Can you make the base game fun first?
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Exactly. They're maybe the minority but every one who played D2 and D3 with me along the years have given up on D4 after a month. They preferred going back to D2R.
I wonder what % of the player base has disappeared from the game since launch.
My gorlfriend pre-ordered the diablo 4 deluxe edition (don't ask) and she maybe played 6 hours. She also played like 60 hours of diablo 3 since. I never played diablo, so idk, i just watched her play the other day and one of her 30 something blizzard friends played diablo 4
Yup, approximately what I had in mind, under 15% of the original player base.
The grinding needed in D2 and D3 didn't feel as tiresome as it is in D4.
It might be that I'm becoming older, "grumpier" by the years and that I don't have the patience and time to grind correctly anymore.
Grinding must feel like fun, otherwise it's just bad game design. If you don't feel rewarded for it, it's specially bad.
I think blizzard have actually lost the ability to make fun games, because they don't love games anymore. They are in this for the money.
I had a legitimately enjoyable time playing through the story. The open world (at that point) was fun to explore. Then the entire game fell off a cliff as soon as I finished the main story content and tried to get into the 'end game'. It's clear they had no real plan for what to do with it and many of the decisions made the felt ok while leveling, did not scale at all with an end game loop.
Death Must Die and halls of torment are early access games that cost <$10 and are more engaging than Diablo 4.
Imagine what blizzard could do if they didn't design for micro transactions first.
That is one of the first things you do though
User design says you should design for the user first and then pass it to marketing to make it shitty, not the other way around.
Diablo 4 never made it out of the user design phase.
No you are confused, what you said leads to a bad user experience
You want to take an idea, design how it makes money, then go to user experience. That way the revenue stream is fun for the users
Also you aren’t going to get green lit if you have no idea how it will make money/have your 5/10 year plan
Why do people still buy Blizzard games?! Sure D2 was great but that was long ago and nowadays Blizzard sucks hard.
I still play warcraft 3 (non shitified version), StarCraft 2, diablo and the diablo2 remaster.
But yeah all their modern stuff is balls.
Hoping Microsoft will use the IP better.
Hoping Microsoft will use the IP better.
This is my pipe dream especially for Starcraft, which I am soon returning to as greedy bastard Bobby Kotick is leaves the company.
As long as they give it to devs who care, they should be okay. Age of Empires 2 definitive edition is as big as ever (and constantly getting yearly 10/15$ expansions since release)
I have little hope they will resuscitate the franchise, but I will keep my expectations low until Microsoft or whomever can positively surprise me.
I abandoned after Blizzard after they stole a game I paid for (WC3) by uninstalling it from my computer without my consent. How does one get their hands on the non shitified version?
D2r is scratching the itch
D3 was fun too, but that was also a long time ago. D4 was pretty cool while leveling, but fell off hard once I finished the story. The end game there is pretty underwhelming. It felt like work, not play.
D2 had been my absolute favourite game, for many years I logged into battle.net daily. So I was ultra hyped and bought D3 right at release but it was the biggest disappointment I ever had with a game. That day I realized that Blizzard was fucked and moved on. Never looked back (while having a lot of fun playing PoE and getting into indie games, which was the best decision ever looking at what is going on in the gaming industry now).
HOTS is the only current Blizz game worth playing but it is really good. I think people play that then think their other games must be good quality
HotS good?! Come on now, it's not even close to the quality of dota 2 or even LoL and I really don't like LoL. Even Smite is better than HotS. If I were judging the quality of blizzard games by HotS, then I would be really worried about my taste in games.
Skins are recolors of garbage quality, heroes are copy/paste from other games, the maps while fun really don't lend themselves to the gameplay and only promote a rush to the objective instead of any strategy, it's also damn near impossible to keep track of your own character in team fights due to the shit decision to shower the screen with effects that all look the same, and only recently did they receive a patch after two years now that their other games are tanking.
I'm sorry but there's a reason they dropped it, game is not good compared to the competition and it took too long to be "decent".
I completely agree with you. I played HOTS for a bit and the quality was just not there, especially compared to other MOBAs.
I will say that I like some of the hero ideas though, but the game as a whole is not very good.
Lol, you must not be very good at mobas to hold that opinion
HOTS lack of appeal is because it’s too hard
Too hard?! You can't be that stupid...if anything HotS is too easy. I played a match with a friend as chogall, it was the most boring shit I've ever played, I just spammed 2 attacks and dashed the entire match, thrall was just as bad playing solo. I want to know what kind of copium you're huffing because this comment reeks of it.
You’re confusing difficulty of the game with skill level of opponents
How many maps does HOTS have? What about the competition? If you’re learning it is much easier to learn 1 thing than many
What about micro? DOTA and LoL are low micro games because you can insta-die
Macro? In LoL you go to lanes and farm then you go mid and fight over dragon/baron. Whoever has teleport clears out the sidelanes. In HOTS minion control is paramount because you are getting gold (xp) for your whole team/denying it for their whole team
You sound like every other blizzard fanboy taking in that copium. There are better games out there, if you like HotS good for you, but don't go around talking about how difficult it is when half the roster only has roughly 2-3 abilities and no items in the game to make any real strategy viable.
What do you mean 2-3 abilities?
I can’t think of anyone with less than 5
Also the no item thing leads to more strategy not less so I’m curious why you think the opposite
Edit: TLV has less than 5 but you are 3 people
I enjoy the base game of HOTS. Then again I only played a bit of League and I didn't care for the last hit money thing and figuring out what books to level.
