The REAL REASON Why They Say "Diablo 4 is Bad"

Diablo 4 has a problem well multiple problems but not only do we all know that I think I can say for the first time about any game that I've played in recent memory that I actually believe the devs know that too now as much as I genuinely don't want to be just another YouTuber jumping on the Diablo drama farming bandwagon I feel that there's something really important that has been missing from the conversation with let's just say less fruitful discussion taking its place far too often and I'm hoping to perhaps shift the discussion to one more thoughtful and constructive the problem I want to talk about is the subtle one it doesn't jump right out and smack you in the face as often as say riding your horse into a wall or having your character feel significantly underpowered while you're progressing and yet in many ways this problem is at the heart of a massive portion of those other problems hurting the game right now that everybody is talking about and if properly addressed has the potential to have a massive positive ripple effect on the rest of the game drastically improving so much of the experience for brand new players experienced veterans and everybody in between let's jump right into it so I know that we've talked on stream before about I know our intentions for Diablo 4 being a game about Choice remains are our our our goal you know that's our that's that's our Guiding Light we're trying to make decisions on balance and uh and design in general uh we cannot make balanced decisions without us without kind of accounting for the way that players are going to feel about those things we're playing those classes like the if the goal of if you know if if our goal is to create an ultimately balanced experience you know uh without regard for how much fun the player is having as part of the uh as part of that exchange you know that's uh that's ultimately that would be like a failure in our part to not kind of think about things so I want to talk about uh our mission statement for the live game so there there are four four parts to this we're gonna start with the first part um we we want the live game to always have a wide variety of viables to discover to put together to acquire the items for and to optimize across all five of our classes and of course ultimately what we're trying to do is make the game more fun for players right players are at the heart of everything that we're doing ultimately arpgs are about power fantasy right and they're about us inviting players to break the game to some extent and find fun toys that we've made do crazy things with them and we need to make sure that we aren't trying to punish players for doing that like because ultimately that's the play that's the playground we built that's like that we built the game that's like go find crazy stuff and we need to make sure that when players uh take that invitation we're not punishing them for that when the developers talk about player choice the unstated premise underlying the conversation is that the choices they're providing players aren't blind choices of course when they say they want players to have choices we have to assume they want their players to make informed decisions right now I contend that it's here at the crossroads of player choice and player understanding that's where the breakdown begins to occur the problem I want to talk about is one of communication or should I say lack thereof now I don't mean communication in the context of the devs communicating with the community which I actually think they're doing a fairly decent job what I mean by communication is best explained with specific examples of which I have a few spanning all of the major systems in the game from itemization to character stats in-game mechanics UI and ux and more now all of the examples I'm going to be discussing are issues related to the game failing to communicate something important to players which in my opinion is ultimately setting them up to fail in one way or another the first of such examples that disproportionately happens to hurt the newest and more casual players of the game the folks very likely making up the vast majority of the player base is one related to character stats and our understanding of them with one of the best examples being attack power for all intents and purposes attack power is a meaningless number that shouldn't be compared referenced or mid-maxed the complexity of the countless interactions that take place with every attack in Diablo from critical strikes to Lucky hits overpowers to vulnerability wrathful hearts that ramp up your attack speed or convert direct hits over a period of time into Amplified AOE explosions and other unique effects that leave puddles of debuffing blood or Trails of crowd controlling frost on the ground simply put makes the idea of having a single number that attempts to summarize how powerful you are completely and utterly absurd let me give a simple and obvious example of this my rogue is a twisting blades Rogue my attack power right now is 8014. these gloves not only add four ranks to my core scale twisting blades but increase my crit Chance by nine percent and my attack speed by 13.8 percent and are imprinted with a legendary aspect that can increase my damage another 30 percent what do you think happens to my attack power when I take my gloves off literally nothing I've objectively massively reduced my damage output and yet attack power a stat that claims to be an evaluation of the damage that you deal remains completely unchanged it's genuinely depressing how many times I've seen comments from community members in my chat on Forum posts or Reddit threads or YouTube comments saying but my attack power is X so why am I so underpowered I'd be willing to bet the majority of folks who think that this number is Meaningful probably don't realize that it displays something different in town than it does as soon as you leave town and might show something entirely different as soon as you begin attacking or using any of your abilities so even if this number could accurately predict their damage output which it doesn't looking at the value in town when most people are actually looking at their stats would probably be the worst possible time to do so if you give players a number and use visual language to give it the impression of significance or importance like putting it as the first of three primary stats above your life total and armor value they're going to take that at face value assume that it's crucial