The difference, young Timmy, is that Diablo 4 has had 20+ years of game design to learn from that mistake, and they did it worse.
I think the biggest problem is, that there is no real uniques/ loot playing for a long time. At a certain, rather early point, you pretty much have maxed out your gear, so you are not interested in loot anymore. In D2 you needed ages to actually perfect your gear and probably 99,9% never had an actually perfected char. Yeah, you had a pretty decent setup after perhaps 200/300 hours (mostly because of trading, because actually finding 4 Bers, 2 Jahs, x Lo, etc. yourself… well we all know that would actually take ages). But to get those life skillers, to role a perfect CTA, to get those 20 life /+15 mana scs, to find/ trade for that 6/40 java etc. etc. That takes aaages. You pretty much always were excited for some drops. You made 1000 CS runs and were happy when you found item / rune X. And the trading function (at least for me) made it so much more fun, because when you found your 5. Ist, you knew: now I can afford this or that item making you better. Which also made the game more social ofc. I think it is a great game to have fun for 100 hours. Which still makes it a good game for me. But that reaally long term aspect is just missing. The only thing you are playing for with lvl +80 is to get a higher lvl. And yeah: there are those „ultra rare uniques“. But honestly. Finding one of these is far less probable than finding tyraels in D2. That‘s just stupid
I appreciate MrLlama being respectful that Actman is a different type of Diablo gamer, more casual but not as casual as other gamers as he is quite experienced, and took his perspective into account. I appreciate MrLlama didn't talk over Actman and let the video play for the audience to hear the points themselves. I connect more with Actman in general and feel his critique is more fleshed out and relatable than MrLlama's, who I feel dwells on smaller details often & loses the forest for the trees.
I think anyone saying the game is bad is out of touch. The problem is that Blizzard isn't going to be able to please everyone with the direction of the game but the game is still at least good. It would be difficult to find a better original adventure game out there.
Level Scaling *does not* do what Blizz wants it to do. I hit 100, and I played with a coworker 5-10 lower and a coworker 30-40 levels lower. Level scaling did not make that enjoyable for any of us. 5-10 was painful because NDs aren’t scaled and I needed his percentile dps. 30-40 was still a rush. It looked like a rush, felt like a rush, played like a rush, was a rush. It *doesnt* keep the 600hrs player from one-shotting things because optimized itemization is king.
Level scaling hurts basically every game its ever been in. Im sure someone will pop in the comments and try to prove otherwise but its such lazy and bad game design. I couldn't name you a single area in D4 cause its all so samey and im level 92.
Your complaining about level scaling but then giving an example of the part of the game that doesnt have level scaling lol. Level scaling is doing what they want, for the casual player who are basically going to play through the story, do sidequests and run some open world stuff, they can play with their friends regardless of level.
@@MixedMilk1 his point is that the level scaling doesn't fulfill the objective it was implemented for, as you still can't play with people lower level than you in nightmare dungeon which is pretty much the only endgame content at this point as it is the only part of the game that isn't scaled and scaling doesn't make the content that is scaled more enjoyable when there is a level difference as once your build is past level 80 and becomes highly optimized you are still one shotting enemies in the open world so it makes no difference even if they are your level. If the pros of level scaling aren't really pros but all the cons are still there don't you think that means scaling just makes the game worse?
@@MixedMilk1 as a lvl 100 sorc i can confirm level scaling does not work at all if i went with a lvl 50 friend id 1 shot everything and go 10x faster so no it doesn't work as it should as to make game difficult for me id have to go to nightmare dungeon at like lvl 120 and they would get 1 shot there.
54:05 I had to pipe in here, what you said reminded me of a story my writer's craft teacher told me in high school. When writing physical letters, we brainstorm and put words on paper as much as we want, but the true craft comes from trimming the unnecessary fat. A lot of content is step 1, good content is step 2.
@@zraebiel1673 same, I started playing more D2R when I got sick of D4 and I'm nowhere close to 100 on my single char in D4 🤣 I have a level 65 WW Barb and I'll probably not be hitting 100 this year, if ever
The multi player suck hard !! I played with my friend last night and i wasn’t able to skip the fuckin cut scene while my friend was able loll. In campane mode their is a cut scene or a dialogue every 5min it was freakin frustrating !
The always online part has another layer of pure evil behind it is not just the cash store, the reality is that we don't own the game. We bought a permission to play which can be revoked at any given time because we don't read the small letters and at some point in time on the future the server might shut down for whatever reason. From a media preservation perspective I can guarantee I can just boot my d2 discs and play the game start to finish without ever going online, no one can do so with d4.
It is a bit odd but I have this instant good feeling everytime I see a D4 vid. It just warms my heart and affirms my confidence because I saw this game early on and just knew it wasn't for me. To not have bought into the hype and hot air makes me feel good.
@@sdotwallace I think you're getting it wrong. Llama or anyone else pointing out the wrongs in the game didn't validate my feelings. Sure, it just affirms them. I guess you could say there's a bit of schadenfreude to it. But this game turned me off from even wanting to try it out from the first gameplay images. The aesthetics were just too far removed from being a joy to watch for me. I don't know those streamers.
@@sdotwallace Exactly. And just as much as anyone can voice their pleasure with the game I can voice my displeasure. It''s probably the same with 90% of modern games. They are released in an unfinished state.
@@sdotwallace I just don't like the surface of it. My criticism of it isn't on gameplay, apart from what I gather guys like Llama are mentioning. But the visual style is what icks me the most. Details are drowned out by bright lights in various bright colors. What isn't drowned out by lights is covered in hitpoint-text blasting at you with every attack. It feels like that is how ADHD would look if it were a game. No amount of great game mechanics or story would change that.
I feel the same, I played both betas and got a sinking feeling that it would be a flop in it's current state. Imagine my surprise when I started seeing the critique of things that I know would have bothered me a lot. I'm glad people are enjoying their experience with the game right now but I'm keeping an eye on it and might jump in if it improves in future seasons. I know it would annoy me if I played it right now. Also all my friends who bought the game have stopped playing. We'll see how many actually returns in S1 or if many people are burnt on the game.
Blizzard put profit over providing a game for its core audience. its so weird. Itemization, loot, lvl scaling, make d4 unplayable. I went back to d2 and having a blast
And what's the games core audience exactly? People with nothing else to do, but play video games 12-16 hours a day, or people with everyday lives, that also wants to enjoy video games 1-3 hours a day, or every other day? Some of us have family's to look after and jobs to do. This immature gaming community is beyond me.
@@jonasvitting8795 You have no idea what you are talking about. I only play a few hours a day between 9:00pm-11:30pm. The same problems I mentioned above still persist.
I never despised D4, I just hit a wall after I made my end game build and then stopped playing and just haven’t been back, the lack of a hunt for things like high runes and uniques (grail running) just made me lose interest
@@sdotwallaceWhat an absolute nephew take. You literally just outed yourself as a teenager that started playing ARPGs a couple years ago. You do understand that tons of people played D1+2 and other ARPGs before seasons were even a thing, right?
I don't think it's that gamers tastes have changed. I think it's that new gamers have had mid to low-tier AAA games to play for so many years now that they don't know any different. It's why being a top quality indie or AA developer is so lucrative at the moment. I think the market is screaming for top tier, quality games again but we just aren't seeing it brought to market. Probably due to a lot of the capable companies being captured by wokism and ESG.
Lets be real, the biggest issue by far is the itemization. There seriously are no chase items (save for a statistically unattainable few) in a game that should be loot driven. What were they thinking?
Wow when he asked “can you name a single blacksmith in Diablo 4?”. Really speaks volumes. Everything in D4 feels so generic, none of the characters are memorable. None of the environments are memorable. Everything just feels like I’m doing a generic quest in a generic area slaying generic monsters.
I've only played the open beta but so much of what this guy said is stuff that resonated with me over that weekend. That point early on 'I don't feel like I'm the target demographic' and later on 'Playing the game feels like a series of chores, ticking off items on a grocery list' hit the nail on the head. I really, really wanted to like the game but by the time the stress test weekend came I couldn't even last an hour I just noped out of it and uninstalled and I have no inclination to buy the full version.
I wouldn't worry about it there is no target audience. It's basicly can you pay for the game multiple times and do you have a object to hit the keys with to play at this point for activisions games. this is mordern life everyone must be included and so noone is satisfied. you come to eat some food at your local and the menu is just a soup made up of everything on the old menu all in one at the same time.
You don't have to die for it cause it is pretty obvious, I'm surprised how few people notice/mention that. But it is even worse, except graphics D3 is a superior game in every single aspect. Seriously, if Blizzard makes D3 Remastered (with graphic style from D4/D2R) right now, nobody would play D4 anymore.
I wouldn't have been D2's target audience when I first started playing it at age 11, it was in a way too complicated for me which challenged me to understand the mechanics of the game and research the different unique items/builds. The tonal dissonance in D3 and D4 are the big detractors for me, whereas D1 and D2's tone were spot on. I always enjoy D2R hardcore ladder because of the risk of losing the character and needing to take into account the difficulty spikes, combined with the dark or eerie atmosphere in various locations throughout Act 1-5 make it a true masterpiece.
Honestly, D3 needed a tone built around your character being so powerful it was worrying. Like, you carve through demonic armies with ease, and if they had emphasized the collateral damage done in the process that would have worked. The ending of Reaper of Souls didn't work as intended for me because sure, your Nephilim is strong... but it's hard to see the problem with that. It's not like the power you threw around is what left heaven a crumbling ruin. D4 seems to have scaled back on power and I am fine with that. Heck, just quietly shuffling the D3 player character out the door without a mention I can understand as well. (after all, either we dismiss them, have them be the biggest threat in game, or have to answer why they didn't handle this in a blindingly fast speedrun.) Diablo 1 and 2 have this tone of 'for all your power, you are as mortal as anyone else.' going on which worked for them.
