Please let us know if everything is alright on your end, because right now it seems like you’re being held hostage and forced to churn out content on a fixed and untenable schedule, resulting in RTM builds that should never have left beta status. Console players are having it a bit rough right now.
I have played Blizzard games since the company was called Silicon & Synapse. Lost Vikings, Rock ‘n Roll Racing, Warcraft, Diablo, 10 years of WoW, among others. I’ve been there for midnight launches and attended Diablo 2 LAN parties. I’ve seen the quality the company was able to churn out before the Activision merger, and many of us were hoping the removal of Bobby Kotick after Microsoft bought you guys would end the days of horror stories coming from the studio.
Diablo 4 took about 3 seasons before you found your footing. Sure, it was okay at the beginning, but it got much better. Season 5 was genuinely great.
And then we get an expansion launch like… gestures wildly this?
The first week was an absolute mess. Placeholder textures, UI malfunctioning to the point where certain NPCs became unusable, items bugged and disabled. Cutscenes playing without voice overs or subtitles. Error messages getting mixed up. Irregular game crashes. Opals not working as intended. Reputation farming nigh on impossible. Loot just suddenly stopping to drop. The tenets of akkarat aren’t fully working a month after launch. Oodles of server issues even outside of peak hours.
The new class, the main draw of the expansion, is so bugged that all other classes feel not worth playing in comparison - which makes me wonder why a class needs bugs to be perceived as genuinely enjoyable and if game design prioritises a slow burn power curve strategy to guarantee player retention over simple fun. At least the Twitter poll went in the right direction, embracing the problem instead of killing the joy.
Whoever signed this off as ready to go live probably needed a good sip off liquid courage to do so.
And then one of the main features is not available for couch co-op. Fun.
Many of us bought this game particularly because it promised to enable us to spend some quality time with family, friends or otherwise loved ones. I say many of us, but clearly the numbers aren’t in our favour, or anything co-op related wouldn’t be treated like the step child you never really wanted and is now an unwelcome hindrance. We clearly don’t hold much commercial pull, or you would actually spend some time putting couch co-op through QA.
Personal sob story: My other half is currently quite sick and barely moving off the couch. We thought we’d get some relaxed play time in. I’d pull up a new Barb to try Mighty Throw, which looked fun.
Problem 1: One of the most synergistic items for that ability, The Third Blade, mainly drops in Infernal Hordes.
We started three 10 round hordes. All of them bugged out with a bug that has been known from day 1 in August, preventing pylons to spawn and the door to the boss room to open.
So we get frustrated and decide to farm glyphs and masterworking recipes in helltides. That works for 5 minutes - then suddenly the game freezes. No bug report, no crash, just a freeze. We reboot the game, and whenever player two logs in the game will inevitably freeze.
We do this five, six times until I teleport back into town, where player 2 can join. We then teleport back into helltide, aaaand… crash.
So we decide to do nightmare dungeons to check out the Halloween event. They work! But it doesn’t feel particularly spooky as we down butcher after butcher and hunt the occasional treasure goblin. The spookiest thing coming out of this is an incentive for people to check the store.
At that point we have spent nearly two hours trying to just play the game, most of which something wasn’t working or is outright crashing.
That is just not an acceptable level of quality for a release! And I fully understand that there are no quick fixes, or any such thing as a perfect game. But we’re talking game breaking bugs a month after expansion release here, not a rounding error.
I am at the very least guessing that the entire dev team would rather solve all of the problems yesterday and simply don’t have the resources available to do so.
So please make them available to them. Maybe prolong the seasons by a month. I doubt people would be too offended by that.
Just please make a respectable game experience available to us.
Sincerely, someone who has spent nearly 1100 hours in this game, most of which were in couch co-op.