and try to min max that number when newer players who don't know what all of the athix is on their gear mean and who don't know how to properly compare one item versus another are faced with such a choice why would they not opt to go with what's seemingly the most obvious decision the one that maximizes their attack power this is an example of player choice without agency in the purest sense it's the illusion of choice attack power serves only as a crutch that at best allows inexperienced players to make what they think are quantitative objective decisions without needing to actually learn the actual mechanics and systems of the game and at worst slows down their progression and diminishes their experience entirely because they're perpetually underpowered and have no clue as to why it's no wonder that so many people are blaming the game for being too slow or too grindy when the game trains them to focus on oversimplified misleading stats that largely don't matter rather than training them to understand the game's systems and mechanics it's no wonder so many people are crying about their bad RNG because they didn't get lucky and find the one or two items with the exact stats they swear would make their build come online because they don't know how to follow build guides when the people that make the guides all too often don't explain the why behind the builds and so many of these builds are designed on the knife edge of being remotely viable or not depending on one or two core synergies it's no wonder so many people are blaming the devs for nerfing this class or that build because they heard it was good before when they watched some video a few weeks back that talked about how it was op how all the content made about Diablo talks about how the best stats on items are vulnerable damage and critical strike damage so these new players dedicate their time to replacing the items that maximize their attack power with these supposedly better stats it takes forever to get those items because they're killing things so goddamn slowly because they're underpowered and when they finally gather all of the gear and are ready to really start doing some damage nothing changes because they're level 26 and have no way of making enemies vulnerable in their crit chance is eight percent now very much related to character stats are some of the issues that I covered in significantly more detail in my first Diablo 4 video on itemization if you haven't checked it out I would highly recommend it when it comes to item power and quality I.E sacred versus ancestral the game has some players so convinced of one thing that when shown clear and incontrovertible evidence that one thing is not true they double down like flat earthers being shown video from the ISS what makes this whole thing worse is that it's still impossible to know the intent of so much of the itemization because of the ambiguity and inconsistency of it all between what we've experienced in the preseason to what we saw happen as soon as season one started all the way until a few days ago with patch 1.1.1 from character level requirements to the possible item Power Ranges of various qualities to the possible ranges and values of each of their affixes and the rules surrounding re-rolling stats as well as the proc rates of certain conditional effects and some of the ordering and interactions between chains of multiple related conditional effects when it's all based on RNG anyway coupled with changes that occurred during major patches and hotfixes that are referenced in the patch notes but are done so in vague and confusing ways to Major balancing changes to items that only apply to items picked up after the Patch so every discussion surrounding them gets bogged down with questions of where and when items were looted and how that compares with our car and understanding of either the original or the new intended behaviors and even more changes that were not included in any patch notes for whatever reason or explained in such a way that seemed consistent with how it worked before or how it works now but nevertheless keep changing in terms of behavior it currently feels impossible to know what changes are intentional when what we see is confusing because of the complexity of interactions coupled with all of the RNG involved or because they're unintentional bugs that we should actually be reporting rather than trying to make sense of now the next set of examples are related to the state of the player the enemies that were fighting in the environment that we're playing in now a bunch of this has been discussed ad nauseam quite a bit in the community already although I think I might have some fresh takes we all know about the issues related to all of the on-death effects exploding corpses poison pools shock lances and now it's all too often impossible to see what's going on around us leading to confusing frustrating deaths all you have to do is watch any of the hardcore death compilation videos and you'll see that most of these deaths involve one or more of these issues this is just another set of examples of a breakdown in communication between the game and the player the game wants us to know something so that we can react accordingly it obfuscates that information from us in countless ways while simultaneously punishing us for not knowing it was there we've all had the discussions related to the endless amount of chains he's seeing that happens in the game and the devs have responded saying that they're going to be reducing it but I hope they also consider what's a large related part of this issue how the game communicates their own character state to the player whenever I talk about this people always bring up the player highlight feature and ask me why I don't have it on when in fact I do and as far as I can tell it's almost completely broken so broken in fact that in my hundreds of hours of playing D4 one of the most shocking things that immediately stood out to me was the one time I noticed player highlighting actually working as intended you can literally see the confusion on my face I had to go back and review the clip to see if what I thought I saw actually happened and ever since then all I can think is why isn't this the way that it looks all the time is the feature broken or does it just not work how I expect it to work whatever this is I want it to look like this all the time whenever the visibility of my character is limited we've got limited time to react to what's happening around us and although some of the time when we're chained cc'd we'd have no options other than to sit and die there are tons of moments where we do actually have options but we sit wasting precious fractions of seconds clicking and mashing buttons wondering what's going on without realizing that we're stunned knocked down or frozen solid and by the time that we do it's too late most people immediately jump to complaining about the CC and reasonably so but what they tend to forget is that there were two seconds where they thought that they were in the middle of those mobs attacking killing enemies hitting life on kill and regenerating resources but in reality they were actually just standing there doing nothing but taking damage if they could clearly see their character in the center of all of those mobs behind all of the on-screen effects standing there Frozen in place by that cold Enchanted Elite they might have had a chance to use that Unstoppable ability before it was too late these are the kinds of problems that aren't always as they appear at face value and we need to be sure that we consider the underlying or alternative explanations of some of these problems that we all complain about on the regular now the weirdest thing to me is that one of the best things the game does to communicate something important about our character in combat is when we're not actively in combat if we happen to have a menu open and we get attacked the game actually gives us audio visual indication that we're in trouble it's arguably more helpful and useful than most of what the game communicates to us about what's going on when we're actually actively playing it so many people complain about the horse and I'll make no excuses for this war crime of a mount but nobody talks about what's in my opinion the biggest factor that contributes to it being so clunky and that's that we have absolutely no idea where we're going and what's going to be in our way because the camera and map are zoomed in about 300 more than it should be when your horse is actually moving at a good clip given how zoomed in the map and Camera are you really only have a few milliseconds to react to the obstacles suddenly appearing in our way which is a huge reason why we're constantly crashing into now if you're playing with mouse and keyboard the horse's speed is based on the cursor's distance from the horse so when we're racing to get to the world boss on time we're incentivized to move that Mouse as far away as possible which is extremely awkward given the dimensions of the screen and how this was implemented now the worst example of this is if we happen to be riding South because the skill bar takes up literally one-fifth of the vertical area of the screen so if we want to ride downwards at any reasonable speed we have to like thread the needle to place our Mouse in the little sliver of open space to the bottom of the screen and even then our already insanely limited field of view is restricted almost entirely to a few feet in front of us so we have no idea what we're riding towards in terms of enemies or obstacles and we have no time to react which is why we're constantly crashing and complaining about our horse getting hung up on all kinds of obstacles now the same can be said even when we're on foot especially when trying to path our way further into dungeons find our friends nearby or locate whatever the current Quest objective is the camera and map only let us see what's basically directly in front of us there's no map overlay like Diablo 2 so we're constantly having to stop what we're doing to open up the full screen map which is constantly resetting its position and zoom level every single time we open and close it to figure out where we want to go to avoid accidentally backtracking taking the wrong turn in the opposite direction of where we want to go or coming to some dead end now even if the devs are dead set on not giving us a map overlay setting in the game like we had for D2 imagine if we could just hover our Mouse over the little mini map and scroll our Mouse wheel down to zoom out just like we do in the normal map wouldn't this view far more effectively communicate where the hell we are and where we want to go rather than what we have currently and don't even get me started on some of the boss fights it's actually not bad during World boss fights and we even get a painful tease of what it could be as we approach the Uber Lila fight but as soon as we get a little closer it zooms back in so far that half of the waves or boils are off screen are covered by the skill bar so a massive portion of the time we die it's to something off screen that we never saw that's not our fault as players that's the game's fault the Elias fight is actually one of the better boss fights in the game there's a ton that's really awesome about it that literally every other boss fight should learn from but it's still painfully close to actually being great now this might be a hot take but I wish we had unlimited evades and if we did this and other fights like it wouldn't be as bad as they are we've got limited movement speed a long cooldown on our evade and maybe a Mobility skill if we're lucky like teleporter Dash with an even longer cooldown so the vast majority of the time that we're fighting the boss we don't have any options when it comes to how to respond to what happens in the fight now so much of the fight actually accounts for this by reasonably telegraphing the attacks such that we have time to do whatever we need to to respond accordingly but then like halfway through the fight it all comes crashing down when we can't even see the boss because he's either off-screen or otherwise not clearly visible so any telegraphing of his attacks aren't visible either the missiles he's firing at you are obscured by the 50 mobs he just spawned that are all quickly swarming you and every Mobility option that you have is on cooldown so you can't really effectively Dodge anything and the room remaining attacks that are telegraphed either have janky hitboxes or unreasonable timing so even if you do think you've timed the evade well you still get hit and die these are all communication issues at their core now let's Circle back to the idea that we opened the video with player choice the developers want us to feel as if we have the freedom to Theory craft and experiment with new builds they want us to experience the fun and enjoyment that comes from discovering all of the unique and interesting synergies and interactions that they've spent all of their time designing they recently reduced the refund costs for skills and Paragon points something by 40 which is for sure a step in the right direction but in my opinion not only isn't enough to give the players The Experience they want us to have but also makes me think they perhaps might not be seeing the bigger picture I forget about the costs associated with re-rolling stats then removing our ability to have any amount of control over this process that we used to have with the quote-unquote priority affixes or the golden material cost associated with extracting and imprinting the often rare and finite resource that are decently rolled legendary aspects personally on numerous occasions I felt more punished than rewarded for my own testing and experimenting with new builds how could it possibly feel worth the cost and risk when we don't really understand the fundamental underlying stats and interactions related to our characters their abilities or our items and unfortunately it doesn't stop there in an alternate universe this wouldn't be so bad if we had any reasonable chance of really understanding the end result of our creativity and tinkering but even this is an entirely other challenge that I think the devs need to consider and address forget about the simple problems associated with the visibility and legibility of the countless damage and Status effect pop-up labels that are overlapping each other covering the entire screen whenever we're testing new skills weapons or changes to our build the simplest and most straightforward question that we're trying to answer is are we doing more damage or not now if you're actually interested in understanding the implications of your changes from even the most basic level of complexity like being able to determine something like how varying your damage or attack speed values in different combinations will result in your overall net damage output to figure out if all of the changes that you made to vulnerable or crit or overpower have affected how quickly you're able to kill groups of mobs versus your capability against bosses then you get your work cut out for you unless you plan on recording your gameplay and frame by Framing your attacks painstakingly Gathering all of the damage pop-up numbers on screen and entering them into a spreadsheet somewhere before and after all of your changes all you really have to go on is your subjective feeling of if it feels better or not which itself doesn't feel good even then if you were to do all of that I'm not convinced that you would have an accurate picture of what the actual outcome was from all of your changes and what's worse when the inevitable moment comes when you find out that that neat idea you had about some cool new build or interaction turns out to not have been all that great you've very likely made irreversible or destructive changes to all of your gear while simultaneously burning through an amount of crafting resources that you couldn't reasonably predict ahead of time leaving you stuck without money without resources and potentially without a character that will be effective or enjoyable to head back out and rebuild the devs need to try to look at it from the player's perspective and then ask themselves an important question if the joy of experimentation is something that they want the players to experience if that experience involves a considerable investment of time money and resources takes place largely in the dark regarding the fundamental underlying mechanics and systems and the final total investment and overall result is almost entirely unpredictable then why would or should any of us bother at all Theory crafting new builds and testing new play styles could be one of the most attractive answers to the question of what to do to keep players more involved and invested in the end game but instead it feels like a costly and cumbersome risk that only ever feels worthwhile to the top few percent of players who have seemingly unlimited time and resources at their disposal it's no surprise that most players don't want to Bear the burden of this and instead rely on following build Guides of whatever the hot new meta build of the day is is that really what the devs want a massive portion of the community running the same copy pasta at cookie cutter builds that two or three content creators put together all too often we don't know where our characters are where our friends are or where they need to go we don't know as much as we should about how we build our characters what their stats mean how their abilities work by themselves or how they interact with other skills in gear I'd be willing to bet that less than one percent of the player base could accurately describe how lucky hit chance Works what stats or abilities add multiplicative or additive damage what the distinction is between the two and how each affects your actual damage output how armor damage reduction and resistances work and what the various trade-offs are between each or how the fortify and barrier features work and what the differences are between those we don't know what's happening with our characters in combat what the enemies are doing when we're fighting them and even what they're doing after they've died at the core of so many of the problems that frustrate the community on a daily basis is fundamentally a communication problem the devs say they want us to have fun and I genuinely believe them when they emphasize how much importance they place on player choice I'm hoping they recognize how important being properly informed is when it comes to those choices feeling meaningful satisfying and rewarding in order for us to actually be informed something has to change when it comes to the game effectively communicating how our decisions are going to impact our experience and I'm hoping that they extend that not only to everything related to properly understanding stats and builds but also the UI and ux before during and after combat so how could this all be addressed as is always the case with things like this there are Myriad valid Solutions I've got a few ideas that I think are worth sharing but these of course aren't the only or best ones by any means just some food for thought as I mentioned earlier the recent change to reduce the refund cost of paragon nodes was overall a good thing but it kind of missed the mark for me as I see the problem a little bit differently and anybody who's done any serious build planning on any of the various sites out there might know what I'm talking about here now imagine if in game we had the ability to pre-plan our