Diablo Franchise

Abandoning Diablo

by

Good Morning Folks. I will give you some fair warning… this is going to be a bit of a bummer of a topic especially if you are a big fan of Diablo or more specifically Diablo IV. If so you might want to give this topic a hard pass. I consume a lot of gaming content, and in doing so I notice certain trends. I’ve been thinking about this topic since the beginning of Season 3, and I am not sure what shape it will take. For years there have been what I could only term “Blizzard Content Creators” or folks who are very dedicated to that company or dedicated to one particular gaming franchise within their portfolio. Diablo had one of the strongest communities of dedicated content creators for years. For example up until season 29… rain or shine… every single week Raxxanterax released a guide video on how to complete that week’s challenge dungeon (650 of them in fact… 1 each week for EU and one for NA).

The thing is… one by one the dedicated content creators have been giving up on Diablo, or at least deciding that they cannot continue to function by ONLY creating content for that game. Affliction League was the first time that Raxxanterax did some dedicated coverage of Path of Exile, and similarly, he has gone extremely hardcore on Last Epoch with its launch. Diablo Immortal and later Diablo IV were the games that really put Darth Microtransaction on the map… and he’s made the decision that he had to stop focusing on that game and instead pivoted to other titles. He is maybe one of the most savvy YouTubers I have seen and it is very clear that he is following the trends and the metrics… and Diablo 4 seems to be tanking in relevancy. The popularity of the game peaked in June 2023 and then has largely tanked since. When the game launched everyone that I had on my large Battle.net friends list was playing it… and by the time season one rolled around it was just my cousin that was consistently logged in.

Rhykker has been one of the most corporate message focused YouTubers when it comes to Diablo. I had stopped subscribing to his channel at one point because it always felt like he was following the company line on pretty much everything. Even his content has reached a point where it is mostly negative about Diablo IV and with the launch of Last Epoch I saw him releasing guide content for that game. While he has always covered lots of general ARPG news, this is probably the first time I can recall him making dedicated guide videos for a game that was not some sort of alpha/beta preview coverage. It feels like the creators that used to make up the core of Diablo… have largely given up on the game. The first season was bad… season two gave everyone a bit of hope… but season three and the poor reception of the heavily delayed gauntlet have caused interest to plummet into the sub-basement.

Of all of the above though… the one that shocked me the most was this video from Wudijo. Up until this point he has been quite possibly the most dedicated content creator for Diablo IV. He was the first solo hardcore player to hit level 100 at the launch of the game and has been entirely devoted to the game through all of the ups and downs. For him, it seemed like Last Epoch was the tipping point, and seeing how well a game from a much smaller team with a smaller budget was providing a much better gaming experience. In the above video, he outlines that he is going to be stepping away from Diablo IV and making content not only for Last Epoch but also diving back into Path of Exile and eventually Path of Exile II. I get that the average couch gamer does not give a shit about these content creators… but it certainly feels like a good number of folks who made their entire career focused on Diablo are now abandoning the franchise.

I feel like at least part of this is because Blizzard has become complacent. They spent two decades not really needing to properly compete with anyone in a number of niches. Diablo was the archetypal ARPG, World of Warcraft the genre-defining MMORPG, and Starcraft the game that largely spawned e-sports. In every single one of these verticals… the games stagnated allowing Last Epoch and Path of Exile to take the spotlight away from Diablo, Final Fantasy XIV to cause a mass migration away from World of Warcraft… and Starcraft to have limited relevancy in the modern e-sports landscape dominated by DOTA2, League of Legends, and Valorant. It feels like Blizzard is a company that long ago began feeding off its own hype cycle and now just isn’t creating games that are that great anymore. To be fair… World of Warcraft has seen a similar drain of formerly dedicated content creators over the last few years.

Diablo will always have a special place in my heart, and there is no theme that “means” ARPG more than the Tristram theme. However, I am just not sure Blizzard is going to pull out of this spiral. Last Epoch for years has been a game with an amazing core but one that needed a lot of polish and window dressing… and more than anything just more content. Diablo IV however is a game with a flawed core… that is going to need to have almost a top-down rework of several systems to bring it in line with what the players are expecting. It is a game that looks gorgeous… but is made up of duct tape and paper mache once you punch through that lovely facade. I am just not sure that Blizzard is the sort of company that is willing to commit to an “A Realm Reborn” or “No Mans Sky” level of reinvention to make the game what it needs to be. So yeah… in writing this I have wound up bumming myself out.

I hope your week is going well and if you have made it to this point in the post… sorry for being a downer.

