I'd say that a lot of people in general are growing tired of time-sinks. Doubly so when the reward is dangled behind a morass of unfun, mundane, and/or cringe content.
It's a combination of audiences reaching adulthood and no longer having as much free time, but also our entire society has the attention span of a goldfish thanks to technology perfecting the delivery of instant gratification. It's honestly a much bigger issue than loot grinds in video games.
I feel like these guys are making terrible assumptions about the playerbase of modern Diablo games. They write in the article, near the end, that a 16-year-old in the D2 days is now pushing 40, and thinking that's still the playerbase of D4. Why is it not possible that their audience is is just the modern day zoomer who expects epic items very quickly, and rejects this "old school" grind? How likely is it that their core audience is made up of those 40-year-olds still?
Does D4 even play as well as D2 does/did? I finally quit WoW after nearly 14 years because the BfA expansion made every class I touched feel so terrible to play. I liked hitting my buttons and when they ruined that I felt there was nothing left for me to enjoy. If D4 feels awful to play, D2 vets wouldn't stick around and would just go back to D2, leaving a younger generation trained on paying MTX fees to skip timesinks.
Watched this divorce lawyer interview and at one point he talks about this like 80 year old guy who's wife divorced him for cheating and how depressing that was to realize that he'll never stop wanting to chase after women, ever.
It's like that. You don't age out of Diablo 2, or Left 4 Dead, or Unreal Tournament 2004, or Team Fortress (minus bots). Great games like these will always be fun at any age.
Their problem is they're making games that aren't fun. Diablo 4 is like chewing gum that's on the 2' high shelf so kids see it; it tastes sweet for 2 seconds then it's like chewing petroleum waste.
You don't age out of Diablo 2, or Left 4 Dead, or Unreal Tournament 2004, or Team Fortress (minus bots). Great games like these will always be fun at any age.
Speaking as a Left 4 Dead fan, how accessable is D2? Cos it's not on steam or anything.
BfA was when I quit as well. Every class felt the same. The XP squish and ability pruning was a fucking death blow to the fun. It also didn't help that Legion was up there with my favorite xpac, so it was just night and day unfun. The in-your-face BfA timesinks, recycled mechanics, loss of... everything was too much. I didn't even hit the level cap. They were too stingy on giving you any new abilities, talents, ANYTHING.
Everyone gotta stop making excuses for D4. It looks nice, but it has no legs. There's not enough choice, there's very little mastery, out of the big 3 themes a game needs, it only scores somewhat high on immersion. (choice, mastery, immersion are key to the best games)
Anyhow BfA popped up in a random convo I had the other day, and I saw you mention it here. I am still salty about it haha! I tried the Shadowlands beta but, meh. I was just done. The love was lost.
The old d2 gamers play d2r over d4. Maybe PoE.
Wow gamers are still sticking around but I guess it depends what you're into. Mythic raiding and mythic plus is basically the same as it's always been so those players stick around and keep that game alive even though blizzard never caters to them.
Yes: older players to a point will be too busy with work and family/social shit. If they do play they are also more likely to take shortcuts via in game shops.
No: current crop of gamers have the attention span of a labrador puppy and can't even stomach "casual" grinds that many games put out. Private servers for other games show this too where every retard buys gear but it still shit because they neither know what the fuck they are doing or have the capability/desire to improve.
It doesn't help that so many of these games grinds are insanely tedious. They're designed so you practically have to treat it like a second job. The games also suck. They consistently make them only just good enough to support whatever tedious loop they were going for and absolutely no further.
It sort of takes the idea of progression in something like an old-school tabletop or pen and paper RPG, and then tries to stretch it out much much further for the sole purpose of extending the amount of "game time" a player is expected to go through to reach their goals.
Which is then further compounded when it's so easy for the developers to add what amounts to an infinite potential for grind and loot, without end. Which is something that you technically could do in something like a tabletop RPG, but it would be glaringly obvious and wouldn't really fit into a finite campaign-adventure.
D4 is just not very good. It's pretty. There's some quality animations and sounds. The abilities are lacking. Everything is so mundane, even once you pump it with points/items. The item properties were transparently stuffed with bad properties. At least make them somewhat desirable. Nope, shit like 'extra % damage at night when you are leaping off a cliff fighting slime class mobs using arcane', levels of specific.
