|
Post by Greatshot on Jun 4, 2023 23:12:40 GMT -5
So, Blizzard has deservedly earned it's negative reputation in the past decade or so. Between the massive bait and switch with OW2, the debacle with China, the absolute embarrassment of Warcraft: Reforged, the trash fire that was Diablo III's launch era (and it's equally trash fire of a story), they've been a shitty company and I didn't have a whole lot of high hopes for the latest in my favorite murder-all-the-things-for-their-shineys series*. But D4.. is.. is good. Shockingly so. THIS is the sequel Diablo 2 was supposed to have. I just finished the campaign, so obviously the real meat of a Diablo game is the longevity and the endgame, but the game itself, impressive as hell (pun intentend). It truly feels like the Blizzard of old in a lot of ways - the world is dark and gruesome. Almost uncomfortably so - everything that was complained about the cartoonish look in 3 -- yeah they dialed up the gore and horror back to a level that the series hasn't had since the original game. It also is one of the most beautiful game worlds I've seen in a long time, filled with lots of neat little detail. And the music is right up there with the classics of 'zard's library. To avoid spoilers I'll be intentionally vague here, but the villains are actually well written and layered and feel like demons instead of the atrociously 80s cartoon nonsense of 3, and there's a couple of *really* cool boss fights, one of which, despite me calling it coming a few hours before we got there, still made me grin like a goddamned idiot when it happened. I do like that they kept the arcadey/mechanical aspects of 3's boss fights intact, that was one of the real great improvements of that game as opposed to the spam potions and hope you out-DPS the boss that 2 had. If the endgame/customization, which at glance, looks to be more complex than 3's, holds up, and they don't run it into the ground with monetization, this could be something special. Granted, it is ActiBlizz, so it's very likely they'll fuck it up, but this is the best game they've put out in a very long time. *No, Phantasy Star doesn't count. Original PSO is the only murder-all-the-things-for-their-shineys installment of that franchise I like. Universe was ass and 2's breathtakingly mediocre.
|
|
|
Post by darkseraph on Jun 5, 2023 4:09:05 GMT -5
So I was lazy and just watched the story on youtube.... which leads to my question. Is this a prequal or is it impossible to truly slay the evils?
|
|
|
Post by Greatshot on Jun 5, 2023 8:03:39 GMT -5
So I was lazy and just watched the story on youtube.... which leads to my question. Is this a prequal or is it impossible to truly slay the evils? Mild Spoilers (duh): It's a sequel, I didn't see anywhere a date was specifically mentioned, but judging by the age of a recurring character, it has to be roughly 30-40 years after Mathael's culling of humanity (D3: Reaper of Souls expansion). They pretty much address the "evil can never really be destroyed" elephant in the room in game, but the shattering of the Black Soulstone freed all 7 of the Evils at the end of the events of RoS anyways. Edit: Official timeline post says it's 50 years after RoS.
|
|
|
Post by darkseraph on Jun 6, 2023 17:09:44 GMT -5
So the whole idea of shattering the stones in 2 was pointless? On the other hand, they can keep milking the franchise. But question GS, did the cut scenes look off to you? there was 2 that looked high quality, the rest looked less impressive.
|
|
|
Post by Optimal Megatron on Jun 6, 2023 17:25:18 GMT -5
I mean, it's pretty clear Diablo is never going to permanently die in a franchise named after him.
|
|
|
Post by Greatshot on Jun 6, 2023 17:32:24 GMT -5
So the whole idea of shattering the stones in 2 was pointless? On the other hand, they can keep milking the franchise. But question GS, did the cut scenes look off to you? there was 2 that looked high quality, the rest looked less impressive. Basically Diablo 3 fucked the lore so badly that 4 is effectively a course correction. When Mephisto and Diablo's soulstones were shattered, it was *supposed* to "destroy them forever". However, they more or less retcon this into "trapping them back in hell without a physical form" in the events leading up to 3, and Kulle's Black Soulstone somehow snatches them out of Hell to create Voltron Diabla/The Prime Evil at the end of 3. When it's shattered by Mathael at the end of RoS, it effectively frees all 7 of them back into hell, but it seems like the Primes are effectively so badly damaged from the Dark Exile/Soulstone/Black Soulstone trifecta they're regenerating their essences (in hell) similar to how Tyreal had to do so after the events of LoD. It's veerry handwavy, but it works for the purposes of effectively setting things back to where they should be to bring them back properly. Mephisto's the only one you interact with/see in any form beyond name drops of the other two though. Seriously though, they tiptoe around 3 to an almost comedic degree. The background lore leading up to to 4 is pretty much "Deep dive of the Darkening of Tristram (1), deep dive of the Dark Wanderer (2), briefly acknowledging Cain being murdered by butterfly lady and the Invasion of Heaven, followed by the Reaping of Souls (which, despite supposedly culling a huge portion of humanity, and only being 50 years ago, seems to be completely forgotten by the population at large in 4). The characters of that game are, like the other 2 (aside from Aiden, they did acknowledge that retcon), simply referenced as heroes or adventurers. I don't think anyone in 4 even so much as uses the word Nephilim (which is basically a drinking game in 3), despite the fact that Rathma plays a big role in the backstory and he's litterally the first of them. edit: as for the cutscenes, I heard a lot of people were having issues with them because for some reason the game defaults to locking them at 30 FPS if you don't go in and manually uncheck that setting. I thought they looked pretty good but I also can't really think of too many other recent games I've played that have true pre-rendered cutscenes so I don't have much mental frame of reference.
|
|
|
Post by Optimal Megatron on Jun 17, 2023 15:31:58 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Greatshot on Jun 17, 2023 18:12:03 GMT -5
Yeah, I was playing (Not HC, I am nowhere *near* that sadistic) when it happened and when I got booted back to the launcher it was like "ffs, server messages were a thing 20 years ago. Really bliz?"
It's a pretty good foundation and I'm cautiously optimistic about where it'll be in 6 - 12 months due to how receptive they seem to be to feedback and how much more complex the base systems are than 3's, but yeah, there's a lot of stuff that seems to be a bit unpolished. I'm enjoying it but I've yet to really hit the true endgame and I'm beginning to see some concerning things. Nothing patches can't fix, but still.
|
|
|
Post by triumshockwave on Jun 18, 2023 12:05:51 GMT -5
I feel like any AAA release these days needs a month or two to cure into a proper state before I bother playing it. It's not even that shit should've been delayed like Cyberpunk, it's just that these games are so insanely complex that you will inevitably have a backlog of known issues when it launches, plus all the stuff that becomes apparent when tens of thousands of people start beating on the software.
|
|
|
Post by Greatshot on Jun 18, 2023 15:12:04 GMT -5
I feel like any AAA release these days needs a month or two to cure into a proper state before I bother playing it. It's not even that shit should've been delayed like Cyberpunk, it's just that these games are so insanely complex that you will inevitably have a backlog of known issues when it launches, plus all the stuff that becomes apparent when tens of thousands of people start beating on the software. 100% agreed. TBH there's maybe 2-3 games a year, tops, that I actually buy out of the gate. Generally I just wait til they hit GOTY editions or Steam sales or whatever as by then they're actually in "finished" state, but I'm an enormous sucker for Diablo, so it's on my shortlist. I went into it expecting lots of stuff to shake out balance wise, as they always do with those kinds of games once you have hundreds of thousands or millions of datapoints to look at vs a beta/dev test. That it's actually in good shape aside from that stuff, unlike the aforementioned Cyberpunk, or the other myriad of games that have launched litterally broken in the last couple of years, is a huge win, as sad as that is.
|
|