If you check the D4 subreddit you can see that most POE players are disappointed, whereas the majority of players is much more casual and happy, because the last ARPGs they played are D3 and D2R and compared to that, they are blown away by graphics update alone.
Yea no doubt, takes the same amount of brain power to aim your mouse at someoneās head and right click as it does to make a build on your own capable of pushing high corruption. Never played wow so no comment there, but I sure as hell have played Elden Ring, gonna have to hard disagree on that. Memorizing enemy patterns is not very hard. Souls difficulty is the most overrated topic of the past few years.
But I do agree with you about Bliz, they have lost their soul. Labors of love are now nothing more than how to extract the most money from people simulators. I will enjoy D4 regardless.
Saddest thing imo is GGG now knows D4 is not the competition we all thought it would be, I was hoping D4 would blow our minds and force GGG to step up their shit for PoE2 and beyond. Not so sure now.
No, itās a bug. Building software isnāt like building a house.
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Yet again, I will reply: being a beta does NOT absolve them of any and all guilt.
It can be a beta, it can be a crappy experience (sometimes) and still hold the devs accountable.
Justifying and excusing their every mistake does NOT improve the game.
Fixed that for you.
This is true. And everybody would be playing the same game, because all games would be exactly the same anyway.
To me, games being different from each other is a positive.
To be fair, the approach is completely different.
EHG doesnāt have to āreleaseā, ever. Because people can already buy the game and play it fully. Releasing doesnāt change anything at all, this is a marketing thing and nothing else.
Blizzard on the other hand follows a more old-fashioned pattern and uses the normal definition of āreleaseā: the moment when the game becomes available and playable.
Therefore they HAVE to release at some point, sooner rather than later. Before that, the game simply doesnāt exists.
Curious as to why you are āworriedā.
For me the experience from D4 beta was more like: game is resource heavy for what little it does, performance was average at best. 11gb RAM for medium settings? Odd. The days of Blizzard being insanely optimized and running on most computers seem to be days gone.
The gameplay somewhat unengaging, the MMO-features and open world events and tasks, felt off to me. I got to lvl 20 to get the open beta reward, then I rushed to 25. At 25 I crashed on the way to the world boss (which in itself is also a weird ARPG thing, since itās time limited etc, just odd).
After crashing I tried to log back in but there was a queue so I effectively missed the world boss. Thatās the moment I thought āokā¦ Iām doneā. I donāt think I will pick up D4 at releaseā¦ I did however buy LE instead and in the span of a few short hours I had a better experience than the D4 beta. And as it stands, Iād much rather play LE and PoE than D4.
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Hey, i understand where you are coming from, but it changes or should change players expectations. For a full release, players should rightfully expect a polished experience with few to zero bugs.
Recently i witnessed the darktide release. It was full with cut features, bugs and crafting had only been partially implemented. Yet MTX store was fully functional and working with tons of leaked cosmetics ready to go. Players got very upset and within 2 months the predecessor had a higher player count.
Many players said, i wouldnāt have been upset if it would have released as early access and I knew what I was getting into.
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I absolutely agree with that.
I was only making the point that a developper who choses to directly release without using the Early Access trick is taking far more risks than another one who just stays ābetaā for many, many years to avoid backlash while nonetheless selling the game at full price in the meantime.
That said, as Early Access sales has become extremely common, it is their choice not to use the trick, and I agree that a release should be reasonnably solid (first few days servers rush aside, this is another issue).
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I agree. But I have to say thisā¦ I think LEās downfall will come from the proposed over-convoluted trading system. I just want to be able to give shards and items (that I find when solo) to friends whenever I feel like it, and I cannot and that makes this game unfit for our purposes. This trading design is going to kill-off the game imo. We are going to give it chance but I really feel the design for LE trading is terrible, and it will be the thing that drives us to D4 (or PoE 2).
This always makes me chuckle. I agree with you but just think how non-casual D2 was. D3 did a LOT of damage to the franchise, for me anyways.
I can understand where you are coming from.
But millions of people not especially interested in ARPGs try their first one only because it is Diablo. Most of them will leave afterwards and go back to MMOs and CRPGs, but a few will grow to like the genre and move towards deeper systems like PoE or LE.
In other words, I think Diabloās huge popularity and accessibility globally helps all the other games in the genre, instead of killing them.
You hit on an interesting point. LEās campaign is terrible. They need to do what the Wolcen devs did. Make it so only your first ever character needs to run through the campaign. All future chars you make can start in the end-game with all passives points etc. This is a brilliant evolution for the genre. Itās the future.
Oh I need to disagree with that statement. LE has full-blown skill trees for every skill you chose to level. No other ARPG has that (that Iāve played). Grim Dawn is the closest, but it is very basic in comparison to the way you can completely change how skills work in LE.
I find that ground-breaking.
Thatās kinda cute that you think there wont be any errors on full release 
I said players should have the expectation. Given how bug riddled it was so shortly before the release, i expect it to be a bug fest full with copium.