@@Sorain1 I can agree with all your points. I think a lot of people 'feel' that the difference between 2 and 3 was just too big to be diablo game which caused a lot of the backlash
i started D2 when I was 10 but couldn’t finish Hell difficulty until I was 20! I remember breezing through nightmare difficulty every time to have my ass swooped everytime i reach Hell! But still I kept at it for a decade because it was so much fun! D4 though…D3 was a hot mess but at least it was hot and I did have some fun too. D4 feels like a cold bland toast
@MrLlamaSC The biggest thing for me is the restriction and friction they added to the game. For example, items being account bound, items being locked to your current characters' power level, unable to target farm, low mob density, and certain classes cant use certain items. I just don't understand why they made it feel so restrictive.
Modern game companies want absolute control over every aspect of whats going on. Always online. No mods. Level Scaling. Trade Restrictions. Stuff to control everything about you from the amount of fun you're having, when youre having it, down to the amount of money you're spending. Its a bloody shame really
@@RonbotnikI will never stop saying this: trading was the main reason why D2 and D2R were so much fun for me. Not being able to trade freely in D4 is awful. I would’ve been able to share many items with my friends who play the same class if they at least change the level restriction. Being at lv 100, there’s just no point keeping any item, not even for myself if I want to play other classes. Such a shame Blizzard made it this way.
@@VicJangight? There's something nice about finally finding someone with the right high rune to trade for a spare nice piece you have. The low drop rates made the trading a thing that didn't NEED to happen, but made it feel worth your time. Blizzard now just want as many people grinding and tempted towards the shop as possible, and they learned the wrong lesson from the d3 controversies around the AH. People want to trade. Bliz don't care because they wanted to monetise it.
1. Checklist-style region completion leads to fatigue and then left with nothing 2. Story/characters uninteresting and just felt like skipping through all dialogue
@@ak_getright9905way too much walking around in the story campaign too. Fuck it was a slog. Also, why the hell can’t we farm story bosses? That’s so dumb!
most of your counter arguments revolve around " Hes only lvl 48, so he doesnt know that X becomes better further" thats the issue, why should people have to endure bad progression because it gets better later... just make it good all along
Remember when the Blizzard production values and polish were what made their games stand out from the crowd? Now it's all they have, 99% polish 1% soul.
Why do everyone reacting not notice, at 11 minutes, he's not "going half speed" he's going NO SPEED until he wiggles the mouse to unfuck the horse. Then he is going half speed. There is an issue there in addition to the north/south/overtheskillicons issue.
Hey Mr.Non-Drama-Llama. :) my thought is, at least with the open world, is it should have been sectioned off much like the previous diablo games. What they could have done with each unique biome, is create specific events, world bosses, and dungeons that cater to that zones aesthetics and monster type. It would have made the world feel much more unique and varied. there are some pretty unique areas that lose some of the fun because they just weren't large enough portions of said area. they tried instead to just jam a lot of biome design into an open world without fleshing out any of the areas. when you go from the rogue encampment to Lut Gholein, or Lut to Kurast, Its very very different from your last experience. It keeps you moving forward and always experience a new large and unique biome. Also would have loved to have seen something happen at the end much like in division 2 where the black tusk invaded the map and the map was altered with a new enemy type/faction that made the endgame map feel different slightly than during the campaign. I feel this is another area they fell off and i don't count whats happening with season 1 toward this opinion as it is not part of a $70 base game.
@@MrLlamaSC Its all good cause in the end we just love our Diablo! there are so many enjoyable versions of it to play so i'll slowly level my D4 main while i dabble in Project Diablo 2 and D2R. :) Take care my dude and looking forward to more content #KeepItComin'
@@MrLlamaSC I think your point about the winding pathways was great, found that hard to put into words while I was playing through. EVERY area just felt like a tile of little pathways that was slightly reskinned. so boring.
The horse fucking sucks on console too though lmao. It has that same problem where it runs in place for a few seconds, even when you're pushing the analog stick as hard as possible in the direction you want to go. It is miserableeeeeeee
I listened to the act man video the other day at work and agreed with most of it. I got to level 45 as a necro and just kind of stopped playing. One funny this is the juxtaposition of all the marketing and the big promises they made in those videos of the devs talking compared to the current reality of D4.
I find it interesting that if you criticize the game as a more hardcore player that went through the entire endgame the Diablo 4 bots will say that the game isn't made for you, it's actually for casual players but then when a casual player criticizes the game they do a 180 and say SKILL ISSUE and say they don't know anything about the game because they're a scrub. Seems to me that they aren't interested in talking facts about how to improve the game they just have some weird agenda where they don't want the game to be improved for some reason. Baffles me.
I sometimes wonder if the game was supposed to be so much more and the poor devs can only speak to what they know but blizzard limited features etc on launch to drip release content over seasons and expansions etc. maybe when they Devs made comments on videos it wasn’t a lie but they didn’t know how it would release
@@evanfero1660 I could see that being a factor. The state of a lot of games at release had been bad lately. Have to answer to shareholders so need to release it even if it's not done. Or something along those lines. I read an article why the blizzard north devs left and that was another case of corporate mismanagement. Vivendi made some bad financial decisions and was in trouble and brevik and many of the original members abandoned ship because their previous parent company screwed up too. I wonder where the franchise would have gone with blizz north at thr helm.
@@SirDehumanizedI suppose they will try to make as few changes as possible as long as people don't complain too much... maybe some things regarding stash size, gems tab and minor fixes, but not in the core of the game... as well as the theme of the useless resistors are postponing it for season 2 or more... it is a question of money and working hours that as a company they should not want to invest.☠️
big issues : - Endgame fluidity => If you have to recycle few items, extract an aspect, and put it into your stash, that'll cost you some times before being able to do next dungeon.. - too much variables for itemizations, when you got the right stats, the item is sacred and not ancestral, when you get both correct, it's the item level that's too low, it takes too much randomness to get one item right (and i'm not talking about a specific aspect that needs to be at least x% amount. I'm okay with grinding, but i have to check every items, before reycling and/or selling just in case I get an upgrade. edit 1 : I haven't rage on a game since league of legends like.. 10 years ago. Last time i had a little peak of rage was because of the chain of ccs, i was like "Can I play now ?"
"It's the loneliest MMO I've ever played in my life" Spoke straight to my heart. I find myself not playing D4 if my personal friends are not online. I rather just go to D2R.
Honestly, I don't think Diablo 4 is a bad game. It's just a game that was pushed out in its Alpha state. And Blizzard, being the predators they are, are withholding basic features that game should have at launch and will release them one at a time over a series of updates as "features" when they all represent things that should have been part of the game from the beginning.
First Diablo game I didn't play, so happy I didn't but then again if people who are new to gaming or the genre or should I say title (this isn't an ARPG anymore) then that's fine.
@@sdotwallace look dude. i played every diablo game back and forth D2LoD being one of my fav games of all time. i was very torn after d3 if i would continue to support hacktivision/bilzzard or not. so just that i dont hate on the game uninformed im actually watching tons of videos about it. so there you have it, happy?`
Do people realize that Blizzard of D4 is not the Blizzard of D1/D2 days? It's amazing that we even got D2R. We all saw what was coming when D3 came out. Sure D4 was hopes and dreams but let's be honest that's all it ever will be. The day we get a TRUE Diablo 3,4, or 5 is the day when true fans/game designers of the game honor its legacy and do it right.
I think a lot of this can be summed upped with this D4 philosophy that Blizzard wants, social social social SOCIAL. But nothing really social about it.
Funny to see all the so called fans switching up and calling the game trash now. Week 1 everyone was saying ths game was the best game ever created. Now all the dads are complaining on reddit saying that the game isnt as good as they thought it wouldve been lol
@@justinflemming2542 so funny seeing the reddit go from a circle jerk and ban anyone who dislikes d4 to, "idk man, im at lvl 50 and the game just isnt really feeling that fun anymore."
It feels like there are so few skills. If Necro (for example) was split into d2-style skill trees (Blood, Bone, & Shadow), it would be 1-2 linear paths per tree. There is barely any choice involved past deciding on blood, bone, or shadow. There are also obvious choices for legendary aspects for each build so there's very little actual choice in that, too. I thought paragon boards might be cool but then the only exciting-ish nodes have core stat requirements that I'm probably 10 levels away from reaching, so it feels bad. I need to get another 100 strength which is essentially going to do nothing else for my character? They're also so specific that it takes away any real choice (i.e. one board providing werewolf buffs vs. a werebear board. Obviously as a werewolf, I chose the werewolf board...) The open world sucks with level scaling, and many of the zones look too similar. Open world could be cool if Acts actually progressed in difficulty and had unique events past the same 3 or 4 escort/protect the annoying npc events. The NPCs constantly yelling "Help" made me want to have the option to kill them. The open world also prevents map randomization which is a huge part of re-playability. It's so clear that the map was designed for mounts and navigating through the game feels absolutely terrible until you get the horse. Then, they gatekeep the horse with excessive cooldowns (not to mention the clunky pathing). So much of this game is just waiting for underwhelming cooldowns. Towns are too spread out and waste the player's time. The horse also takes away any fear of enemies because I can just mount and easily flee. Hell zones actually looked really good but are only playable for like 20 mins during the campaign?? After the incredible cutscene introducing Hell, I was expecting a tide of demons but it was still the same bullshit where I'm spending more time walking between mobs than actually fighting them. Chests and shrines became a chore because it seems like more than half of them trigger the same long events that I'm already sick of doing. I just walk away when events start now. The game is the most enjoyable to me from level 1-20 on alt characters and quickly falls off, which is not how ARPG progression is supposed to work. My biggest complaint by far is performance. Over a month after launch, the game crashes 1-5 times per hour, despite my PC being well above the minimum specs listed for the game and playing on the lowest settings. When it doesn't crash, it rubberbands or d/c's despite my low ping. I've seen a ton of technical support forum posts of people have similar problems with this game or worse but have yet to see a useful response from Blizz. Season 1 seems very underwhelming, especially after how much the devs hyped up seasons and claimed a huge allocation of resources to developing seasonal content. I thought the story was actually interesting but involved too much travel and had several confusing choices. Items actually look fantastic to me visually, but the stats are awful. Far too many conditional stats that are annoying to try to calculate or only affect a tiny part of your character. The music feels more like ambience to me and is sometimes grating, while D2 has my favorite music of any game.
