Depends on the game genre and also on the player.
I still play GD. Heck, I still play PD2 which uses D2 LoD (not resurrected) graphics.
That is undisputable.
That is less so. Not that it wouldn’t be better, but that there’s a balance. If they had focused on graphics over gameplay, we’d have less than half the systems we currently have, because graphics is what takes most of the programming time for games.
So there is a line for each person where graphics are “good enough” and game mechanics start to matter more. Each person has their own tolerance for this (some people like pixel art games, others require better produced graphics).
But you could have the best graphics in the world and if the game wasn’t good you wouldn’t play it.
Whereas you can have acceptable graphics (again, personal threshold) and you’ll still play it if it has great gameplay.
Obviously if a game with great gameplay improves their graphics it will be a better game. But the effort required for this is usually too big and requires that you stop working on gameplay.
I think these have different levels of importance for different people. It’s not that LE, PoE or D4 is better or worse than one another, they just target different people.
There are some that like more than one, or even all of them, but the main target playerbase for each of the 3 games is different.
They certainly expanded on their systems, but D4, to me, as a “fatal flaw”, which is that their systems don’t overlap. What do I mean by this?
In PoE, you have dozens of different mechanics. You can choose a few of them or even focus on a single one that you like and you will be able to get everything in the game with it. So if you don’t like mechanic X, like Delve, you don’t ever have to do it.
In D4 you have a series of linear goals and do the related mechanic until it’s achieved:
-Want to level? Do mechanic X (currently Helltides, might change in the future again)
-Want to gear up? Do mechanic Y
-Want to level sigils? Do mechanic Z
You do one of them until you filled the checkbox and you move on to the next one. If you don’t like mechanic Y? Tough luck, you have no alternative to it and are forced to play it for hours on end.
The main thing is that not every game wants to be the most popular ever. Not every game wants to outsell everything else. Sometimes a studio just wants to do their own thing and create a unique product they’re proud of.
That’s the case with EHG. They set out to make the game they wanted to play and attracted a bunch of people that also shared the same preferences.
Obviously no one wants to lose money, but you don’t have to be GOTY to make enough money to justify making a labor of passion.
If volume and sales were all that mattered, the industry would basically just be P2W mobile games.