Still Not Feeling Season 3

by

At this point in the Diablo IV Season, I am level 36, and have completed the main story quest and defeated the story version of the new boss. Quest length is about equivalent to one of the Final Fantasy XIV Holiday quests, which is perfectly fine and more than enough for a seasonal introduction. I’ve also largely finished acquiring the abilities that make up my current Upheaval build on the Barbarian, which also feels perfectly fine. The problem that I find myself in however is that I am not sure what else I want to do. In Season 2 there was this extremely fun seasonal mechanic that colloquially was referred to as the “Bloodtide” and it really created this central focus. When in doubt… do the bloodtide and it felt overwhelmingly rewarding.

I talked about this the other day, but instead of a rotating mechanic that really draws your focus… there are instead five areas on the map that ALWAYS have spawns related to the seasonal mechanic. One of those areas will have around three limited-time Tree of Whispers quests, and if I understand correctly these shift locations every hour. Mechanically this is exactly the same as the Blood Harvest aka the Bloodtide but the lack of a regional colored highlight… makes it less obvious where you should be spending your time. The density of mobs also feels less than that of the vampires which might simply be that the vampire packs had so many ghoul mobs that it just FELT like you were killing more. I feel like they need to bring back the green color coding to indicate where the player focus should be drawn on the map. This is one of those things where the vibe feels off and in spite of it mechanically functioning exactly the same it does not feel as “good” to experience.

The other challenge with this league mechanic is that the pet does not appear to scale with your level, which means that while they might start out fairly strong they quickly become useless. Even at 36, I can’t really see any noticeable difference between when my pet is attacking something versus when I am taking something out solo. I am specifically using the flame ability that chains a beam of fire between all of the mobs that the pet is engaged with so that I can for certain see that it is doing something, but still, it isn’t like it can really solo anything on its own unless you went afk. All of the defensive abilities seem to fire infrequently enough that I gave up on them and just went with Flash of Adrenaline which gives me a short-term buff. Some additional damage some of the time is better than nothing I guess?

I’ve now done several more vaults at this point and even did the whole Zoltun’s Warding mechanic successfully and I have to say… it does not really feel worth the effort. If there was a chase unique associated with the vault then it might be worth spending time in there, but as it stands it is just a more annoying version of the already bad dungeon system. The funny part about the Vaults is that you can absolutely cheese them. You can clear everything in the entire vault, then go back to the start and get the Zoltun’s Warding buff… then go back to the treasure chamber and get the loot 100% of the time. I did not do this and managed to get hit twice during the encounter leaving me with one warding, and my rewards were the same if someone went through the encounter flawlessly. I guess what I don’t get about the vaults is that players have given copious amounts of feedback that they want dungeons without ANY OBJECTIVES… that you just clear your way to a boss and get loot. Vaults seem the exact opposite of this, because in addition to the same “take the MacGuffin to the location” that all dungeons seem to have… you have to avoid traps while doing it.

I’ve seen this said a number of times, and can’t really find any origin to back up the validity one way or another. However, the “urban legend” is that the Diablo IV team has two sub-teams that work on seasonal content with one doing Seasons 1 and 3 and the other working on Seasons 2 and 4. I really hope this is not the case because I feel for that first team immensely given that Seasons 1 and 3 were both stinkers and Season 2 was pretty freaking great and brought a lot of players back to the game. At a minimum if this is the case, that first team really needs to assess their objectives and take some lessons from the second team. The plague tunnels and the gems that they rewarded were boring, and did not really add something new and fun to do to the game. This time around the pet is boring and the vaults really feel like a worse version of the dungeon system that is already in the game. I would like to say I would grind out the battlepass but I am just not sure I will be sticking around that long.

Here is hoping we get some mid-season patches that improve upon the mechanics enough to make them feel worth doing.

Diablo IV Season 3 Initial Thoughts

by

Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 3, and like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to create a new character and check it out. This time around it is the “Season of the Construct” with the unique seasonal mechanic involving building up a little robot friend called a Senechel and equipping it with abilities and modifiers you collect along the way. I’ve kept up the hope that Diablo IV will turn into an amazing game at some point, and while it has improved greatly since its launch, it isn’t quite there yet. I have to be honest… I did not play a ton of this last night because I was not exactly feeling the experience, so please go into this post knowing that I was a bit “meh” on the experience and it might have simply been my mindset.