Blizzard is smart, when it comes to making money. D4 will be a monetary success for them. They’ve sold a ton of copies which will taper off, but I believe they have an ulterior motive. - Everyone buys D4 - After 3 months all the D2 enthusiasts will have bailed and gone back to, or bought, D2R to get what they truly wanted. - Blizzard makes lots of money.
I also think that level scaling kinda kills it. Everything kinda feels the same regardless of what lvl you’re at. There are many issues with D4 that I find annoying and that make D2R a much better overall game, but level scaling is definitely one of the top ones.
wow, this guy is right in like 90% of his points. if not more... if only Blizzard would understand. most of this stuff are the reasons i never bought D4 after playing all the betas. just not good enough imo. i think that as the honeymoon phase dissipates most ppl will have either buyers remorse or just stop playing
around 37m mark, lets not forget the Necro who has to have the minions on the hotbar to take up a slot. what if all the other classes had their"passive" skills on the hotbar?
I think personally, in my personal opinion, the way I see it, my viewpoint is Diablo 2: Resurrected was made for older gamers like me who don't enjoy the direction modern games are headed. Now if Blizzard could just make Diablo 1: Resurrected with all the modern and requisite QoL changes.
Diablo 1 Resurrected should just be added to D2R as dlc. Take the portal to Tristram and start descending through the cathedral. I'd be pumped for that!
@@shadyrebob5999 I've been saying that for a while, except my idea is to make it sort of like the Pandemonium Event. You enter a portal to Old Tristram and you have to descend through its original 16 dungeons. At the end of every 4th dungeon you would fight an Uber version of a D1 enemy. Like for instance Lvl 4 you would fight Uber Butcher in order to open the exit to the next 4 dungeons. Lvl 8 would be Uber Skeleton King. Lvl 12 maybe Uber Archbishop Lazarus. Until you reach the final dungeon, Lvl 16 where you fight Uber Diablo (in his D1 form, which is my favorite Diablo iteration). You would have to do all 16 dungeons in 1 playthrough and if you die you exit out of the challenge. If you defeat Uber Diablo you'll be rewarded a new item similar to the Hellfire Torch and the Annihilus Charm.
I like the way the tattooed guy says it. We have to be critical if we want cool games, cause now what we get is a shiny, server needing, dumb story Diablo 3 for which we pre-pay. Once upon a time we had nicer games, I mean who can produce Heroes of Might and Magic again? So melt them with criticism and if they are not going to make cool games let them go grow vegetables.
Grim dawn has level scalling in later dificulties and some parts of normal, still you aleays feel powerful and can even punch above your levels, thanks to better itens, better leveling and devotions. Seems blizzard took the worst of their competition (PoE itemization overly restrictive and grim dawn's renown and shrine grind)
My main is an arc-lash Sorc, and I'm feeling locked in this playstyle. I'm 81lvl and I'd like to change to Ice-shards or even try some fire build, but now I need to hunt for cd/+mana/resourcegen items, and *reroll* the crappy attributes; not enough gold.. plus I don't want to lose my arc-lash build; I wish I could save the paragons/items/skills as a template.
Honestly if Diablo 3 and 4 were Diablo 2 with extra skills, content, acts etc I would enjoy them just as much. That's not saying D2 was perfect, but D3 was plain boring, and D4 simply didn't captivate me even after 3 hours of gameplay.
It seems that they went Quanttity vs Quality , D2 fights were almost mini boss fights at times not smacking around spiders (hey those ones in A3 were HUGE), they need to remove the cooldown for the horse for starters, when utilizing an ability you should pass thru (or error) whats in front of you pathing around in a big scrap just get you killed, gems should be available for all characters once 1 of them has met the requirements, better visualization when CC'd (frozen edges of screen are frosted sort of deal), it's a really good game overall but it feels rusty and clunky and for a commercial release of such an acntipacted game it's almost sad to see that state it's in(But of course I will still play it )
The only reason for attributes/stats are to action the Paragon boards Rare % boosts/multipliers and whatnot. It is disgusting. Easy way I figured to perceive what is "close range" is to roll a Rogue and use the Flurry 360 legendary. Anything not getting hit by that skill is not close I guess suggesting that anything past that may be considered distant.. not sure on that one though.
I think the confusion with gold restricting options comes from the fact that casuals probably only salvage loot instead of selling. Gold drops from monsters (at least visually lol), materials come from salvaging. Selling to vendors is probably a learned behaviour.
Go check out Actman here: ua-cam.com/video/ihZe-ABUhsc/v-deo.html
Thanks for sharing this. After watching I just had to download diablo 1 from GOG. Pretty fking fantastic.
@@newman1711 If D4's social features are so complete, why are you using Discord to find other players?
@@remoredbeard LOL
@@newman1711 I tried to offer to help beat the cathedral in Tier 1 in local chat. Spent 30 mins and literally no one responded 🥲
@@remoredbeard to help noobs
The quests having a recommended level but because of level scaling it’s always your level is absolutely priceless.
Thats because areas have "floor" levels, but if you aren't below the floor they then begin scaling up with you. Seems like you haters don't actually know how the game works. So there are hard areas you need to level too, they just don't sit at that fixed level once you are strong enough. Imagine wanting to go back to a level 5 area and kill level 5 monsters instead of getting experience that will actually be meaningful at your level. Again, go learn how it works first. Act Man is an idiot
Level scaling is the single biggest reason I quit the game.
Yeah that was funny.
But at least it proves that scaling was an after thought. They must have felt also that the world is empty, and it was their way of implementing some life into the game.
I was overleveling some main quest areas actually. In Scosglen mobs were 35 when I was closing 40. Final quests areas were 50 when I was 52. So there was some static parts in the story areas. After story was complete in that area the mobs scaled up to your level.
They could have just kept the whole areas that way and once you complete the campaing the monsters would scale to your level.
If you don't play story (in seasons I guess) they could just give each area a maximum level the monsters would scale up to.. though with the scaling system you are able to skip to the dungeons you need aspecs of etc.
@dougfoster445 level scaling doesn't take into account your paragon board or skill points which is 90% of the characters power. You steamroll everything in open world if you run a proper build
Crazy how D2 has lasted 23 years, and D4 lasted 23 days
Nah mate. I literally got bored of the game during stress test, when I reached the 1st proper town and handed over the whatever talisman Lorath gives you to the shopkeeper. I quit the game there, and uninstalled the beta.
So for me, the game lasted less than an hour.
And right after that, I launched D2R
"modern games"
I got bored of the game when I saw the initial gameplay footage. Outside of the more gothic design, it is too much like diablo 3 . And I hated diablo 3.
My all time favorite game ever was D2! And my first video game needed a screwdriver to hook up to a tv! 😂
this is what happens when you hire a bunch of candy crush 'game devs'
😂😂😂😂😂
accurate enough lol
and diversity hires as well. dev
team dont understand what arpg is and how to balance everything. this is hilarious
mobile app ui/ux designers as well
This is also what happens when you believe DEI is a more important hiring basis than merit. But don’t worry about it. But hey, at least the game was debugged by a trans lesbian dwarf of color who identifies as a competent game developer. Because that’s something players are begging for, not a quality game created by a passionate and talented team that actually has reverence for the franchise and an emotional investment in the final product being a reflection of the absolute peak of their capabilities.
Support indie studios and devs. Making an MMORPG is ambitious at a level that makes it almost untenable for anyone but a AAA studio to take on, but I would take an indie made, crowd funded, loot-centric MMO with Diablo 1 level graphics, 1/4 of the characters & mechanics of D4 and a decade long Early Access phase over the fucking garbage Blizzard is putting out today.
Glad I passed on Diablo 4. Never even touched it out of a fear that it would hook me in and disrupt everything else in my life for a year like Diablo 2 did, but it looks like that was never even a risk with this entry lol 🤡🌏
I shouldn't be thinking to myself, "I better beat this boss before I level up."
😂😂
Wow i literally had that thought😂
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
It's funny, level scaling games are one of the only times I've seen players groan because they leveled up. The other was 3.5 D&D, because the amount of work at higher levels could be a nightmare. (That experience is also why I stopped DMing 3.5, much as I respect it.)
I actually like the scaling. You can choose the path you want to take in Diablo 4, so it's good that as I get stronger, so does the game. Otherwise, it would be too easy.
bruh we need breviks cancelled diablo 3 project.... im just starving to see what he did with that game..
Meh. Brevik worked on torchlight and those games are dog shit.
Dude.
It probably would've been amazing unfortunately. And we'll never get it 😔
I’d honestly pay 20$ to see a full documentary with llama and the original team behind D2
Play Grim Dawn
I like the scaling in Diablo 2.. you work towards meaningful numbers and not numbers that have to be abbreviated with a B or a T, negating the importance of literally 7 or more digits in the amount of damage that a character does.
Doing 2200 damage in Diablo 2 feels pretty damn good.
