That’s just not consistent with the reality that Diablo 4 was released to wide acclaim. Wolcen was far worse than D4 in almost every area. I think you just got farmed for engagement, because contrarianism is trendy.
There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.
I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers
people were literally criticising the game so much on all the Diablo-related r/'s that i had to unsub from each one. like, yeah, it got good ratings, but if anything, that only served to further incense the ones displeased.
there was a lot of stupid, toxic bs, for sure, but there were also players dipping out before the first season even began – myself included. like, this is just me, obviously, but D4 at launch was straight up the most let down i’ve ever been by a game.
for brevity’s sake, i gotta say that season 4 made me wanna give D4 another shot. & you know, it’s fun now, but there are still elements to it that make me want to scream & that’s not gonna change, because it’s all a part of their vision for the core experience of the game.
Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.
I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.
yeah, okay. all i’m saying is, parts of the internet were practically incandescent with negativity towards the game, a not insignificant amount of which had to do with the base mechanics. like, there are content creators currently reporting on how season 4 is turning things around, which wouldn’t be noteworthy if the game hadn’t been hemorrhaging players almost immediately after launch.
D4 released to “wide acclaim” where the critics are concerned, yes, but a sizable portion of the audience clearly didn’t agree. like, the game was practically a meme until recently.
I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.
I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.
i get where you’re coming from, i believe, but i don’t mean the, well, “treadmill,” specifically. there were players testing D4 extensively & finding out that 1) some mechanics, while baffling, appeared to be working as intended (necro minion behaviour, for one) & 2) some mechanics were not working as intended (armor chief among them, IIRC). add to this the monetisation, lack of content, dungeon / map design & a whole bunch of other things people had legitimate problems with from the get-go… well. i mean. i know kind of a silly amount of people with a long history with Blizzard / Diablo, some of whom i wouldn’t feel weird calling Blizzard fanboys. not a single one picked up the game at all. like, not that my peers are the alpha & omega; i just kinda hadn’t thought about this much before, but it’s bizarre how many friends & relatives i was sure would eat up anything by Blizzard just straight up ignored the game. again, it’s not really about the treadmill as much as like, just old-fashioned word of mouth, i think. it didn’t take long at all for Blizzard to post their “so, uh, things are gonna change” damage control video, which to me says they know they messed up (for what it’s worth), when everyone & their dog were reporting on the game selling a buttillion copies only a little while before.
i believe i may have been coming on a bit strong. apologies. i don’t at all mean to be saying that D4 was overwhelmingly criticised by everyone, just that the reception seemed to be mixed enough where two people could have an entirely different view of it, depending on the environment. you know? there were people who were primed to hate it no matter what, absolutely, but also a veritable mountain of legitimate critique that i don’t want to be dismissed, because the game was not ready for launch. the “beta testing” showed as much, but of course, it was already too late to change anything. & you know, what boils my piss is, there were folks saying, “have fun with a year’s worth of beta testing you paid for.” because they were right. they shouldn’t have been right about this. this shouldn’t be happening.
I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.
That’s just not consistent with the reality that Diablo 4 was released to wide acclaim. Wolcen was far worse than D4 in almost every area. I think you just got farmed for engagement, because contrarianism is trendy.
Everyone I know that played at launch when I asked if it was worth getting told me no, even more so after the first few patches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_IV#Reception
There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.
I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers
people were literally criticising the game so much on all the Diablo-related r/'s that i had to unsub from each one. like, yeah, it got good ratings, but if anything, that only served to further incense the ones displeased.
there was a lot of stupid, toxic bs, for sure, but there were also players dipping out before the first season even began – myself included. like, this is just me, obviously, but D4 at launch was straight up the most let down i’ve ever been by a game.
for brevity’s sake, i gotta say that season 4 made me wanna give D4 another shot. & you know, it’s fun now, but there are still elements to it that make me want to scream & that’s not gonna change, because it’s all a part of their vision for the core experience of the game.
Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.
I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.
yeah, okay. all i’m saying is, parts of the internet were practically incandescent with negativity towards the game, a not insignificant amount of which had to do with the base mechanics. like, there are content creators currently reporting on how season 4 is turning things around, which wouldn’t be noteworthy if the game hadn’t been hemorrhaging players almost immediately after launch.
D4 released to “wide acclaim” where the critics are concerned, yes, but a sizable portion of the audience clearly didn’t agree. like, the game was practically a meme until recently.
I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.
I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.
i get where you’re coming from, i believe, but i don’t mean the, well, “treadmill,” specifically. there were players testing D4 extensively & finding out that 1) some mechanics, while baffling, appeared to be working as intended (necro minion behaviour, for one) & 2) some mechanics were not working as intended (armor chief among them, IIRC). add to this the monetisation, lack of content, dungeon / map design & a whole bunch of other things people had legitimate problems with from the get-go… well. i mean. i know kind of a silly amount of people with a long history with Blizzard / Diablo, some of whom i wouldn’t feel weird calling Blizzard fanboys. not a single one picked up the game at all. like, not that my peers are the alpha & omega; i just kinda hadn’t thought about this much before, but it’s bizarre how many friends & relatives i was sure would eat up anything by Blizzard just straight up ignored the game. again, it’s not really about the treadmill as much as like, just old-fashioned word of mouth, i think. it didn’t take long at all for Blizzard to post their “so, uh, things are gonna change” damage control video, which to me says they know they messed up (for what it’s worth), when everyone & their dog were reporting on the game selling a buttillion copies only a little while before.
i believe i may have been coming on a bit strong. apologies. i don’t at all mean to be saying that D4 was overwhelmingly criticised by everyone, just that the reception seemed to be mixed enough where two people could have an entirely different view of it, depending on the environment. you know? there were people who were primed to hate it no matter what, absolutely, but also a veritable mountain of legitimate critique that i don’t want to be dismissed, because the game was not ready for launch. the “beta testing” showed as much, but of course, it was already too late to change anything. & you know, what boils my piss is, there were folks saying, “have fun with a year’s worth of beta testing you paid for.” because they were right. they shouldn’t have been right about this. this shouldn’t be happening.
I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.