The video: https://youtu.be/4-G3j00RQ1U
The Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/15p5v8j/devs_play_the_game/
Fat, purple-haired butch lesbian with insane vocal fry is playing Diablo 4 co-op alongside clueless younger colleague. Highlights include:
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spamming basic attacks almost the whole time while resource bar is full
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dying on the easiest difficulty level
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talking about how both women are products of university game design mills
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they are both dungeon designers (dungeons are possibly the worst designed aspect of the entire game)
It’s a complete dumpster fire of a video. Tons of people are taking it as total confirmation that diversity hiring practices are what ruined Diablo 4. There are a few detractors in the comments, but they are mostly getting roasted.
Huge mistake by Blizzard. The interviews with various diversity hire devs were bad enough, but there was some plausible deniability there. This is two clear diversity hires, with rubber-stamped credentials, struggling to competently play their own video game. They’re showing off the terrible dungeon design while boasting that their sole contribution to the game was dungeon design. It’s like every anti-woke turbo hitler’s dream come true.
Everyone who is/was working at a major corporation understands diversity hires have destroyed everything.
The Pareto principle has always existed, but I have to imagine it’s a lot harder to sell 20% of the employees on doing 80% of the work when you also demonize them for their identity and consistently pass them by for pay raises and promotions.
I also imagine it was less frustrating to cover for your incompetent coworker when she was a cute flirty blonde or a well-meaning fellow nerd - as opposed to an openly hostile dyke hambeast or a minority grievance farmer.
Yes, I imagine when the office women were hot and having sex with the men, the men didn't mind doing her work because she served a different function and was never competition with the men.
Now the women are ugly, don't have sex with men in the office (not that the men would want to) and the women get paid more than the men and are in direct competition with the men for promotions. No one actually likes working with women either, not even women.
I can verify this.
When I was in the corporate world I grew more and more resentful every day having to cover for all the diversity hires. It’s even worse when you work under one that you have 30 IQ points on.
To be fair, most people are bad at their jobs. In tech, 10% of people tend to do all the work, and everybody else is just bopping around or a manager. Diversity hiring just made an existing problem worse.
Elon was able to fire like 80% of Twitter with no loss in performance. Tells you something. If a company is financially successful, eventually it becomes a feudal nation with courtiers. The girls in this video strike me as courtiers.
Fucking LOL.
Thankfully they’re getting rid of that at a lot of places due to the recession. Along with the workers. It all started because there was a cap on tech worker salaries behind the scenes, so they tried competing on other levels. Then they all lost their damn minds. It kept ballooning because in some place here in the Bay it’s pretty pricey to eat and live, so it let them offer workers less money be providing some of that and not having to give the money to the government.
Turned a lot of them into entitled baby people that are now unemployable. I hear people complain about the lack of benefits or perks now, then you hear about it and it’s the kind of benefits and perks people normally get, sans the amusement park ride at the office and ghost viewing chambers and in-house steakhouse. It’s hard to take them seriously when that’s what they’re used to work being like, and when their job is to simply exist.
Wasn’t it proven that Twitter before the Elon Musk takeover had more than half of its staff as management?
Don’t recall but that’d be hilarious if true. That’s more than one manager per person. Everyone has 1.5-2 managers exclusively for them. Or matrix management where everybody manages everybody else.
I learn quite a lot here. I will incorporate "hambeast" and "grievance farmer" into my vocabulary. Thanx!
You can drop "hires" from that statement. I have worked for security for a company, that went all pro-diversity, and filling incident reports has gone from simple, clear, and helpful, to an insanely unhelpful reporting level.
"Tall ugly woman wearing native-y looking clothes caused X incident" turns into "Human wearing brown was in proximity to what looked like X incident" (and of course, even the incident would need to be changed, too). Because you can't assume someone's gender (or beauty standard), height, describe clothes in racist terms, make possibly accusatory statements, etc etc.
their whole core ideology revolves around not describing, or even gaslighting people into anti-reality bullshit. an accurate description of what happens might result in accountability, and even noticing things.
