So, I never had any hopes for D4 after it was first announced and the first gameplay was made public. I didn’t even really follow the updates much, that’s how disinterested I was. Fast forward 2 years and some new gameplay videos have been released. Watching them assured me that this will just be a D3 with darker color palette. Maybe they’ll implement some other minor improvements and the game could be called “D3.5”, or a “better D3” but that’s all.
A good Sci-Fi movie needs to have a set of coherent, logical and interesting laws of physics that describe the world where the action takes place. These can be different, or slightly different from the real world but they need to make sense to the viewer and be intriguing.
D1 and D2 were focused on creating a world that makes sense to us, humans. If you get hit you may need some time to recover (hit recovery). If you block it takes some time. If you swing a sword you swing a sword and hit or miss a monster. If you get surrounded by the mob you are stuck and you’ll likely die. And monsters have their hit recoveries, blocks and chance of missing you when they attack. So far this is representing the physics of the world we know, within the limitations of a game engine of course.
After the world that makes sense is established you can start to spice it up. Try to add things that do not exist but are easy to imagine how they’d work if they did. Fireball is essentially an explosion, lightning is, well lightning, some sort of electric discharge. Poison weakens you over time, whirlwind is a skillful and desperate weapon swing in an arc while running. They are “dialed up to 11”, but they are belivable.
All of these mechanics and skills start to interact with each other and you get builds that are optimized, efficient, good at killing density or at killing bosses or are difficult to kill and so on.
Also, the world in D1 and D2 is more… open. You can choose which areas to farm. They are different and different builds may be used. Farming chaos is different from travincal, which is different from cows, which is different from mephisto, which is different from ubers. The game doesn’t tell you what to do. It’s just there. The world invaded by monsters is there and the game mechanics / skills are there. And it is up to you to choose what builds you want to make and which areas to go to.
D3 has none of the things above. And it seems like D4 follows the path of D3. Instead of focusing on creating a convincing world mechanics the devs started from the end results: mighty barbarians, glass canon sorceress, agile amazons and try to hardcode them into the game in the form of one-click, all encompassing skills and „epic” graphical effects. The whole screen lights up and darkens when sorc casts lightning, barbarians cause minor earthquake that changes colors when swinging a sword into to the ground. All the time some epic music is played in the background and skills have far too impressive sound effects. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like telling me what you want to achieve without actually achieving it. This looks like a guy who wants to impress a girl with how rich he is buy taking loans for expensive cars and rolexes. Somebody trully rich doesn’t need to do this. And doesn’t need to overdo anything. He is who he is and it emanates from within. A well designed game doesn’t need all of these exaggerated effects. You feel as a tough barbarian or glass canon sorc because you are, in the realms of game mechanics, and not because the game tries to convince you with a disco light effects and calls you a „nephalem” every second sentence.
It’s all just an illusion. All of the characters are the same. Sorc is a long(er) range caster and barbarian is just a short(er) range caster. They all have AoE, they all move equally fast, they all are good at clearing density, bosses, uniques and they all play the same. There is no physics in this game. It doesn’t even try to simulate the real world. Characters just glide through the terrain, without any difficulties, monsters cannot really surround you and block your escape path, there is no hit recovery. You just sit there and cast skills and monsters do the same and the end effect is decided by a simple arithmetic calculation. A „gear check”, if you will. The game doesn’t even have any true mechanics. It just has special skills and special effects for everything. You click a button and a red AoE is cast. You click another and a blue one is cast. And even these climbing walls / jumping cliffs abilities they presented in D4 are just a gimmick. There are special places where you can click a button and be transported to somewhere else. That’s all. There is no true wall climbing or cliff jumping, it’s just another special-purpose, boring eye candy. Even the 3D look of these games is an illusion. You have one degree pf freedom: you follow the corridor or a path. It just so happens that it is surrounded by stone pillars or trees. You cannot interact with them, you cannot really block monsters behind them. You can’t even decide the route through the area, because the whole area is just one route and everything around is just a scenery, like in a theatre. And with how smooth the movement is and all of the mobility skills, the real space you are in is a graph of mobs clusters. You effortlessly glide from one pack to another, push the button and they disappear. The whole desert / jungle decorations are just there to distract you from how dull this whole “world” is.
Is D2 a perfect game? No, obviously not. Some builds are too powerful (e.g. hammerdin), some classes are too weak (e.g. druid), there are tons of exceptions to the rules of the game that you need to learn. But… it’s properly designed, interesting game. And because of that many people can forgive these imperfections.
D3, and most likely D4, are empty, flashy, vain animations, that want too fool you into believing that you are playing a real game.
This post was edited by kayko on Apr 16 2022 04:51am