And even the strange experience penalties make a lot of sense and work quite well overall. And just doing 20 dmg instead of 9 feels great already because things actually die faster and you live longer. Getting more health doesn't just make it so you survive more and stronger attacks, it changes how pots work and how much dmg it will take to put your character in a hit recovery animation, potentially stun locking and killing you if you're surrounded by extra fast tiny little #%$*#ing... RAKANISHUUUUU! :P But you don't need a skill to get out of that. You just need to at least level once, not get surrounded and not spam an attack on Raka himself while they're close. Just your brain and you'll get out of it just fine. (until you finally have WW and try it on Nightmare beetles in act 2 and learn some interesting game mechanics :p It isn't nearly as impressive in LoD or Resurrected because you hit a lot less but it was really messed up in classic if you played single player untwinked, and exponentially more deadly if they're enchanted with fire or cold XD)
Like Llama keeps saying, it's all these little things that some games did right and D4 and D3 just never did at all or messed it up or pretended to do and mess it up or not do.
But I think that a thousand papercuts is lowballing it. I think that Llama is far too generous because he hates being mean even when he should be. I think it already adds up to several thousands of nasty paper cuts.
hammer builds weree pushing 16k lol. but still that was a BUILLTTTT FULLY 99
@@mitchelbruh And your point is?
@@stylis666 well he said doing 2200 felt good, but that wasnt eating hell numbers. hammers doing that still took 10-15 seconds to melt baal.
2200 on grief* but we all know it’s much more 😂
I quit D4 two weeks ago and I don't miss it at all.
Farm Nightmare - Repeat - The End. Got bored really quick and moving on with life.
Same I quit after like 3 weeks I got borde of farming nightmare dungeon + seasons kinda made me quit I find it pointless to grind and create a build when in 3 months were going to make a new characters and grind same thing over and over
is that same thing you do in d2? :3 he he
@@ambridge6645his point again.
Yes those are repetitive as well but those can actually be rewarding, unlike the nightmare dungeons that basically drop nothing, where in the endgame you just run then for the sake of running.
In D2 you can do a hell meph run with a sorceress along with a p8 lower kurant chest run in under 5 minutes with no “grab box here, bring box there” chore megchanic that’s only there to waste your time to unlock a boss fight where the boss is actually easier than a trash mob in the dungeon (above nightmare tier 80 especially where a quill rat 1shots you while having full barrier but you can just facetank the boss).
Back to running bhaal 10000 times, don't get good drops and with a more dogsht inventory filled with charms. It's more rewarding gameplay.
I expected D4 to flop, but it flopped way too fast, it's crazy.
it didn't flop it did record sales
@@zilliq and lost 80% of players in less than 2 weeks after launch. if it wasn't named Diablo (and it shouldn't be, cause the game is very generic) if wouldn't have sold so much. and it flopped cause the more one plays it, the more they realize it's just a failed game.
@@fabioc.9682 It's the tactic almost all big companies with established IPs are doing: "We have a name and marketing, easy money!". Just look at everything Movies, Series and Games with established IPs. It's dogshit. Some of it is barely even tangential to the original idea of the IP. It's rinse and repeat for them. If any of the things that have had huge budgets with no payoff didn't have the IPs attached to them, no one would even know they exist.
For me I got to level 91 in the game just bored me. The itemization is bad as well as the scaling. No loot excited me at all. Was just a very boring game. Seems to me they tried pleasing everyone and did not focus their game. And where is the trading? But really there is nothing worth trading
There are things worth trading for like Uber Uniques. Your chances of legitimately finding one are astronomically low and your best bet at getting one is via trade. But they aren't tradable which is asinine.
More like the goal was to give a great first impression and promise the world so people would jump the pay wall to buy the hype rather than spend the extra effort to craft better systems and content that actually strives for player retention and longevity.
@@arcc4modern blizzard in a nutshell
They forgot who is the diablo player base after they had people play d3 in my eyes d4 is d3.s ugly sister and I barely played d3
@@mickpratt8327 and what exactly do you plan to trade for one? you think someones going to give you $10,000 if you give them $1? the whole system is a joke, making it tradable fixes nothing when there is nothing worth trading in the first place
When all future D4 patches just remove more and more of the open world "existing" like Llama says, it just goes to show that Diablo should never have been open world in the first place. Imagine if all that wasted dev time actually went to itemization, or monster/build variety. Or god forbid....actually made the dungeons unique.
I do not think d4 open world is that big to begin with when compared to like lets say elden ring not sure what took them 6 years to make this mess
Bro ur so right! I actually can’t even imagine how awesome the game would’ve been if they focused on all the good stuff instead of purposely making it a grind. D2 grind was good because the game was good. They didn’t make it a grind for the sake of making it a grind. Devs and game produced have no vision for the game outside of making it as dull af. This is a problem with blizzard, they’re so afraid of imbalance that they balance their game to the point of dullness. There’s no stregnths and weaknesses. A sorceress is suppose to be super fucking powerful but easily killed and the barb opposite. And that is something which is lost on blizzard. They don’t want imbalance in their games and that’s why they’re all dull now.
@@Eskoxo5 years to find out how to monetize the shit outta it and 1 year of actual development
@@Eskoxocross platform development buddy. Also elden ring has a lot of simple systems compared to d4, items being one.
@@yt_nh9347 cross platform nothing to do with it and what complicated system in d4 you mean items that have a bunch of useless stats just to make it appear "complicated" ?
I play ps5 and one of the first things I said about d4 is why can't we just hold one button and have a second bar of moves like resurrected? Give us this giant skill tree But limit us to 5? I don't get it.
YES! How fuckin stupid. D2R gets 2 skills bars but D4 has only 6 options???? LOL!
This is spot on.
Being limited to 5 skills only makes sense in a game like Last Epoch.
Early on in my D2 days, Duriel used to wreck me every run. I used to dead body spam to chip away his health. I just assumed that was normal until I learned how to build properly.
the first time i had ever beaten Duriel easily in my entire life was D2R launch. that creature had been the bane of my existence for 2 decades, turns out i was just ass the entire time. you really feel actual growth in both your skills and game knowledge with D2, something completely missing from D4
@Ronbotnik The only redeeming thing about D3's challenge level is that you can change the difficulty in the fly. D4 does get challenging when you get to World Tiers, but that is really late in the game.
@@RonbotnikDuriel in D2 and Butcher in D1 are so incredibly difficult for new players. Such memorable fights!
Nothing in D4 comes close. Even Lilith in the campaign is kinda easy.
@@VicJang It was boring. By the end of the story I was rooting for Lilith and would have rather joined her than continuing on with my character-less brain-dead allies in the story.
@@clintbeastwood5116 but the mobs still.scaled with your level making you still.feel.as weak as you are low level.
The open world was an initial draw for me, but then when I played it felt like it was big for the sake of being big, not because there was so much stuff to do that required it to be big.
It's obvious it was just to add horses to have something else to sell to people. They could have condensed a lot of the areas to focus on making unique world events for each one to make the game immersion better.
Man that sucks but you're right.
Yeah, I honstly thought it would be a transformation like Elden Ring was to DS. But it seems like D3, but darker (haven't bought it, don't intend to).
I think they just left room for season shit, the game is unfinished as hell.
Diablo 4 only has the illusion of being big. The game has barely any content at all. There are only 23 monsters and 54 uniques in TOTAL. That is absolutely embarassing.
The open world sucks because of barricades IMO. You wanna just run from event to event but nope, gotta slow you down just because
Diablo 2 had very intentional level and challenge design.
You can tell the developers in D2 were thinking hard about ways to throw the player curveballs and variations on the system to make players overcome and solve the challenges that arise out of those variations. For instance “what if we made a cave where you had no room to move” (maggot lair), “what if we filled this area with fast to move exploding enemies”, “what if we made this boss force you to beat it without going back to the town to restock on potions (3 ancients) etc etc etc. Diablo 4 loses this sense of intentionality in its level design
This!! I think d4 devs should have similar challenges such as in d2.
Well, think about it, they’ve had over 20 years to work on D2
diablo 2 devs were most likely thinking, how do we get people addicted to this game. lets take casino winning chance dopamine and a video game that kills monsters and combine them...thats all it is...basically a legal crack addiction to a video game for us when we were 11-13 years old
@@jimmyscoggins2209 Well no - D2s main work ended after LoD and a couple of patches? Even D2R doesn't address end-game or change fundamental mechanics. This is why D3 was a disappointment to many D1/2 fans as it didn't deliver a D2 sequel to plug the holes in D2, it went in a different direction. The challenges mentioned by stone301 were there from near the start/LoD - way less than 20 years of Dev. Also, D4 had ~8 years - that's enough to get the basics right and also learn from the previous games
Wow, never thought I would have someone make me appreciate maggot lair
Diablo stopped being diablo after 2. They decided to not only make a game more casual but also ignore all the things that made d2 great.
Yeah as a D3 fan, it makes perfect sense to me that D2 fans hate the game. I genuinely think D3(In its current state) would be beloved if it wasn't a Diablo game. Like I love the game for being an over the top hack and slash with many cool builds, but it just isn't Diablo at all.
Fair take.@@spookzer16
Like it said in the video D2 was made for teens in the early 2000s we wanted hard games that changed us and were fun to us. In 2011 ish D3 was made for those teens who grew up up Micky Mouse Cub House. Now D4 is made for 2024 teens who grew up eating Tide pods!
I loved d3 but only playing harcore and agreed that it wasnt hardly like D1 and D2 at all. But I loved d3 hardcore mode. Hated normal mode.@@spookzer16
He nailed the point: the game feels like a chore. I need to constantly remind myself: hey wake up concentrate this is the mf Diablo 4 the game you've been waiting a decade for and spent 70 bucks on, must play, must enjoy!
YES! The game was not fun at all. As soon as I started to play another game after I beat D4 I was reminded what fun was in video games! D4 is so terrible.
@@coopstain1728 I constantly drift to other games while playing D4. Last week I was glued to Darkest Dungeon 2, so much so I barely touched D4 and felt somehow a bit guilty about it lmao
Must consoom...