ESG investing forces companies' boards and executives to care. Academia indoctrinates the HR degree holders who get hired on the pretense that they're trained in HR stuff.
At the end of the day, this is being forced on everyone by "the elite". Which is a group of people whom you can decide for yourself exactly what they are comprised of and what their motivations are but they definitely aren't here to help you or I.
I work at a small company and they're obsessed with ESG. It's like a cult. It's is 100% being promoted everywhere.
Leftists are super excited about their end-run around the free market. Turns out all they had to do to defeat capitalism was sell their souls to global finance.
None of the money they used to buy out entire sectors was earned fairly, either. They've taken over entire systems through corruption, lies, manipulations, and all other manner of crime. They're not punished for it, either, because they're in charge of most governments and both false choice political parties.
Shoes? Wtf?
You don’t think they should be on the clock while putting on required safety gear?
I’m not understanding
Do you understand that large financial firms are offering pretty juicy discounts on loans to corporations based on set “diversity” and “green” goals? Such as “make a certain percentage of your new hires “diverse” over the next x number of years” and in return the borrower gets a discount of 1% on their billion dollar loan. ESG isn’t just going to go away overnight.
I just checked, because I was curious. Some of the largest shareholders of Activision Blizzard are Blackrock and Vanguard. This is clearly ESG woke bullshit.
Blackrock and Vanguard buy large percentages of shareholder stocks of most large companies, and then force those companies to push the woke crap. That's why we're seeing such a drastic uptick in all of this lately, because this is a relatively new phenomenon, at least through this specific tactic.
If you ever see a company pushing woke stuff, just do a quick internet search for who their primary shareholders are. Here are the primary shareholders for Activision Blizzard:
https://www.investopedia.com/activision-blizzard-top-shareholders-5094540#:~:text=Activision%20Blizzard%20operates%20through%20three,(BLK).
This is by far the stupidest comment coming out in defense of the clearly inept workers. IF you don’t know your product, then you should not be creating that product.
“Honestly, not every dairy farmer drinks milk.”
“Not every accountant needs to be good at math.”
“Not every mechanic likes cars.”
It’s even more stupid when you put it into the context of other jobs.
Most female engineering graduates don't ever work in the field.
So the whole "design a good bearing housing" thing? Yeah, women (in general) don't.
There are notable exceptions. I know a truly exceptional female engineer.
In general, the best scholarship and internship are given to female engineering students. Only something like 20% of thoe ever go on to work in the field.
Look at Natalie Portman. An qualified aerospace engineer. Not one day at the job. This is standard.
Yes, but what you describe would be the equivalent of being an artist for a game. The person who designs the drivetrain or the engine should be people who know and love cars.
A game developer who is designing something core to the gaming experience (dungeons in this case apparently) should understand and enjoy games and the genre of their game. I'd love to watch these midwits play POE.
If you're the guy doing the car designs, you should probably be competently familiar with how they work and how to come reasonably close to optimized performance.
We're not talking about a programmer that doesn't explicitly like games coding for a game studio. We're talking about people who do higher level design for games; games themselves are the most relevant part.
Ah. So basically what you want is... The Homer. :)
But seriously I see your point. I've always thought along the lines of what u/WoonStruck said that the cars don't have to be aerodynamic. In fact they'd been making cars curvy since the 40s, but then there was this weird period in the 70's and 80's where manufacturers realized you could make them like boats or spaceships. Having a boxy car was kind of like making a statement that the owner is well off enough that he doesn't even care about fuel efficiency. "Yeah I'm driving a giant fucking box on wheels, what are you going to do about it? Get the hell out of my way."
Then that became passé and they all went back to the old curves. Probably something to do with the fuel crisis and inflation.
I imagine a lot has to do with having slight arcs in every plane for the structural integrity of carbon fibers/plastic/glass, since most aren't metal anymore, IIRC.
Most recent car I've really looked at is the 2014 I'm driving.
