diablo

Necros and Pyre Golems

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Good Morning Friends. This past weekend was the Open Beta for Diablo IV and since my friend Ace was going to give it a spin, I thought I would try out the Necromancer. That gameplay is something that I have enjoyed greatly in other games, so I figured it was worth a shot here as well. At this point, I have leveled Barbarian and Necromancer both to 25, and they were wildly different experiences. Necromancer felt pretty solid and honestly a bit on the grossly overpowered side, and Barbarian felt like I had made a mistake at the character selection screen. You would think that the Necromancer would have improved my opinions of Diablo IV, but in truth, it didn’t because there is something intangibly wrong with this game and it is almost impossible to put my finger on it.

I thought it was just me honestly. I thought maybe I was struggling to grasp the brilliance of this game. Then Ace played it and had some of the exact same comments. There was a side thread going on over slack about how they felt like the game just was wrong, that there was something not right with the combat, and that they could not put their finger on it either. I’ve tried to give you a close approximation over my several posts about Diablo IV… but none of them really explain the totality of the experience. The thing is… the game that is there seems to be what a lot of players wanted. I’m seeing quite a few comments showing up in my threads about how much they enjoyed the experience. I did not. I stopped playing a little way into Saturday because after hitting 25… I just felt like I didn’t care enough to keep playing. I had accomplished the ephemeral goal I had for the weekend which was maxing out the Necromancer and was largely done with the game after that.

I contemplated trying out the Druid, because that is another class I have liked quite a bit in the past and wished that Diablo 3 got. However, after watching this video from Wudijo… I decided against it. All signs point to the Druid feeling even worse than the Barbarian did. I think maybe my general takeaway is that much like Path of Exile… playing melee is arguably the wrong choice. The players that opted to play the Sorceror or the Necromancer had pretty good experiences. Playing a ranged rogue was fine, but was not really doing it for me in the way that the Demon Hunter did in Diablo III. Though honestly, it seems like a lot of people liked the sluggish gameplay because to them it felt more weighty and meaningful. For me, it just felt like a game from a different genre than the one I was wanting to play. I said this on the podcast but had I not been gifted a copy of Diablo IV, I would have absolutely made the decision to just pass this game up until a year or so after launch. I feel like there are more issues with the game than three months can solve.

Really stupid thing that pissed me off. This screen. When you exit the tutorial you are given a prompt to buy the game. When you finish the campaign… you are yet again given a prompt to buy the game. I own a copy of the game. In fact, I own the granddaddy super mega package for the game, because my benefactor was overly generous. I feel sort of awful not liking the game knowing how much they spent on it. Doesn’t Blizzard have the tech to be able to detect if someone owns a valid license to the game or not? Because that seems like a relatively trivial check. If I already own the game… stop showing me a billboard in the game.

Honestly, I think the problem really is me and my expectations. I am too ingrained in the culture of the ARPG game to accept this MMORPG as the next Diablo game. Had I been someone who played through Diablo III once, and then showed up to play this game… I probably would have been extremely happy with what I saw. It would have been a better-looking game that has the window dressing of a franchise that I remember fondly. However, I have expectations of what it should be based on what I have experienced from games that have moved on past Diablo and created honestly better experiences. So a key example of expectations biting me in the ass is with the World Boss. When you say that, I picture the deep mechanical feasts that are the world bosses and meta bosses of Guild Wars 2 that feature 50 players. What we got instead was a 10-player limited instance featuring a bag of hit points with three mechanics that all one-shot you if you failed any of them. It felt awful and was so much less than what I was expecting as the bare minimum.

So instead of playing any more of Diablo IV after I finished up with Ace on Saturday afternoon… I went back to Last Epoch a game that is making me extremely happy. I’ve since moved on to the level 80 monolith after fighting my way through the annoying revamp of Lagon at the end of the level 75 monolith. Ace is far enough ahead of me to now be on empowered monoliths, so I am trying to catch up. Slowly bit by bit I am replacing gear that I had held onto for far too long, and that is making me feel more powerful as a result.

When I got to the level 75 Monolith I started saving all of my level 75 chest pieces and then using the stockpile of runes that turn an item into a random unique for that slot. There is a new unique chest that went in with the 0.9 patches called Aaron’s Will, named after the content creator behind the Action RPG channel on youtube. Essentially it makes it so you can no longer summon Skeletal Warriors/Archers and instead for every 4 warriors you can summon, it gives you an additional full sized full strength Bone Golem.

