Not necessarily. Blizzard has a reputation for keeping the lid sealed on what they are working on until is nearly ready so I’d say it’s entirely possible they really had been working on it all along and had been simply following their usual M.O. Unfortunately for them deciding not to reveal it and instead show a mobile game at a Blizzcon was a huge miscalculation on their part.
Trust me… I agree 100% that this reveal is definitely an attempt to garner back some goodwill because, lets face it, they’ve been getting slammed ever since the D:I fiasco and now the Hong Kong business isn’t helping them either. They had no choice but to do a D4 reveal this time.
I suppose the possibility is always there that they are lying but I feel that would be an extremely poor decision if proved to be true - they can’t afford to have something like that come along now on top of all the other bad decisions.
And besides, the gameplay streams show a good bit of work done from what I can see… they woulda had to crunch hardcore to do all that in a year or less - even if they reused D3 assets. Perpetuating such a farce would also be a complete waste of resources.
I will note that I am pretty much anti-Blizz at this point and extremely disappointed that they are going on the path of full MMO. Normally I wouldn’t defend them, it’s just that in this case it feels unlikely that they are lying about having been working on it before last Blizzcon.
Blizzard also has a reputation of being greedy. I believe there was another convention where there was a reveal of a mobile version of a game which was met with some disappointment but then later on there was the reveal of a simple title for a pc continuation of the game bringing everything back to positivity. Not sure if it was for Fallout 76 (lol) or an Elder Scroll game.
I am simply baffled that Blizzard didn’t foresee Diablo Immortal ending up as the fiasco that it was. They had time between it’s reveal and the Q&A so they could have easily fixed it. They could have hinted at another large project in the works for the Diablo Universe and yea they do hint a lot of the time, they like to tease with a carrot just as much as they like the secrecy.
Either they chose to not placate the raging fans (Immortal Trailer becoming one of the most despised videos on youtube) which resulted in a ton of negative backlash and stocks falling (it’s fall due to other things as well) or they simply didn’t have anything at the time and Blizzard was simply in a state of shock because they didn’t know what to do.
Leading up to Blizzcon there were a ton of major leaks thought to be done on purpose to try and bring some excitement and positivity during the whole Hong Kong debacle.
Yea I am also anti-Blizz so that could be lending a bit more skepticism in my crazy theory. I think an ARP with small MMO influence could work and you could even have solo work as well technically.
Basically you’d have to set up a world where players, npcs, and monsters are treated as different frequencies. So the character that you play you can see clearly but from time to time you’d see ghostly glimpses of other players, monsters, npcs and so on. Kinda like Dark Souls in a way. So if you are in a large area and a boss shows up you could be “alone” and the boss itself could phase in and out to fight other players while you might have to deal with spawns or environmental influences during the fight - maybe the boss is in all phases and can have attacks that might strike all players whether they are in your phase or not (so like forming a party which would be optional you could hone in on someone’s frequency and join them as opposed to just having ghost players).
This way you wouldn’t have nearly as much clutter to deal with when it comes to 10+ players all visibly smashing on one boss, boss fights could be very dynamic and you’d have to position well so as to avoid the boss jumping in on your frequency while you might be fighting spawns or avoiding environmental hazards. You might start the fight against a completely healthy boss and then all of a sudden it will shift out leaving to do either gain some respite or deal with something else, only for that boss to jump back in the fray but visibly wounded or in a completely different boss phase which would be a large surprise.
You could even have HUBs where you can visibly see all other players but once you leave the HUB you’ll notice the players beginning to fade away.
I think this way an ARPG small MMO could work. It would be rather unique imo.
IKR? Once it happened and I had time to process all the information I was just sitting there thinking, “WTF Blizzard? How in the hell didn’t you see this coming? Were you idiots spending so much time in China that you forgot how Americans (and Westerners in general) think about mobile games?”
Was noone at Blizzard in touch with reality enough to speak up and say, “Hey, guys, I get what we’re doing here but maybe it might not be the best ideal to unveil a mobile game as the ‘centerpiece’ of the event. How about we do something less… controversial instead?”
I can’t even envisage it turning out any way other than it did.
at this age, going full moarpig (mmorpg) always online path is viable for diablo 4, unlike diablo 3. though i wish for solo players they can design the mobs and bosses with the right scalings.
Anyway D4 trailer was epic! Probably the best game trailer made by Blizzard.
Gameplay looks like No more cartooned ponny world, but dark, gothic, bloody and scary.
I hope there will be amazon like character which was best offense/defense mix HC character for me. In paladins armor, stormshield, jawelins, high block/dodge/evade rates, 95% all rezists and high physical damage resistance, she was unstopable lighting fury
First of all, even for PoE i find it cancer. I mean besides the fact that i don’t like the Game to begin with, it’s one of the biggest Reason why i would never touch PoE anyway. It simply doesn’t worth it to me.
Secondly: Even with that in mind, i’d argue it’s a complete different thing for PoE because PoE is a Free2play Game. It can’t be helped in this case because they need the playerbase for Online-Only to sell Cosmetics and Stashtabs. If they would have an Offline-Mode it would open the possibility to mod the the stuff into the offline-mod without getting them any money. D4 however will be fullpriced Games plus addons, why is it underserved to expect that i can play it whenever i want without being bound to the Blizzard Online Servers…
What was shown at Blizzcon did not at all seem to represent that discussion. That’s probably not ‘production ready’ and hence the game being out ‘not even Blizzard soon.’
Yup. Unless something changes between now and whenever it releases it is unlikely to have offline. Keep in mind that, per usual Blizzard bonehead moves, console versions of D3 had offline mode available while leaving PC gamers out in the cold both on that count and from having native controller support. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do the same for D4 as well.
Apart from the “darker” visual style what they showed and backed up by all the panels info - its a re-skin of D3 with even more simplified character progression system as well as an itemization system on the level of a brain dead mosquito.
Even the 4 dimwit stats they had in D3 are recycled into - Attack and Defence
Those people are completely oblivious to what makes D2 a timeless masterpieces and how to make an actual worthy successor to it.
Thankfully we have Grim Dawn which apart from the combat is uncountable times better than anything these poor newbies at Actiblizz will muster in a decade`s time.
Just by watching the reveal video speaks a lot for the insecurity the D4 team has - and i admit i got a sense of satisfaction how they couldnt muster even a whimper from the audience - it was that hilarious.
Well, Blizzard is seemingly going in the right direction. But then again they’ve had a history of scrapping and/or radically altering interesting features before release. They’ve also had a history of going one step forward and one to two steps back.
I’m slightly hopeful they’ll make a good sequel, but I’m more cautious than anything, particularly after seeing the super-simplified Attack/Defense system and the MMO-lite features. I’ll definitely comb through the reviews after it releases.
I dont trust this showy display attempt to lure players in. To save this franchise we a need Zantai or a Grava or some Crate dude to join this company.
I agree 100% From what I have seen it’s just a D3 reskin and the skill system pretty much the same idea of what they had in D3.It’s the same old issues that’s screaming for attention even in these early stages of development.Unless they make major changes to the skill system and character skills (if any…) I will not even bother with Blizzard or D4.
That’s probably one reason why Grim Dawn is so much better than D3. I wonder what would have happened if Vivendi let Blizzard North handle the development of D3 instead of taking it away from them. Maybe we would all be playing D3 now instead of GD!
