Morning Folks! I am still fairly shocked to be able to say that the Season of Blood in Diablo IV seems good. As I near the point where I will do the capstone dungeon that allows me access to World Tier III, I have to say that my build is holding solid. Overpower still feels great, but I am uncertain how much of that is the core build and how much is how good the assorted vampiric powers feel. This brings up a whole other series of concerns about Blizzard and their dependence on borrowed power systems in World of Warcraft… and now seemingly Diablo IV… but that can be a concern for another season. For now, the game feels great, which is a wild turnaround from my previous feelings about the game.
Last night I recorded a quick and dirty video of some gameplay in the Blood Harvest area. I also talked a bit about some of the vampire powers and showed off some gameplay of what my Barbarian looks like killing things. I have to say that more than anything it is this seasonal mechanic that is making the game feel good. Previously the open world largely felt pointless apart from the Helltide Events, and now I feel like I have a reason to do the thing that I enjoyed the most… which was roaming around aimlessly and killing things. Blood Harvest areas are exceptionally rewarding both in experience and loot and gave me the thing I was missing in this game… aka a default thing to log in and do. No matter how hard I tried I just did not like Nightmare Dungeons. They felt weird and forced and too rigidly structured. Popping into a zone and hopping back and forth between mini-events while killing copious amounts of Vampires is my jam.
All of that said, while I have not reached Nightmare dungeons… the few normal dungeons that I have run to unlock legendary powers have felt much improved. I will essentially have to relearn the pathing, but it does feel like you have to go in the wrong direction far less often and that most of the objectives that you need to collect and take back to a location are closer to the destinations. The Dungeons however continue to feel fairly boring and tedious, and I do worry a bit that I am going to be forced into them in order to level up my paragon glyphs once I hit level 50. The Blood Harvest area feels so fresh and exciting… that the old dungeon design while improved, still feels like a massive step backward. Personally, I still feel like the dungeons need to be taken back to the drawing board. I would love to see all objectives removed and implement some sort of clear percentage system that spawns a boss similar to Nephelem Rifts from Diablo III.
One of the biggest changes for me personally is how much better town and settlement layouts feel. Firstly there are SO MANY more stashes available in the game, and you are rarely far away from one. Take this overhead map of Kyovashad, where there used to be a single stash in the Inn with your Wardrobe, now there is one at the Enchanter, Jeweler, and Smithy giving you rapid access no matter what task you are needing to complete. I would still rather have seen more compact layouts that put everything within a few steps of each other, but for that, we have the Tree of Whispers that now has an Enchanter. If they swapped the Jewelry merchant for an actual Jewel Crafting vendor… that “town” would be perfection because you could do everything that you might need to do in a single location.
However in the “weird hill to die on” department, Blizzard still seems to be pushing the RealID in spite of having long disabled it in my account settings within Battle.net. What this means is that after the Season 2 patch, if you do not go into your settings and enable one of the “Streamer Mode” options you are going to end up doxxing yourself if you happen to take a screenshot with your inventory open. All of the options around this are awful because this originally defaulted to “Character Name (Firstname Lastname)” and with streamer mode on… instead of getting just my character name, I get random character names each time I log into the game. Why this exists on this screen is beyond me and why someone might want to see their RealID in addition to their character name is beyond me. Does anyone use RealID by choice?
All things considered, though I am enjoying myself and I didn’t really think that was possible. I think my biggest frustration is… had the game launched in this state I think it might have been a game of the year candidate. Now however it is probably going to take a lot to get some players to return. I know my friend Cyl for example pretty much wrote the game off, and has moved on to other games and is probably unlikely to pop back in and give it a second chance. This is the challenge with games that launch in a rough state, you never really get that second chance to amend those first impressions. New World is a prime example of this, and it has more or less improved everything that was wrong with that game at launch… but will never again see the numbers it did in those first few weeks. It is going to take a lot of work to remediate the meme of “D4 Bad”.