Today, the Diablo 4 developers held another campfire to talk about some mid season updates. Truth be told, there was very little compelling content outside of “we’ll buff underperforming classes/abilities.” I was really hoping that this mid season update would add old content or provide some novel reason to continue playing the season but nothing that I saw felt worth doing at this time. The other thing they mentioned was an upcoming PTR/patch for Season 7. With almost no hints at what will go into Season 7, the only noteworthy comment was that there would be “hefty changes” in the works for Season 7. But does that include content that go beyond fiddling around with numbers?
My real hope for the mid-season patch was that they would add previously successful seasonal content back into the core of the game such as the Vampiric Powers, Construct companion and Vaults. Right now, seasons are turning out to be primarily experimental content as it seems and that it’s more for testing theories that the developers have towards driving players in a certain direction. But I don’t get how these things are meaningful in the scope of the game the way Seasons are handled in Diablo 3. If they are meant to be treated similarly with the intention of being recycled down the road, then I would say that these ideas are not good. Like what good is Season 4 going to be in the future? The only key component was getting the Mind Cage to buff Helltides or the special potions. But those aspects aren’t interesting and are better saved as future features inside the game itself. As for recycling content, that’s even worse because of how long it may take to eventually return to a popular season. I don’t want to wait for years just to get back Vampire Powers.
If seasons are meant only to test theories but the theory proves successful, why not bake it into the core of the game? There’s a real schizophrenic view when it comes to the trajectory of this game because the whole thing feels like a constant experiment with little vision in the ultimate direction it needs to go.
This is where I like Path of Exile a lot better in terms of their handling of leagues. Obviously, over the years, Path of Exile had to deal with power creep and feature bloat where one system would compete against another, especially older systems. But the key thing to me is that most of the systems introduced have ended up baked into the core of the game. What that provides is simply more content and activities that players can do to progress their characters.
The problem with Diablo 4 is that there are very dramatic steps in terms of progression in the game. Usually, those are when certain uniques, items or levels are unlocked. Once those occur, there are huge boosts that occur to a character. Once you gain the key boost, your gains become almost unnoticeable between levels and changes to gear. For instance, once you hit roughly paragon 200 in the current system, you should be able to have all five boards unlocked, probably five of the glyphs in place and leveled to 15+ as well as gaining the legendary nodes. After that, the nodes you receive don’t feel impactful so the motivation to go past 200 or making huge dents into your paragon boards aren’t inspiring. Then leveling an alt, you’re simply waiting to hit level 60 where you gain a massive boost in power both from items and all the paragon board nodes. So the only motivation for playing at that stage is finding/elevating glyphs and getting your base gear. Compare that to the previous two seasons where each alt had a clear purpose for leveling and the power gain was more meaningful and fun from level 1 – 100.
With the expansion, you gain only two real modes of power: mercenaries and runes. Mercenaries’ power fall off quickly once you hit level 10. From there on out, the only meaningful gains apply to alt gear. Obviously in future seasons, you still need to level them up but you’ll hit that leveling wall with each of them fairly quickly from which thereafter they become an afterthought. Runes don’t really gain power but are item hunts. Once you get the key ones you need, their only real purpose is to convert to other runes (which is a horribly frustrating process) or crafting mythics (which is equally if not worse process because your Torment IV ladder bosses probably will provide better ones despite not being targeted)
Once you get the basics unlocked, then it’s really just min/maxing gear, glyphs and paragons. These so-called end game activities are simply not fun for me. Gear is finding multi-Greater Affix imbued Ancestrals or Uniques that you can masterwork to perfection. But the masterworking system as it has been reformed simply isn’t interesting by itself because of the three levels of critical hits you want to really enable certain builds. Similarly, trying to temper gear can be infuriating due to poor randseeds/potential anti-affix biased that works against you.
As for glyphs and paragons, I’ve already mentioned how both are almost intrinsically tied to The Pit. While the ultimate statement of progression can be found in the bragging rights of doing a 150 level Pit, the truth is that outside of a particular group of individuals, doing that high of a Pit level feels meaningless. I had mentioned that I simply hate The Pit where too many things are now connected to it as a form of progression. I know that they wanted to segregate rewards from Glyph progression in The Pit, but outside of hitting level 46 per Glyph, there isn’t that much else of a solid reason to go that much further.
