What should PoE 2 avoid in order to beat Diablo 4. Opinions ?

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WaterDropy wrote:

- psychological pricing. It`s the first thing that you see and it annoyed the hell out of me. Price is 69.99 not 70 $. This felt like an extremely cheap and greedy move, like a sleazy seller that tries to trick you into thinking its cheaper if you buy from him.


- story is .. i mean PoE has almost no story so thats a + for Diablo. But their story is so badly written and cringe that it can easy pass a being written by a 12-14 yrs old school kid. Wont get into details here because spoilers.

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BlackDabera wrote:

I think you can say the PoE story is bad told, no cutscene, no npc dialogue(until now) , but saying poe has almost no story is a bad take.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

If OP is even still reading these responses, I'd love to know what they mean by "beating" Diablo 4 because as it's written, the question they posed makes zero sense to me.

If "beating" Diablo 4 means getting the most players, obviously D4 is going to win. There's just no possibility of competition there; leaving comparisons of the games themselves completely out of it, Diablo 4 has a marketing budget similar to the entire net value of Grinding Gear Games. They've been running multiple different commercials on TV for the last 3-4 months, they've been doing press junkets, they've been hiring streamers to promote the game in dozens of different languages. Activision is putting some serious money into this, and it's going to move a lot of copies regardless of the game's actual quality.

If "beating" Diablo 4 means making the most money, see the above paragraph. It's a game which costs (at least) $70 USD, with in-game MTX, and multiple paid expansions planned. It's very hard for me to imagine that D4 won't eventually sell at least as many total copies as Witcher 3 (50 million) but let's assume a worst-case scenario for Blizzard, which is that D4 only sells the 30 million copies they got from Diablo 3 and literally nobody buys in-game MTX or a single expansion. That's still over two billion US Dollars in sales, which puts Blizzard completely outside of competition with mid-sized game studios and into the same league as smaller countries.

Now, conversely, if "beating" Diablo 4 means "remaining more popular with the PoE core audience," it would be nearly impossible for PoE to LOSE. Diablo 4 is, in a very literal sense, not competition for Path of Exile. It was very clearly never intended to be. Having played a decent amount of D4, I'd honestly say it feels a lot more like Blizzard is taking aim at FF14 here. D4 is still, technically, an ARPG, but the MMO elements are by far the strongest aspects of the game and the only thing standing in the way of it being a full-fledged MMO is some way to band multiple different parties together to take down strongholds, map events, and world bosses.