So now I am running around with two giant Pyre Bone Golems, that do stupid amounts of AOE fire damage… and the game feels amazing. Like it felt good before now, but after swapping things out it feels dumb in the best of ways. It also meant that I dropped Skeletons since that didn’t really do me much good and let me pick back up Dread Shade again. I had a blast last night chipping away at the level 80 monolith. I ended up killing the Shade of Orobyss without realizing what I was doing… and now have +5% corruption on all of my maps. I think I am stepping away from Diablo IV and the rhetoric surrounding it because clearly, it was not making me happy. Instead, I am focusing on the things that are making me happy and just moving on with life. If you enjoyed Diablo IV, then awesome. I hope it has a very smooth launch. I hope the next few months turn it into exactly the game you want it to be. For me, I think it is too far off the mark to really salvage.

AggroChat #428 – Bad Big Boss

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! Tonight we are down three folks and contemplated not recording at all…  eventually deciding on the recording to save ourselves from a mega show.  The original intent was to record a fairly short show, but ultimately we ended up chatting away for the full time regardless.  Tonight we talk about Diablo IV again and some of our frustrations.  This weekend Grace got to play the game in the Open Beta so we start out with their opinions and devolve from there.  After that Tam talks a bit about his experiences with Triangle Strategy.  Finally, we talk about Adepticon and all of the news coming out of it for new miniature gaming releases.

Topics Discussed:

  • Diablo IV
    • Grace’s Opinions
    • More Frustrations
  • Triangle Strategy
    • Awful Name Great Game
  • Adepticon Reveals
    • Warhammer 40k
    • Infinity
    • Ral Partha Nostalgia

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Why Diablo IV Is an MMORPG

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Good Morning Friends! First I wanted to start off with a quick notice that if you have the Battle.net client, you can begin preloading the Diablo IV Open Beta now. Technically you could begin preloading yesterday afternoon, but suffice it to say by the time you read this post it will still be available for loading. The Open Beta itself begins tomorrow at 9 am PDT, and I fully expect that the servers are going to be wildly overloaded again. I would not take off work to play in this beta, because more than likely the first 24 hours are going to be unplayable. However, I do suggest that if you have been interested in Diablo and ARPGs in general, you give this game a spin to determine if it works for you personally. I definitely do not hate this game, but when I shared my thoughts earlier this week I largely shared that it just was not the game I was expecting it to be. Since it is a rather expensive purchase and since the refund policy on Battle.net is not as clear and hands-off as it is on Steam, you might as well try it while it is free.

Sometimes content lands in your lap. This happened to me last night when my good friend Wininoid asked me why exactly I thought Diablo IV was more of an MMORPG than an ARPG. This caused me to really clarify that stance, and I thought this morning I would share some of those thoughts with you. You can of course just read the short-form response, but you can only cram so much nuance in a 500-word reply.

The Character Creator

A fairly robust character creator

I guess first let’s start with the character creator. This is not exactly something that I associate with an ARPG, though I would dearly love them to offer more options. Please note that none of the things that I am going to highlight in this post are necessarily bad things, just what I would consider trappings of an MMORPG. In MMORPGs, I absolutely expect to have a pretty robust character creator, and the Diablo IV options would align to the bare minimum that I would expect for that sort of game. I created a “beefcake murder hobo” as I called it but one that aligned well enough with my sensibilities. Black hair and a beard, and has some sort of nonsense going on over the left eye… which is effectively the minimum requirement for being a “Belghast”. ARPGs would be so much better if they offered character creation options, but given that most do not… and even more, have gender-locked character classes… I am going to throw this in the bucket for MMORPG traits.

Open World and Passive Player Interaction

Other players in the world with me, with no ability to play solo

Next up we are going to flow into a “twofer” in that this game features an Open World with at least theoretical seamless shifts between towns and the surrounding areas. More than this however when you are out in the open world, you are surrounded by other players who are also taking part in content alongside you. The game features permissive tagging, in that you can help fight creatures and you will both get credit for the kill and your own copies of any rewards that come from those fights. Of note what I mean is that without formal grouping, you can actively participate in content with other players and there is no way to turn this off that I am aware of. You cannot venture forth into the world completely alone and you will always be at least indirectly impacted by the actions of other players and be competing at least passively for kills.