That's why I said reasonably close.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't muscle cars burn through gas primarily because of mileage-affecting factors that aren't aerodynamics?
Unless you're going over 70, which is the highest you're supposed to go in the extremely vast majority of America, aerodynamics hardly play a factor, and even in such cases other factors are a significantly larger part of fuel efficiency.
Agree that a lot of car designs are boring today, though. I don't think they have to be to be fuel efficient, either.
Accountant had better damn well at least be competent in basic arithmetic!
Janitors remove trash. HR hires trash.
I believe there is a decent chance that some real developers on the team are fed up with taking the blame for these incompetent morons and just set them up with this video.
Can't imagine how shit it must feel to do your work diligently and then see these trashbags get the same money just because they tick some made up HR boxes.
I don't expect devs to be the best players out there, but I do expect them to be competent enough to master all systems that the game has. Blizzard shown that their devs are on the level of a games journalist.
"Master all systems" is asking a lot. In games with dynamic difficulty, beating the hardest mode shouldn't be standard practice within the office. ZUN (touhou project) infamously cannot beat many of his own games on Lunatic mode, because he is designing them for someone with faster twitch reflexes than he has in his aging self.
But he can beat them on normal. And they're not easy games.
I don't ask for "mastery of all systems", I just ask for "baseline competence". It's simultaneously a much more reasonable ask, and a much clearly indictment of the wokists when they inevitably don't meet it.
Master all systems =/= master all gameplay.
It means knowing how the PoE trees work, how the skill gems interact, etc., etc. and being able to apply them in-game to reasonable success.
Most people can 'master' a bike without being the best biker out there because the "biking" part isn't where peak performance comes from; it comes from input.
It effectively just means "baseline competence"; that you are in control, hence master.
Some developers don't need to be good at games. Nobody gives a shit if the graphics artist is good at games. He has no need to be. Slave away at photoshop, wagie. Make us a model that looks like this.
Level developers, however, 100% need to be experts at the game, because they need to make it flow and balance and be suitable for advanced strategies.
Back in the day, Blizzard employees would go home from work to play Starcraft or WoW just because they were that much fun to play.
Can anyone say the same about nu-Blizzard's games?
Remember when people ended up getting fired because they played wow so much they skipped work? They haven’t had that problem in over a decade
Oh that's still an issue, but its due to raw addiction instead of fun addiction. Old days you'd skip work to run more dungeons with the boys and level more.
These days you skip work because the Rare Spawn with the 1% drop mount hasn't spawned yet for you to get your daily CD off it and you still have 17 more Rares to kill today on top of it because you hung out with the family and missed their last spawn time.
I still remember the sad sacks that took out vacation days for the launch of Diablo 3.
Hey, those of us who got past the Error screen made fucking bank. I made like 1500$ off the RMAH that first month, because fucking vendor trash yellows not worth picking up would still sell for like 20$ a pop to idiots and 3rd worlders.
I literally never paid for a Blizzard product again (because cashing out they took like 30-40% cut from battle.net money to real money) for just playing D3 a few weeks on launch before the meta shook out. And all of it just doing what I was going to do anyway and having a good time with the boys, before we beat Inferno and there was nothing to do.
I'm sure you didn't spend all of your vacation days staring at an "Error 37" screen like the Diablo fans did. Now that was some premium copium, back when Blizzard could do no wrong.
You're right, FO4 fans spent all day gawking at piles of trash for screws.
Sounds riveting.
I just heard Francis bellowing about "What the fuck is Error 37? What are the other 36 errors?" in my head. Thank you for a nice nostalgic memory.
Damn, that was 11 years ago…
Back in my day, games were made by fucking rockstars hammering keyboards with their massive erections while flying down the highway in their Ferrari F40s as bimbos would cling to the side, all while promising to 'make us their bitch' in their marketing material.
Ah, back in the day when Stevie Chase did a Playboy shoot in the id corporate conference room. The 90s were awesome.
