Quote (bjones9 @ Oct 7 2024 11:11pm)
Thinking about playing Diablo 4 on PS5 (girlfriend bought one)
Has anyone played it?
Just came back and reread this and now I'm wondering if you were asking specifically about playing on console or just d4 in general.
D4 is extremely boring and underwhelming imo.
- mid tier writing at best
- lackluster itemization, similar to D3. Item artwork might as well not exist, every item is the same size and takes up 1 slot in the inventory, there is nothing iconic about any of it. Everything feels exactly the same. Everything rolls the same stats.
- ridiculous imbalance between classes. Think of a a bash barb vs a hammerdin and then multiply the difference in power level by 1000x. Literally. The new class from the expansion does something like 1 millionx more damage than any other class.
- open world mmo-lite that only allows 4 player parties. How have we regressed from 8-man parties over 20 years?
- more of the same modern ARPG trash design: the entire screen is always exploding in a plethora of garbage and you can't tell what is happening at all. There is no such thing as having a tanking frontline. All classes are required to be tanks. Every spell and attack penetrates through everything. All boss mechanics require you to run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
- terrible gameplay loop. In d2 you could argue the gameplay loop is bad but at least the content itself was fun and engaging. In d4 it's just mind-numbing.
- the new "runewords" are not runewords. They are just a resource generation and resource spending system.
- it is basically a single player game. 90%+ of the player base just plays solo. There is no loot scaling based on the number of players in game like in d2. It's just allocated loot. There is at least a small degree of bonus XP for playing in a group but it's not nearly on the level of D2.
- the crafting system is extremely overbearing and the game is completely based around it. You have to pickup trash constantly to salvage it and use those materials for upgrading gear.
- monsters do not feel unique or interesting. Everything behaves the same way. You don't see dolls and know to step back to avoid their explosions, or souls and know to try to stay out of the lightning. You don't have scary packs of death lords to let your merc tank. You just charge into everything and the screen explodes.
The game just feels like a chore to play and it's a total slog. They have designed everything to be so ubiquitous yet ambiguous at the same time so that you spend way too much time trying to determine if a piece of gear is an upgrade or not. It's not like finding a shako in d2 and immediately knowing it's good. The world events are all the same copy-pasted trash. It reminds me of Skyrim procedurally-generated quests. Procedural generation in d2 was cool because it affected mob spawns and map layout. In lieu of actual content, d4 has just copy-pasted procedurally-generated crap all over the place.
This post was edited by TatersaladAF on Nov 14 2024 04:39pm