Good Morning Folks. Diablo IV Season 2 is on the very near horizon, and I feel like this is going to be a make-or-break moment for the game going forward. Diablo IV was easily one of the best-selling games Blizzard has ever created… but like a poorly sealed party balloon left out overnight, all of that hype has deflated. So much so that creators who have made their careers upon the Diablo brand… have started shifting focus to diversify into other games. The first season of the game was “not good” and now we have had two live streams talking about the future of the game and what we should be expecting for Season 2. Blizzard also dropped over 40 pages worth of patch notes shortly after the discussion.
I cannot deny that there are a lot of changes coming with this season. Several systems like Resistances and the concept known as Damage Pools are getting completely reworked. Additionally, there is a sweeping set of changes to the way that some legendaries and the paragon boards work in order to attempt to spur more build diversity. So I give the team a lot of credit for seemingly listening to some of the feedback from the players and then attempting to iterate on their design philosophy to address these. This also tells me that the player drop-off was likely even larger than I imagined because this is some significant “desperate to save the franchise” level of hustle. I do worry about what this meant as far as long hours for that team, but if they can nail this season and the changes I have hope for the brand.
One of the things to come out of these patch notes is an attempt to clearly tier the game into three phases… 1-50 campaign game, 50-70 sacred era, and 71-100 ancestral era. One of the big complaints that I had was that once you crossed into World Tier 3, anything that was dropping that was not Sacred quality was absolutely useless. This is being fixed by making any gear drops that are not of the maximum rank will instead drop as materials, which works similarly to how Diablo III Season 28 Altar worked. This seems like a really good change, and while you are in one of these tiers your level increases are going to keep raising the minimum item level so that you are in theory more likely to keep seeing better stuff. The idea is that you won’t move into World Tier 3, and immediately find the best loot you can possibly get for the next 20 levels, before moving into World Tier 4… and having the same impact once you equip your first full set of Ancestral gear.
I think the thing that concerns me the most about this plan, is that it spreads out the worst part of the game for me. I really hate the way gear works in Diablo IV. My “build” is less about making sure I have the right talent points chosen, or the right paragon boards assembled… and way more about making sure I have the correct legendary affixes attached to the right slots. Many of these cannot be pulled from the codex of power, which means that when an item drops… I cannot simply slot that item in and get an immediate boost of power without having to go back to town and scrounge around in my vault hoping I have a good enough aspect to pull from an item in order to make the new item actually useful. In Diablo 3 or even Path of Exile, the leveling process is extremely quick allowing you to stabilize the state of your gear quickly. After that you are just swapping out items on the very rare occasion that you manage to pick up an aspirational item that gives you a significant boost. While moving through the levels I fear that this is going to feel awful to keep shifting to marginally better gear.
The other problem I’ve had with both Season of the Malignant and now the Season of Blood… is that the “new content” that is being added to the game is borrowed power. Neither is expanding the scope of the game in a permanent way and instead giving you a neatly encapsulated seasonal chase that goes away as soon as the next flavor of the quarter mechanic rolls in. I hated the rut that World of Warcraft fell into by having a rotating series of mechanics that only mattered so long as that one expansion was live, and Diablo IV is heading down that same path. Sure you occasionally get a Path of Exile season like Crucible League where you have a borrowed power system in the form of skill trees associated with weapons, but I have faith that those mechanics will likely resurface again in the future in a more permanent form. For example, the Sanctum league introduced a whole rogue-like mode to the game, and while it was gone for the Crucible League it made its return during the current league as a permanent mechanic.
What the Diablo IV seasons are lacking is something that can realistically stick around and become a permanent fixture. Sure they are adding a few more boss fights in this league, and that is fine… but it doesn’t really do much to make me excited about grinding to 100 in order to complete them. Path of Exile has these pinnacle bosses as well, but it also has a lot of other ways that completely shift and change how you approach the game. Betrayal is an obtuse mechanic, but it gives you deterministic ways to modify your gear and obtain new abilities that you can’t get through other means. For example, I’ve been shuffling my entire board in an attempt to get Vorici into Research so that I can in theory get White colored sockets on one of my items, which eases socket pressure and allows me to shift my builds slightly.
This is just one example because there are countless mechanics that started out as the focus of a single League but eventually found their way into the game as evergreen content. I am a Delve-enjoyer, and I build characters for the purpose of being able to crawl through the darkness looking for interesting loot. Other folks might build entirely around the Breach league mechanic which opens portals allowing demons to bleed into our reality, which then in turn allows you to collect materials to fight specific bosses that award unique items. Over the last decade, there have been forty-one leagues, and each of them has left some permanent mark on the game as a whole. What I see instead with Diablo IV is a focus on creating disposable FOMO-inducing content… which gives me great concerns about the long-term success of the title.
None of this is to dilute the fact that the team has put in an awful lot of work on this second season. I hope it improves a lot of the problems with the game, and that subsequent seasons also continue to move that bar forward. It feels like we are sort of dealing with issues that should never have made it out of beta testing, but that is where we are unfortunately. There were just some poorly designed systems in this game that will need to be fixed in order to make the game better in the long-haul. I do have to say though… that the faith that Blizzard will put forth the work in order to improve the game is not really there for me. I worry that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction to the massive fall-off in players, and if Season 2 does not magically fix things… the game might just be abandoned entirely.
All of this said I am certain I will poke my head into the season when it launches in a week or so to see how the game feels in its updated state. I think a huge thing for the life of this game is going to be erecting a PTR and letting players test the content as it is being developed. While Blizzard ignored a lot of the feedback coming from the community during the beta tests of the game leading into launch, I think they have realized that they did so at their own peril.
I don’t go deep into the weeds with builds or anything like that either with Diablo or PoE. But, I almost would think that Diablo is more for the “casual” crowd that just wants to turn on their Xbox and smash demons than PoE is. Like, I’d rather that D4 is for people like me that just want to hit things with big weapons, and not think too hard about builds, and PoE be for the people deeper into the building and loot side. Like, have them both have a place in the genre.