But what this leads to is my real complaint: too much RNG and not enough controllable progression. I will complain until my demise on how RNG progression is a thinly veiled mechanism behind a different version of bozosort and that it’s nothing more than the false carrot dragging a horse along a trail. Eventually, the horse is going to figure out the trick and just dump the rider off and go somewhere it’s wanted/need. That’s the current state of the game and where I think players are getting burnt out and feeling the most frustration.
I’ve heard the game developers, streamers and commenters on the false pretense of the so-called “dopamine rushes” connected to RNG wins analogous to slot machines at a casino. I think this is a really bad diagnosis of the psyche of the average player but misplaces that mentality only upon those with serious gambling addiction issues. My gut instinct is that most people aren’t hardcore gamblers and that people prefer short term burst of feelings of success through the effort they put in which is directly proportional to one another. When people see a clear path of success, they will aim for it. Take for instance, the success of Seasons 4 and 5 in terms of time allotted. My proposition for why those seasons ended up being great successes compared to previous ones was the tie in between the rewards of the reputation grind which resulted in the Resplendent Spark. You could easily calculate that a minimal of four characters would gain you a guaranteed Mythic item of your choice. That is a clear and achievable goal and I think players appreciated that notion because the time to get that Mythic was something of a known quantity. I can further qualify this statement through various forum posts on reddit that directly attribute players’ increased alt creation as a result of that Resplendent Spark and reward system.
Now, let’s look at the current system of obtaining Mythics (besides merely discovering one as a random drop). There are two mechanisms at play here. One is to crafting them through having a set number of specific runes or paying 50 million in gold for a random one. While the desire is to have a trading system, the current mechanics make trading awkward, unreliable and sketchy at best. Then there are players who prefer a near self found experience (raises hand) which makes this new system of crafting Mythics unbearable. First, you have the stupid RNG into RNG crafting of runes. Then you have the RNG gold sink version. Neither are fun nor meaningful. Honestly, I’ve had better luck just taking my Spiritborn and farming Duriel or other ladder bosses. And honestly, I would have preferred simply creating 4 different characters to individually push reputation in order to obtain the guaranteed Resplendent Spark and thereafter the Mythic I was aiming for. The RNG method merely frustrated me and discouraged me from playing further because I felt it was a waste of time.
What about previous seasons? Let’s talk about the Vampire Season as something almost comparable. The thing with the Vampire season was that you had a few key mechanics at work: 1) the blood; 2) the glyph aspect. Getting blood was RNG based. Finding/unlocking the glyph (or whatever they were called) was RNG based. Leveling the glyphs through the blood currency was slightly RNG based. But this system wasn’t bad because the power gains were meaningful, configurable and fun. But ultimately you would unlock these powers per character with the commonality being the currency. You still had the so-called “agency” and progression felt meaningful. This to me should have been the model going forward.
How about the Construct? I wasn’t as big of a fan of the Construct because minions are harder to perceive in terms of efficacy. My main complaint was not “feeling” the contributions of the Construct as it would visually get lost most of the time. But I really liked the concept where again you would try to find the right runes or unlock them through the season quests. Then the construct itself was great to help fill in certain gaps such as vulnerability. And even if you didn’t have the right runes (or whatever they were called), you could still configure abilities using what you did have.
In both cases, the lessons of those two seasons were the power gain through some configurable mechanism where you’d still need to unlock abilities or discover them. The item hunt was the discovery prospect which I think most people felt were fine but having these additional powers made gearing more fun. I have no idea why they weren’t kept in the core (and I avoid talking about the nonsense of Vampiric Aspects which I think are horrid). But let me talk about that Vampiric Aspects.
During Season 3’s mid-season update, I feel very strongly that many people had hoped that with the success of Season 2, the Vampiric powers would return. We saw in Season 2 the return of the Malignant whatever power feature showing back up as Unique rings. That wasn’t too bad because the notion that a popular power could return I think was fresh and novel. However, Vampiric Powers were really cool and the way you would obtain them were fun. My thought process was that they should’ve kept them but just nerf their power by 20-40%. Instead, they were converted into (sometimes lesser) versions as Aspects, which only bloated up the Aspect pool unnecessarily. I think a lot of players did NOT want the Vampiric powers to return as Aspects nor Uniques but as the way they were in Season 2. Even providing 3-4 slots worth of these powers would make progression more interesting.