I think the first challenge is that I decided to mix things up a bit and break out of my normal Barbarian gameplay pattern and try the druid. This led to a lot of respeccing and trying to find a way to play the character that felt good to me. I want to love this class but at least at low levels it never really is the thing I want it to be. I want to be a werebear and NEVER leave that form, and have big smashy melee abilities. Unfortunately, Pulverize which is essentially that gameplay methodology took some significant nerfs. As a result, I started out trying to play a Tornado Wolf and not really jiving with that… then leading to the reportedly best leveling style Lightning Druid… and feeling that even less. The problem with Druid is that it feels like I have to use caster abilities in order to power up the fun melee abilities… leading to this mangled awkward experience. What I really want I guess is Bear Druid from WoW, but I think you have to get pretty deep into the game before it can really feel like that. Tornado Wolf looks cool, but it seems like you sort of have to suffer through some crappy gameplay to get there.

Instead this morning I rerolled completely and went back to good ole Barbarian. There are a lot of changes to Upheaval and I wanted to play with them anyways. Already the gameplay feels so much better to me. I guess maybe I am just a Barb main and should stop trying to fight it. Sure I like the idea of trying other classes but this seems to be the core experience that I enjoy the most in Diablo IV. At some point I want to revisit Necromancer since I love pet classes, but I figure I will wait until I get deeper into the season before doing that. The biggest frustration I have with alting in Diablo IV is the fact that the seasonal mechanics are tied to each character so I had to start over from scratch with the Senechel. This felt awful with Vampire Abilities in Season 2, and it still feels awful with your pet mechanic. They should be account-based to make alting feel more enjoyable and that is a hill I am willing to die on.

Speaking of the Senechel, it is an interesting idea that feels a bit poorly implemented. Right now it is an entirely passive experience of having this pet follow you around and occasionally do things… but also does not feel like it directly improves your gameplay much. How the pet works is that you can equip two Governing Stones that give your pet some core ability. For example, right now I have Lightning Bolt equipped which fires a shock attack, and Protect which seems to give me a shield at random intervals. Were these something that I could control as the player it would feel a bit more impactful. If I could hit the shield button whenever I reach low life or something like that, it could in theory actually save me a death. As it is now… it is a poorly coded companion that sort of does whatever the heck it wants whenever it wants. Tuning Stones you collect along the way allow you to tweak how the abilities work, but again they don’t really feel like they are changing much. I gave the lightning bolt a taunt, but it doesn’t seem like it actually does much of anything to take monsters away from attacking me.

The new open-world mechanic for this season is something called an Arcane Tremor. Essentially these are the new “Blood Tide” but a sort of worse version of them. There is an area in each zone of the game that I have marked with circles on the above map image where seasonal-related mini-events can spawn. You go here to collect the materials that you need to level up your Senechel and collect new abilities for it. Why these are worse than the Blood Tide from Season 2, is that they don’t have the clear sense of purpose that those had. The mob density is so much lower and instead of having a fixed area of the map that draws the attention of ALL players for 30 minutes… you have five static spawns that don’t really have any quest support behind them. With the blood tide I would pop in, do three objectives… probably fight a series of mini-bosses, and then feel like I was okay to move on with my life until the next one spawned. This instead has a very “mill around and wait for shit to happen” vibe that I do not like anywhere near as much. I get that they caught shit for having 3 different Helltide-like mechanics in a row just with different colors… Helltide, Season 2 Seasonal Mechanic, and then the Christmas Event Mechanic… but they were all far better than this approach.

The other new seasonal feature is the Vault, which is essentially a Nightmare Dungeon with traps. There is a mechanic called Zoltun’s Warding which is a number that shows in your hud, and each time you get hit by a trap it takes one away from your current Warding level. If you manage to finish the vault with even 1 left on your warding, you get some extra rewards. The problem that I see however is that Vaults are exactly Nightmare Dungeons… in fact, there is a “Nightmare” version of the Vault that allows you to level up your Glyphs. I do not really like Nightmare Dungeons in the first place, and think the entire Dungeon system needs to be reworked from the ground up. I am not excited to do all of the same bullshit “find the MacGuffin and return it to the pillar” mechanics while avoiding traps. I feel like there would have to be very good rewards in order to get me to do this thing. It reminds me a bit of the Labyrinth in Path of Exile, which is quite possibly my least favorite system in that game.

I feel like I am being a bit harsh honestly… but at this very moment, Season 3 has been a bit of a letdown. Season 2 was a hell of a lot of fun and felt like a clear step forward for the game. Season 3 however… feels like a step backward and maybe all of the seasonal stuff greatly improves as you invest more time and effort into it but for the moment it is “less fun”. The “Bloodtide” gave me this clear call to action and a super fun mechanic that I should spend all of my time focused on. Vaults and Arcane Tremors just feel less enjoyable and more akin to the plague tunnels from Season 1… which were aggressively mid.

