Thought I'd let people know, in case they were curious.
I've only played a few minutes but...I'm very underwhelmed. For all the hate a lot of woke games get, you're often hearing only one side, and so they're often better than you might think. Not excusing wokeness, and I hate the state of modern gaming, but point is if you just hear the negative sides of a game, you might be impressed on playing it, even if there's plenty that annoys you.
This is not the case with D4. It feels like a fucking mobile game. I'm only a few minutes in, as mentioned, but it starts with a decent cinematic (not as mindblowing compared to past Blizzard games when compared to the technology of the time, but not terrible or anything), then hits with "connecting to servers" and stuff, with "accessibility" options turned on, including text-to-speech. It has an AI voice telling you it's connecting to servers, that's your next intro to the game. Already leaves you with a weird taste. Next thing is it pushes you right to the aforementioned accessibility options. Next is character creation. I suspect the characters are randomly generated, but I had four blacks, and one fatass female (Druid is always fat.)
As to the actual gameplay, as I said, it feels like a mobile game. Not far enough in to fully judge, but my initial impression was very underwhelming. And, again, was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I think a lot of woke games get an exaggeratedly bad image, since we're hearing only the one side. But, yeah, just feels kind of clunky so far, and zoomed in a bit too much. Music is good, though, from what I've heard. Classic Diablo-style music. Mutes on Alt-Tab by default though.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling. I don't want to color anyone's opinions and, if you are curious, I do actually suggest you try it while it's free. But I was surprised at just how much I didn't like my first dip into it, and thought I'd share. For all the woke nonsense, I expected to like it more than my initial impressions.
Temporarily, at least.
So far, I'd rather play either D2 or D3. No way I'd pay $70, or even $50, or even $20 for D4.
Sad, Blizzard was one of my favorite companies for quite some time. Not sure how they fucked it up this bad.
D4 is basically just Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It's so high budget that everything is written by committee. There's too many people involved and too many egos to fix any mistakes, bad ideas are just forced through with money and inertia. It has to run on every platform from phones to pro gaming PCs.
At the same time they're investing so much that they're totally risk averse. They ape design from successful games, they gimp chat so they can't be responsible for hurting somebody's feelings, everything is pg-13.
They have "over 9000" people credited on the game. The movie-style credits roll goes on for 45 minutes.
Ironically they could have split just some of these people into groups of 12, have an internal competition with high-stakes consequences, and come out with many hit games better than D4 and a few new franchises that they could milk for decades to come. But they're institutionalized and not capable of innovation even though they still have some talented people working there.
the ethnics committee sucks out all the fun and soul out of a game.
It's not even the woke. I haven't run into any woke in the game after the character creation really. It's just uninspired and unimpressive so far.
You need to have a mix of unfuckable 90s-type D&D/comic nerds, 30-35 year olds who hung on to their superhero fantasies, one or two wizard level programmers, and absolutely no women to make really good Western games. They might have a different formula in Japan.
Yup. No argument.
I remember that video from a while back where female "dungeon designers" were jilling themselves off to what a magnificent game they'd made.
There was a video around about some lesbo designers playing D4, they were incredibly bad at it. Not only are this people making the game now but someone at Blizzard thought showcasing their incompetent diversity hires was a good idea.
Then you weren’t paying attention. The game is wall to wall girl bosses.
Again, I'm not that far in. And, point is, the wokeness is the least of the problems. There have been games with "wall to wall girl bosses" that are more enjoyable than this.
You could multiply the wokeness I've experienced in this game so far by one hundred, it would probably make it better, just for the sake of comedy.