Played 200 hours of Diablo 4, because a friend asked me to play. I can’t see myself playing this to 1000+ hours like I have with Grim Dawn. Just need to rant a bit.
You never get a good item in D4, never. The true quality is determined by the tempering system.
If you don’t get the right rolls it’s now trash. If you manage to get the right rolls now you get to make even more rolls via Masterworking, and you need the random masterwork bonuses to land on the right stats, or guess what, you can pay a gazillion gold and do it over. You have random rolls stacked on random rolls, stacked on random rolls which just means that 1% chance is now 0.0001% chance. I can’t be bothered. In Grim Dawn I can screw around in the end game and make almost any kind of hybrid abomination I want. It’s power is determined by MY choices, not random luck rolls
The talent system seems pointless. If you have 1 point in a skill or 5 points it may not even matter because the “REAL” power is coming from aspects attached to said equipment. There is nothing worse than spamming a useless spell because it procs something important. You speced into blizzard? No that’s actually a trash spell, but the Ice Spike affix it triggers is what makes it “Good.”
Stuck with ONLY 6 moves on your action bar. In Grim Dawn I can have 1 move, or I can have 20 moves (if I’m willing to switch between bars) somehow I can complete the game this way. I even have a character with NO MOVES and he’s level 70! “Different” builds suffer from the same repeated 3-4 skills and then you get to pick a couple to spam. Wowee…
Paragon system is busywork, and is a pain in the ass if you want to to try a new build out, because of all the crap you need to click. “Oh wow 5 more intellect amazing” It’s fake depth. Many of the “top” builds don’t even use the “Legendary” nodes, what is the purpose of the “Legendary” node if you’re better off stacking basic stuff? The constellation system in grim dawn feels better, I like the puzzle element, and the choices feel better implemented, and I’m not forced to reallocate 225 bloody points.
Seasons suck, and they feel like an excuse for any kind of class balance. The thing you worked on, yea it’s trash now, the one build you never got to try out last season? Well don’t bother now its trash.
The endgame feels terrible, I never felt it 100% necessary to go into the Shattered Realm in Grim Dawn, but I am compelled to enter it in D4 if I want “The Best Items.” I find myself breezing through tiers, and then just hitting a wall suddenly. I slept through the entire 1-100 experience as a Whirlwind barbarian, and went up to Tier 63 in the pit, but I can’t really determine what is one shotting me. After 78 hours playing this Barbarian I can’t be bothered pushing deeper. I had more fun in Grim Dawn with the character who’s moveset revolves around throwing his own turds at enemies than smashing my head at Pit tiers.
The end game in Grim Dawn for me is get all my purples, then try and push some of the secret bosses, maybe fight Ravager, then make a new character. I enjoy the leveling experience, the talent tree(s) feel meaningful. The experimentation is what keeps me coming back.
My biggest overall gripe with the endgame in D4 is I have trouble seeing stuff I need to dodge. The dodge also has no iframes, which is not fun. Tormented bosses like Varshan have stacking debuffs that will kill you basically over 3 stacks. They get applied to you by shit on the floor that’s very hard to see. I CAN’T SEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
The most aggravating bosses in Elden Ring and Dark Souls feel more fair than going into the Pit/ attempting Tormented bosses in Diablo. I literally can’t determine if it’s my gear that is at fault or my skills.If it’s just lack of grinding out more 5% stat increases and not because of my poor play, then I have no interest in doing that at all.Stacking cooldown reduction isn’t gameplay.
Overall I feel like Diablo 4 is designed to waste my time.
D4 is visually great, but otherwise it has mobile game depth and mechanics written all over it. After playing the beta pre release in 2023 I knew I don’t need to actually buy the game.
Blizzard basically went to shit when it was acquired by Activision. Even the games you could have fun with are still marred by dumb design choices, greedy practices like lootboxes or both.
Interesting. I haven’t played D4 but a lot of your complaints remind me of my (very brief) experience trying out Last Epoch. Way too many random rolls to “craft” a good item, boring endgame with nothing else to do, handful of skills that are only powerful because of the other skills they auto-cast, and completely broken balance that they handwave by promising to change it up next “season”. I’m not convinced they have any idea how to balance an ARPG.
I know the whole conceit of LE is near-absolute customization of both equipment and skills. Although most skill nodes aren’t of the genuinely interesting variety, mostly just being increases of effect procession, critical rate, charge retention, etc. I suppose there’ll be a question soon of whether the developers overdid their devotion to player customizability–whether there’s a point beyond which balance becomes too unwieldy to manage.
If it wasn’t for my buddy asking me to play I wouldn’t have shelled out the dough. I don’t think he plays enough to actually make it to the endgame though, so for him everything still seems good.
