well D4 was a dissapointment why delay league becuz of it?

Diablo 3 was a cartoonish joke with comedy monsters, that was as strong a reason for people to switch to PoE or Grim Dawn or sth as the dumbing down of the rules, if not stronger. Diablo 4 actually copies some mood beats from PoE, is a live service game, and will be much more a competitor than D3 was.

Stop calling games like D4 or Destiny MMO's - they are online and you sometimes see players, but they are not anymore an MMO that PoE is - even if they sometimes have some things that MMO's now have (that MMO's stole from other genre's).

From my experience, D3 and PoE didn't have much overlap in players compared to PoE and Grim Dawn, etc.

In my opinion, there will be much more with D4 and PoE (2) - however, should GGG want to maximize profits, they will plan around D4 seasons. That way people like me that are highly likely to play both will do that, and spend on both.

Keep in mine a lot of players who didn't bounce off one league may bounce off another - D4 is likely going to look good to them for those times OR for times after the current league grow boring (second or third month).


People really need to get off simplistic A vs B, and/or good guy / bad guy thinking.

You actually sell yourself short, nevermind whatever it does or doesn't do to the companies and their games, or sports teams, or political parties, or, or or...

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BINARYGOD wrote:

Stop calling games like D4 or Destiny MMO's - they are online and you sometimes see players, but they are not anymore an MMO that PoE is - even if they sometimes have some things that MMO's now have (that MMO's stole from other genre's).

From my experience, D3 and PoE didn't have much overlap in players compared to PoE and Grim Dawn, etc.

In my opinion, there will be much more with D4 and PoE (2) - however, should GGG want to maximize profits, they will plan around D4 seasons. That way people like me that are highly likely to play both will do that, and spend on both.

Keep in mine a lot of players who didn't bounce off one league may bounce off another - D4 is likely going to look good to them for those times OR for times after the current league grow boring (second or third month).


People really need to get off simplistic A vs B, and/or good guy / bad guy thinking.

You actually sell yourself short, nevermind whatever it does or doesn't do to the companies and their games, or sports teams, or political parties, or, or or...

I was only calling D4 an MMO because of forced grouping on World bosses. You cant beat them without grouping in parties of at least 6.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Aloe vera dude. ALOE VERA.

I dunno. It's easy to forget how much time separates each Diablo entry. With the necessary exception of D1 to D2, at least a decade. It feels like PoE has been around forever but it has only barely crossed a threshold of longevity we take for granted when it comes to Diablo titles. And what is the biggest complaint about this decade-old game, due for a facelift in lieu of a graceful retirement and proper renewal? That it is stuck in the past. And not even its own past, but the past of a franchise that outgrew PoE's core parent twice. D3 was a godawful ARPG at launch and an even worse Diablo game, and PoE was almost prescient in its timing. D3 was definitely Blizzard losing their way and straying too far from what made their series iconic. I blame the unwarranted supremacy of WoW there.

DIV by all measure seems to have returned just enough without regression to what PoE never outgrew. I refuse to play Lost Ark but still see more GW1/2 in DIV than any other "new" influence to the series, and I am willing to bet DIV devs have played a lot more of those games than LA. Equally willing to bet that those making that comparison to LA, a committed MMO cosplaying as an ARPG are missing the mark with what DIV wants to be. What it so far pretty much is. Lol, see above.

Assuming the rest of the game is on the same level as the first major area and the servers are up to the task, it will raise the bar for what "normal gamers" expect from an ARPG, just as Elden Ring did for so-called Soulslikes. D3 raised no bars worth discussing and the only bar PoE raised was one most other developers are happy to limbo under: aggressively complicated D2-era ARPG succession.

So while you are right that Diablo post 2 has a legacy of massive deviation, even with D3 it wasn't so much of a deviation that it utterly abandoned what makes a Diablo game a Diablo game. Same with IV, only much less so. Deviation in the pursuit of evolution in a wider, more diverse environment is not a bad legacy provided it isn't a dead end (d3 was close, no doubt) -- a better one than constant and generally pointless mutation in a stagnant ecosystem, I think.

I didn't play D4, so my ability to comment on it with direct familiarity is limited. My view is based purely on the streams/videos I saw, so take it with a grain of salt. But the MMO aspects of the game are a non-starter for me. Forcibly shared open world instances sounds absolutely awful. You know players are going to find ways to grieve other players non-stop. And being forced into large groups to do world events sounds even worse. I feel pretty firmly that an ARPG should be small multiplayer optional, but not mandatory.

All that said, we've not seen end game content. Perhaps the single player experience isn't as bad as I'm expecting. There are certain things that I think the beta showed which are hard to fix for me, but the end game systems might be something new and refreshing. I'm obviously jaded with what they did with D3, so my hope for that franchise was already dwindling (read as dead), but maybe the beta was not a good representation of the game in terms of character depth, single-player and end game loops.

Aloe vera feels like an optional mode for Kleenex. Opt in if you like it, else stick to the dry original content. :)

I assume the OP has played the full game of d4 including all endgame and all bulds to make that statement? [Removed by Support]

Play 1act of poe w/o any league mechanic and tell me how good the game is.

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Nubatron wrote:

Aloe vera feels like an optional mode for Kleenex. Opt in if you like it, else stick to the dry original content. :)

And then those so-called flushable wipes. I hate that that's not true, because they're great.

Okay so this is a rare occasion where I have absolute superior experience over you and I plan to enjoy every single moment of it. The MMO aspect of Diablo IV is minimal, at least from my Australian/Oceanic experience.