And that PCXL issue she was in. chef's kiss
I really miss those days.
Western AAA devs have been taken over by activists and diversity hires. I don't even consider them anymore when I'm looking for a new game to play.
Their only purpose these days is to make fun of them. In that way they're at least more entertaining than their games.
Can confirm. Indie developers are where gaming is now. I hope the same happens to Hollywood, but that medium seems much more difficult to produce.
This was almost certainly released to get them attacked and bullied, so they then had a "reason" to cancel the Fireside chats and community involvement they had been half assing.
Because now they are being bullied by the ebil alt righters who just hate the women and trannies in their videos, so they have to stop doing it for "safety." Which will have all the Wokies running to their side and defending them without a thought.
Its a great tactic really. Removes your obligations by faking victimhood and then you can blame the community for being "toxic" so you don't have to listen to them at all.
No surprise. How can you design dungeons if you don't really know how to play the game? I don't mean you have to be an insano competitive min-max twitch streamer no life at it. I'm not by any means even in the ballpark of that with those type games, but I use abilities. I've not touched and am not interested in touching that game, but that dungeon looked boring. Like rectangle room to rectangle room.
I'm so glad I stayed out of game or any sort of software development when it was time to go from programmer kid to adult with a job. I'm pretty sure I would have hated it.
Do You Guys Not Have Phones?
I have but one response to this entire story.
Sad thing is, Diablo Immoral (not a typo) is still making Blizz an absolute mountain of money. As of November of last year it had already broken $300 million in microtransaction sales. Whales gonna whale, and until they stop doing so things won't change.
Anything with a pre-order or a phone app should be ignored by the community.
That would sort it out quickly.
As for China, they'll move on quickly enough.
How very, very dysgenic.
Also...
HUGE oof. I don't need everyone involved to be expert pro gamers or anything, but come on.
I haven't played, so I can't speak to the quality of the dungeons, but I'll also say dungeon design is far from the most difficult aspect of game design, either. Not knocking it, of course, and everyone loves a good dungeon, but baseline competent level design for this type of game isn't that high a bar.
Imagine being in an industry lead by people who are just ignorant of its core principles or that downright hate you
One of the YT comments:
It's worse than that. If they come away from the crash unharmed, the company can at least use that to prove how safe the car is.
I mean, maybe the takeaway from this ad is "Diablo IV...accessible to those of all IQs!"
The game of choice for the differently abled
Anyone with an IQ above room temperature isn't playing D4 at this point.
Exactly, which is why I guess this pro-retard messaging might be effective advertising. They're appealing to their playerbase.
The dungeons all look randomly generated to me. Are they not? If they’re not and they appear that way, then they should all be fire. I actually thought them being randomly generated was why they were laid out as they were.
Skipped around and happened to land on them saying their challenge was making them look good.
By "dungeon designer" they mean they picked out what textures to use out of the approved list and what decorations. 'There should be a skull pile here, that would look hella cool'.
To me it just looked like D3 dungeons but with grit. Random books and pillars and stairways, shit like that. Didn’t get too far, but it seemed like there was ‘rockish’ dungeon, ‘old castley’ dungeon, ‘hellish’ dungeon, and ‘tree hippie’ dungeon. It’s not bad, but generic, and at that point I think they’d be better off just using AI to make shit.
Same.
I haven't played the game, so I can't say. I'd fucking hope they're random, since that sort of goes with Diablo. Based on a YT comment, random generation is at the very least significantly lacking, though.
Yikes.
Agreed. Again, I am thinking they must be random, but if they're not...holy shit.
Also, I just searched "Diablo 4 map" and found this.
It might fucking not be randomly generated. Now, there may still be random dungeons within that, but, uh, that's still quite questionable. Diablo has always been random. What is this nonsense?
Also, I searched "Diablo 4 random..." but autocomplete gave me the following: "FPS Drops," "Freezing," "Crashes," among others. OOF.
Based on some of the other results, though, it does sound like the dungeons themselves are randomly generated, at least many of them.