As something of an ARPG fan, for better or worse, I'll chime in here.
I appreciate some of the smoothing out modern ARPGs have done, but I also resent some of the dumbing down. Also, trying to sell 'skipping the grind' via microtransaction - at least in a non-F2P game - is just cheap bullshit, and can fuck right off. Microtransactions are not, and should not be, an alternative to gameplay. Anyone who does this can get fucked.
I will never pay someone to play the game for me. If they've made a game so unfun that people would pay to skip it, hopefully I did my research and never gave them money in the first place. Fuuuuck you.
Back to the topic at hand more mainly, I don't think I'm the average gamer anymore, sadly, so I can't say too much about what 'the fans' want. But I will say, I don't mind a smooth curve with a fair bit of grinding. I don't mind if I play a bunch and never find upgrades to gear. It's in some ways gratifying that you already have a decent setup.
Last Epoch is a good example of this. It's quite tricky to find the true best in slot. It's somewhat easy to craft stuff that's passable, but you'll reach a point where you likely won't find an upgrade for days. Some people might find that obnoxious, I don't really mind. If the gameplay is decent, it all works. And classic ARPGs like D2, you could go months (years for the truly insane players) without finding viable upgrades. Shit was hella rare. I don't want things quite that absurd, but I also don't want things dumbed down too much. And a lot of modern games seem to be going in the direction of dumbing things down too much, no surprise. I don't need constant gear upgrades. I need the potential for gear upgrades.
Even finding uniques was pretty rare, at least compared to modern game droprates. Now you find multiple 'super uber ultra unique legendaries' per play session.
I'd say that a lot of people in general are growing tired of time-sinks. Doubly so when the reward is dangled behind a morass of unfun, mundane, and/or cringe content.
That's the key for me.
Along with many of these making the grind absolutely ridiculous so they can peddle skipping the grind for some of that MTX money.
It's a combination of audiences reaching adulthood and no longer having as much free time, but also our entire society has the attention span of a goldfish thanks to technology perfecting the delivery of instant gratification. It's honestly a much bigger issue than loot grinds in video games.
I feel like these guys are making terrible assumptions about the playerbase of modern Diablo games. They write in the article, near the end, that a 16-year-old in the D2 days is now pushing 40, and thinking that's still the playerbase of D4. Why is it not possible that their audience is is just the modern day zoomer who expects epic items very quickly, and rejects this "old school" grind? How likely is it that their core audience is made up of those 40-year-olds still?
Does D4 even play as well as D2 does/did? I finally quit WoW after nearly 14 years because the BfA expansion made every class I touched feel so terrible to play. I liked hitting my buttons and when they ruined that I felt there was nothing left for me to enjoy. If D4 feels awful to play, D2 vets wouldn't stick around and would just go back to D2, leaving a younger generation trained on paying MTX fees to skip timesinks.
Watched this divorce lawyer interview and at one point he talks about this like 80 year old guy who's wife divorced him for cheating and how depressing that was to realize that he'll never stop wanting to chase after women, ever.
It's like that. You don't age out of Diablo 2, or Left 4 Dead, or Unreal Tournament 2004, or Team Fortress (minus bots). Great games like these will always be fun at any age.
Their problem is they're making games that aren't fun. Diablo 4 is like chewing gum that's on the 2' high shelf so kids see it; it tastes sweet for 2 seconds then it's like chewing petroleum waste.
Fruit Stripe Gum. There's your analogy right there, for anyone who remembers the stuff.
Fun packaging. Cool mascot. Funky pattern on the pieces of gum. Tasted great ... for about 10 seconds, and then all the flavour was simply gone.
And D4 actually is like that. Starts out OK, but it turns inexplicably ... boring ... really fast.
They should really take a look at MedianXL.
Speaking as a Left 4 Dead fan, how accessable is D2? Cos it's not on steam or anything.
D2 is old enough you can play it in virtualbox, so I would just torrent it and do that. I'd never run a pirated game outside a VM though.
Or you can get it from battle.net if you really want to give Blizzard $10.
