No it wasn't. I used to buy AAA games with 25 and 30$, what are you talking about?
Not at release, but on heavy discount sure. Triple A however never had a 25-30 dollar price point. Stop making up nonsense.
That's another problem IMO. You have a battle-pass and store in a paid game. The only justification of which are to support the ongoing development of the game. That they are going to charge $30 - $60 for expansions is pretty crazy, where exactly is the micro-transaction money going?
Repetitive isn't necessarily bad (rouge-like games provide many examples of this) but Diablo IV doesn't really evolve on the formula in any significant manner. Diablo 1 and 2 had a repetitive end-game because the dev team was very small relative to the Diablo IV. Given the time constraints, the D1 and D2 dev teams did what they could with the resources at hand. There's no such excuse for Diablo IV, where they had vastly more resources and instead of choosing to innovate they choose to populate. I'm not saying change the whole game either, just that the formula used here is somehow more stable than COD at this point.
You have a game that launched at $70 and a portion of the content can only be had on the store. Whether it's integral to the game or not is irrelevant, how can you definitely say that content would not be a weapon or armor skin in the game given it was available day 1 on the store and probably make alongside the rest of the content? In most other AAA games, that is base game content.
None of which changes the morality of Activation-Blizzard's past actions. You are vastly over-simplifying how easy it is to just leave a job and how little modern days workers have to cover up the fact that you are supporting those bad business practices. If you are going to point the finger out the employees at least have the introspective to see your own culpability in enabling their actions as well.
This is a rather pessimistic view of your own country given the Netherlands ranks pretty high in most regards. The Netherlands has always had a culture of the sixes and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
At the end of the day you are paying $70 + $60 or whatever they ask for the expansions and you aren't even getting the full experience. You are getting some watered down experience because the game is designed around enticing you to purchase the battle-pass / from the store. At the end, even if you don't personally get the battle-pass / purchase from the store your actions are tacid approval of further monetization. The base game already cordon's off skins that otherwise would have been in the base game's loot lists so clearly you have demonstrated to Acti-Blizzard that you are fine with it.
I agree, the game does play really smooth and that it is stronger than D3. That said I hold D3 in very low regard given I played it at launch to a year after and dropped it because the endgame was terrible. By the time they actually started adding significant content to the game I was already done with the game. There's a lot of reused assets from D3 and repetition of enemies is more than I'd like in D4 and considering Diablo 3 already provided them with so much, it was really not a huge task for them to get D4 to where it is today.
While not strictly in the same genre, both Gunfire reborn and Hades demonstrate concepts that you could integrate into looter shooters and ARPGs respectively.
Most ARPGs follow the same formula of grinding or RNG but what many of them don't realize is that you can vastly improve the genre by adding additional elements of skill to the gameplay. Series like borderlands already do this to a very small extent with their staged boss fights but it only rises to the level of taking the game from completely generic bosses to palatable. It's odd given that both Gunfire reborn, Hades, and even games like darksouls incorporate concepts from bosses in WoW yet blizzard itself has yet to do so in a significant manner. D4 does have boss stages (same as D3) but they are very underwhelming and not memorable. Have more dynamic regular mods would go a long way as well. Not every fight has to revolve around throwing more numbers at the problem, that's just the easy way to do things.
That's really not comparable to what Acti-blizzard has done. Most every game company has crunch, most every company does not have a "Crosby" suite among other issues. Those are just the ethical issues, people quickly forget that Acti-Blizzard has been picking up grievances related to their games quickly the last few years. People seem to have completely forgotten the D3 auction house or Diablo Immortal (I could also write a 3 essays on how Blizzard screwed OW players over but I'll refrain for now). In fact D4 is basically some of the mobile concepts from Immortal applied to a AAA title. They are pretty clearly testing the limits of what people will tolerate and it seems they've found it. When Diablo 3 had the auction house, quite literally the drops were setup so that you would specifically get a very low drop rate and mostly got drops for other classes than the one you are playing, in essence forcing you to use the auction house to buy / sell. I have a couple thousand hours in D3 to prove that. Surely this same company, which has only gotten worse since then, won't take D4 sales as a node of affirmation that they can crank up the monetization. I got a pinky promise from Bobby. My words are a warning from experience, I can only hope that people listen.
Extra store cosmetics are now part of a base game gotcha. You have a peculiar lens on that, honestly. Those cosmetics were
never in any of the games, they look awful, and they're completely pointless. If you feel like that should have ever been part of a base game you oughta get your head examined, seriously. I don't, and never will. The fact some shitty suits are in a game
with other monetization is completely irrelevant too. This is a norm now, if you haven't noticed. Good luck avoiding every game that monetizes cosmetics, you won't be playing much. And a vast number of those games
also push DLC content, often fragmenting
real game content in little 5-10-15 or even 20 dollar packs. There is a difference here between types of content sold post launch, you can handily talk around that, but you and I both know that's a BS argument. If transmogging was removed from the base game/only possible with store transmog coins or whatever... then you would have had a point. And even then, I still wouldn't care. I loot mobs to get stronger, not look in the mirror.
The rest is repetition, I've already covered the whole affair at length
If you like ARPG's, D4 is a fine title. If you never really did, but just casual'd your way through some of them in your days, D4 is more of the same and it won't grab you. I think I can see that distinction and I'm with you on that too - D4 'as a game with a story' is pretty weak. D4 as an ARPG with lots of replay value though is pretty strong and it has some elements other ARPGs just don't have, such as vibrant online activity which could matter especially towards the end game. And there is nothing monetized in it or on it that wasn't before. Seasonal content
IS AVAILABLE without buying passes. Its the same thing as an Apex battle pass - you get extra bullshit to feed some emotional need for progression bars that fill up and 'levels gained' that aren't actually levels at all. Again, you're avoiding the crucial distinction here in what makes MTX unacceptable combined with a full game purchase, and what makes them acceptable. You may not look at it that way, that's fine. I do.
I don't give a shit about any of the extra monetization options and I never did, despite playing several dozen games heavily pushing all of the above. I pay for
actual content. And D4 has a lot of that - in its $70,- base game. They populated a world with dungeons and somewhat repetitive environments, correct. Welcome to the ARPG? This isn't new. D2 is chock full of repetitive dungeons, what makes it tick is the randomized nature of them. What's new is that I'm now 30+ hours in, still not max level, still unlocking new things and still with 4 Acts of Story to go. The world is still half undiscovered on my end. That's not bad at all. I'm not bored either, despite samey dungeons where yes, you can see they're stitching together pieces of road to make a map - again... what's new?
People seem to act like the world is burning with every AAA release now, D4 isn't the right candidate though. You're really making mountains out of moleheaps here to get D4 in the outrage category imho, when the fact is we have an expansive game with pretty ok content. Is this the next GOTY? Far from it. Is it a solid ARPG? Most definitely. And that's all it is. There are five classes to play around with and you can take them really, really far in terms of playtime. If that progression curve is what you want in a game, D4 has it. Its really that simple and everything else, from Store to whatever side quests you do or don't do is secondary. You grind mobs and that's the game. Could they have innovated more? Sure. Would that have been a smash hit? We can't say. What I can say is that what IS innovation in the game, such as its dodge, or some new keywords and effects, so far works well. I'll take small improvements that work over reworked systems that don't, to be honest.
Comparisons to other Blizzard screwups of late... myeah. Ever since Immortal I've taken the position that Blizzard had D4 as its final saving grace to be worth any further look in the future. I
don't forget. Never. You assume too much.
I said this in the What are you playing topic too... I'd rate D4 a 7/10. Whether that means $70,- worth of good is personal
But the monetization angle or the 'Blizz bad' angle... pfffff get a life.
That's really not comparable to what Acti-blizzard has done. Most every game company has crunch, most every company does not have a "Crosby" suite among other issues. Those are just the ethical issues, people quickly forget that Acti-Blizzard has been picking up grievances related to their games quickly the last few years. People seem to have completely forgotten the D3 auction house or Diablo Immortal (I could also write a 3 essays on how Blizzard screwed OW players over but I'll refrain for now). In fact D4 is basically some of the mobile concepts from Immortal applied to a AAA title. They are pretty clearly testing the limits of what people will tolerate and it seems they've found it. When Diablo 3 had the auction house, quite literally the drops were setup so that you would specifically get a very low drop rate and mostly got drops for other classes than the one you are playing, in essence forcing you to use the auction house to buy / sell. I have a couple thousand hours in D3 to prove that. Surely this same company, which has only gotten worse since then, won't take D4 sales as a node of affirmation that they can crank up the monetization. I got a pinky promise from Bobby. My words are a warning from experience, I can only hope that people listen.
Well... in fact, what Blizzard has done is try horrible things and a massive banhammer was returned to them, upon which they altered course.
Diablo Immortal was the PR screw up of the century. Its not going places either.
en.wikipedia.org
"
Immortal received mixed reviews, with praise for its combat, graphics, and the adaption of
Diablo to mobile, while criticism targeted the plot, voice acting, and the game's focus on microtransactions. It became the lowest user-rated game on
Metacritic in response to microtransactions and the progression system."
Blizzard, like Microsoft, has been known to make drastic changes when they get it wrong. And most of the time they still end up with a product that is high quality, high polish, and always backed by the most solid patch and balancing pass regime in games known to man. You were asking what you're paying for with all those MTX. That's it. The patches never end, tweaks happen all the time.
You say you have thousands of hours in D3. That just means you're burned out from this formula perhaps ...
Let's just define the ground rules - only discuss the game itself. Not the world around it. We can whine in the certain-to-come upcoming news flashes about outrage #58710