I somewhat agree with this, certain setpieces in the game are really nice looking, there is one hallway setpiece that you sometimes walk through before the boss that’s nice. There is a light ray casting across half the hallway, the character enters this beam of light, and I usually stop to look at it. On the other hand most of the game has a muddy palette Scosglen in particular is terrible they added a permanent rain effect that just washes out every color and detail.
What makes this even worse is the camera is set so close to the character. There are areas where the camera pans out and it looks really nice, because you can see more of the terrain, but most of the time it’s too close. The only way I can stand to play Diablo 4 is with a controller. The myopic camera makes aiming at enemies on the screen border a chore.
I bought it, because I used to play D3 with a mate and it was mindless fun, so I thought it’d be more of the same.
D4 is still mindless, but it’s just not fun. Also, no Monk. Well, it was ok for a little while (I played Rogue), but then all I’m looking for is stat increases on my gear and running the same couple of activities repeatedly. Progression feels bad, variety is completely lacking and it certainly does not inspire altaholicism like GD does. Sorc and Barb and Necro seem like mostly tired rehashes.
It’s obvious in the way streamers just blast to endgame asap, then just rush to fight the hardest bosses. Nothing about exploring builds or meme ideas, just slightly better stats on the same builds over and over again.
Overall, I have way more fun with something like The Slormancer, and that’s a two person team. D4 seasons are just a copium hit for the streamers that need it to give them a reason for subs.
I think it’s primarily the feeling of “I’ve done all this before.” It doesn’t feel really different and the content was really repetitive. I was playing solo this time also so I didn’t have the chat and banter while playing to counter the boring progression path.
I usually like doing campaign mode in ARPG’s, but in D4 I did it once and then skipped it after. I think because of the mounts, it felt like most of the time I was just travelling, and I wasn’t enjoying fighting the mobs on the way either after the first few.
I didn’t enjoy the D4 campaign mainly due to the unlikable characters that were introduced, and then later, for some reason (poor writing etc.), took over as central parts to the story. The character you are playing just goes along with it/never really answers in a way you might as a player, and you aren’t giving even a basic choice on how to respond. I am more a fan of the silent protagonist. I really scratched my head at some of the choices of people filing certain roles in D4, they just really didn’t fit the role they were supposed to play, and didn’t improve immersion/believability of the storyline.
The mounts are an odd one, I feel as if they were implemented because they made the world too boring, and too large. You combine that with the GPS navigation for quest completion, and you can find yourself mindlessly following a glowing line blazing past all enemies and scenery. I think this has to do a lot with how activision-blizzard-microsoft makes all their games, they all share a lot of the same elements game design wise.
I have all the the Grim Dawn map memorized, it doesn’t feel like an area is just large, randomly generated paths. D4’s map is very bland and forgettable. When I look at a shot from Grim Dawn I can immediately place where the person is.
Yeah well said, that’s exactly it, the mounts almost explicitly call out that the content is not interesting ‘on the way’ to your objectives.
And the story did certainly feel very forced.
Not to mention, though this seems a minor thing I think it’s substantial: making all items in the inventory the same size and relative look makes everything feel generic. I mean the loot system is fairly mundane anyway (especially that you can slap whatever power on whatever gear you want), but seeing all your found loot as the same rectangles is just an obvious indicator that you’re mostly going to press the ‘salvage all’ button.
lost the little interest i had after playing the d4 beta. build craft was way worse than even d3 (at least there i can pick and choose to use any amount of spells from any tier in any slot), the spells felt muted, weak even, because they had to make you get everything within the first 2 hours, the overworld felt like mmo busywork full of crafting mats, the story was too self-serious for how insultingly bad it was (everything revolved around neyrelle and the beta ended with the narrator telling us nobody expected her to play a part going forward, seriously?), the story dungeons were boring (wait and listen to bad dialogue in fixed top down view) - way to unceremoniously kill off rathma.
i don’t care about endgame, i care about coming up with fun to play build ideas - thank god i wasn’t subjected to that tempering/masterworking system (or paragon for that matter). and i looked up the full story a bit after release and boy is it forced, now we’re helping meph to kill his daughter because - why exactly, what was her actual plan? give me d3 camp if you have the skills of d4 writers.
i mean if the overall feel was great i probably wouldn’t care as much about any of that but it just didn’t come together for me.
Well, i might be one of the ‘few’ people in this forum (even there is even one of them here) who really does ‘like’ Diablo 4 overall. For me honestly the best Campaign in the whole market and also esp. in the Series (though D3 already pushed in a good direction, just some plotpoints where weird). The Open World-Layout itself is actually done pretty well, i kinda feared it might go too much Sacred (2) but it feels pretty fitting for a Diablo Game, just that the map is connected. Finally we got some skill-systems back… while i find there is some ‘missed’ potential in the skilltree itself, i overall and that might be a somewhat ‘controversal take’, that in a Diablo Game there shouldn’t be expected to much anyway. It was ‘always’ even with Diablo 1 but also Diablo 2, more on the casual-friendlier and simplisitc side, that’s what i’d argue was part of the appeal as well, that it was accessable. The whole complexity for ARPG did come afterwards when other companies picked the genre up and wanted to add into it more (plus part of the complexity which i said about Diablo 2 - is purely player driven, like the economy/trading).