This is not something that I associate with ARPGs. Occasionally there are shared hub environments like the cities in Path of Exile, but once you start venturing forth you are doing so only with your party. Passive interaction with other players is a tenant of the MMORPG genre, so I am throwing this trait in that column both for the big open world with seamless zoning and the forced existence of other players in your world. Of note I consider Lost Ark to be an MMORPG, not an ARPG because it also has all of these traits and there have been folks calling Diablo IV a Lost Ark clone.

Respawning Mobs and Events

An event that respawns on a regular interval

Here come another two traits that are connected. In an ARPG you generally clear maps from one side to the other and the only time you ever see something respawn is when it is directly connected to some sort of a ring event. In Diablo IV while you are venturing into the open world, everything respawns. If you stand still in an area long enough, the same static spawns will keep popping back up. This has led players to just hang out in the location that a named mob spawns, and farm it over and over. This is absolutely a trait that I associate with an MMORPG because traditionally an ARPG is more map-based with its own population of spawns and you can clear from one side to the other without seeing any of it repopulate. Sure there are ways to FORCE a respawn in an ARPG, but these generally are centered around discarding your current map and forcing an entirely new map with all of its spawns to appear, not just single packs.

The other piece of this is that Diablo IV has zone events that happen in fixed locations and on a reoccurring schedule. In the above screenshot, there is an event centered around filling the pillar with blood by killing monsters on top of specific pads. If I roam around that same area long enough, I will keep encountering the same event. Again if there are players in that area you all can participate in that same event or even stand around and farm it over and over. This again is a behavior that I associate with an MMORPG and not an ARPG.

Hub and Spoke Side Quests

A side quest asking me to go to a location and kill something

This one gets a little hazy to be honest because it isn’t like I’ve not encountered this behavior in ARPGs before but it is more the totality of the features rather than a single trait in particular. Diablo IV progresses in a hub and spoke model when it comes to questing. The central quest will lead you to various areas of the map, and once appearing in a town a bunch of blue exclamation marks will show up offering you side quests that continue to force exploration of the surrounding area. These quests align with the central tropes of an MMORPG such as:

  • Kill X Monsters
  • Collect X Drops
  • Go to Location and Kill Specific Monster
  • Go to Location and Collect Specific Thing
  • Take Item from Point A to Point B

In truth, MOST quests in any game align with that model, but again it is the totality of traits and not any single trait. The same could be said for The Witcher 3, because its questing also feels very MMORPG at times.

Predictable Equivalent Loot

Loot drops from a named monster, that effectively aligns with the same types of drops every time.

This one is probably a little esoteric but hopefully, you can follow me. When you kill named monsters and open chests in Diablo IV, you seem to get roughly the same loot quantity every single time. For example, every time I killed this monster I got an amount of coin, two yellows, two blues, two whites, and the potential for a single legendary item. Chests similarly drop roughly the same items every time and the only real difference is based on what type of chest you are looting. Fixed loot tables and the regularity of loot drops absolutely tick the MMORPG checkbox for me.

A sequence of lucky drops in Path of Exile

In a traditional ARPG, it is a complete crapshoot that you are going to get on any given map. The potential for drops is more tied to a specific zone and less to specific encounters… apart from intended zone bosses. Drops are very feast or famine and you live for those big loot explosions. I’m sharing an example of a very lucky explosion of loot from Path of Exile for reference, but I saw something like this maybe once in every ten maps… rather than something that was predictable on every single outing. Sure it is mostly just a difference in methodology because it isn’t like I am getting MORE loot… I am just getting it all at once rather than rationed out in equidistant drops. I definitely associate predictable loot as an MMORPG trait.

No Map Overlay

Map Overlay Shown in Last Epoch

Now this one is more of something that it is lacking and less something that it features. I have come to associate ARPGs with playing with my map up at all times so that I know where I am going. This is more a case that the individual combat interactions are less important than the totality of clearing a map or finding a specific exit. When I am playing Path of Exile, Last Epoch, or Diablo II… I am essentially playing with the map overlay at all times. My eyes are sort of fuzzed out a bit watching what is happening with the actual encounters but also the lay of the land at the same time.

A More Hand Drawn an Immersive RPG style map in Diablo IV

This is not something that you can do with Diablo IV. When you bring up the map you get the traditional MMORPG opaque “hand-drawn” feeling map with fog of war for areas that you have not discovered yet similar to World of Warcraft. This sort of map is absolutely something that I associate with MMORPGs because while helpful, it is nowhere near as mechanically functional as the overlay. ARPGs tend to be more about mechanics and combat interactions than immersion and roleplaying… and Diablo IV absolutely seems to be trying to focus on immersion and story over raw mechanics. Again these are things that I chiefly associate with the MMORPG more than I do with the ARPG.

Factions Grind and Alternative Currency

The Purveyor of Curiosities Vendor allows you to spend “Obols” gained through events and quests.

Every region of the game has a faction associated with it. Completing quests and events in the area rewards you with a currency called Obols and standing with that faction. Over time you gain benefits by raising your ranks with that faction at specific predetermined break points. The currency is used to buy items from a gambling merchant located in each area called the “Purveyor of Curiosities”. While this maps pretty closely to Kadala and Blood Shards from Diablo III, the gaining of factions with groups of NPCs and the collection of alternate currencies are absolutely things that I primarily associate with MMORPGs. Faction grinds in general… are not something that I generally see in ARPGs. Instead, I am more used to trying to keep doing harder and harder content for better rewards, rather than accumulating an amount of renown to unlock something.

None of this is Necessarily Bad

Completing a Stronghold with Other Players

Again I am not necessarily saying any of this is a bad thing. However, these are the reasons why I have said this is more akin to an MMORPG like World of Warcraft than an ARPG like Path of Exile. We also have no clue at this point what the end game for Diablo IV is going to look like. I am not thinking it will really scratch the itch for the folks who live by the schedule of the Diablo II Ladders, Diablo III Seasons, Path of Exile leagues, and eventually Last Epoch Cycles. I might be completely wrong however and there may be systems within systems that we have yet to see. What I see is an MMORPG masquerading as an ARPG, just like Lost Ark is doing the same thing. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have World of Warcraft redone in the Diablo universe… and in truth, I guess we now have that answer. To be fair Diablo Immortal did most of these things so I legitimately should have set my expectations accordingly.

Completing some of the story content in Diablo IV

I don’t even think that Diablo IV is a bad game. There were absolutely some parts of it that I really enjoyed. However as I said at the start of this post, sometimes content falls in your lap. After getting the question from my friend I decided to further expand upon why I think Diablo IV is an MMORPG, and I think at this point I have done so. I would have liked to have seen something that more directly continued the lineage of Diablo and created a product that could compete with the current king of ARPGs… Path of Exile. Ultimately I am getting that in the form of Last Epoch, but I wanted to see what Blizzard had to offer in that genre as well.

I highly suggest that you don’t take my word for any sense of finality. This weekend you have your chance to get into the game free and try it out. Maybe it clicks in ways that I did not expound upon, and I would love to hear your thoughts after having played it yourself. I am likely going to be playing some more of it myself. I suggest you save the rush and preload it today. I think I am probably in the minority with the amount of side-eye I am throwing at the game, because for the most part everyone seems to be enjoying it.

Hugged to Death

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Last Epoch Multiplayer patch 0.9 and it was most certainly interesting. Shocking to no one that has ever experienced an MMO launch… there were problems. I attempted to create a character around noon when the servers first went online and encountered a litany of errors and gave up. Last night around 4 pm when I was attempting to log in, I kept encountering the above situation where it would try and load the character and then fail out with an error of “[LE-61] Failed to Matchmake” but have to hit some sort of time out before it returned me to the character select screen to try again. Around 5:30 my time, things had calmed down enough that I was actually able to log into the game as was my good friend Ace. From there we experienced a pretty hilarious night of weird bugs until I reached a point where I could no longer interact with NPCs… and we had to call it a night.

The above video is one that I snagged from this post on Reddit and uploaded to YouTube so that I could embed it. Unfortunately, it was uploaded directly to Reddit so please know I am not attempting to take credit for it. I absolutely encountered this same bug several times yesterday, and in truth, it seemed to be happening quite a bit for various skills. For example, if I used Lunge without a target, it would lock me in the movement animation while seemingly it waited for the command to time out. When I got shield charge, I was able to charge through walls and skip sections of the map…. because I am guessing my client, Ace’s client, and the server all had a disagreement on where exactly I was heading and where I successfully managed to go. The funniest thing though was when I would shield charge… and it would go super slow for a few seconds and then rapidly warp me to the final destination of the ability. When things got really bad towards the end of my session I started rubberbanding back to near Ace’s location because it was as though the server lost track of me.