EDIT:
That's what Brave's search AI tells me. Even the summary is just basically "people don't like this."
I have D4 and played it for a bit until around level 35. Starts off pretty well. Boss fights are neat. Art is fine I guess. Gear all feels the same so you stop caring pretty quickly. Once you’ve made it to the end of the skill tree, which doesn’t take long, you’ve kind of seen everything that character has to offer I felt. Also has a similar problem to D3 in that it’s mostly a ‘put in more time and you will win’ kind of game and there’s not much skill involved, but D2 had a little of that going on as well, though nowhere near as much. Itemization in D2 is still king. Almost all items in D4 are junk. Which you can mark as junk. You can sell them for money you won’t use or break them down for skins you also won’t use.
I didn’t dislike D4, but it did feel a little bland after a while. I just assumed dungeons were randomly generated because it was random wandering in areas that all looked the same. I kind of did feel like I was just wandering around picking up endless junk even in the premade over world. Story is probably fine, though the game isn’t really made to show it off outside of the opening cutscene and the beginning scenes. After that it’s mostly ‘go here and hit A on mobs’ and ‘go there and hit A on mobs’. Some characters seemed like they had potential, like some guy that’s mangled and hooked into a tree like the one dude from God of War, but he exists for a good minute and a half before that’s all over.
I think it’s better than most people shitting on it probably think, but I never hit or cared about the end game, and mostly dropped it because I felt like I’d seen most of it already and prefer skill based things. Pretty quickly I felt like I was walking around being told I won on repeat. Played Barb if that matters and did make use of a bunch of skills chained together.
Again, haven't played it myself, but if it was like $20-$40 dollars I'd at least look at it. Isn't it $70? That just seems really steep for an ARPG, even a AAA one.
Often the case, honestly. Modern games are often bad or at least disappointing, but it also often gets exaggerated massively. I can totally believe that D4 is fun for a while, and not the worst game ever or anything. That said, with a grindy game like an ARPG, 'fun for a while' really doesn't cut it, especially at such a premium price point. There are so many other games, basically all less expensive, that will likely give you a better and longer experience. D4 isn't bad per se, but it doesn't seem competitive either. Which is kind of shocking for such a big name game.
Yeah, it was $69.99 when I got it. Friend was hyped and said it was really good so I bit. He’s wrong about most things so I should have known. It’s not a bad game or any worse than a lot of ARPGs. It is better than D3 in many ways, at least to me, because it feels like you’re actively doing more and it doesn’t look like WoW. Still falls into similar traps though, and you can’t adjust the difficulty on your first playthrough high enough, so you’re in for a lot of easy stuff until you get to the ‘real’ game, and by then I’d probably just want to play another.
Most big budget games from people that aren’t Nintendo or Indie are now usually a little soulless and have some BS in there. In a different vein, playing Ratchet and Clank - A Rift Apart now. Probably the prettiest game of all time, but it feels super generic and soulless. Camera isn’t that great when you need it to be. Very, very shiny and pretty, but feels like it was written by a focus group for 3 year olds, and even then that’s an insult. It’s not a bad game, just a shell of what it could have been. Most likely a step back from prior games in all but graphics. Most of the game is spent watching cut scenes it felt like, which are Pixar level or better, but also not particularly interesting. Only like 4 types of enemies. Platforming is mediocre at best and the gunplay even on the hardest mode is pretty easy.
They also jammed so much crap and effects in it to show off the graphics that sometimes I don’t even know what’s going on. Rare, but it happens.
Reminds me of D4 in some ways though. Nobody bothered to even edit some things in it. Could have easily made a bunch of stuff better but didn’t. Ad for the Deluxe or whatever version any time you start it. Not at all a bad game, but kind of makes you feel bad that a game so pretty and with such high production values had not one meeting on how to make any of the gameplay meaningful, and they took a franchise that was founded on being edgy and made it for infants.
