Why the hate?

[DrUnK PuNk]

I have a hard time understanding why reviews are mixed and why there are so many people complaining about the game.

I started with Diablo from the very beginning running on Windows 95 and it was ground-breaking in creating a randomly generated map. It had it's flaws though, there were no skills, when you level you choose your attribute point and that's it. This made characters pretty generic with one persons warrior not much different than anothers. For the mage, getting the best spells was from random drops which could be a bit frustrating.

Diablo 2 made improvements on the first game, adding a skill tree now while keeping the good features of the original. Are people just letting their nostalgia change the truth? This game had it's flaws too, online mode was full of modders and cheaters. I played the game mostly vanilla but at one point used a tool which allowed you to create any equipment with any stat. I created a piece of equipment with my necromancer that allowed summoning 999 skeletons, I ran out of town slaughtered some demons than ran back into town and pretty much flooded the whole hub with skeletons, probably crashing people PC's who had potato PC's at the time.

I can see people complaints of Diablo 3 when it comes to the art direction being cartooney, I was surprised about it as well. It fixed the problem of online though, in fact this was a Diablo with not many flaws at all. It brought in seasons that kept people around for years to come, made hardcore mode which I personally loved.

Diablo 4 I haven't played too much of yet, but Blizzard seems to have heard the complaints about the art style of Diablo 3 and returned to their roots. What exactly are people complaints? What are they expecting? It would seem to me that people are just letting their nostalgia change reality, or they are just complaining to jump on the hate bandwagon. It seems things are improving, getting better. Help me understand!

[potato]

cause hating blizzard is cool

[FhqwhTODD]

The complaints stem from the endgame, mostly.
Or from a vocal minority that thinks that every ARPG must be just as anbearably unplayable as PoE for beginners.
Also the crazy amount of marketing seems to have attracted quite a few players that had no idea what a seasonal game is.

[Ashling]

Diablo 3 feels like if you took the story & game play mechanics of WoW but just made it darker. I like the game, but it is a bit weird probably thanks to the whole nephilim thing.

Hot take, but I think 4 has more in common with Diablo 1 than 2 did.

[Shield]

Diablo 4 is really polarizing. It's similar to the discourse about Starfield. You're going to have one camp of people who tell you its the perfect product, and another that says its existence itself is against is a blaspheme.

Both camps have correct points, but are usually way blown out of proportion. Diablo 4 is not the definitive, perfect ARPG, nor does the cash shop shoot your family on game launch.

The only way to see for sure where you fall on that scale is measuring your personal enjoyment on one of the infrequent free weekends. Or taking the dive.

[Niragiです]

Diablo IV is a GOTY not Baldur's Gate

[😎Astran😾]

PC/Steam forums accumulate all the whiners who are incapable to post anything on Sony, XBox, mobile forums because they either don't exist or heavily moderated or aren't popular at all.

[Letobrick]

Diablo 4 received alot of hate earlier due to the dreaded "nerf patch". But that's ancient history and the game is MUCH better now since Season 2 has been released. The trolls and the haters still fart and rear their ugly heads from time to time though.

[Xiane]

Diablo 4 hate is mired in a few key points:

1. Rampant nerf patches. Early on it wasn't odd to have your class nerfed into the ground when it was discovered to have any feasibility towards endgame. Sorcerers in particular were getting pimp slapped weekly.

2. The shop. For a 60-100 dollar game, depending where you are and what version you got, a day one shop selling horse armor for 8-10 dollars and player armor skins for half the price of the base game really annoyed people, and still does.

3. The campaign is completible long before you get near level cap. In fact to not be over leveled and simply rick roll the entire content players are, to this day, advised to ignore all the side quests available, just doing all the side quests in the frozen 'act 1' area will easily get you to level 50+ and you can face tank Lilith.

4. After the campaign the grind is just flat out unrewarding. Between itemization and the paragon board the 'endgame' is a slog of mindless grinding in a handful of dungeons that really don't change much. In the formers case you weren't looking for the super uniques that came out later, you were essentially looking for NORMAL gear that might give you .5-1.0% better item effect to improve.

Couple this itemization with the old meme of:
+ 1% damage on a thursday, in june, during a leap year, between the hours of 3-4, while the enemy is vulnerable, rooted and back on. Only procs when you are in a barrier, at half health with no enemies around you, but eight enemies on screen.

Every item is now more than +to your stats. It's always a slight percentage of damage on conditional situations which pigeon holes your build into focusing on something other than crit % chance and crit damage.