It does feel like a chore and it feels like the game was designed to be as annoying as possible. Road blocks out of nowhere, monsters that can crowd control you for 5 seconds, every monster dies and either explodes or leaves pools of poison on the ground, or dies and spawns 50 spiders out of it. It’s beyond ridiculous.
@@infamouscheesecake2232I soom soom
I think his entire point is; why do you have to invest "Insert X amount of time" for a game to become fun? It shouldn't matter if you play the game for 30 hours as he did, or if you have played for hundreds like many of us. The game should be fun from start to the end game.
his fun is subjective, i thoroughly enjoyed the story even if it was "easy" at times
@@sdotwallaceI like slow beginnings in jrpgs that build up
@@sdotwallace idk about that. Not everything need to high adrenaline and action right from the first hour which doesn't take long regardless in DQ 11 imo
@@sdotwallace Why look further for JRPGs? Diablo itself was a franchise known for intriguing players from the get go(when it comes to gameplay and progression at least)
Then D4 f it up. What's your point here?
The items being the same size in your inventory ruins the look of them, it's too small to appreciate the artwork
Yep. Since they made that shift in D3 I haven't liked it. D1/2 style is much better for me. There are solutions to the inventory tetris problem if you see it as a problem; auto sort button, etc.
It’s a game !! you’re supposed to be playing it, not appreciating art.
@@ToxModwhy did they put so much effort into the landscape scenery foliage, character customization detail, etc then?
Crap artwork all looks bland and the same anyways lol
@@ToxModbut the game is about loot and items man. You want that shit to look awesome. It all looks the same. Not to mention it makes inventory management a nightmare also
thank you for pointing out the one thing i hated that act man didn't cover; the sprawling, fungal patchwork of the "map design". i kept waiting for an open field, a river, a vast canyon, or to run upon the facade of a giant cathedral... anything substantive to world building. but no.... just a landscape of spaghetti. the jackson pollock map here isn't going to be memorable at all.
also, when the devs said "there's always going to be new & exciting things for players to find in every playthrough", what they mean is "please kill 3 macguffins to lower the barrier to the super macguffin".
gg
The level recommendation piece where Llama lost his marbles got me good LOL 🤣. It’s so incredibly stupid when you put it that way 😆
0:15:13
there is an obvious reason it exists in the game. there was a time before all the good designers quit where the game didn't have level scaling. And then when they changed that, it would have taken up a lot of manhours to remove it so they just did not remove it.
I'm at that, I'm at that : )))
@@WildFungus Yeah, I didn't think about it until I saw Actman point it out, but once he did my first thought was this game was developed from people who were just not on the same page. Probably multiple different teams that had different ideas of how the game was going to play out and it just ended up this bland mismatch of half-assed ideas
@@Joseph-R whenever I see developers in a promo for a game talking about the games 'features' with the sort of bland enenthusiastic ennui that you see with this game it feels like this is the checklist of features administration told them they HAD TO HAVE to make the game have money while also telling them if the game didn't sell very well they would be being laid off later where they had a no win scenario going off like these mandatory features don't make the game good and the game also has to be good, (think like redfall, gotham knight) hehe.
I actually agree 95% of what he says. The issues actually get worsen after 50. So his points all valid.
D2 classes had passives like increased mana from energy for Sorceress and Necro, Barb can wield 2 handed weapons in one hand, etc that changed how they were played without plainly increasing damage. You are incentivized to play as a caster as sorceress but could still primarily pump into strength if you wanted that playstyle. FCR FHR Energy Strength etc are meaningfull to everyone but as soon you make the only passive "x attribute increases skill damage for y class" it destroys all meaningful itemization and build crafting because now you know x stat is the only one that matters. It increases damage numbers exponentially and thus you need to increase the health of monsters a ton which further makes it more difficult to try wonky builds like melee Sorc when there isn't anything that enables the variety
Yep, D2s skill/attribute and itemization combination creates so many weird "out of the box" playstyles that can actually be very strong. Huge replayability thanks to that
bow enchant sorc with a bow that fires explosions
This is the most accurate breakdown of stats and itemization I have seen to date. Preach!
This is why I'm going back to D2 and Grim Dawn
Yeah it's just a way better game overall
His gold cost at vendors point is completly valid. The problem is that during leveling the cold cost increase scales out the gold you found until then so hard, that you can't afford anything if you don't sell all on level items you found to make up for it.
I mean, that's probably intended. If they haven't done this already, they'll probably eventually introduce a pay-only currency with which you can purchase gold or items. Another advantage of always-online enforcement. You can completely fuck up the game via monetization patches weeks, months, or even years or decades after release and there's absolutely nothing that anyone could do to prevent the game that they've purchased and paid for from getting fucked after the fact.
Inflation is so bad even the world of diablo is affected :V
That was likely intentional to force the grinding loop
@@nk-dw2hm Putting on my tinfoil hat, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that it's in preperation for soon-to-be-announced microtransactions. First, make people unable to afford anything, next provide "help" in the form of real money transactions in order to make it seem slightly less bad. Of course, this is entirely speculation, but I wouldn't be suprised if that's actually what they're gonna try to do.
agreed, drop all your money on an item that is insta replaced was my experience too. I played until level 70, at 60, i stopped looking at vendors altogether for items that you equip.
As soon as I finished the story I lost interest in D4.
The main reason for this is that every time I leveled up (after around 60), is that it felt like my character was becoming less and less powerful.
I couldn't find upgrades in world tier 3 and I wasn't strong enough for world tier 4. Every new level I reached, the enemies became stronger and I in comparison had a tougher and tougher time killing them.
In Diablo 2, every level increased your damage output, and presumably health through the 5 attribute points you'd pop into health. It always felt like my character was progressing, not regressing.
I absolutely HATE the scaled dungeons and world for this reason. I much prefer being able to out level zones if my gear isn't up to snuff.
Yep. The enemies just get more and more powerful and if you arent getting better items youre going to be getting weaker as you level up. And because everything scales with you you cant go back to a lower level area to level up. Very poor game design.
I mean thats a case of you building wrong and having terrible paragon knowledge then. Cause it's honestly a breeze. lol
I like the scaling, as a barbarian I've not had much problems, you'll eventually find good gear and you'll smash anything pretty much outside the nightmare dungeons.
@@bobbobb5759okay pro. Not everybody has time to perfect craft paragon builds on their own or feel like looking up guides telling em how to play
@@teamkimochi191but everyone has time to cry and whine 👍
Bli$$ard should transform into a pure CGI filmmaker studio instead of gaming they would be happy and player would not feel bad.
regarding respeccing in d4.... on higher level (65+/70+) i feel like i need to have a whole set of equipment for the new build in place before i even specc into it. if i just respecc without having any legendary aspects complementing the new build then killing stuff gets very tedious at the beginning. not difficult. just tedious. i guess level scaling plays into this as well.
Diablo 4 was lagging the other night... so I booted up Diablo 2 resurrected (which has offline as it damn well should Blizzard) and holy hell it just feels and plays so much better from menu to map to gameplay.
I recently quit and went back to project diablo. SO much better. Everuthing, the gameplay, itemization, loot system, etc. fuck d4
I’ve been playing a whole lot of D2 for the exact same reason lol
Went back to D2R like 2 weeks ago... So much more fun :) D4 is shit as it is now, levelscaling and the itemization ruins the whole game
@@taruxyep this. D4 is the best *foundation* of a game they’ve had at launch. That being said it’s by far the worst RPG experience of D2-4 at current and it’s not even close or worthy of debate.
@@taruxy The fact that were all going back to a 20 year old game proves how TERRIBLE diablo 4 is. Shame on the developers, completely out of touch with its core audience.
It's bad because there is no trade economy. The entire game is 99.999% SSF, and there's very few "chase" items that massively change up gameplay. Give us bad ass rare unique items, and give us an auction house or trade site.
I'm glad you're reacting to this. I enjoy your take on Diablo. I tried to play a sorc (32ish) and a necro (20ish?). Both characters got bogged down with poor item drops and while I didn't die my TTK went from 1-2 attacks to 4+. The game is not fun for me, at all. If they had scaling for groups and static mob levels for solo I might come back. but as it stands now? I'm done.
D4 just makes me want to play D2, D3, or POE. There are aspects to all those games I enjoy more than D4. D4 just became too repetitive and boring after the campaign and into the 'end game.' They had so many good games to look at to reference like aspects of the other games I mentioned. I think they just wanted to poop this out, call it a final product, but make it better during seasons and hope to sell the season battle passes. Like Actman said at the start, I don't feel like I'm Blizzard's target audience anymore.
Good takes. The biggest issue preventing me from trying D4 at all is the FOV. If it was any closer it would be listed in FPS category.
Yeah. It's so fucking close that you can count the blackheads on your character's nose. It's completely ridiculous.
It's a top down fps
@@preservinglightcalling it that implies you perform attacks at range, every class fights within melee distance. 😂
I think the devs obviously zoomed the camera in is that you can see the design of your char up to the details. So that when you compared it with others who bought battle pass, you may be envied to buy also to look more cool to your char. I think that is it.
ROFL, when you see d4 gameplay you just think "WHAT IS THIS FOV" mobile game FOV. It's shocking, you feel like you are permanently zoomed in.
I hate that people chalk everything about our love of Diablo 1 and 2 up to nostalgia and then when we complain about something being a boring tedious grind in Diablo 4, they say "well you did 5000+ runs of pindleskin and Diablo 2 has that as a boring grind so why don't you complain about that". The difference, young Timmy, is that Diablo 4 has had 20+ years of game design to learn from that mistake, and they did it worse.
I think the biggest problem is, that there is no real uniques/ loot playing for a long time. At a certain, rather early point, you pretty much have maxed out your gear, so you are not interested in loot anymore. In D2 you needed ages to actually perfect your gear and probably 99,9% never had an actually perfected char. Yeah, you had a pretty decent setup after perhaps 200/300 hours (mostly because of trading, because actually finding 4 Bers, 2 Jahs, x Lo, etc. yourself… well we all know that would actually take ages). But to get those life skillers, to role a perfect CTA, to get those 20 life /+15 mana scs, to find/ trade for that 6/40 java etc. etc. That takes aaages. You pretty much always were excited for some drops. You made 1000 CS runs and were happy when you found item / rune X. And the trading function (at least for me) made it so much more fun, because when you found your 5. Ist, you knew: now I can afford this or that item making you better. Which also made the game more social ofc.
I think it is a great game to have fun for 100 hours. Which still makes it a good game for me. But that reaally long term aspect is just missing. The only thing you are playing for with lvl +80 is to get a higher lvl.
And yeah: there are those „ultra rare uniques“. But honestly. Finding one of these is far less probable than finding tyraels in D2. That‘s just stupid
yeah man D2 was lightning in a bottle and unfortunately its never coming back
I appreciate MrLlama being respectful that Actman is a different type of Diablo gamer, more casual but not as casual as other gamers as he is quite experienced, and took his perspective into account. I appreciate MrLlama didn't talk over Actman and let the video play for the audience to hear the points themselves. I connect more with Actman in general and feel his critique is more fleshed out and relatable than MrLlama's, who I feel dwells on smaller details often & loses the forest for the trees.
I think anyone saying the game is bad is out of touch. The problem is that Blizzard isn't going to be able to please everyone with the direction of the game but the game is still at least good. It would be difficult to find a better original adventure game out there.
Level Scaling *does not* do what Blizz wants it to do. I hit 100, and I played with a coworker 5-10 lower and a coworker 30-40 levels lower. Level scaling did not make that enjoyable for any of us. 5-10 was painful because NDs aren’t scaled and I needed his percentile dps. 30-40 was still a rush. It looked like a rush, felt like a rush, played like a rush, was a rush. It *doesnt* keep the 600hrs player from one-shotting things because optimized itemization is king.
Exactly. Level scaling is only hurting the game.
Level scaling hurts basically every game its ever been in. Im sure someone will pop in the comments and try to prove otherwise but its such lazy and bad game design. I couldn't name you a single area in D4 cause its all so samey and im level 92.
Your complaining about level scaling but then giving an example of the part of the game that doesnt have level scaling lol. Level scaling is doing what they want, for the casual player who are basically going to play through the story, do sidequests and run some open world stuff, they can play with their friends regardless of level.
@@MixedMilk1 his point is that the level scaling doesn't fulfill the objective it was implemented for, as you still can't play with people lower level than you in nightmare dungeon which is pretty much the only endgame content at this point as it is the only part of the game that isn't scaled and scaling doesn't make the content that is scaled more enjoyable when there is a level difference as once your build is past level 80 and becomes highly optimized you are still one shotting enemies in the open world so it makes no difference even if they are your level. If the pros of level scaling aren't really pros but all the cons are still there don't you think that means scaling just makes the game worse?
@@MixedMilk1 as a lvl 100 sorc i can confirm level scaling does not work at all if i went with a lvl 50 friend id 1 shot everything and go 10x faster so no it doesn't work as it should as to make game difficult for me id have to go to nightmare dungeon at like lvl 120 and they would get 1 shot there.
54:05 I had to pipe in here, what you said reminded me of a story my writer's craft teacher told me in high school. When writing physical letters, we brainstorm and put words on paper as much as we want, but the true craft comes from trimming the unnecessary fat. A lot of content is step 1, good content is step 2.
What's the surprise, we could see it was gonna be the same sht as d3.. We are just lucky to have D2 in our lives.
Yup. I was saying at least we have d2r to fall back on if d4 sucks before the d4 launch
I'll take D3 over D4 any day 🤣
Uh what, it’s completely different from D3. Arguably, D3 is a better and more fun game.
@@GiuseppeG11 Funny thing for me is that D4 just makes me want to play D2, D3, or POE more.
@@zraebiel1673 same, I started playing more D2R when I got sick of D4 and I'm nowhere close to 100 on my single char in D4 🤣 I have a level 65 WW Barb and I'll probably not be hitting 100 this year, if ever
"Horse speed is built for controller" yet horses with controller cant go max speed.
D4 was meant to be played with other people. So they put the camera so close you can barely see what's going on, especially where your friends are.
The multi player suck hard !! I played with my friend last night and i wasn’t able to skip the fuckin cut scene while my friend was able loll. In campane mode their is a cut scene or a dialogue every 5min it was freakin frustrating !
The always online part has another layer of pure evil behind it is not just the cash store, the reality is that we don't own the game. We bought a permission to play which can be revoked at any given time because we don't read the small letters and at some point in time on the future the server might shut down for whatever reason. From a media preservation perspective I can guarantee I can just boot my d2 discs and play the game start to finish without ever going online, no one can do so with d4.
Am I the only one that thinks D2R looks better than D4?
It is a bit odd but I have this instant good feeling everytime I see a D4 vid. It just warms my heart and affirms my confidence because I saw this game early on and just knew it wasn't for me. To not have bought into the hype and hot air makes me feel good.
@@sdotwallace I guess it's the feeling of trusting my instinct and having it being validated by what I saw when it was released.
@@sdotwallace I think you're getting it wrong. Llama or anyone else pointing out the wrongs in the game didn't validate my feelings. Sure, it just affirms them. I guess you could say there's a bit of schadenfreude to it. But this game turned me off from even wanting to try it out from the first gameplay images. The aesthetics were just too far removed from being a joy to watch for me.
I don't know those streamers.
@@sdotwallace Exactly. And just as much as anyone can voice their pleasure with the game I can voice my displeasure. It''s probably the same with 90% of modern games. They are released in an unfinished state.
@@sdotwallace I just don't like the surface of it. My criticism of it isn't on gameplay, apart from what I gather guys like Llama are mentioning. But the visual style is what icks me the most. Details are drowned out by bright lights in various bright colors. What isn't drowned out by lights is covered in hitpoint-text blasting at you with every attack. It feels like that is how ADHD would look if it were a game. No amount of great game mechanics or story would change that.
I feel the same, I played both betas and got a sinking feeling that it would be a flop in it's current state.
Imagine my surprise when I started seeing the critique of things that I know would have bothered me a lot.
I'm glad people are enjoying their experience with the game right now but I'm keeping an eye on it and might jump in if it improves in future seasons. I know it would annoy me if I played it right now.
Also all my friends who bought the game have stopped playing. We'll see how many actually returns in S1 or if many people are burnt on the game.
Blizzard put profit over providing a game for its core audience. its so weird. Itemization, loot, lvl scaling, make d4 unplayable. I went back to d2 and having a blast
With 17k people to feed, profit would be one of my highest priorities along side with sleeping, eating and toilet breaks.
With how much it has sold I think they’ve got the right core audience from their view
@@mikeho you did not calculate how many people are quitting daily. I bought it but I stopped playing at level 70. Boring
And what's the games core audience exactly? People with nothing else to do, but play video games 12-16 hours a day, or people with everyday lives, that also wants to enjoy video games 1-3 hours a day, or every other day? Some of us have family's to look after and jobs to do. This immature gaming community is beyond me.
@@jonasvitting8795 You have no idea what you are talking about. I only play a few hours a day between 9:00pm-11:30pm. The same problems I mentioned above still persist.
yall need to move on with your lives.
Do you still play Diablo 4? No.
I agree llama dramas views are so invaluable with zero arguments, either agreeing with the video or saying d2 good every thing else bad
I never despised D4, I just hit a wall after I made my end game build and then stopped playing and just haven’t been back, the lack of a hunt for things like high runes and uniques (grail running) just made me lose interest
@@sdotwallaceWhat an absolute nephew take. You literally just outed yourself as a teenager that started playing ARPGs a couple years ago.
You do understand that tons of people played D1+2 and other ARPGs before seasons were even a thing, right?
Act man was correct with his "sexist analogy" .
I'd rather have 20 to 30 quality dungeons over 160 samey dungeons
I don't think it's that gamers tastes have changed. I think it's that new gamers have had mid to low-tier AAA games to play for so many years now that they don't know any different. It's why being a top quality indie or AA developer is so lucrative at the moment. I think the market is screaming for top tier, quality games again but we just aren't seeing it brought to market. Probably due to a lot of the capable companies being captured by wokism and ESG.
I just hate that most of the builds become in endgame sort of "push 3-4 cooldowns, do damage, wait for cd reset and repeat"
This. I got so tired of rogue with it's obligatory "trap on cooldown to reset your imbuement cooldowns" loop. Super tedious.
@@sdotwallace Lol, really? Diablo 2 for example:)
@@sdotwallaceyou can a lot of them. Some like blizzard have small cooldowns.
Diablo 1.... I could fill the map with gaurdians lol
Lets be real, the biggest issue by far is the itemization. There seriously are no chase items (save for a statistically unattainable few) in a game that should be loot driven. What were they thinking?
We now look for stats instead of Legendaries. when all the items can be legendary, none is... as the villain said in the movie "the incredibles" 😢
I’m totally in that “not target demographic” group, long time D2R
Wow when he asked “can you name a single blacksmith in Diablo 4?”. Really speaks volumes. Everything in D4 feels so generic, none of the characters are memorable. None of the environments are memorable. Everything just feels like I’m doing a generic quest in a generic area slaying generic monsters.
No one can name a blacksmith in a elder scrolls game and they're known as some of the best RPG's
One of my biggest problems with the game is the loot its just so boring I couldnt stand playing anymore ha
I've only played the open beta but so much of what this guy said is stuff that resonated with me over that weekend. That point early on 'I don't feel like I'm the target demographic' and later on 'Playing the game feels like a series of chores, ticking off items on a grocery list' hit the nail on the head. I really, really wanted to like the game but by the time the stress test weekend came I couldn't even last an hour I just noped out of it and uninstalled and I have no inclination to buy the full version.