Now, let’s fast forward to this update. The only real “content” we’re getting outside of updating numbers is the Winter event. Le sigh. Nothing seems to be changing for that event. I would’ve loved seeing more activities for that event to have been added especially after the negative reception it received after launch. You would think that after a year, they could have done more to make that activity seem livelier. Like add a specific legion event, maybe 1-2 Nightmare Dungeons, some boss. ANYTHING. I guess that company is just run by Scrooge and his lot.
But supposedly they’re saving everything for this HUGE PTR. Let’s talk about this qualifier in the adjective “HUGE” (and I’m using adjective correctly unlike Kevin Nash in an infamous promo). I’m certain that the main thing that they’ll do is just fuck around with numbers. To Blizzard, fucking around with numbers is actual content. So they can fuck around with all the classes they want but it’s not real content to me. It’s just mucking around with toggles, sliders and input values. In that sense, my expectation for “HUGE” is quite low.
They could add leaderboards to the Pit, but I think that will make the game worse than it already is. The last thing this game needs are more leaderboards. The Gauntlet was shit and Leaderboards ended up being niche. Let individual streamers handle their own leaderboards and events when it comes to esports. But leave leaderboards out of the core game because it just ruins the experience. Maybe the only novel thing is the capability of checking out the high end builds similar to Greater Rifts in D3 but the idea of a leaderboard in D3 didn’t suddenly evoke a massive paradigm shift in the so-called esports community to hype up D3 beyond what already existed.
Then you have other core systems that they’ve already reworked three times since S4. I have a feeling that Tempering, Masterworking and Enchanting aren’t going to change for a long time, even though they should. But these need serious updates no matter what because they just don’t feel good nor meaningful.
There are rumors of an Armory. Truthfully, unless they get rid of the cost for an Armory, I don’t see much of any help here. The Armory worked well in D3 because of things like having a Gold vs GR build. But unless the Armory involves being able to copy a build from someone else, I just don’t see a point in D4. If I want a completely different build, in all likelihood, I’m better off just sharding old equipment or rolling a new dedicated character. Most times, I only need a different build if the one I’m currently using is for leveling. But I never intend to return to the old build unless I mess up drastically.
The only other really meaningful feature in the game that players do want is an in game trading spot. People are clamoring for an Auction House and I suppose this just because it exist in World of Warcraft. It definitely should not be tied to any real money mechanism or this game is dead in the water. But it does need to be handled far better than what D3 had done and I truly hope that scarcity isn’t going to be as poorly handled as D3. What I mean by that is that D3 made the tragic mistake of relying on the AH to find the better items rather than in game. I don’t mind the idea of buying say a 3-4 GA item for billions of gold but I do mind if the stats and type of items I need to enable a basic build become impossible and force me to become overly reliant on this device. If trading is introduced and just becomes an in game version of diablo.trade, then I’m fine with it and will probably use it. Otherwise, I foresee disaster.
I can’t imagine what other things will be done to the core of the game beyond class balancing. I really hope more features are added to the core. I like how there’s more to do in general but I don’t want to get into the same loop each season. Sure, there will be some sort of seasonal mechanic and that the game needs to find its footing (it’s getting there but it’s still missing the mark in a lot of cases). I think the big picture lessons the developers are seeing should be common sense for anyone who has played a significant amount of RPG style games (not just ARPGs)
An example that I think the developers continue to harp on is the word “agency.” I’m not a fan of this word in the way it’s reiterated but the main item I do believe is that you have this core gaming experience in this base platform. From there the experience of playing it should be customizable. I dislike having set difficulty levels like Normal – Torment IV as semi-static toggles that determine your experience. Instead, I prefer the direction that the game is going with using currency style items like Mindcages, Opals and Tributes to define your reward/penalty structure.
Similarly, I hope to see more of these customizable aspects introduced into other aspects of the game. I don’t really care about game balance as much as the idea of being able to configure my characters and giving them a flavor that can handle the game to my standards. To that end, I would like to see more progression systems be based on my ability to control things rather than depending on the degree of RNG that is handled currently. Likewise, I want those progression systems to feel meaningful. The developers harped on the word “punchy” in focusing on areas like Paragon boards or the differences between certain difficulty levels. Yes, those exist but I don’t exactly feel a huge delta outside of speed/efficiency.
Overall, I hope that the developers will surprise us for Season 7. I’m not very hopeful right now but will keep an open mind.
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