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:
-
spamming basic attacks almost the whole time while resource bar is full
-
dying on the easiest difficulty level
-
talking about how both women are products of university game design mills
-
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.
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 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.
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).