If one uses the word inclination he’s automatically not the target demographics
I wouldn't worry about it there is no target audience. It's basicly can you pay for the game multiple times and do you have a object to hit the keys with to play at this point for activisions games. this is mordern life everyone must be included and so noone is satisfied. you come to eat some food at your local and the menu is just a soup made up of everything on the old menu all in one at the same time.
D4 is just a darker D3 and that is a hill I’m willing to die on.
You don't have to die for it cause it is pretty obvious, I'm surprised how few people notice/mention that. But it is even worse, except graphics D3 is a superior game in every single aspect.
Seriously, if Blizzard makes D3 Remastered (with graphic style from D4/D2R) right now, nobody would play D4 anymore.
@@pipermaru5402 That's right! I'd rather play D3 even the way it is. GRs were so much more exciting than nightmare dungeons.
The WORST by far are those "kill ALL monsters" dungeons.
I just want D2 combined with the rifts from D3 as a different option for leveling.
Look up Project Diablo 2
@@davidmorin4283 Yeah if you want permanent migraines from playing on pixel art in 2023
@@davidmorin4283 Was about to comment this
I wouldn't have been D2's target audience when I first started playing it at age 11, it was in a way too complicated for me which challenged me to understand the mechanics of the game and research the different unique items/builds. The tonal dissonance in D3 and D4 are the big detractors for me, whereas D1 and D2's tone were spot on. I always enjoy D2R hardcore ladder because of the risk of losing the character and needing to take into account the difficulty spikes, combined with the dark or eerie atmosphere in various locations throughout Act 1-5 make it a true masterpiece.
Honestly, D3 needed a tone built around your character being so powerful it was worrying. Like, you carve through demonic armies with ease, and if they had emphasized the collateral damage done in the process that would have worked. The ending of Reaper of Souls didn't work as intended for me because sure, your Nephilim is strong... but it's hard to see the problem with that. It's not like the power you threw around is what left heaven a crumbling ruin. D4 seems to have scaled back on power and I am fine with that. Heck, just quietly shuffling the D3 player character out the door without a mention I can understand as well. (after all, either we dismiss them, have them be the biggest threat in game, or have to answer why they didn't handle this in a blindingly fast speedrun.)
Diablo 1 and 2 have this tone of 'for all your power, you are as mortal as anyone else.' going on which worked for them.
@@Sorain1 I can agree with all your points. I think a lot of people 'feel' that the difference between 2 and 3 was just too big to be diablo game which caused a lot of the backlash
i started D2 when I was 10 but couldn’t finish Hell difficulty until I was 20! I remember breezing through nightmare difficulty every time to have my ass swooped everytime i reach Hell! But still I kept at it for a decade because it was so much fun! D4 though…D3 was a hot mess but at least it was hot and I did have some fun too. D4 feels like a cold bland toast
@MrLlamaSC The biggest thing for me is the restriction and friction they added to the game.
For example, items being account bound, items being locked to your current characters' power level, unable to target farm, low mob density, and certain classes cant use certain items.
I just don't understand why they made it feel so restrictive.
Modern game companies want absolute control over every aspect of whats going on. Always online. No mods. Level Scaling. Trade Restrictions. Stuff to control everything about you from the amount of fun you're having, when youre having it, down to the amount of money you're spending. Its a bloody shame really
@@RonbotnikI will never stop saying this: trading was the main reason why D2 and D2R were so much fun for me. Not being able to trade freely in D4 is awful. I would’ve been able to share many items with my friends who play the same class if they at least change the level restriction. Being at lv 100, there’s just no point keeping any item, not even for myself if I want to play other classes. Such a shame Blizzard made it this way.
@@VicJangight? There's something nice about finally finding someone with the right high rune to trade for a spare nice piece you have. The low drop rates made the trading a thing that didn't NEED to happen, but made it feel worth your time.
Blizzard now just want as many people grinding and tempted towards the shop as possible, and they learned the wrong lesson from the d3 controversies around the AH. People want to trade. Bliz don't care because they wanted to monetise it.
I miss potions/scrolls and all the "OLD" ways of doing stuff. I think the new ways like globes you get are worse.
1. Checklist-style region completion leads to fatigue and then left with nothing
2. Story/characters uninteresting and just felt like skipping through all dialogue
Because there was way too much dialogue as well
@@ak_getright9905way too much walking around in the story campaign too. Fuck it was a slog. Also, why the hell can’t we farm story bosses? That’s so dumb!
most of your counter arguments revolve around " Hes only lvl 48, so he doesnt know that X becomes better further"
thats the issue, why should people have to endure bad progression because it gets better later... just make it good all along
Remember when the Blizzard production values and polish were what made their games stand out from the crowd? Now it's all they have, 99% polish 1% soul.
Remember when UA-cam comments weren't this generic? I do
@@based-ys9um They never were. Having a bad day? I'll hear you out.
Why do everyone reacting not notice, at 11 minutes, he's not "going half speed" he's going NO SPEED until he wiggles the mouse to unfuck the horse. Then he is going half speed. There is an issue there in addition to the north/south/overtheskillicons issue.
Hey Mr.Non-Drama-Llama. :) my thought is, at least with the open world, is it should have been sectioned off much like the previous diablo games. What they could have done with each unique biome, is create specific events, world bosses, and dungeons that cater to that zones aesthetics and monster type. It would have made the world feel much more unique and varied. there are some pretty unique areas that lose some of the fun because they just weren't large enough portions of said area. they tried instead to just jam a lot of biome design into an open world without fleshing out any of the areas. when you go from the rogue encampment to Lut Gholein, or Lut to Kurast, Its very very different from your last experience. It keeps you moving forward and always experience a new large and unique biome. Also would have loved to have seen something happen at the end much like in division 2 where the black tusk invaded the map and the map was altered with a new enemy type/faction that made the endgame map feel different slightly than during the campaign. I feel this is another area they fell off and i don't count whats happening with season 1 toward this opinion as it is not part of a $70 base game.
Yeah I think I was really hoping we would get way more variety in the world. That was a big letdown for me
@@MrLlamaSC Its all good cause in the end we just love our Diablo! there are so many enjoyable versions of it to play so i'll slowly level my D4 main while i dabble in Project Diablo 2 and D2R. :) Take care my dude and looking forward to more content #KeepItComin'
@@MrLlamaSC I think your point about the winding pathways was great, found that hard to put into words while I was playing through. EVERY area just felt like a tile of little pathways that was slightly reskinned. so boring.
The horse fucking sucks on console too though lmao. It has that same problem where it runs in place for a few seconds, even when you're pushing the analog stick as hard as possible in the direction you want to go. It is miserableeeeeeee
POE2 will be my Diablo 4. 😂
💯
D4 has such a good atmosphere and seems cool. But it's bland. The color palette is flat, the skill tree is shallow, the game loop is lonely.
I listened to the act man video the other day at work and agreed with most of it. I got to level 45 as a necro and just kind of stopped playing. One funny this is the juxtaposition of all the marketing and the big promises they made in those videos of the devs talking compared to the current reality of D4.
Unfortunately, this is a problem with most American corporations now. Pump a ton of money into marketing and watch literal shit sell.
I find it interesting that if you criticize the game as a more hardcore player that went through the entire endgame the Diablo 4 bots will say that the game isn't made for you, it's actually for casual players but then when a casual player criticizes the game they do a 180 and say SKILL ISSUE and say they don't know anything about the game because they're a scrub. Seems to me that they aren't interested in talking facts about how to improve the game they just have some weird agenda where they don't want the game to be improved for some reason. Baffles me.
I sometimes wonder if the game was supposed to be so much more and the poor devs can only speak to what they know but blizzard limited features etc on launch to drip release content over seasons and expansions etc. maybe when they Devs made comments on videos it wasn’t a lie but they didn’t know how it would release
@@evanfero1660 I could see that being a factor. The state of a lot of games at release had been bad lately. Have to answer to shareholders so need to release it even if it's not done. Or something along those lines. I read an article why the blizzard north devs left and that was another case of corporate mismanagement. Vivendi made some bad financial decisions and was in trouble and brevik and many of the original members abandoned ship because their previous parent company screwed up too.
I wonder where the franchise would have gone with blizz north at thr helm.
@@SirDehumanizedI suppose they will try to make as few changes as possible as long as people don't complain too much... maybe some things regarding stash size, gems tab and minor fixes, but not in the core of the game... as well as the theme of the useless resistors are postponing it for season 2 or more... it is a question of money and working hours that as a company they should not want to invest.☠️
big issues :
- Endgame fluidity => If you have to recycle few items, extract an aspect, and put it into your stash, that'll cost you some times before being able to do next dungeon..
- too much variables for itemizations, when you got the right stats, the item is sacred and not ancestral, when you get both correct, it's the item level that's too low, it takes too much randomness to get one item right (and i'm not talking about a specific aspect that needs to be at least x% amount.
I'm okay with grinding, but i have to check every items, before reycling and/or selling just in case I get an upgrade.
edit 1 : I haven't rage on a game since league of legends like.. 10 years ago. Last time i had a little peak of rage was because of the chain of ccs, i was like "Can I play now ?"
"Don't you guys have phones?" still haunts me
Bro... in 20 years we will still be playing d2r and trying to find a jah rune.
D4 will be dead in 3 years at most.
"It's the loneliest MMO I've ever played in my life" Spoke straight to my heart. I find myself not playing D4 if my personal friends are not online. I rather just go to D2R.
same here, cmoooon season 5! Give us something haha.
Honestly, I don't think Diablo 4 is a bad game. It's just a game that was pushed out in its Alpha state. And Blizzard, being the predators they are, are withholding basic features that game should have at launch and will release them one at a time over a series of updates as "features" when they all represent things that should have been part of the game from the beginning.
amazing. im so fucking happy i havent bought it. EVERYTHING the guy said, was more or less what i had issues with in the first place.