BfA was when I quit as well. Every class felt the same. The XP squish and ability pruning was a fucking death blow to the fun. It also didn't help that Legion was up there with my favorite xpac, so it was just night and day unfun. The in-your-face BfA timesinks, recycled mechanics, loss of... everything was too much. I didn't even hit the level cap. They were too stingy on giving you any new abilities, talents, ANYTHING.
Everyone gotta stop making excuses for D4. It looks nice, but it has no legs. There's not enough choice, there's very little mastery, out of the big 3 themes a game needs, it only scores somewhat high on immersion. (choice, mastery, immersion are key to the best games)
Anyhow BfA popped up in a random convo I had the other day, and I saw you mention it here. I am still salty about it haha! I tried the Shadowlands beta but, meh. I was just done. The love was lost.
The old d2 gamers play d2r over d4. Maybe PoE.
Wow gamers are still sticking around but I guess it depends what you're into. Mythic raiding and mythic plus is basically the same as it's always been so those players stick around and keep that game alive even though blizzard never caters to them.
Yes and no.
Yes: older players to a point will be too busy with work and family/social shit. If they do play they are also more likely to take shortcuts via in game shops.
No: current crop of gamers have the attention span of a labrador puppy and can't even stomach "casual" grinds that many games put out. Private servers for other games show this too where every retard buys gear but it still shit because they neither know what the fuck they are doing or have the capability/desire to improve.
It doesn't help that so many of these games grinds are insanely tedious. They're designed so you practically have to treat it like a second job. The games also suck. They consistently make them only just good enough to support whatever tedious loop they were going for and absolutely no further.
It sort of takes the idea of progression in something like an old-school tabletop or pen and paper RPG, and then tries to stretch it out much much further for the sole purpose of extending the amount of "game time" a player is expected to go through to reach their goals.
Which is then further compounded when it's so easy for the developers to add what amounts to an infinite potential for grind and loot, without end. Which is something that you technically could do in something like a tabletop RPG, but it would be glaringly obvious and wouldn't really fit into a finite campaign-adventure.
D4 is just not very good. It's pretty. There's some quality animations and sounds. The abilities are lacking. Everything is so mundane, even once you pump it with points/items. The item properties were transparently stuffed with bad properties. At least make them somewhat desirable. Nope, shit like 'extra % damage at night when you are leaping off a cliff fighting slime class mobs using arcane', levels of specific.
The current season has remedied this from what I can see.
The fact that there are "seasons" for games is a problem in itself.
As something of an ARPG fan, for better or worse, I'll chime in here.
I appreciate some of the smoothing out modern ARPGs have done, but I also resent some of the dumbing down. Also, trying to sell 'skipping the grind' via microtransaction - at least in a non-F2P game - is just cheap bullshit, and can fuck right off. Microtransactions are not, and should not be, an alternative to gameplay. Anyone who does this can get fucked.
I will never pay someone to play the game for me. If they've made a game so unfun that people would pay to skip it, hopefully I did my research and never gave them money in the first place. Fuuuuck you.
Back to the topic at hand more mainly, I don't think I'm the average gamer anymore, sadly, so I can't say too much about what 'the fans' want. But I will say, I don't mind a smooth curve with a fair bit of grinding. I don't mind if I play a bunch and never find upgrades to gear. It's in some ways gratifying that you already have a decent setup.
Last Epoch is a good example of this. It's quite tricky to find the true best in slot. It's somewhat easy to craft stuff that's passable, but you'll reach a point where you likely won't find an upgrade for days. Some people might find that obnoxious, I don't really mind. If the gameplay is decent, it all works. And classic ARPGs like D2, you could go months (years for the truly insane players) without finding viable upgrades. Shit was hella rare. I don't want things quite that absurd, but I also don't want things dumbed down too much. And a lot of modern games seem to be going in the direction of dumbing things down too much, no surprise. I don't need constant gear upgrades. I need the potential for gear upgrades.
I never found any of the high runes or super uniques, and played for years starting since launch
Even finding uniques was pretty rare, at least compared to modern game droprates. Now you find multiple 'super uber ultra unique legendaries' per play session.