Good Morning Folks. This is a topic that I am really frustrated and sad to have to bring you, because I thought Diablo IV was well on its way to an epic redemption arc. By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion rolled around, Diablo IV was in a pretty great state when it comes to the sandbox aspect of the game. Mechanically the classes felt pretty solid and the expansion added a whole slew of new activities. Season 6 mechanically was somewhat forgettable, but there was so much other stuff going on with the game that we mostly lost focus of the season itself in the midst of everything happening with the expansion. Season 7 was quite possibly peak Diablo as it represented the closest we have seen to the ideal flow of the game. The game still really lacks anything resembling a proper endgame loop, but the leveling and gearing aspects of the game were spot on.
The seasonal mechanic was essentially a retread of the most successful season ever… Season Two and the vampire themed Bloodtide. This new “Witchtide” as I called it represented a super fun repeatable mechanic that made leveling and gearing feel amazing. So much so that it essentially eclipsed every other bit of content in the game. Similar to Diablo III, it took about a week to get geared and capable of tackling Torment IV the highest difficulty and at that point it was mostly just hanging out and running bosses, which always felt amazing because you could pool your resources with your friends and get a ton of loot out of it. All they really needed to add is something resembling a proper endgame with something akin to an Atlas of Worlds from Path of Exile, or a Monolith from Last Epoch and the game would be rocking. Add in some more chase items and and varied repeatable endgame system and the game would have been on good footing.
However this week we got the Campfire Chat for Season 8, and it seems as thought Blizzard is unlearning everything that they have learned and largely fucking everything up. Basically when you lack a proper endgame loop… what do you do? Release incremental upgrades to the game that keep adding more functionality until you reach a critical mass of so much content that the player never lacks something to do? Fuck no. You release another season with a borrowed power system and slow everything else down as to delay the inevitable point of boredom behind a more tedious treadmill. You can see the entire live stream here, or I would instead suggest just watching Raxx’s breakdown video. I am going to talk about some of my points of frustration from the presentation.
What do you do when you don’t have enough butter and too much toast? Well you spread it thinner of course. As such Diablo IV is having its leveling curve slowed down significantly. Why were players leveling so fast? Because of the Witchtide and how perfectly repeatable that endgame loop ended up being. Without that… the leveling curve would have been considerably slower, but it does not seem like the team realized that. Instead they are planning on slowing down the entire progression curve so that you spend more time in the doldrums of the mid-levels instead of zooming to the level cap and then spending the rest of your time working on actually building out your character. Essentially in a seasonal model the level cap is the beginning of the game… not the end of it. The slower you make leveling, the more folks that are just going to give up before they finish it.
It is weird how people can look at the same statistic and take wildly different things away from it. 50% of players made it to Torment IV, which to me seems like a wild success of the game as a whole. Torment IV is again… to me, the beginning of the real game. That is when you can farm things the most efficiently and get the best loot rewards. The fact that 50% of the players made it to that point seems like a real win. The team however wants Torment IV to be an aspirational goal… and that number to be around 10% so as such are cranking up the difficulty curve. Again… when you lack an endgame you have to slow things down so that players don’t realize they have nothing that they are grinding for. Diablo IV has a lot of disposable treadmills, that are not that fun in themselves. They have vehicles for generating loot, but no real fun mechanics that are sustainable in the long run. There is no Betrayal, or Heist, or Delve, or even no surprise content like Essences, Legion, or Breach that make the mundane aspect of playing the game feel more exciting. They have awful mini-events that have no real payoff and apparently the act of leveling is the reward in itself.