Quite possibly the best universally good feature of this season is the introduction of a new hub area called The Gatehall. This is going to be the only place most players hang out because it has everything that you could need in a tightly contained space. I am hoping this becomes a permanent feature of the game and something that they build upon rather than something that we only get for this one season. The Tree of Whispers was close, but it was missing several vendors… and this basically fixes that problem. Honestly, the main quest chain has been enjoyable as well but I don’t really play this sort of game for the story, or at least the story stops mattering once I have finished it the first time. ARPGs are for mechanical enjoyment, and as cool as the story has been it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to have to do this on every character. Again these features really need to exist at an account level.

So far at this moment after an evening of screwing around with it… I would say that Season 3 is a solid 4 or 5 out of 10 experience. It doesn’t really add anything to the game that is exceptionally enjoyable save for the new hub. The pet is a completely passive experience, and mostly just feels like you have a random NPC following you around on your questing. Vaults are just worse than Nightmare Dungeons and I already did not like Nightmare Dungeons. Helltides and World Bosses still take too long to spawn and both feel like mandatory content, and there is nothing really that is fresh and new and exciting to act as a focal point for your moment-to-moment gameplay. I am likely going to grind out all of the steps of the Battle pass and then call it good for the season. The Gauntlet and Ladder that are coming are not really content for me given that I am not exactly a competitive player.

I think the biggest challenge that Diablo IV has at the moment is the fact that Path of Exile just has more content and is going through what is quite literally the wildest league that it has ever had. Then near the end of next month, you have the launch of Last Epoch officially, and a ton of new systems going into that game. I think folks will probably play Season 3 for a few weeks and then fade back into either Path of Exile or prep for Last Epoch. Diablo IV needs to make some changes that feel like they are moving the needle forward and adding more permanent evergreen content to the game. I still say that the Helltide needs to be reworked to essentially be the Bloodtide and always be up. Dungeons still need to be nuked from orbit and rethought because the objects are still awful in spite of numerous rounds of changes. What the game really needs is something akin to a Greater Rift that can be run from a hub environment. There is too much required dicking around and not enough focused fruitful grinding. Then again… maybe Diablo IV will never be the game I hope it can be.

BlizzCon 2023 Thoughts

by

Good Morning Folks! I have to be honest… I had every intention of writing a post on BlizzCon this past Friday as the event was going on but that never quite came to fruition. For those who do not follow such things, this past Friday and Saturday was the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019. I know a ton of friends who were very happy about the return of the event and made plans to travel to Anaheim for it. I’ve always wanted to go, but tend to have a fairly fraught relationship with Blizzard games in general. I feel like it is probably a good idea to get this out of the way, but I have not actively played World of Warcraft since December 2020, though I have followed from afar and did some alpha testing for the latest expansion Dragonflight. I’ve grown apart from the fandom and Diablo was really the last vestige that I clung to.

If you are so inclined, you can watch the full uncut presentation for Blizzcon 2023 here.

All of that said… I am shocked to say that I thought this year’s BlizzCon was almost universally positive. I found it extremely interesting that within 10 minutes of the event starting, we had a speech from Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. He said all of the right things, but I find myself wanting to believe them. As someone who has been a Windows programmer for most of my career… I have a fraught relationship with Microsoft as a whole. That said… I can’t see that Microsoft has done wrong by any of the companies they have acquired. They have most definitely been a steadying force for Mojang and Minecraft. The one strike that I could throw against them was Redfall, but who knows precisely how that mess unfolded because it was a game so far out of the comfort zone of that studio. As compared to the reign of Bobby Kotick… I have to imagine that Microsoft will be a positive force for Blizzard as a whole.

Another thing that I have to admit is that there is a lot of presentation that I just did not care about at all. Overwatch is a setting that seems interesting, but I am not going to engage unless they shift gears and turn it into a looter shooter. Hearthstone is something that I did care about for a while… but now that Magic that Gathering Arena exists and is relatively enjoyable… I have a good representation of the game I actually care about and don’t really need the Blizzard clone. Rumble is outside of my wheelhouse especially now that my aging phone seems to have trouble running any modern games that are not the most simplistic of 2D graphics. So essentially for me… BlizzCon was a show about World of Warcraft and Diablo, both of which got some interesting announcements.

