Diablo 4 lead claims players don’t actually want classic Diablo back as modern gamers are too “consumptive”
Diablo 4 lead claims players don’t actually want classic Diablo back as modern gamers are too “consumptive”
Do modern Diablo 4 players actually want a return to classic Diablo? Series lead Rod Fergusson claims they actually don't.
Shit like this is why people go back and play much older titles and have a great time with them.
c/patientgamers rise up! Or maybe not. We'll just wait until it goes on sale and maybe give it a try down the road.
A friend and I literally just finished Diablo II with SlashDiablo's servers so we avoid Blizzard. It was an awesome time
"People" as in maybe 5% of players. Most of the money is in what is being released - live services, forever games. They're not idiots, they have statistics and know what most players actually pay for.
The entirety of sales for Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, generated less money than a single mount skin in World of Warcraft.
47% of the total playing time on Steam was spent on games released in the last one to seven years, while a sizeable 37% of time was spent in games that have been out for eight years or more.
Also with all the recent Concord-style live service fails maybe investors will want to fund other stuff from now on? idk
A lot of it is untracked, though. I know we live in the era of big data, but Blizzard et al has no clue how many people are playing TIE Fighter Total Conversion and countless other old games. 5% is way too low of a made up estimate.
Hell, classic arcade emulators are ubiquitous.
My point here is not that game publishers aren't making money. My point is, gamers don't have to buy into it to have fun.
Kins alike when they said "you think you do but you don't" about doing WoW Classic, which turned out to be extremely popular.
Today's gamers just want slots machines on their phone! You guys have phones right?
Ironically Balatro has proven this is close to what we wanted. Of course if blizz made that game, buying jokers would require a credit card.
The same folks that created the real money auction house for Diablo 3, the memes "You think you do, but you actually don't"; "Don't you guys have phones?" and Diablo Immoral, continues to show their complete dissociation from reality because money.
Similar to his recent comments about how gamers turned the series towards live-service, Fergusson claims the “consumptive” nature of modern fans means a true, classic Diablo wouldn’t succeed anymore.
Ah yes, it's the gaymurrs that asked for more fucking live service. Fuck off. To be fair, the actual interview doesn't have anything saying that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a statement thrown elsewhere, since diablo immoral is full of lootboxes, gems and all the predatory bullshit that works wonders to funnel money. It worked exactly as expected, it's profitable beyond reason. To conflate that with "gamers want more of that" is pure corporate bullshit and they know it.
(Fergusson): And so we launched that way with D4 and we found out very quickly that if you don't give me my Uber in my season, then I'm upset. And so we're like, oh, wow, okay. And now it's not like, now we actually have an uber currency, uber unique currency that you can go make the one. If you're not finding it, you can actually go make it for yourself, right? And so, which is very different. It's just a kind of a recognition of how much players have changed in 20 years. You know, what they, that consumptive nature of a live service and that time is money and I don't have much time, so let's go, right? And so that idea of like, oh, you're going to get a unique every six months. So what are you talking about? I need to get all the unique in six months, you know? And so it's been, so that's that clarity that Brent talks about is just putting in players' hands, getting their actions and adapting."
That's a "problem" because of how you decided the game should work, as a fucking live service.
For more Diablo coverage, read about Fergusson’s wish to have the ARPG genre renamed to “Diablo-likes”.
Everything old is new again, I guess.
The only reason the players are "too consumptive" is because the game is designed to not give the player any other way to play. You wanted that outcome, so you designed it so there was no other option.
Diablo 2 was my first and favorite, I played the shit out of that game with my friends. We'd join up and rush each other, share equipment, meticulously plan our builds, and kill the strongest stuff we could find.
The story was stale after the first playthrough, and yeah I killed Baal and Mephisto thousands of times, but it was so much fun. There wasn't an auction house or an ability to buy the best equipment. Leveling up didn't take forever, so I could build a level 80 character in a few weekends of grinding away.
I played Diablo 3 too, but it felt like they lost the storytelling magic and focused more on monetization. Rifts were cool, but I really just felt like it was more of the same with better graphics and different characters / skill trees. It wasn't novel enough to grind away my weekends on.
I haven't tried the latest, and despite having a phone, I refuse to play Immortal or whatever (if that is still around).
I am over Blizzard games at this point ... in the 90s and early 2000s they could do no wrong. Since they hitched up with Activision they completely lost the plot.
Don't you guys have phones??
IMO Path of Exile 2 is kind of like "Diablo 4 classic".
Sure it lack some QoL just because it wants to be old school but it nails the mood of the older Diablo games.
I also played Diablo 4 and there is no way I will return to that game. They clearly don't have a good formula anymore.
I've been jamming on poe2, and (to me) it feels like D2 resurrected, but with a bunch of extra content. Act biomes are identical, storyline is conceptually very close (chasing a corrupting force across the continent), look and feel, etc..
Also, it's too bad the VGAs don't have a "Stable Release" award, because, even being early access, the level of polish on POE2 is pretty amazing.
Indeed. And its half a game, without classes, without systems and act 4-6 as well as all the skills and abilities associated with that stuff.
Another 6 months of balance and polish on it plus all the above mentioned content, it's gonna have something for everyone that is even slightly a fan of arpg's I'd hope.
