I cannot believe that I am saying this but I really didn’t get excited for the new D4 quarterly dev blog. I played D1, D2 and D3 (just until Paragon came out) and I really thought I was going to be super excited for the new D4 news. Though there was quite a bit of news there and mechanics it just didn’t generate the same excitement as I felt leading up to Patch 0.8.4 in LE. I think whoever is in charge of creating Hype for LE leading up to each patch is doing a outstanding job.
Most likely D4 will release and the story will be the thing that blows me away but so far the planned legendary powers extraction and the paragon board just doesn’t generate as much excitement for me. it feels a little ‘‘been there, done that’’.
To be honest the LEs Werebear looks way cooler than what was shown in the D4 blog.
Also the Werewolf looks more like a WereRat.
Items still multipliers with extreme high damage numbers and i assume the new paragon board system has a limited amounts of points to spend. If not we have again endless mainstat farming as in D3 and they would make the same mistake again.
I will hold my bashing mouth shut till D4 is out, and im definitely preordering it and playing it like what i did with GD, Wolcen and this LE before i start shooting my mouth at something.
Base on the quarterly update, i like the idea of the paragon web and being able to socket it.
That being said, not everything in the quarterly update will make it into the final game.
Bit on the fence with Blizzard games… not liking all the crap going on in the org and sometimes you have to just say “enough” to putting money in ars3hol3s pockets…
Its actually easier than you think… and things like games are not important so its not like I am missing out on lifesaving medication by deciding not to spend my money with a particular dev/publisher…
There’s an aweful lot you could substitute but some you can’t like consumer electronics (or anything electronic), medication (no, I don’t count “crystals” & homeopathy) & so on. Anything that requires much in the way of artificial resources (plastics, etc) or processing would end up being entangled with some of those soul-less corporates (& lets not forget the machinery/tools/etc that those humble bastions of {insert nice stuff here} use to make whatever it is they’re making).
True… and I am not a naive earth hugger or doe-eyed millenial… but I in some cases like this, I can decide to spend my money elsewhere out of principal.
D3 when I played it felt like my character and Diablo each had their own Twitter acnt or Facetime and they were each checking it every 10min to speak to one another.
After all the legal troubble bliz had I’m pretty sure they’ll rewrite the story to empower womaen and queer people and produce a clusterfuck like BL3 did ^^.
I found act 3 most egregious with Azmodan’s monologing about how you couldn’t possibly beat XXX, then a few seconds after you beat XXX he’d be on about how they weren’t important & you’d never get past his YYY.
sigh I’ve read Topsy & Tim books with more compelling dialogue.
And it’s not like I have particularly high standards for aRPG plot/writing.
Visually, D4 is seeming to place itself at the top of the arpg list. I really hope they don’t botch this aspect and turn it into rainbows and white graphic noise. I’m eager to see how it turns out and am hopeful for another arpg option. I don’t foresee it having as much build depth as Last Epoch, since they’ll probably please the masses somehow through free respecs and/or gear or whatever, but I anticipate I’ll get some good enjoyment out of it in between LE patches.
As long they have popping out damage numbers as in D3 all carefully crafted environments,light effects are ruined by this and breaks the otherwise good immersion.
I would suggest to remove damage numbers completly so you have the old classic feeling without looking to arcadey.
I noticed watching the latest D4 skill effects that it seems like they’re still going with bright blues for ice types spells. Every ARPG does this I guess because blue always = ice but I’d like to see studios move towards a more white-opaque blue effect for ice spells. It keeps the cluster of rainbow effects down.
The druid lightning looks more like lightning thankfully from what I saw; more on the white side while a lot of games these days still use various shades of blue for their lighting effects.
If a spells turns the ground into ice I think it’d be cool if the ground turns more into a black ice effect or something that looks glossy with minimal amounts of blue. A lot of games these days they just slap a blue patch on the ground.
Actually, I see that the D4 team is paying attention to PoE. Stiff competition between games is good in my book. With that said, I’d like to end with 3-4 separate ARPGs where each has a separate reason to be played, rather than being copies of each other.
Oh dear. I had tried BL1, 2, the pre-sequal, Battleborn and finally BL3. All had great potential that got squandered by critical errors in direction choices on a fundamental level. I am done with Gearbox for the time being.