I saw a handful of people in the main town (each act area has multiple towns), a few running around, and of course never any others in dungeons. The town part was actually one of my favourites because a big part of the game is showing off not just your gear (the inspect function is a bit of harmless voyeuristic fun) but also your titles. There are a heap of achievements and each unlocks a two-word title. You can mix and match them to come up with hundreds of amusing combinations. Since 'trash' was one of the easiest suffices to get (just dismantle enough items), titles like 'Lonely Trash' and 'Nocturnal Trash' were fairly common. I did see one that was simply 'The Goat' that made me laugh. I enjoyed unlocking and customising my titles per character. Twisted Witch. Lonely Slayer. Bubbly Echo...etc.

In the overworld, there are, or at least were in the beta, strict limitations on player capacity. As I said, I didn't see many even in the relatively cramped first act area -- relatively, because good lord was it big. So I imagine with all the acts open, they will fiddle with that cap so that the experience is roughly the same: mostly you're alone, but if there's an event nearby, people might cluster towards it. I had fun with these events, communicating with a few basic emotes and then just moving on.

There are world tiers, and you will only see players on those tiers in your version of the game. I suppose people could smurf but eh, there are more rewarding games for that sort of behaviour.

Also, due to enemy scaling, you can do any of the first three acts in any order. There should be no early game crowding or easy targets for griefing. Especially once mounts are a thing -- saddle up and fuck off.

It was generally in everyone's best interest to cooperate with group events, be they small ones like defending a caravan or a bigger deal like liberating a town overrun with goatmen. As with GW2, everyone who participates gets their reward. It's hardly realistic but eh it's a game. There are and should be limitations on how realistic a game is if the cost is fun/entertainment/satisfaction. If there is any aspect to Diablo IV I'd consider modern MMO-ish, it's that allocation of loot for participation. And I don't consider it a bad one.

So your concern about players griefing in the overworld seems unfounded to me, and if any company is aware of the pitfalls of it it'd be Blizzard. Their entire design philosophy is 'if the player puts the controller down or quits the game, we need to address why' (insane approach but there you go). We will see.

Quests can spawn instanced versions of otherwise public areas. For example, one quest had me chasing a possessed dude through the main town of chapter one and into a dungeon under it that simply didn't exist in the normal version. This is something I encountered in GW1 and 2 but obviously never in an ARPG. I dig that kind of design pretty hard.

Now to the meat of the issue: dungeons. I spent more time in those than in the overworld. They are, of course, instanced. They are the true 'Diablo' experience of Diablo IV, and most are large enough to feel like mini acts. At no point in my dungeon running did I feel like I was playing anything close to an MMO. Other than the bosses (which are tuned for AoE/ranged, whether I like it or not), the whole thing felt perfectly fine alone. The overworld is, in a way, a giant nexus hosting these significant dungeons.

To my knowledge, there is a player cap of 12 for World Bosses, or at least the one in the beta. That is hardly 'massive' (let us not forget what that the first M stands for and why it does not apply to every single game we play online). I did jog past the spawn area for her at one point, and a few players were gathering five minutes out of her spawn time. I liked seeing that but didn't stick around. I had my own shit to do.

Now this was on my local server, which as I said I think was OCE since I saw Australians, Kiwis, Koreans and Japanese -- I had chat turned off entirely but I can tell the naming conventions pretty easily. It's possible the American or European ones had or will have more congestion and griefing, but I don't quite see how. PvP will likely be opt-in. There was ONE example where I was doing the same overworld quest as someone else and I had to wait 30 seconds for the target npc/enemy to spawn. No bigs.

So all in all, I'd say the multiplayer aspect of it, at least going from the beta, was no more intrusive or immersion-breaking for me than all the glowing shit in Lioneye's Watch or Sarn or Oriath.

I am not trying to convince you here -- a non-starter is a non-starter and I respect that. I just want to illustrate, from my very experienced MMO perspective, why Diablo IV is not comparable to a true MMO in any way. It is not Lost Ark and anyone making that comparison should be disregarded as superficial and uninformed. It's a simple ARPG with a sprawling world you share at any given time with just enough people not to feel completely alone in it.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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Nubatron wrote:

It is not Lost Ark and anyone making that comparison should be disregarded as superficial and uninformed. It's a simple ARPG with a sprawling world you share at any given time with just enough people not to feel completely alone in it.

THE TRUTH! Bravo 👏 hoho

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AccountNameDiddler wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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Nubatron wrote:

It is not Lost Ark and anyone making that comparison should be disregarded as superficial and uninformed. It's a simple ARPG with a sprawling world you share at any given time with just enough people not to feel completely alone in it.

THE TRUTH! Bravo 👏 hoho

The man is quite true with his statements, D4 is a much more superior game than POE stuck in the past.

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OrlocTheEternal wrote:

The man is quite true with his statements, D4 is a much more superior game than POE stuck in the past.

Nah it just caters to different kind of people. Some people like to be constantly learning. Those people will continue to play POE.

Some people like to master a game, those people will play D4. All there is to that.

That said game balance between classes is absolutely awful in D4. Melee classes like barb are purely dependent on specific legendaries to make the class work, while classes like Necro are dependent on nothing. They just work.

And worse still they are drastically reducing the drop rates of legendaries making it much harder for barbs to play well.

I hope Blizzard fixes that. Other wise a lot of people are going to complain.

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Gopstop22 wrote:

Played it and as expected fluid combat but everything else same as d3 you will probably end up spamming dungeons and world bosses and thats it thats what you gonna do in d4 for the next 10 years i dont understand why GGG is afraid and is delaying league due to d4 beta

They didn't delay because of it (a short beta test at that)

The league mechanic and the extensive patch nots are a very clear indication of why they delayed.