I like D2 soundtrack way more. The d2r act 2 town music is fucking Stellar, yohan wishes

It's D3.5

They took the skills and runes that were in D3 and put them in a skill tree. Voila. D4 skill tree.

Itemization is the same. Equip strongest weapon with highest Attack power to make all of your skills do more damage. Crit Chance/Crit Damage and some obfuscated Overpowered etc. shit that effectively all does the same thing: more damage. No resistances or immunities to worry about, so just make whatever does the most damage. It doesn't matter.

Builder/Spender. Use your Firebolt to get Mana, spend Mana on big spell. Rinse/repeat.

Use your 90 second cooldown Ultimate to clear the screen. Press defensive ability to avoid big damage.

Everything scales with you, so you're never actually getting stronger relative to the world. Linear progression at its finest.

Play for 2 weeks, fill out your Battlepass, get your cosmetic rewards, get bored and come back next season. Or don't.

Once the initial hype and newness of the game wears off, even the most retarded staunch defenders of D4 will be complaining.

ohh yes thats it

maybe blizzard will change something else the release date has apparently changed from april to june -.-

This post was edited by Crystal87 on Dec 10 2022 06:07am

Sounds like they used the D3 team to churn out this garbo.

From their perspective, it's the safe play. D3 was a "success", right? So just copy/paste with some changes, new graphics, story, etc., throw in a Battlepass and print some money.

They literally took no risks with this game. The gameplay is about as safe and curated as you can get. It's like the difference between Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends. Blizzard's version of a MOBA is dead, which was the safe, curated, casual friendly shit where they stripped any complexity or depth out (no items etc.).

D4 follows that same mentality. And it will also die out due to a lack of real depth. The hardcore players will shift back to POE and D2R, and they'll be left with that same tiny community that still actually plays D3.

But if the game sells well, they'll consider it a success. If you're a D2 fan, and want a proper sequel to it, then you have to hope that D4 underperforms their sales expectations, and that we get an entirely new team and mentality for D5.

But who am I kidding? D5 lol.

I think the best we can hope for is another expansion to D2R. It sold 6mil copies. Maybe they could put a team on it to release like an Act 6, a new class, new skills, new endgame content (mapping system, new uber bosses etc.). I'd pay out the ass for that.

This post was edited by OhJaY on Dec 10 2022 06:37am

I think D2 also led to it's own demise in future iterations due to the fact D3 was such a huge tonal shift, but it rode the coat tails of D2 to massive sales because of the hype it had built up over the years. This resulted in D3 having massive sales, not from it's own merit, but from the previous iteration garnering such a massive following and creating word of mouth to launch sales into the stratosphere. Now the executives think following the changes D3 made is the right decision because it had higher sales. The problem is it only had those sales because of it's predecessor. D3 itself has no real staying power and players only hop on to play a few days each season unless they're die-hard supporters. No where near the following that D2 has, but modern players don't know any better and think the most recent release is superior (higher # and heavy marketing in comparison), and thus end up leading to more sales for the overall inferior game.

This post was edited by BlakeXeal on Dec 10 2022 06:46am

Nailed it. D3 sales were heavily bolstered by how successful D2 was, which is why, by the time Reaper of Souls came out, a lot of D2 fans were so burnt by D3 that they didn't even want to play the expansion. Which is why RoS sales paled in comparison to Vanilla D3, and why internally the higher ups considered D3 a shit-show and had anyone working on a 2nd expansion for D3 shifted to working on D4. I'm surprised people don't make this point more often: was it not suspicious that a game as "successful" as D3 only got 1 expansion?

It's why the tone for D4 changed to: "Hey, look, we're putting some D2 elements back in, like skill trees and the darker atmosphere, and Unique items."

Except it's still 90% D3. They didn't learn anything.

This post was edited by OhJaY on Dec 10 2022 06:48am

Madden syndrome and fomo are definitely a thing. There was huge hype because it was the successor to something that was considered a masterpiece which led to some of the biggest pc game sales ever. It's a shame the information you elaborate on wasn't really analyzed by executives, how ROS purchases fell off a cliff in comparison. It's because the hype and franchise itself was tainted by consumers having a bad experience with D3.

Seems like D2R is the perfect hype builder for D4 to erase those pesky thoughts of how bad D3 actually was though. Interesting how we're actually repeating history.

This post was edited by BlakeXeal on Dec 10 2022 06:56am

Yeah, it does feel like déjà vu.

D2r also dead to me.....stupid holiday events to really suck the fun out of it + additions to make the game easier and bis gear more accessible.....way to spoil a classic