Considering the ORIGINAL Diablo was pretty much all "random". Randomly generated dungeon layouts, and quests on a carousel (will you get the Butcher? The poisoned water? Maybe, maybe not). It was one of the mindblowing things about it at the time.
It's where D2 was the beginning of a downgrade, with the removal of "randomized" quests. But at least the map layouts were still different with each game (with certain exceptions).
It’s Blizzard putting up their diversity shields. “PLAY OUR GAME OR YOUR RACIST.”
A few individuals here have beeb defending blizzard. Its very weird. It literally has zero redeeming qualities. They rape people, woke as fuck, and went into nickle and diming people.
All good will and benefit of doubt for blizzard is gone. You cant automatically assume their next game is good. You can fuck up 1 game.. maybe 2 games. But so far, all their IP is doing poorly. Overwatch, diablo, wow, starcraft. All those are either not relevant anymore, so woke it breaks the lore, horrible development over time, or just plain inferior games when compared to 10+ years ago.
Game are no longer designed or made by passionate autistic asian and white dudes.. people who are the original geek/nerd culture. The ones being pushed out unless they simp or go super woke.
Hasn't PC gaming gotten so much better since we let these people into the club?
If we can ever get them to leave we are barring the door and investing in a portcullis.
Anybody remember when we used to get games where the marketing material literally said the lead developer of the game, himself, was going to personally "make you his bitch"?
Playing poorly while being interviewed wouldn't be an automatic red flag - if we didn't already know the dungeons were bad, it could just be the usual streamer problem of it being hard to hold a decent conversation and focus on the game at the same time.
We don't call it DIEversity for nothing!
At this point blizzard is a masterclass at release things that backfires like that overwatch diversity chart tool they were so proud of until people ask how does the monkey score at racial identity, they regretted that almost instantly fucking lmao.
diablo4’s window is closed, everyone on that divinity original sin 3 kick now
Fat lesbian bitches are the worst people to interact with
I haven't followed it, but I was pretty offended by the existence of season passes, as well as the ugly character design on some of the classes.
Like you said, it's sad. The Diablo series had a lot of great games, it's a shame to just not even be interested in IV. There are plenty of better ARPGs out there for people who need to scratch the itch...including D3 or D2, sounds like.
What's funny is that Season Passes are basically made for Diablo games, as they literally already live entirely on "Seasons" to keep people playing anyway.
But they tried to charge for it, when they already had negative good will, which means it was treated as the largest sin possible.
To clarify, I object to paid passes, yeah. D3 had seasons, and you could choose to play them or not, but you didn't have to pay, outside of already owning D3.
Paid passes feel grabby enough in free games, but at least there the monetization makes sense. Paid season passes in purchased games can suck a dick. Especially if, like you said, they already have negative goodwill.
The thing is, Paid Season Passes make the most sense in Diablo of any game ever. Simply because of its already set up seasonal structure being the core of why people play it after the original rush.
The problem is, the price needs to be fair, it needs to provide real reason to want it, and if its in a paid game it absolutely needs to be worth it. None of which Diablo 4 can provide, and I doubt they ever could even under great circumstances without making huger problems elsewhere. So it was stupid to try.
Then they should let me play D4 for free. Or, as you say, at least have much more reasonable prices, both on the passes and the game. Fuck 'em, I'm not paying full game price and then what amounts to a subscription fee if I want to fully engage with the game content.
Isn't that what Diablo Immortal was?
Jokes aside, its honestly a bit funny because D3 mostly figured out how to make a season pass that is both reasonable in expectations and and minimal effort (so it can be free), but that apparently wasn't enough despite the D4 pass giving very little more than those.
It's amazing how they managed to take a working formula - D3 wasn't perfect, but still seemed to mostly have a positive reputation, fluid gameplay, decent enough options - and make it worse. As one of the biggest companies in the field. D4 isn't terrible, by all accounts, but it's much worse than it had any right to be.
Grim Dawn has been doing a hell of a job scratching the itch for me lately.
This is my head cannon for the Diablo franchise release titles: