I'm happy to report that my compulsive playing of Diablo IV has come to an end.
I've done all the things, many times, and I'm officially over it.
Of course I'm 'only' level 87 still and would like to hit 100.
No promises though.
While D4 is a pretty fun game for casual gamers with a lot to do in the early to mid game, the endgame is completely broken for several reasons which I'll go into in detail.
First off there's always something to be said about men choosing to play a female character in a roll-playing game. The gaming community remains infamous for its toxicity in this regard; a sprawling sub-culture of involuntary celibate dorks who make the situation even worse by being perpetually salty about this situation. "I pick girl character because titties. lol lol." So on and so forth.
To start, he voice of the male sorcerer is absolutely intolerable. Every time he speaks all I hear is blah blah blah pretentious douchenozzle. I actually didn't realize how annoyed I could be over the voice of my character, but hot damn D4 showed me what for.
I think I started picking female avatars for spellcasters because I wanted a wide range of characters on the games that I played. Different jobs for different people, eh? Didn't quite seem appropriate to have a small female avatar swinging around a 50 pound axe with deadly speed and precision, so if I was playing a warrior class I'd pick a male character just because it made logical sense to me.
Also in D2 there wasn't an option for male or female classes... or even customization of your character. The sorceress was the sorceress and she was always a she and always looked the same. Simpler times. No choices. Perhaps that plays into all of this as well.
There's also something to be said for the "vessel" always being female. In this case the vessel being the avatar that gives you access to the digital world, but a more relevant example is in the real world where ships are referred to and named after women. Carry me.
In any case we crypto maniacs know all about fizzled hype.
We experience it on a cycle over and over again without fail.
To the moon and back again in record time.
King of the world to empire of dirt.
And so my rant about D4 begins.
First and foremost there is no economy. This is something I've stated many times and knew it would be like this going in, but it's still a huge disappointment. The micro-transactions are all just cosmetics you can buy in the shop directly from Blizzard Entertainment. It's basically the exact opposite of what we are trying to build here in crypto land. I suppose it was inevitable that I'd get bored and walk away from this WEB2 heap.
Barring that issue it seems that the same classic mistakes were made in this iteration once again. There was a contest for getting a hardcore character to level 100. First 1000 characters to level 100 in hardcore will have their name etched into a demon statue. The contest ended a while back... I didn't make the cut because I refused to play the game like a chump (IE grinding and exploiting everything for an edge).
But of course the incentives didn't align.
There was a bug that allowed infinite mobs to spawn in cellars and a handful of other tactics to grind XP without actually playing the game as was intended. Gamers will always find the path of least resistance, and you'd think Blizzard would have figured that out by now after decades of game development, but I guess not. If you don't specifically program in the path of least resistance then gamers are going to find the loopholes and jump through them a thousand times over.
Nightmare Dungeons
The most difficult task in D4 is to complete nightmare dungeons. These are regular dungeons upgraded with a special Sigil that makes them much harder. the Sigils have ranks from 1 to 100, with 100 being the hardest (level 154 mobs) and 1 being the easiest (level 54).
So did Blizzard align the incentives so that players would take the biggest risks to get the best rewards? Of course not. Nightmare dungeons were simply not worth farming for any reason. This pushed players into grinding the same events over and over again in the open world or finding an exploit that would allow them to kill elites over and over again in a short period of time.
Essentially this contest incentivized everyone in the race to play like a bot and just grind super safe areas and level up faster than everyone else. Worst contest ever. Just terrible. They really botched it on so many levels.
Endgame scaling is nonexistent.
I've been in T4 tier four difficulty since level 67 (called Torment but classically referred to as "hell"), and it is so damn boring. One of the biggest reasons for this is that items do not seem to scale with the level of the mobs one kills. As soon as you jump to a harder difficulty level the item drops get exponentially better, and then just as quickly you find all the gear you need and it becomes very difficult to find upgrades even if you're leveling up. I'll be surprised if I find a single upgrade in the next 5-10 levels of gameplay... and I'm at level 87 out of 100. BORING!
This is another reason why Nightmare Dungeons are totally pointless. You could be fighting mobs +10 or even +50 levels higher than you and there is absolutely no reward for doing so. You don't get more XP and you don't get better items. I swear it's like they make these stupid decisions on purpose just to annoy their fanbase. Why would you ever make a game with such stupid incentives? It's not hard: high risk = high reward. Duh. Just like everything in life. Again, not hard, but apparently they can't handle it.
Two days ago they buffed nightmare dungeons by increasing the XP granted and allowing characters to teleport directly to them instead of riding on a mount from a waypoint, but it's still not even close to good enough. The item drop scaling is still terrible and the XP is still arguably not worth the risk. Completing a dungeon more than +3 your level is certainly not worth it because that's where the XP bonuses end. Bad bad bad.
Completely imba gameplay
There are a couple of BS cookie-cutter builds in the game that are totally overpowered and everyone is just copying from the pros. The meta is absurd. Whenever I group with a Barbarian or a Druid they just one shot everything in the room and nobody else even has a chance to do anything. Some of these abilities seem to be doing x10 more damage than everyone else, showing once again that Blizzard should be hiring game testers that actually know what they are doing. It's funny too because I bet a lot of these gamers would totally do it for free or at least peanuts.
The Butcher
There are also a few rare bosses that spawn that are also totally not worth fighting whatsoever. The most obvious example here is The Butcher. He's very hard to kill and Blizzard has even been recording the statistics of how many times he's killed players. Last time I checked it was over 3 million players dead to The Butcher.
Do you get good loot for killing him? NOPE! It takes forever, he's really dangerous, and the drops are absolute trash. Again, the failure to align incentives and proper risk/reward scenarios is absolutely flabbergasting. Like honestly how can you drop the ball so badly after putting this much work into a project? It's embarrassing.
Conclusion
It's always nice to have a forceful wakeup call that reminds us that WEB2 simply cannot compete with WEB3 in the long run. Traditional businesses like Blizzard Entertainment have retreated back to business models that don't create economies or player engagement; they just milk the player-base for micro-transactions in the shop. WEB3 doesn't have such a luxury because WEB3 isn't owned by a centralized agent that can milk the system. A better way must be found.
Once the tipping point gets reached for crypto (proper templates that actually work) it will gut the entire gaming ecosystem. A corporation can't police their own network better than a community. They can't regulate it as well. They can't pay for as many servers while maintaining profitability. They can't scale up. Upkeep is always on life-support. They can't fork because the IP forbids it. They can't compete with open systems owned by large communities.
Crypto continues to have a long and frustrating journey ahead of it, but at least there is a journey to be had. The dinosaurs are content to sit on ass and continue doing what has been working for them all this time. But suddenly that strategy will stop working and they'll have no idea what to do. I'm glad to be ahead of that curve.