Diablo 4 cinematic was absolutely amazing!
seeing Lillith return made my heart skip a beat and instantly fell in love with her design.
The daughter of hatred and the mother of creation.
(In diablo 2 Lillith was just a simple reskin in black of Anderial so this was a welcoming for sure.)
Diablo 4 looks great,
that medieval, goth, occultist style is top notch.
The animations and the character designs looked amazing.
The spell interaction with the light effects within the environment looked great.
The monsters seemed very well designed!
(although i thought the fallen were a bit too tall, especially the shaman but i can only assume it was a simple copy paste design decision from Diablo 3.)
But!
i do have some serious concerns about the Itemisation, Skills, Talents, Runes, Stats, Etc.
- Bring back stats, (we haven’t seen any of this yet).
Creating your own character and standing out from others even in terms of stats was always good game design because when you played your character and you notice that your mana couldn’t replenish fast enough you’d had to increase your mana pool.
Same goes for life, or even strength and dexterity to equip certain pieces of gear.
The downside of this is when people put everything into mana they should be able to cast unlimited But you’d have no points in life or str or dex so you can’t equip gear or basically get no life thus getting one hit all the time - Give items a Requirement in order to equip them, Dex/ Str.
This is part of your own you, Your character Your build Your design Your gear.
You find a big large heavy shield that covers your character pretty much like a “door” you’re going to need lots of strength for it, but that also should really increase your block chances since you are carrying a “door” with you all the time.
*Itemisation differentiation.
Bring back the Common items Ethereal, Superior common affixes!
make gear custom!
Allow players to build their own gear, to gear up to what they think they need give them that freedom again of making choices where they craft their runewords in.
this also means bring back 1 to 6 socketed items.
And jewels with random suffixes and affixes. - Lack of freedom.
(when i saw gameplay footage of streamers showing inventory and the so called “Runewords” i was severely disappointed because this was the same thing as in diablo 3 there is no creativity any more your locked down to basically “what is Bis”.
Once again creating your own you in your adventure alone or with others should be what makes diablo Actually a Role Playing Game. This is what kept me motivated even till this day i still play Diablo 2 and try to perfect my gear)
The part of motivation, is always finding something better or crafting something that can be better.
Its sad to say but The loot system and the crafting system has never been beaten by any other game currently on the market.
Its a unique part of motivation in order to beat the highest difficulty And then also going beyond doing the real end-game content like Pendamonium Event or Ubers.
This looks like a game made for the Casual player…
You bash through 100s of monsters at level 20 it seems way too early for that.
I remember a Diablo that is very brutal Both 1 and 2.
Without knowledge the game is crazy difficult,
Diablo 2 in the beginning its fairly easy you walk through kill Zombies, fallen, rangers, big yeti like monsters etc… you learn to run away so now and then during a fight to heal up. not too difficult for any beginner.
But once you enter act 2, Oh boy! you better have some lightning resist otherwise you die ALL the time and that was just on normal difficulty!
The game was Brutal, You died? oh your gear is gone! its at your corpse! now go run back naked and grab your gear!
To the casual this is very annoying… But this is part of the challenge this teaches people to dodge manually instead of having a button that does it for you.
Oh and on top of that… Try fighting 10 monsters at once… in diablo 2 with a new character see how long you will last.
My point is, Diablo 4 looks like a Diablo 3 -> Poe skinned game with few new additions. in my opinion it again steps away from creating/building your own character and this is the one Sole thing that makes a RPG an RPG.
Runes
- Creativity at its peak.
Runes + Runeworded items were something of a majestic thing.
The drop rate overall in Diablo 2 was great you rarely got something and it was easier to just farm smaller runes and upgrade them in order to finally make something you wanted for your character.
This in itself was great you didn’t have to rely on unique items you couldn’t find, you could just simply grind your way through to get an item of equal or better power.
- Classless items.
Classless items allowed to have the game endless synergy even uniques were all classless., Magefists remember those? +1 to fire skills? Druids, Paladins, Sorc all could use that +1 to fire skill this made the game great.
If you’d find a classed item like Occulus, you’d trade it for something of equal value something that could be used, Or you’d trade it for a rune that was of equal value.
For better or worse Synergy in terms of items that affects all classes is best in any game, its allows way more freedom.
- Drop rates
Please stop this gibberish with the open chest get a rare item and magical etc…
Chests don’t always have loot in them make the drop rates EXTREMELY SCARES.
People shouldn’t get constantly rewarded for doing the right thing in saving the people of sanctuary.
Runes should be Extremely rare.
Rares items should only drop 1 in a 10,000.(unless magic find but that’s another topic.)
This is why they are called “RARE”.
Dispose of Legendary.
Bring back “UNIQUE”
You can keep mythical, But allow these items to be actual mythical like a 0.000000001% drop chance. or only allow them to drop at certain specific special end-game Events so that no one or barely anyone ever sees them.
Aura’s
- Aura’s Offensive/Defensive or Visual.
When having a complete set, or specific mythical item is acquired show it to the world make the player/character glow and show its marvellous wonder to the world.
Allow the X character to have a offensive aura
Unlimited skills.
- Diablo 2 has 2 activation keys, Left mouse and Right mouse buttons.
and with Shift, you could stand still and cast with left mouse button.
1,2,3,4 potions
and then your skills, by default you could bind your skills to F1~F12
You could change this to what ever keybinding you’d want and swap during combat.
Honest opinion… Perfection.
simple controls easy and fast to use the points or skills that you had unlocked were instantly for usage.
Diablo 3? console controls.
Diablo 4? Again Console limited controls = Bad game design.
You’re limiting peoples freedom and this is bad.
Is this a mmorpg? or a Arpg?
Having open world events is great, but not being able to create your own individual character is a big let down.
To my standards this is a mmorpg… and not a Arpg.
and i come from a time when Quest for Glory was total hype show building your own character and doing it Your way instead of the Games way.
In all honesty i think the creativity needs to come back to diablo including the part of Synergy with items that affect not just one certain thing.
Stop dropping so much loot from chests or monsters or even gold for that matter.
Diablo used to be this Grim dark world where (“GOOD”) loot was scares.
Brutal difficulty, right from the start. Don’t simplify the game please.
force people to make difficult decisions again, like if someone find a Ohm rune.
Does he/she use it now in their weapon to gain 50% enhanced base weapon damage? or does the player decided to use it later for a runeword that might bring way more dmg to the table?
Regardless, i’ll still try the game probably nonetheless.
But it won’t be a long term motivation.
And i know from experience that a lot of people that, i am one of the very few who actually really enjoys a Challenging game.
Creativity please bring it back.