The later, the paragon board is doing the same twelve dungeons forever to level up glyphs. This isn't too far from what you did with greater rifts but the fact is the content you're repeating is B O R I N G. There's no random map layout, there's no alternating tilesets, no real enemy variety. Just the same dungeons over and over against the same enemies only thing that might change are nightmare conditions that ultimately amount to effects that exist only to slow you down. 'Hide in a shield or be one shot by lightning', don't stand still or be one shot by a dark shot, kill blood pimples randomly spawned from killed monsters or it one shots you when it explodes... Seeing a theme?

5. The game design is just flat out bad. Take two prime examples: Stashes and Bosses.

Stashes apparently can't be expanded easily because someone in their infinite wisdom while developing the game hardcoded it so whenever other players are on screen... you have to load their entire stash. Brilliant game design hey?

Uber Lillith is in short not a typical boss battle for diablo, it's a bullet hell event. If you're not meta built to do a trillion damage in under five seconds her attacks are coded to one shot you. Your armor, your build, your resistances. None of it matters. Get hit by even a slight bit of one attack and you're dead. And the combat area shrinks as the fight goes on. So have fun in that 'epic' quick time event they call an end boss fight.

As a lesser example of mentally challenged boss fights:

World bosses are neutered. In the beta/stress tests, world bosses were a fun challenge for level 20 players. Now World Bosses are punching bags. Unless you're a complete dipstick and stand in the 'fire' constantly you just have to wait for under two minutes and someone will nuke it. I don't think since launch a single world boss ever timed out... unless literally no one bothered to try killing them.


All in all Season 2 went a long way to make you feel like you're playing a hero of Sanctuary not a random hayseed randomly wandering around kicking demon babies until the dommy mommy shows up to slap you into next tuesday. But the gameplay is a slog. In d2/d3 there was grinding as well, but the rewards ultimately made the grind feel worth it. Fighting hordes of demons didn't get boring because every area had their own types of enemies.

Diablo 4 is both unrewarding and uninteresting. There's only so many recolors of Fallen ones and Spiders you can kill before you start wondering where the creative minds of Blizzard went in this installment.

[Ironside]

Originally posted by Niragiです:

Diablo IV is a GOTY not Baldur's Gate

Neither one are GOTY, TBH

Originally posted by Letobrick:

Diablo 4 received alot of hate earlier due to the dreaded "nerf patch". But that's ancient history and the game is MUCH better now since Season 2 has been released. The trolls and the jealous haters still fart and rear their ugly heads from time to time though.

Wake up guy, the game is crap. No one is "jealous" of anything. Jealous of what? It's just not fun. It's a "okay game" until you wake up and see how horribly broken it is. It's worth a 1 time play through for the builder-basic story and that's it, but no one is jealous or trolling. Overall, it's just bad.

[Letobrick]

Originally posted by Ironside:

Wake up guy, the game is crap. No one is "jealous" of anything. Jealous of what? It's just not fun. It's a "okay game" until you wake up and see how horribly broken it is. It's worth a 1 time play through for the builder-basic story and that's it, but no one is jealous or trolling. Overall, it's just bad.

Ok, I've edited since you're such a stickler for that one word :

Originally posted by Letobrick:

Diablo 4 received alot of hate earlier due to the dreaded "nerf patch". But that's ancient history and the game is MUCH better now since Season 2 has been released. The trolls and the haters still fart and rear their ugly heads from time to time though.

[DrUnK PuNk]

Thanks for all the insights into why people are having some issues with the game. I'm enjoying my time with it so far, still in act 1 as I don't have the time to play as I used to. It seems to me to be just more Diablo with better graphics. I like the character customisation in this game that is something new to the series. I like the cut scenes how they include your character in the scenes.

It seems those who are having complaints are mostly about the endgame (other than those that just say "it's just bad" and offer no constructive criticism), which to me personally is not a huge deal anymore as I don't have the time to invest as much and I have the money to buy lots more games instead of sticking to one for a long time. I will likely play just through the story and might come back to try out other classes.

For those that do have issues with the game, what is it that you think is missing or that you expected to be added? What do you want in a Diablo 5, update, or expansion?

[Dark Exile]

It offers nothing at endgame you didn't already do a hundred times before getting there, other than slight buff to a horrible as is gear system.
I played S1 to see what they might add with the new modifiers ect and honestly it seemed just as dull as before seasons started.

Couple that with nerfing everything because "omg it plays well", to this day i don't understand why they don't bring other classes up to par instead, case and point druid already sucked copious amounts of balls until end game in comparison to 3 other classes, and it got nerfed too. (I hear they stopped doing that but the end game is still crap so whats the point)

[StanicEnemy]

Because there is nothing to do at endgame. Once you are 100 level theres no reason to play it since theres nothing to do rewarding.

[Many-Named]

Originally posted by potato:

cause hating blizzard is cool

^

[MangorushZ]

Originally posted by potato:

cause hating blizzard is cool

Pretty much.