Based on the schedules that came out ahead of the show, I fully expected that we would not get a Diablo IV announcement this year. I am pleasantly surprised that we did and it is going to be set in the area of the world from Diablo 2 Act 3 the Torajon Jungles. This should in theory be southwest of Kehjistan in the current Diablo IV areas. They were pretty limited on their information but did drop that we are going to be seeing a new class that has not existed in the Diablo franchise before. Data mining leaks ahead of the show indicated that this was some sort of nature-based class. More important than all of this however is that they released some information about more endgame content going into Diablo IV starting this week and continuing into Season 3 in January. There is also going to be a winter holiday event which might be interesting for a bit. Unfortunately, the new endgame content starting this week is going to be gated behind the season’s journey, which means it is really only for folks who are languishing at level 100 and doesn’t do much to solve the problem of running out of an interesting reason to grind further after about level 80.

In the realm of “why does this exist” we get to World of Warcraft and more specifically “Classic WoW”. Apparently, the classic servers are updating to Cataclysm… which seems really weird to me given that the sweeping changes to the old world that came with Cataclysm were the impetus for many of the unofficial emulator servers that eventually coalesced into the official “Classic” product. Does anyone actually want this? I am hoping that they maintain some Wrath servers for the folks who did not want to move forward into Cataclysm. Maybe there is someone out there who missed out on the first decade of World of Warcraft and is now interested in reliving it at a rapidly increased pace. It is however spawning a number of memes around this having to happen so that they could launch World of Warcraft Classic Classic. I have specific negative feelings towards Cataclysm as this is when I first broke from the game as a whole.

The other classic project however seemed really interesting. “Season of Discovery” is sort of a re-imagining of World of Warcraft with unique talent trees and class changes designed to make playing it wildly different. They specifically name-dropped Tanking Warlocks and Mage Healers as mutations available during this game mode. The irony here is that we absolutely had a Warlock Tank in Ahn’qiraj, and I myself tanked as a PVP geared Boomkin…. so this might be something that interests me in the long run. One of my favorite eras of World of Warcraft is Gladiator Stance and being able to dps with a sword and shield as a Warrior. If they bring this back… then they probably have me at least for a bit.

The big news however was the announcement of a change in practice towards expansions in World of Warcraft and while they did not elaborate on this… a shorter time frame between them. Not only did they announce The War Within which comes out next year, but also Midnight and The Last Titan as a trilogy of expansions with shared themes. We’ve learned that they always worked on multiple expansions at once from the fallout of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands… but I do feel like this would probably improve the narrative experiences of the Warcraft universe. Final Fantasy XIV was only as good as it was because it was a cohesive narrative that evolved over a decade rather than what felt like a serialized villain of the week type gameplay that we have had in Warcraft. My hope is however that they can be nimble with the mechanical side of the game because having the narrative be something that is building over time is good… you need to be able to adjust to changes on the ground when the player base is not reacting well to something like the “borrowed power” systems.

I think this is going to be the World of Warcraft expansion that wins me back. Almost everything about it seems to specifically cater to my interests. I love underground areas and this seems to be an entire expansion where we are diving deeper below the surface. I am very much dwarven-influenced, and I am all about tunneling through the earth to find interesting things. When I plan Minecraft I almost always start by digging a giant shaft to bedrock and see what I find along that path. I am also super interested in the Warband system as I have always wanted to be able to share more benefits from my Alts, given that I tend to be an Altaholic by nature. Almost everything that they announced seemed universally good and I am super interested in the Delve system which seems to be a dungeon-like experience that scales between 1 and 5 players.

I think more than anything… there was just a different energy in the air for this show. Gone was the “we know better ” attitude that surrounded a lot of the discussions from past BlizzCons and it was replaced by what seemed like a genuine unbridled excitement over what they were showing off. The vibe was just better than it has been in probably a decade or maybe even longer. Blizzard felt like a different company, and while we had the return of Metzen… he didn’t necessarily overshadow the other folks who were presenting things to the players. I want to see Blizzard thrive under Microsoft not in small part because I still know more than a handful of folks who work there. I want to play these games without having a bad taste in my mouth and feel like I am betraying my core principles.

This is the first time in a very long time that I have had hope for World of Warcraft as a franchise, and Blizzard as a company. I watched Diablo IV evolve from a complete shit show at launch to being a rather enjoyable if not somewhat temporary game with Season 2. Blizzard seems to be saying the right things and I just hope that they can back up those words with actions over the next few years. In the new year, I am probably even going to poke my head into the Dragonflight expansion and see what it has to offer. This is the best I have felt coming out of BlizzCon weekend in a very long time. Good job all… now keep that momentum going into the next few major launches.