Thanks to Blizzard in giving us a demo.
First Diablo game I didn't play, so happy I didn't but then again if people who are new to gaming or the genre or should I say title (this isn't an ARPG anymore) then that's fine.
@@sdotwallace look dude. i played every diablo game back and forth D2LoD being one of my fav games of all time. i was very torn after d3 if i would continue to support hacktivision/bilzzard or not. so just that i dont hate on the game uninformed im actually watching tons of videos about it. so there you have it, happy?`
Do people realize that Blizzard of D4 is not the Blizzard of D1/D2 days? It's amazing that we even got D2R. We all saw what was coming when D3 came out. Sure D4 was hopes and dreams but let's be honest that's all it ever will be. The day we get a TRUE Diablo 3,4, or 5 is the day when true fans/game designers of the game honor its legacy and do it right.
I think a lot of this can be summed upped with this D4 philosophy that Blizzard wants, social social social SOCIAL. But nothing really social about it.
Blizzard are of "Antisocial Social Club" 😅
The devs don't know how to balance anything. They just nerf everything into oblivion
Funny to see all the so called fans switching up and calling the game trash now. Week 1 everyone was saying ths game was the best game ever created. Now all the dads are complaining on reddit saying that the game isnt as good as they thought it wouldve been lol
Marketers/streamers figured out that if you repeat a lie enough times, people will believe it at least for awhile.
@@justinflemming2542 so funny seeing the reddit go from a circle jerk and ban anyone who dislikes d4 to, "idk man, im at lvl 50 and the game just isnt really feeling that fun anymore."
@@justinflemming2542hive mind shit, It's a very real thing. People being following sheep only gets worse with social media.
Ff 16 might be next 🤔
It feels like there are so few skills. If Necro (for example) was split into d2-style skill trees (Blood, Bone, & Shadow), it would be 1-2 linear paths per tree. There is barely any choice involved past deciding on blood, bone, or shadow. There are also obvious choices for legendary aspects for each build so there's very little actual choice in that, too. I thought paragon boards might be cool but then the only exciting-ish nodes have core stat requirements that I'm probably 10 levels away from reaching, so it feels bad. I need to get another 100 strength which is essentially going to do nothing else for my character? They're also so specific that it takes away any real choice (i.e. one board providing werewolf buffs vs. a werebear board. Obviously as a werewolf, I chose the werewolf board...)
The open world sucks with level scaling, and many of the zones look too similar. Open world could be cool if Acts actually progressed in difficulty and had unique events past the same 3 or 4 escort/protect the annoying npc events. The NPCs constantly yelling "Help" made me want to have the option to kill them. The open world also prevents map randomization which is a huge part of re-playability. It's so clear that the map was designed for mounts and navigating through the game feels absolutely terrible until you get the horse. Then, they gatekeep the horse with excessive cooldowns (not to mention the clunky pathing). So much of this game is just waiting for underwhelming cooldowns. Towns are too spread out and waste the player's time. The horse also takes away any fear of enemies because I can just mount and easily flee.
Hell zones actually looked really good but are only playable for like 20 mins during the campaign?? After the incredible cutscene introducing Hell, I was expecting a tide of demons but it was still the same bullshit where I'm spending more time walking between mobs than actually fighting them. Chests and shrines became a chore because it seems like more than half of them trigger the same long events that I'm already sick of doing. I just walk away when events start now. The game is the most enjoyable to me from level 1-20 on alt characters and quickly falls off, which is not how ARPG progression is supposed to work.
My biggest complaint by far is performance. Over a month after launch, the game crashes 1-5 times per hour, despite my PC being well above the minimum specs listed for the game and playing on the lowest settings. When it doesn't crash, it rubberbands or d/c's despite my low ping. I've seen a ton of technical support forum posts of people have similar problems with this game or worse but have yet to see a useful response from Blizz. Season 1 seems very underwhelming, especially after how much the devs hyped up seasons and claimed a huge allocation of resources to developing seasonal content.
I thought the story was actually interesting but involved too much travel and had several confusing choices. Items actually look fantastic to me visually, but the stats are awful. Far too many conditional stats that are annoying to try to calculate or only affect a tiny part of your character. The music feels more like ambience to me and is sometimes grating, while D2 has my favorite music of any game.
Man, I hope someone from Blizzard is watching your videos. So many broken components to this game and you do a great job addressing each one.
No one is looking. They don't care as long as they can push and force micro transactions camouflaged with all sort of behavioral psychology tricks.
Blizzard is focused on making more skins for cash, They don't care about the broken game. That's why resistances will be patched after season 2.
Blizzard is smart, when it comes to making money. D4 will be a monetary success for them. They’ve sold a ton of copies which will taper off, but I believe they have an ulterior motive.
- Everyone buys D4
- After 3 months all the D2 enthusiasts will have bailed and gone back to, or bought, D2R to get what they truly wanted.
- Blizzard makes lots of money.
Yeah, all the complaining about how "D2, D3, etc are better" just makes Blizz more money so it's a win win. D4's real competition is PoE and PoE2.
I also think that level scaling kinda kills it. Everything kinda feels the same regardless of what lvl you’re at. There are many issues with D4 that I find annoying and that make D2R a much better overall game, but level scaling is definitely one of the top ones.
They put in D4 the worst feature of the MMOs without having the best ones
wow, this guy is right in like 90% of his points. if not more... if only Blizzard would understand. most of this stuff are the reasons i never bought D4 after playing all the betas. just not good enough imo. i think that as the honeymoon phase dissipates most ppl will have either buyers remorse or just stop playing
My main issues were Itemization, Lvl Scaling, and Social.
around 37m mark, lets not forget the Necro who has to have the minions on the hotbar to take up a slot. what if all the other classes had their"passive" skills on the hotbar?
I think personally, in my personal opinion, the way I see it, my viewpoint is Diablo 2: Resurrected was made for older gamers like me who don't enjoy the direction modern games are headed. Now if Blizzard could just make Diablo 1: Resurrected with all the modern and requisite QoL changes.
Diablo 1 Resurrected should just be added to D2R as dlc. Take the portal to Tristram and start descending through the cathedral. I'd be pumped for that!
@@shadyrebob5999 I've been saying that for a while, except my idea is to make it sort of like the Pandemonium Event. You enter a portal to Old Tristram and you have to descend through its original 16 dungeons. At the end of every 4th dungeon you would fight an Uber version of a D1 enemy. Like for instance Lvl 4 you would fight Uber Butcher in order to open the exit to the next 4 dungeons. Lvl 8 would be Uber Skeleton King. Lvl 12 maybe Uber Archbishop Lazarus. Until you reach the final dungeon, Lvl 16 where you fight Uber Diablo (in his D1 form, which is my favorite Diablo iteration).
You would have to do all 16 dungeons in 1 playthrough and if you die you exit out of the challenge. If you defeat Uber Diablo you'll be rewarded a new item similar to the Hellfire Torch and the Annihilus Charm.
One of the best feelings in d2 is starting new character in new season and going through the game as a GROUP
I like the way the tattooed guy says it. We have to be critical if we want cool games, cause now what we get is a shiny, server needing, dumb story Diablo 3 for which we pre-pay. Once upon a time we had nicer games, I mean who can produce Heroes of Might and Magic again? So melt them with criticism and if they are not going to make cool games let them go grow vegetables.
Grim dawn has level scalling in later dificulties and some parts of normal, still you aleays feel powerful and can even punch above your levels, thanks to better itens, better leveling and devotions.
Seems blizzard took the worst of their competition (PoE itemization overly restrictive and grim dawn's renown and shrine grind)
Can the camera be closer? i can't see my battlepass cosmetics.
I'm saving so much money not having to buy new games, it's great!
Broke Beach
@@ToxMod I knew I would get a comment like this. How about I am saving so much time b/c time is most valuable.
@@ToxModThe proud coomsoomer.
"My job at Walmart allows me to buy all the bibeo games! I'm so rich, peasants!"
i wonder what percentage of game devs these days have only worked on mobile games and then they try to make a game for the PC crowd
My main is an arc-lash Sorc, and I'm feeling locked in this playstyle. I'm 81lvl and I'd like to change to Ice-shards or even try some fire build, but now I need to hunt for cd/+mana/resourcegen items, and *reroll* the crappy attributes; not enough gold.. plus I don't want to lose my arc-lash build; I wish I could save the paragons/items/skills as a template.
this. currently my experience with my rend barb that I want to switch to WW (to have some FUN finally LOL).
Honestly if Diablo 3 and 4 were Diablo 2 with extra skills, content, acts etc I would enjoy them just as much. That's not saying D2 was perfect, but D3 was plain boring, and D4 simply didn't captivate me even after 3 hours of gameplay.
It seems that they went Quanttity vs Quality , D2 fights were almost mini boss fights at times not smacking around spiders (hey those ones in A3 were HUGE), they need to remove the cooldown for the horse for starters, when utilizing an ability you should pass thru (or error) whats in front of you pathing around in a big scrap just get you killed, gems should be available for all characters once 1 of them has met the requirements, better visualization when CC'd (frozen edges of screen are frosted sort of deal), it's a really good game overall but it feels rusty and clunky and for a commercial release of such an acntipacted game it's almost sad to see that state it's in(But of course I will still play it )
The only reason for attributes/stats are to action the Paragon boards Rare % boosts/multipliers and whatnot. It is disgusting.
Easy way I figured to perceive what is "close range" is to roll a Rogue and use the Flurry 360 legendary. Anything not getting hit by that skill is not close I guess suggesting that anything past that may be considered distant.. not sure on that one though.
I think the confusion with gold restricting options comes from the fact that casuals probably only salvage loot instead of selling. Gold drops from monsters (at least visually lol), materials come from salvaging. Selling to vendors is probably a learned behaviour.