Long time Diablo player here, since D2, I have spent 1000s of hours in this franchise and I’m not sorry.
I played D3 from launch all the time until D4 came out. I played all the seasons and it was fun every time I did it. It had a clean start and I usually set my goal to be able to do level 100+ greater rift and after that wait for the next season. This way the game (for me at least) had a beginning and an end. In the end my characters were powerful, I had the sense of a challenge, progression and a goal completion.
But D4 just feels bad, the grind is boring, the pace of progression is just mind numbing slow and pointless, the different build options are vague and fuzzy.
And maybe the worst of all is that the amount of time investment in any given game session leaves me with the end result of … meh. Just a paragon point that changes nothing or get to a special paragon point that gives +10% damage to enemies that are bleeding in a 3cm radius around a chest that is cursed and while vulnerable… (face slap!)
You know what grabbed me and kept me in Diablo’s embrace for over 20 years?
The feeling that the game was challenging but engaging, the knowledge that somewhere, some monster is walking around with some awesome item in its pockets and I only have to find it. Now all D4 legendary, unique and even the uber unique items just feel like again …meh.
And this even for items that have (rumoured) one-in-a-million chance… Are you kidding?
Why play this game? When am I going to feel the sense of progression? The sense of some kind of completion? Now with the 1.1.0 only out in the open word, where there is nothing to do?
The campaign was really great, love the story and all. Probably will do the campaign few more times with different chars, but the end game as it is now is just ridiculous.
I know you can make it better, like you did with D3, remember?
But why do we have to go through this again?