Interesting, havenāt played Wolcen. And maybe Iām in the minority here, but I actually like playing campaigns. Iterating on content you already know works best in an RPG, it can feel satisfying because as you learn and build better or make different choices the effect of you improving is tangible during levelling because you can relate and compare to something else. Feeling satisfied in your progress character wise and also in terms of efficency. You know how long it takes you to get to certain points in the game, and you can use that as a reference for builds etc. I kinda enjoy improving and knowing exactly where to go, who to talk to etc. And particular nice content is like coming home to familiar territory. āoh finally at chapter/act X, lets gooooā
The campaign also serve as levelling content, learning your class, finding the items for that class. It allows for race events, skill challenges and more.
I realize a lot of people are sick of it in POE for example, and perhaps my sentiment will be different when I have thousands of hours in recent ARPGsā¦ but even thinking about it, Diablo 2 the fun is starting from 0 and playing the campaign.
So yeah, personally I hope that it does not become the evolution of the genre.
PS: New LE player, but been enjoying the campaign so far. Some surprisingly good voice acting. The time travelling touch is so simple but brilliant. If they keep working on it and voice all the main then thereās nothing so far Iād mind playing again.
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You want to go through the campaign with every character? Really? I have 20+ characters just to put that in perspective for you. I am bored out my mind doing this campaign.
I would say this, if the devs are going to force me to do the campaign with every new char, then at least let me have fun and experiment with my build as I do so. Right now I cannot as during levelling, loss of level on skills I spec out of is absolutely game-killing. No way you can experiment with builds while levelling a new char. Net result: everyone follows a build guide and creative thinking is actively supressed.
Just to be clear here, in Wolcen it is an OPTION. When you make a new char you can do the complete campaign again if you want to, or you can skip to the end-game if you want to (you will get all rewards youād have gotten from the campaign). Nothing is forced on the player. Wolcen is very very good right now, if anyone is curious.
Grim Dawn has gone a similar way with a purchasable item (whose name I forget) that lets you skip entire difficulty levels (in GD each char needs to do the campaign THREE times normally).
That is because in D2 the campaign is the end-game.
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Wellā¦ yeah. I find that enjoyable. And if you look at POE thatās their whole loop. You make a new character at league start and you get to maps and you do the mapping. Your idea is that everybody would start at endgame taking a significant chunk out of the game and, in my opinion, part of the game (because of the positives I listed in my first post)
I also have started playing on HC so perhaps my attitude towards this subject is slightly different because of the, more or less, inherent āoh well crap, guess we go againā
Again comparing to POE the current respec system is rather forgiving. But as a new player, it has annoyed me that it in general is forgiving in passives but if you make a mistake in Skills you have to re-level. And I agree in general that ARPGs should be more lenient when it comes to respeccing, and I think you should be able to respec a point in skills and keep it (even if at a cost)
Well, ha ha, fair. The point I was getting at is that IS the game. The whole experience is just that. And when you have played it enough times you fastclick all the dialogs and know exactly what to do etc, but people kept playing it. Even to this day.
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But will you still enjoy it 20 new characters later?
No, as I mentioned above, it would be an OPTION per new character. Same as Wolcen and Grim Dawn. You can chose to do full campaign if you want to, I can skip it if I want to. (The main advantage to skipping is that, just like Last Epoch, the enemy density in Wolcenās campaign is very low compared to end-game so you level very very very slowly. I might feel different if the LE campaign was in any way challenging, but it isnāt. I donāt think I have died during the LE campaign since 2020. It is an exercise in tedium for me).
Eh? In PoE, you remove a gem (which does NOT de-level) and slot in another one. How is that unforgiving? It is entirely free and instant.
Imagine now if that gem reverted back to level 1 when you removed it. THAT is the Last Epoch style of re-speccing. Would you play PoE if that happened when you removed a gem?
That change skills most of the time very slightly. This is from my viewpoint as an player who played P&P RPG#s most of his life and RPGās and hack and slays on PC. There is so LITTLE evolution in PC game no matter how you look at it. The gameplay functions and systems are mostly the same in the end no matter how many points you invest where or what kind of thongs your toon is wearing.
I havenāt found a āground-breakingā game since Diablo 1 and Borderlands as well as WoW because it took a step back from genre standarts and defined new ones or in case of Diablo it was a breath of life to a new genre.
When you played to much stuff gets old pretty fast and how often do I hear stuff like āHey look at this thatās exactly the same as in the other game!ā.
There is a lot of untaped potential in the market because outside of oldy but goldy skills everyone likes like āFireball of nuclear Winterā (Thanks Hackmaster) there are a lot of new possibilitys out there that are not as overused as a fan favorite like Spin2Win what isnāt a bad thing to have but booooring!
20 toons is nothing ^^. Letās talk again when you are in your 50s and still then there will most likely be a lot of people who did it more often ^^. Sooner or later everyone is overfed with it but at release playing the story again and again should be a thing.
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I think he was referring to the passive tree in PoE, not skill gems. On a new character with no currency, it costs a whole lotta regrets to fix any mistakes you made on the tree.
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