I enjoyed the simplification/streamlining of HOTS where you level as a team and select your upgrades. Games then seem to take 20 to 30 minutes? League can sometimes stretch out quite some time, I found (once again, not as much experience with it)
I think they screwed up on the monetization of HOTS though and it really is a shame it didn't last. Still my favourite MOBA but it seems no one on this thread agrees and they could be right. I don't play other MOBAs, but I love HOTS.
I actually came close to buying D4 this Black Friday but my friends all reminded me about the recent changes and the reviews and that it's no longer the regular Blizzard I once loved. I think they were all saying Path of Exile is way better.
SC:BW, Vanilla WoW, WC3 + Frozen Throne, D3: Reaper of Souls (the original had um... RMAHitis that needed fixing), SC2 - campaign pretty good, multiplayer had various problems until several patches into legacy of the void, but overall pretty fun. Oh, and Overwatch was a blast when it first launched, and I mean before the competitive scene was pushed, before the forced que roll BS and all of that. Honestly, one of the best parts of Overwatch 2 is the open role que - where you get decent and interesting comps, and usually have balanced outcomes until change is needed - it's just fun chaos. Just don't pay attention to the battlepasses.
If you play casually, and don't treat the games as forever games - blizzard makes decent stuff... mostly. The issue is, under activision, and especially in the last few years, the push for hyper monetization has left a sour note in everyones mouth... and it's showing. But we love the IP, and we want to play through the story.
This is where the hope for Microsoft leadership comes in. Microsoft wants gamers - they want to expand the player base. And functionally, this means while monetization is useful for funding development, being aggressive with monetization is generally bad. And really, we have seen in the last year or so at least from the WoW team some pretty awesome changes in the systems, with a renewed focus on evergreen content, and persuing making the game more fun to just like... play.
Is Blizzard perfect? No. They have had some missteps. Should you pre-order a game? No. Pretty much never. But Blizzard has not completely flunked out to a point where disregarding their game releases (like Ubisoft) is warranted just yet. And given what we have seen from blizzcon, from various interviews, well: I'd say - while you should take everything said with a pinch of salt, I'm optimistic blizzard after a half decade or so of making some lacluster products, is heading in the right direction. Because lets face it: Microsoft wants the Late 90's to early 2000's blizzard, not the Activision blizzard. Because late 90's to early 2000's blizzard kicked ass and chewed bubblegum while swimming in cash that players wouldn't stop throwing at them.
And so we get to a truth: Nostalgia - a LOT of people grew up on blizzard games. We met lifelong friends, formed relationships with people around the globe, ran into people from all walks of life, learned to be better leaders, better team mates. We Grew up.
Blizzard isn't just another company - they created a gold standard of RTS, they established ARPG's as a Genre, and they took the concept of an MMO and created something that resonated with people across generations, income brackets, career paths, and so on.
To FINALLY ACTUALLY SIMPLY ANSWER THE QUESTION
Many people buy blizzard games because well, these IP's are our childhood. They are our pass times of happiness when things were stressful, or not so great. They were the way we connected with people we couldn't feasibly go and meet up with.
For awhile Blizzard and playing their games wasn't just entertainment - it was, in a way, a life style. The Clans of BW, the Servers of D2, and the Guilds of WoW.
And hell, I learned I needed to grow the hell up, from a guy who told it to me straight when no one in my actual damn life did. Ya, I've largely moved on, the guild fell apart, we went different ways. But there will ALWAYS be a place in memory and the heart for those people.
100$ expansion probably going to throw another 100$ collectors edition with no game also. People need to just stop buying blizzard games at this point. They aren’t the same company and never will be. Get the nostalgia glasses off.
The big con. Blizzard frightens current players that the next expansion will be super expensive. Blizzard release a £60 expansion price. All players breathe a sigh of relief and hand over cash.
Why do that when they can just keep it at $100
Expansions are usually cheaper than the base game. They usually offer less content and just extend on already known game play. This has been the case for every blizzard expansion I have seen released.
Do you think people will buy it at $100? Considering many avoided the $70 price tag for the base game in the first place.
“But it comes with Platinum currency so it’s worth $100!”
Some suit will unironically say their funny money makes it allllll worth it.
Because then they can sell the Premium Collectors' Deluxe Edition for $100. Exactly the same stuff, but it also comes with a WoW mount and some Hearthstone card backs that an intern crapped out in an hour. And people will eat it up, as is tradition.
Can't wait to buy the "Useless digital bullshit" pack!
Did they all respond with the only acceptable answer?
Answer: "LOL"
Microsoft do something!
M$ ~~just~~ bought github and* are requiring logins to code search. What exactly are you expecting, if they do anything?
- Corrected
** thanking dandroid for taking me it was five years ago
Microsoft bought GitHub 5 years ago.
I stand corrected. I didn’t read the date on the posted article. I’ll edit my post to reflect that, thank you.
They proooobably surveyed about a wide range of price points, but individual people only saw one. People react differently to "would you pay this?" than "what is the most you would pay for this?"
I played the demo this past weekend and after the 4-5 hours it lasted I was kinda bored, it feels a little too automated. No potions, regenerating mana, loads of meaningless drops. It was really pretty though.
Played the beta demo and hated it. It was completely devoid of both fun, and everything that was good about D2. D3 wasn't very good either in my opinion, but at least it had a few charming aspects. I failed to find anything I enjoyed in D4.
lol
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