We were also apparently getting gear too quickly… so they are slowing that shit down as well. Once you hit level 60.. everything that drops that is not an Ancestral drop is useless. Most of your time dealing with loot is looting things that do not matter at all. They say that they want Magic and Rare items to matter, but in order to do that… Magic and Rare items have to be competitive with Ancestral Legendary items. When your game is effectively collecting the right stat sticks with the correct Legendary Aspects on them… the more stats you have on an item the better it is going to be. In Path of Exile Magic and Rare items can be competitive because they have systems in place to make them competitive through Unique items that have specific parameters and a robust crafting system that allows you to turn exceptionally well rolled Magic items into a Rare with perfect stats on it. Slowing down the acquisition of the Legendary items needed to get your build online is going to feel awful. It legitimately feels like they do not play their own game and most definitely do not play the other games in the same market.
Quite possibly the worst change is one that is hidden behind something that adds real quality of life. Obtaining the right widgets to summon a boss is sort of annoying, and you always end up with a lopsided and mismatched number of items. So limiting it so that every boss is keyed off a single item is a great change. However making it so that you only get loot if you have one of the boss keys… is fucking awful. Additionally it is slowing down the loot acquisition of uniques that are required to make builds work. One of the highlights of the last several seasons has been when Ace and I have pooled our boss materials together and did an entire evening of nothing but summoning bosses chasing the ancestral uniques required to make our builds feel good. It was an amazing feeling because you end up drowning in loot because every summon I did paid off for Ace and vice versa. Now we are going to get half the amount of loot, because in order to get ANY of the drops from any given summon we are going to have to pay our own boss materials. I get that this is designed to fix some hypothetical problem with random strangers not paying their way in boss summoning groups… but wildly fucks over the more likely scenario of friend groups pooling their resources.
I can’t really complain about the seasonal power mechanic because it seems like they have taken to heart the lessons learned from the vampire event, and then reinforced recently with the witchcraft event. Being able to pick and choose which abilities you want to buy is a good model and it appears that there is a currency to spend on unlocks that let you target which abilities you need for your build. However my core complain with borrowed power systems is that they are fleeting and are throw away content. In a game that is lacking content, it feels wildly inappropriate to squander resources on something that does not stick around the bolster the future of the game. This is not how you turn the tide of there being “nothing to do” when you finish leveling. This is why you end up with this design path of slowing things down, because you simply do not have enough content to soak up player attention. You are wasting resources and creating a temporary heatsink for a fire that keeps raging season after season.
All of this feels so much worse because it was released on the same day that Last Epoch dropped this phenomenal trailer. They get it. They get that they need to invest time in broadening the game and making interesting things for players to do once they have finished leveling. Similarly Season 7 was overshadowed by the release of Path of Exile II Early Access. Thankfully Last Epoch Season 2 lands on April 2nd… a few weeks ahead of the reason of Diablo IV Season 8. By the time the season of summoning Belial hits, I will be otherwise engaged and am I guess fine with this one being a stinker. If you are a Diablo IV player, I highly suggest you check out Last Epoch. Unfortunately there is no console version but the PC release is $35 and worth every penny.
I am legitimately really saddened to see that Diablo IV is going in the wrong direction now. I had a lot of hope for the game. Season 7 was a freaking blast and I was legitimately looking forward to spending a week or two playing Season 8 once Last Epoch Season 2 died down a bit. At this point I am probably going to take a hard pass and see if they can pull their heads out of their collective asses by the time Season 9 rolls around. I guess I should be thankful for all of the stuff we are getting in Last Epoch Season 2, and how damned good the Legacy of Phrecia event has been in Path of Exile. On top of that I am still having a lot of fun hunting monsters for parts that seem almost impossible to get. I have plenty of shit going on, but it sucks to see Diablo IV going off the rails. For the last year I had been a cheerleader for the game actually being pretty solid, against a sea of D4 bad memes. Sure I criticized the hamfisted nature of the Vessel of Hatred campaign, but the game-play was solid.
Hopefully they see the error of their ways when this rolls out and no one shows up. I was shocked at how few people were actively playing Diablo IV Season 7… but I can’t see that anything they have announced is going to draw much interest. The ARPG zeitgeist is likely to be playing Last Epoch still, and by the time that fire dies down Path of Exile II 0.2.0 will drop… and then hopefully shortly after that Path of Exile 3.26.