Between the gameplay loop, endgame progression, and early game story progression, Diablo 4 seems like its having an identity crisis.
The core gameplay loop of this game needs some work. It's too heavily tilted towards staring mindlessly at the absolutely mind boggling mess of an overload of stats trying to eyeball whether or not the piece of gear you got is better than your equipped gear. Often it's entirely not worth it to sit and find out so you'll find yourself skimping on potentially better gear of a certain tier because it would be too much of a hassle to trudge through the garbage to find. Even after you consider that, you're still likely spending at least 5 minutes between dungeons, which is typically around the length of a dungeon if youre clearing it coop, sorting through items, making sure everything is in order before you go back in and rinse and repeat. That is an unacceptable amount of downtime for a game that has a relatively mundane looting system, with very little in the way of loot creativity, and is mostly fun for it's intrinsic combat.
Another big thing that gets in the way of it's intrinsic combat is the amount of story padding there is. People that play these types of games want to hurry up and get back to the killing, they don't want to be bored with long drawn out cinematic, of a frankly mediocre plot, or even worse yet, in game story pauses where you watch a bunch of dialogue boxes appear over flimsy character models and sit there and wonder when it is you can go back to the fun part. These things communicate very poorly with what the game excels at, what it tries to be, and what people play it for.
And that's really only the major problems. Between the annoyingly backtracky dungeon mission design, the lack of proper unit differentiation causing various mobs to either look a lot more threatening than they actually are or be a lot more threatening than they look, the hilariously cheap elite modifiers that seem entirely tailored into baiting you into getting killed by flashing shiny loot at you and getting you to walk into the bomb, or if youre more aware, just having to sit there and wait for the annoyingly long animation to finally finish and the level scaling mobs gutting any sense of gains in power you might feel and relegating gains in power to increasingly meta builds, the list of issues just goes on and on and I'm only really scratching the surface.
It seems as they iterate on these games, blizzard inevitably gets further from the mark. Not closer. It really is a good thing that they haven't forgotten how to make their core combat feel very satisfying because this game would be nothing without it.
The core gameplay loop of this game needs some work. It's too heavily tilted towards staring mindlessly at the absolutely mind boggling mess of an overload of stats trying to eyeball whether or not the piece of gear you got is better than your equipped gear. Often it's entirely not worth it to sit and find out so you'll find yourself skimping on potentially better gear of a certain tier because it would be too much of a hassle to trudge through the garbage to find. Even after you consider that, you're still likely spending at least 5 minutes between dungeons, which is typically around the length of a dungeon if youre clearing it coop, sorting through items, making sure everything is in order before you go back in and rinse and repeat. That is an unacceptable amount of downtime for a game that has a relatively mundane looting system, with very little in the way of loot creativity, and is mostly fun for it's intrinsic combat.
Another big thing that gets in the way of it's intrinsic combat is the amount of story padding there is. People that play these types of games want to hurry up and get back to the killing, they don't want to be bored with long drawn out cinematic, of a frankly mediocre plot, or even worse yet, in game story pauses where you watch a bunch of dialogue boxes appear over flimsy character models and sit there and wonder when it is you can go back to the fun part. These things communicate very poorly with what the game excels at, what it tries to be, and what people play it for.
And that's really only the major problems. Between the annoyingly backtracky dungeon mission design, the lack of proper unit differentiation causing various mobs to either look a lot more threatening than they actually are or be a lot more threatening than they look, the hilariously cheap elite modifiers that seem entirely tailored into baiting you into getting killed by flashing shiny loot at you and getting you to walk into the bomb, or if youre more aware, just having to sit there and wait for the annoyingly long animation to finally finish and the level scaling mobs gutting any sense of gains in power you might feel and relegating gains in power to increasingly meta builds, the list of issues just goes on and on and I'm only really scratching the surface.
It seems as they iterate on these games, blizzard inevitably gets further from the mark. Not closer. It really is a good thing that they haven't forgotten how to make their core combat feel very satisfying because this game would be nothing without it.