Admittedly so, I’m very biased and often guilty of repeatedly comparing GD to Diablo 2 since a lot of its appeal to me is from the standpoint of seeing it as the closest thing to a modern successor.
For me it has more than enough staying power and if you observe the forum and note the “regulars” who interact in many of the posts, probably a good indication they’ve been playing (and likely still are) quite a bit as well.
That part I agree and my attempt at critiques wouldn’t be applicable if I didn’t see and enjoy the same staying power.
For example I complain a lot about the game’s item design and loot because there’s something I hate, which is the amount of inapplicable loot collected for a particular build (to the extent that I feel like, even among over 20 characters I’ve created, half the stuff I collect isn’t useful to a single one of them).
But that complaint has a side that maybe I should focus on more, which is nothing but compliments. The reason the game has this problem is because it allows a very, very diverse range of builds. The irrelevant loot problem is the problem of having items too narrow in purpose matched with the maximum diversity of character builds (excluding gear choices). It becomes apparent each time a ranged demolitionist collects a 2-handed crossbow only to find it deals poison and gives skill bonuses to occultist and nightblade, e.g. This is a problem Diablo 2 never suffered to anywhere near the same extent because it allowed limited build choices with generalized loot that applies to many builds, making even a poison crossbow useful to any bow amazon and sometimes even to other classes, e.g. It’s part of the reason there were players still farming 10 years later as I see it. They weren’t collecting irrelevant stuff that would require creating new character after character after character to find any use.
Yet that maximum diversity of character builds is one of the reasons that has me creating my 26th character and taking it all the way to ultimate and beyond and repeating the same damned quests over and over while trying to improve run speed to reduce monotony. It’s addictive as hell, and the game has no problems there to me. There it’s one of the places that deviates from Diablo 2 in a way that outshines it in my opinion, it just kind of leaves some loot/item/farming issues behind.
So there’s a tremendous amount of staying power, I’d agree. My interest is just maximizing it – from balancing to gear thoughts to making it take much longer to reach level cap, they all relate to the desire to maximize and extend staying power as much as possible.
Nerfing on its own doesn’t bother me that much. I just pretend the game is still in beta and we’re still testers, that the game hasn’t reached a really stable release just yet. No problemo, that’s kind of interesting with a “contribute to the growing development of this unfinished game” vibe. It’s mainly nerfing combined with no seemingly clear attempt to make a wider range of builds viable to reasonably clear the hardest content (ultimate Mogroden and now 150 waves of gladiator solo) that bugs me. It’s the coupling of these two that gives me a knee-jerk reaction that something isn’t being steered in the right direction, that I could wait 2 months from now and perhaps still perceive the same gross imbalance problem. Imbalance to me is at its grossest when there’s too few builds that can even survive/clear content in any sane fashion. It’s not as bad when enough builds can clear the content and a few can just do it a bit more efficiently.