Please note this is not me complaining, this is me regaling you with the experience we had last night. Ace and I were on discord laughing the entire time like we were drunk with joy. The folks I feel bad about though are the team over at Eleventh Hour Games. I am certain they did not get any sleep last night… most specifically MoxJet aka Judd (Mox) on Discord. He was in the chat when I disappeared last night and was back up this morning around 6 am, still answering questions… still being chill, responsive, and helpful. I remember when we were attempting to log in yesterday I was watching the chat for any signs of updates, and the chat was thrown into slow mode allowing one new message from each user every 5 minutes. Even then being throttled like it was… it was scrolling by faster than I could read it. I mean all multiplayer launches are at least somewhat traumatic, but I feel for the late nights the team is going to have over the coming days.

Last Epoch is legitimately overwhelmed by new players at the moment. If you look at the steam charts, as of writing this post Last Epoch is sitting in the 8th spot for top-selling games in the US and 12th Globally. Notice that Steam indicates that it is new to the list, which I believe means it has not appeared before on the top 100 list at all. This game went from a very niche title to being thrust into the mainstream literally overnight. I bought into the game in 2018 when it was a wildly different experience, and over time it has shifted from something I honestly did not enjoy much to being a legitimate contender for the Diablo/Path Of Exile throne. This is absolutely benefitting from the hype surrounding Path of Exile having a phenomenal Sanctum league, and Diablo IV waiting in the wings… but not quite ready for launch. It is probably even widely benefitted from Diablo II getting a remastered edition that has had its own traction among classic ARPG players. So while this is awesome for the future of Eleventh Hour Games as a company… it is going to be a bit of a rocky ride in the interim for that team.

For the moment since I spent so much time playing Necromancer in testing, I decided to try out a Sentinel build. This looked to be the sort of Righteous Fire gameplay I enjoy where you are nigh unkillable and just AOE everything around you to death. You can see the .85 build here on Last Epoch Tools, which I am adapting to fit .9, and for the most part, there are not significant enough differences to really cause challenges. I also plan on playing around with a Ritualist and Acolyte like I did in testing and Rogue is just stupid fun and arrives at a point of power way earlier than the other classes. I ran a bunch of things up on the test realm and I plan on doing the same over the coming weeks in online play. The game keeps your offline and online characters separate similar to how Wolcen did, so you have to make a choice of playing with friends or not ever playing with friends. I wish we could have at least played characters offline and then shifted to online play, but I get why they wanted to keep online play somewhat sacred.

Sadly I have no screenshots of me playing with Ace last night because quite honestly we were laughing too hard for me to think to take screenshots. We managed to run a few characters up to around level 17, and I plan on more or less holding my Sentinel where it is currently and resuming play together tonight. At first, we thought maybe there was some catch-up experience going on, but I think they just buffed the XP rates across the board whether or not you were grouped. The main thing we noticed is it felt like we were getting way more “Blue” and “Yellow” monsters than we would in a non-multiplayer map. The chat message indicates that the monster’s health is buffed but I think the changes maybe go deeper than that. It felt good to play with friends and did not feel like we were just stomping things without any challenge. I even died last night because I just did not get out of the bad fast enough. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I am hoping the servers calm down or stabilize as the team adds more resources.

I did not get anything that was necessarily set defining, and I probably traded more good items to Ace than I kept because I ended up getting a lot of +minion items on a build that does not care in the least about that. I did get Snowblind which is a somewhat universally good leveling item. Sadly I am not really going into elemental attacks at all, but maybe I will find some +cold weapons to make this do some work for me. I am also using Avarice Gloves which have synergy with elemental attacks. If I can lean in that direction a bit, those items should help me out a little bit. I had fun though and that is ultimately the real judge of a game launch. I think the Eleventh Hour Games team has a great product on their hands, and hopefully, they have the capital required to ramp up enough to stem the bleeding. They definitely have some work ahead of them because the testing did not hammer the servers anywhere near what happened last night. However, I think they are in a good place to move forward because it was at least playable.

Did you play Last Epoch last night? What were your experiences? Drop me a line below.