entire Paragon starting at level 50 when we unlocked it being able to nicely preview all of the board options and Tinker with the endless combinations of order and orientation of each would make Paragon planning infinitely more enjoyable removing a bunch of the arbitrary constraints and limitations that the UI imposes on us right now by allowing us to maybe pre-select nodes that we haven't passed to yet on boards we haven't yet gotten to planning it all out from a top-down approach starting with what we know we want like which glyphs on which boards in what order then filling in the radius of each as desired then maybe pathing towards the legendary nodes or clusters of rare nodes that we know we want ultimately then connecting the dots with what's left over at the end all of that would allow for actual planning and might actually incentivize advise people to invest a little bit of time in learning and designing their own Paragon setups rather than rolling into whatever Diablo 4 stream they can find to ask to see the streamer's Paragon so they can just copy it exactly this would be a far less painful experience if we could know what we were investing in before we already invested a ton into it but right now unless you copy someone else's you're likely going to realize that you did it all wrong or it was terribly inefficient about 70 percent of the way through the process meaning that you're gonna have to likely start all over which in and of itself remains an annoying unfun time and money sync imagine being able to fill out a board and then save it as a preset you could then switch back and forth between an Uber Lilith and viewment build a dungeon clearing trap build and then a PVP Focus build all by quickly and easily swapping out a couple of boards swapping over 405 skills and then moving around a couple pieces of gear all too often I see people complaining about them not finding any gear upgrades for the last 30 levels of their grind and how they have no goals and are getting bored and a large part of why they're bored is because their character is effectively done now imagine if you had a couple of Paragon and skill presets that you could easily switch back and forth between well now they immediately have a new goal trying to find a bunch of items and aspects that they're going to need for these different builds even though they've got the best in slot gear on their current build maybe they want to try out some other kind of build that would focus on different stats and abilities conceptually simple changes like letting us pre-plan our Paragon and all kinds of different preset systems we'll make respecting not only less costly as we're not wasting points on nodes that we won't know aren't good Investments until 30 Paragon points from now but it's better than that because it also makes it less cumbersome annoying more enjoyable and rewarding and keeps us invested in planning and Theory crafting later on into our character progression now how about being able to customize or filter what's being displayed during combat like damage and Status effect labels personally I only care to see the vulnerable label pop up when I'm fighting a boss I don't need or want to see the 50 vulnerables pop up every time I hit every pack of trash mobs and most of the time I only care about my damage numbers when they're a crit or an overpower of being able to do something like setting a minimum threshold that would need to be exceeded before the game would display a damage value on screen could be a really nice quality of life improvement from three different perspectives Not only would it improve the overall Clarity of the UI but it could also have performance implications as much less visual processing would be needed when there's already a million mobs and effects on screen and if for example damage numbers only popped up over say a million damage that could actually serve as a valuable tool when testing our damage output as it turns a million overlapping illegible labels constantly on screen into a small handful of easily readable indications of only the most significant damage events improving our testing and Theory crafting now absent some Suite of features that could give us extremely detailed analytics related to our character's performance like some kind of console commands that would spit out the average incoming or outgoing damage values on screen like an FPS overlay or some fully featured testing ground area with Target dummies or something like that both of which I think are almost definitely wishful thinking I have one last idea that I want to propose directly to the devs and if any of you are watching and you take anything away from this video let it be this my idea involves this guy and the best part is it doesn't have to break anybody's immersion we pulled the knife out of his heart like two months ago and not only is he still not Dead We Know This creepy old pervert is a glutton for punishment more and more and more I say you make him a valid enemy Target and you give him infinite HP let him be a Target dummy that will give us a consistent source for testing our damage output under some remotely controlled circumstances let us have a reliable way to be able to do a little bit of science to be able to compare gear or abilities with different stats and interactions when we're not surrounded by a million trash mobs or getting hit by lightning strikes or meteor showers inside dungeons so we can begin to learn a little something about the stats interactions and systems inside of the game that many of us still very much enjoy to play but might be frustrated that we don't fully understand because when we have the ability to control and test we can learn and when we learn we become informed and when we're informed we'll be that much closer to truly having the choice that you say you want us to have now if you guys have any thoughts on this I'd love to hear it in the comments and if you enjoyed this little rant and want to see more content like it providing thoughtful and constructive criticism in an attempt to advocate for the community to hopefully make the game better please consider liking the video and subscribing to the channel until next time thanks for watching [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Veritas

Views: 63,628

Keywords: diablo 4, diablo IV, d4, d4 bad, diablo, diablo immortal, diablo 3, diablo 2, d2, d3, problems, issues, bad, bugs, fix, blizzard, developers, devs, season 1

Id: ZC-545CyfH4

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023