Also i agree with the ‘visual’ point, plus i really do love the character-creator (despite being minimalistic) and esp. classfantasy and their armor designs.
It won’t land on my current top 3 (1. GD, 2. D2 and 3. LE), esp. as it is now and due being online only (which is my absolute biggest gripe about the game), but i also don’t find it closely as bad or mediocre as people try to make it out to be, quite a ‘good’ (not great nor perfect) Game with alot of wasted /untapped potential, which hopefully will adressed in the future. I think the biggest problem about debate like this, despite being in the same genre, both GD and D4 just have a different target audience that’s why i can see (on top of it flaws) why it doesn’t resonate with GD players as much.
Tho to be fair, that stuff was added after LE ‘success’ and quite a lot of people (myself included) seem that they took the right direction of that. With the way they reworked aspects, and stuff, it did become more fun in my opinion. But then again, look at some other posts here, i also love the way Last Epoch handles items, crafting in that Game is quite fun. So yeah…
As i pointed out above, i don’t expect in a Diablo Game the level of complexity of an Grim Dawn and especially not of a Path of Exile, and (again unpopular opinion) don’t even want that. I always loved Diablo for it’s simplicity. it was easy accessable and get back into, that’s why Diablo 2 was one of the best Games for me over 12 years to have an on,- and off relationship because it’s simplistic.
I’d still argue it needs some rework and polishing tho.
I’m gonna be blunt, but i feel like this is a very subjective moot point. Because you’ll find people who appreciate that they don’t need to play piano builds and focus on a few instead. And let’s be honest, how many people played in older Games that many skills anyway. ARPG’s never were like MMORPG’s with 3 bars of skills and so on. It’s only for some games like Grim Dawn which did go a bit further on that. And even there i might need to check how many skills geniunly are used for the average amount of builds. I can see tho why you might prefer GD over D3/4 then.
You mean like Grim Dawn Devotion tree of heaving multiple variation of +20 cunning and so on. I mean don’t get me wrong, if you’d force me to pick between GD Devotion and Diablo 4 i might pick GD Devotion because i just love the Devotion Skills which you put on top of another skill. But it feels a bit weird for me to call out a talent tree for being a talent tree, meanwhile celebrate the game which have a similiar itch. It surely could be argued that Paragon does have more untapped potential, but if you geniunly invest time it ‘can’ be fun to tinker with esp. with the glyph mechanic on top of that.
Honestly, i can kinda ‘resonate’ with that, esp. due i jump back and forth between Diablo 4 and Last Epoch seasons. It’s the same issue which i’ve with battlepasses, which i wouldn’t mind or rather say, would find a fair concept without it, is the whole FOMO and getting stressed out of it. I just want to take my time and play when i want, but can’t because season and their seasonal themes and makes you feel you missing out.
BUT if we’re being fair here, that’s not really just on ‘Diablo 4’, that’s what the market asks for. You see it in the various ARPG’s with seasons they 've huge spikes when they drop because the mainstream audience seems to love that. And look at Grim Dawn, we also have people doing their own community seasons… so while i get the complain i wouldn’t blame it solely on D4 but rather the market.
True, and that sadly on more level than one, tho then again playing since pretty much last years S2, they did already work and improve on that, it’s just not quite there. My Problem and i dropped that on the LE Discourse as well, i feel like the ‘Endgame’ Critique is sometimes a bit, … well overblown because if we would be absolutely fair and honest, that’s not something which games nail at release and often needs to be adressed post launch. Like if you compare GD 1.0 Vanilla it’s alwo not comparable to what it is now with both expansion and a lot of love of labor from Crate with many updates. Like i remember the ‘early days’ of Grim Dawn when this was a more common complain and people in the community argued “well i love alt’ing as Endgame, starting over with new character and grind them up” (which arguable missed a bit of the point when people criticsized endgame). And even now in other communities when you talk about GD i hear quite some people with the mentality like “nice game but endgame sucks tho” (not agreeing with that, because as it is now GD does have for me the best endgame but anyway).
Which also leads me to the point that i’d even argue that “good Endgame” is pretty subjective to begin with. Because people want different things out of it…
Still, in case of Diablo 4 i’d agree on this… there is still a lot left ot be desired(even tho in my opinion they did quite improve a lot since the last few months / seasons).