PoE took, what, four years before they decided to change it from 3 acts repeated thrice to the 10 act arc? I loved playing it from beta, but I think I'll wait a while for PoE 2. I'll bet 6 months is just enough for chis wisson to figure out what horror he wants to add to the rnGods, and that's much more important than balance and polish.
Have you by any chance played Grim Dawn? I really enjoy the mechanics and aesthetics of it, and I'm wondering how PoE2 compares. I don't think I'll ever be in the market for Diablo 4; the P2W cash-grab of Diablo Immortal really soured me on the franchise.
I wish they never discovered that all gamers were monolithic.
They are right about the latter part, but attributing who doesn't want the classic ways back to the wrong group. Developers don't want to go back because people will actually pay for the MTX/Battlepass/whatever the fuck bullshit and they (the developers and publishers) love money.
I loved D2 and yes D3. But 4... I've tried to play it twice and gave up. It is just such a giant expanse of soul sucking nothing that I've not been able to find any "fun" in the game.
The intro was cool. When I played it I thought "nice, they're going back to Diablo 1's atmosphere". Then the rest of the game happened.
I played Diablo II so much as a kid and then when the remake came out over twenty years later, it was just as great as I remembered and I play it regularly. I haven't bought Diablo III or IV.
(It was much harder when I was a kid so I do wish there was more challenge now.)
/players 8
I wish they would enable that in battle.net games so I don't have to choose between trading and it.
I picked up the base for III after sinking countless hours in II and LOD. It was so much less fun and more grindy… maybe some people like it, but it didn’t hook me like I & II did. I never even finished the base game I got maybe 10-20yrs tops and gave up. Luckily it was on a steep discount at the time.
It was a pain in the ass unless you played everyday. Playing with friends was tiresome because you'd have to do the same boss battles over and over. Diablo was great because of the horror and the levels got more twisted as you went deeper. There was also the secret cow level.
Now, it's open world and a bit soulless because it caters to always online. Art direction was great in D4 but I got so sick of the 40Gb updates everytime I booted up the game every few weeks. Just give me a one and done solo offline story mode and separate online.
That's the only thing that could bring me back to Blizzard. Dedicated and fulfilling solo for most of their ips
They did try loot and difficulty changes that are closer to Diablo II in style. Players moaned endlessly until they gave up.
Is the difficulty in 4 as broken as it is in 3? I gave up in disgust after realizing I could win most encounters by literally just standing still and holding down the A button.
Diablo 3 has nearly infinitely scaling difficulty. If it was too easy, you were playing on too low of a difficulty.
I enjoyed D3 and D4, I think they both do difficulty well (at this point, D3 was stupid at launch). In both there are now hundreds of fine grained tiers you can shift up or down to find the right difficulty for your gear/build/skill.
That said, holding down a button to win is more of a build issue unless you're running embarrassingly low difficulty. There will always be easy builds and more challenging, technical, timing based builds. Finding a fun build is part of the fun of ARPGs.
He's not wrong. As much as we loved the old games, it's hard to go back once you've gotten used to the QoL improvements in modern games.
We think we want the old games back, but really we just want the emotions that came with playing it.
There are studios out there making games with the QoL improvements modern gamers demand without without modern bullshit like subscriptions and microtransactions. Baldur's Gate 3 is a particularly prominent example of a studio doing the right thing and being massively rewarded with sales.
Absolutely! I just meant that going back to an old game is never quite as good as it was the first time.
We want the old style of games back with the modern QoL changes. Not just remakes.
Modern Corporation:
Just in... we're re-releasing old classic games, but making every reward 10x harder to earn... but adding in microtransactions so you can get them without having to do all the playing portions.
Is making the game live service a quality of life improvement? There's still a market out there for Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and Borderlands, after all; a large one.
That's been the elusive key to nostalgia that half of these remake projects (80s and 90s franchise revival movies in particular) don't understand.
It's about recreating the experience of doing that thing the first time that people want, not the experience of doing the exact same thing. To recreate that first time experience, you have to understand where your audience is now, and also give them a comparable "new" experience to what they had originally.
I find this comment amusing because other than Vagrant Story needing 1h to access the memory card, I think modern QoL has destroyed the fun and community in video games. Exhibit 1: the souls series. Not only did it introduce actual difficulty (not HP bar go brrrrr) in a world where it was gone it also had obtuse storytelling and a lot of missable content. It has resulted in one of the best franchises of the last 10y and a strong community that produces lore and discussion content to this day.
The main issue is in surveys of people who identify as "gamers", your farmville enjoyer also considers itself a gamer, so AAA studios started to produce games to an audience that didn't exist. Now the laid off development teams are paying the bill.
There should be more games like Outward, Valheim etc. Fun games that eschewed QoL that should have never existed like map click fast travel anywhere.
Friggin Farmville. I forgot about that shit. 😂
I notice path of exile has sucked xi xinpings cock exactly zero times and is also a better game even if they had.
I notice path of exile has sucked xi xinpings cock exactly zero times
In 2018, Tencent became a majority holder in GGG, acquiring 86.67% of the company's shares.
-sourceI enjoyed Path of Exile, and may give PoE2 a go. But ya, GGG looks set to deepthroat some Xi Xin Pooh cock,