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A comment on Diablo. Parent comment

Re:Diablo by ecshafer on Friday July 21, 2023 @01:33PM (#36816824)
I love Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, I don't care much for what the genre has become though (Diablo 3/4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, etc). The genre of loot focused ARPGs really took after the worst aspects of Diablo 2 LOD end game. An extreme focus on grinding and optimizing builds to maximize your ability to grind, so you can get gear to beat end game content that is otherwise impossible, to repeat the process. The genre took this and ran with the concept and brought it up, but also kind of killed the simple parts of the game. A lot of older 90s / early 2000s games had this game first, that then maybe had this end game aspect which some communities played towards. But now the industry plays towards the end game aspect, and neglects the person that just wants to sit down and fight into the dungeon for a while.
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Re:Diablo by troebr on Friday July 21, 2023 @01:48PM (#36817028)
I think the loop that hooked me on game such as Diablo 1, Valheim, Subnautica, etc, is that cycle of safe place -> adventure -> "safe place, recharge, upgrade". The grindey aspect of Diablo 4 totally turned me off and if I buy the game it'll only be for the couch coop aspect.
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Re:Diablo by strictnein on Friday July 21, 2023 @02:04PM (#36817247)
Just an fyi - the couch coop for Diablo 4 is a little more work to get going than Diablo 3. Requires that the second player sign into their own PSN/XBL account and have that account tied to a Battle.net account:

https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platform...

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Re:Diablo by ohashi on Friday July 21, 2023 @02:01PM (#36817202)
The latest patch is an abomination to make it even slower, grindier and less fun. Save your money.
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Re:Diablo by giantrobot on Friday July 21, 2023 @02:01PM (#36817200)
I'm in the same boat. I loved Diablo 1 and 3, but Diablo 3 is just meh and I haven't even bothered with 4. The first two games it could be fun going through loot you'd found and try to optimize your character. There were only a few dimensions to each piece of equipment so finding the "best" a relatively easy. Even if you didn't have the absolute best stuff you could still play the game. The character optimization was an emergent part of the game, not the core focus of the game.

Diablo 3, especially with real money used to buy equipment, turned the CharOp into a core aspect of the game. If you didn't pay attention to that aspect the game could be mercilessly hard. So I couldn't just mindlessly play, I had to pause half way through the dungeon to go further tune all my gear across a dozen different dimensions.

The extra cognitive load means there's more steps between me sitting down and engaging something fun. If I have an hour to play a game having to spend ten minutes out of that time dealing with loot is just a tax on fun. It's bad enough that unless I play every day I have to wait some unbounded amount of time waiting for updates because of the forced online component.

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Re:Diablo by nntwozz on Friday July 21, 2023 @02:13PM (#36817373)
And now you have "seasons" on top of that grindfest that reset every three months.

Endlessly repeating one-armed bandit gameplay, throw battle passes on top and boom Bobby Kotick can show shareholders how successful the game is.

Why gaming sucks in '23 …it's the money.

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