I know i wasn’t asked on this, but from my PoV, if you would compare D3 Vanilla /without expansion and Diablo 4 Vanilla, i’d argue they were similiar messed up and lacking(tho tbf d4 quite more so). I feel both games biggest issues on release were, that the feel quite unfinished and had some very weird design decision. It’s just with all the post-launch work put into and esp. with the expansion they did quite improve it a lot. That’s why, if you ask me at the ‘current state’ at both of them, i’d argue as well that Diablo 3 is better than Diablo 4. Why so?
Diablo 3 feels in many more areas well thought out and it also did come with some real cool stuff. Like for one thing, and i’d argue that’s the single best aspect about diablo 3 where i’d even put it above Grim Dawn, is about the way they handle replaybility. No forced replaying of Campaign devaluing the story, but at the same time offering for people with the chapter select to freely engage with it. You wanna New Game+ or Nightmare Run? Set it to Chapter 1 and put the difficulty up. You wanna play the best of your favorites? Do that. You wanna go rather random. That works as well. And then you have a huge open sandbox with the Adventure Mode, where you can either go your own farming routes, doing bounties, engage with some secret quests, or do rifts/grifts(and i loved rifts because they were super chill and allowed exploration unlike G-Rifts or Shattered Realm which is focus on the race because time and rewards only at the end, reminded me of the mapworks of Torchlight 2 which i really liked as well).
Generally Diablo 3 felt more well crafted and thought out then Diablo 4, when they implemented ideas they utilized it more. Like another example, and that’s one thing where i’m kinda angry at Diablo 4, is the whole Events thing. Diablo 3 had random events when you roam around the world, but they were part of the world and felt like they tell a little story. You’ve games like Guild Wars 2 - super old, but also had these type of events (even event chains) and they felt like part of the world. Like as example Queensdale - i know exactly some of the events and how they go, like the farm where you fight the big worm, if you fail it, then he poison the water-thingies (i dunno how they’re called in english) which change it to a new event where you need to fight the smaller worms to purify the water. What does Diablo 4 do? Pretty generic random “oh escort the pretty same ghost in 3 different areas, with they only difference that the ghost might look for the grandchild instead of the wife”. They’ve this huge’ss open world, where (as i pointed above) they nailed the layout, i like the overall world-design, but they don’t utlizie it. Like even if the world would be memorable designed, you really don’t feel the design because they don’t do much of that… and that frustrates me (to finally come to some of my critiques… jumping at the defense of D4 might seem like i’ve only good things to say, it’s not, i’m also very critical, mine just are different then yours and i find overall the game good enough with a lot of potential. If a company like blizzard with an ip like Diablo should deliever a ‘good’ or ‘good enough’ is a different story…).
Heck - Diablo 4 unlike Diablo 3 not even have some sort of codex where audiologs and stuff is added so you can relisten them. Because god forbid you play with people or there is action… in an ARPG / Hack’n’Slash so you need to focus on the combat ._.
Dungeons. How the f*ck can blizzard screw up with dungeons. World of Warcraft was once a pioneer of exciting fun dungeons which were memorable. The Amount of Dungeons in Diablo 4 which are memorable can you, if at all, count on one hand, the rest of them look the same. (Tho to be fair Dungeons in ARPG’s atleast which i played are rarely good. Last Epoch layed a real strong groundwork. I love that they’ve for each dungeon an indivudal mechanic, it’s just the layouts aren’t that good and well designed and the mechanic often not utilized. But if they can adress this LE have the potential to be one of the strongest ARPGs in terms of dungeons. !Grim Dawn! - i can’t tell you how much loved and excited i were for their roguelike dungeons. They reminded me of the good ol’ WoW Days (i mean that very positively)…)
I found GD also quite accessible at the start. And quite easy on normal difficulty. So if you just want to casually game a bit then you definitely can.
It’s probably what generates the most money. The market doesn’t usually ask for anything. Stuff gets marketed and people get ‘tricked’ into buying said stuff, for better or worse.
This is most likely why it’s done, to play into the “oh shit I’m missing out” feeling.
It’s also one reason why I play GD. It stays more or less the same (ignoring the balance changes). I can play how much I want whenever I want and I don’t feel like it’s wasted time or that I “didn’t make it” or anything.
So for me GD is great because it’s fun to play casually, doesn’t pressure you into anything and yet it also provides you with an almost endless amounts of possible end game builds that you can fiddle around and come up with. More than I have time for anyway
I cannot get into any of the popular ARPGs other than Grim Dawn. Supposedly the graphics engine of Grim Dawn is the oldest but none of the other games gives me the realistic, nasty and impactful feeling which Grim Dawn presents. I don’t know if it is because I didn’t play longer enough of the other games.
If they don’t grab you in the first hour (or sooner) then probably playing more won’t help
I think graphical style is more important than shiny whatever these new engines have. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with how GD looks. I really like the style and I quite like the lighting.
