Gaming's Biggest Tragedy: The Rise And Fall Of Diablo 4

Fun fact: Right now there's more people watching videos about Diablo IV dying than people actually playing Diablo IV.

During my childhood Blizzard couldn’t get it wrong. As an adult, they can’t get it right.

The advertising was insane, i live in a village with 2 bus stops and they both had diablo 4 adverts on them

A great example of how companies don’t listen to the feedback from their player base and implement what they think we want.

Diablo3 item description: "Increase your damage by 5% for each ally within 30 yards." Diablo4 item description: "Increase your non-physical damage by 0.3% every time you spend 5 energy on a core skill while standing in a pool of blood when surrounded by at least 5 undead within 15 yards when your health is below 50% and "Reign of the Pointless Skill" has less than 4 seconds left on cooldown. This skill stacks up to 12 times but all stacks will drop if you fall asleep while playing and your wife hits you with the "Baseball Bat of the Gullible Idiot" for wasting your money on this tripe.

I do not know how anyone can be surprised by this after watching Blizzard for the past 10 years.

It’s free for a week on Steam right now. I’ve played a few hours and I’m wondering when it will start to get fun. It’s a shame nobody told them how important it was to hire an amazing foley artist. One of the best parts of Diablo, that helped to keep me playing, was the incredibly detailed and disturbing sound effects. Who else remembers the first time they heard the sound of their axe splitting open the skull of a Fallen? Like a watermelon splitting open and splattering its contents onto the pavement.

The main campaign was good and fun with nice graphics and the cinematics and characters were great also. The late game was boring and a chore to try to follow the limited events happening randomly, only to get useless loot. The dungeons were all built on the same mode - find the keys to open the door - to kill 2 elites - to kill a boss. Then seasons happen and there was no way on earth I will lvl up a new character for a few gameplay changes that will only last a couple of months. To me it was the same feeling I've had in D3, nice to try it for a while but I don't get why people tryhard to find some interest in it after that...I won't get back to that game since they won't change all those points and honestly I feel I'm tired of Blizzard games in general, there are way better games to play with...

That phrase, "Do you guys not have phones?!" Will forever go down in infamy.

This absolutely warms my heart to see Blizzard struggle, especially financially. They 100% brought this on themselves so I have less than zero sympathy for them.

It’s the result when sales people and accountants make the call, when the goal is to maximize profit rather than to optimize player experience, when the dedicated and passionate employees being replaced with people who just want a job, and when players keep supporting such greed.

Bit of a brain dump on this whole ordeal: For context, I've been playing Diablo with my dad for years now. I used to watch him play D2 when I was little, and that eventually led up to playing D3 when I was old enough to be introduced to that sort of thing. Neither of us are particularly interested in really truly no-life grinding out characters or seasons like madmen on D3, but it was always fun to sit down and just genuinely enjoy the game together. We liked the loud, overwhelming screens when you'd get to higher levels and into paragon and all that, and seeing just how much crazier everything got when we'd inevitably crank up the difficulty again every time was enjoyable, seeing how quickly we could disintegrate a boss' health bar. I've probably replayed D3's story mode more times than I can count, and actually speed-ran it for my friends a few times for fun. Personally I've never kept up with Blizzard as a company, nor the Diablo community online since I usually only ever played it with my dad since I was mostly interested in it solely for the Game itself, rather than where it came from or the people around it. I've pretty much experienced D3 in a vacuum chamber, and still consider it likely my favourite game, so when I stumbled on the D4 trailer (late might I add lol) I showed my dad and we agreed to pre-order it and eventually play it when it came out. It was hard to lock down time to play it, so We've only played it all of three times over the past 2 months as of May 2024, but we definitely got to the party WAY late, and I had no idea the game was such an enormous dumpster-fire until now. We did download immortal on the phone when it came out and were both pretty much baffled by how egregious all of the micro-transactions were, and lost interest pretty quickly. It just felt like such a far cry from what D2 and D3 were to us that it just wasn't worth it in the slightest, but we never looked into it any further than that. But setting up D4 we were also punched in the face by more micro-transactions the first damn screen we loaded up, so I just remember both of us being super baffled by it. Just- putting such a blatant cash grab as the first thing your players see when booting up a game didn't sit well. Especially so given we're supposed to be here for a story and a game to be experienced, not to just further paid for. But again, neither of us know much about Blizzard's history with this theme in recent years, so we just brushed it off. We aren't very far into the game yet, hardly level 27, but we're enjoying ourselves. It's pretty, and the updated animations and textures are cool, and the atmosphere is well built and executed... but that's sort of just it. it looks good I suppose, but if that's all that's to it then I'd rather go back to D3 once I'm done with the campaign mode. We're like, the filthiest of casual players mind you so if none of this holds ground I wouldn't be surprised, but it feels like there's very little direction given to the player on where to go or what to do. Not a bad thing mind you! But certainly frustrating for us when we're trying to figure out navigation through a bunch of menus that are lacking in explanation at best, completely baffling without an online query at worst. a lot of the menu navigation feels clunky in a way that D3's system certainly didn't, and I find a lot of little things that added a little charm to the older games is completely lacking here. I vividly remember reading through the descriptions for skills like with the Barbarian and seeing a hulk joke in the lore bit, or finding a headcrab helmet you could transmog, or finding silly enemies with sillier names, hell- even annoying my dad by rapidly running my joystick through my player menu was fun. Maybe I haven't played enough to make this call yet, but It just doesn't feel like I'm going to be finding those sorts of things in D4. It's really quite disheartening to learn that Blizzard has made such a mess of such a loving, hopeful community of people who just want to see their well-loved game be done right by. It's so strange to suddenly learn that a franchise I'd held in such high regard was reduced to a cash grab and immediate failure, especially having no prior context to any of it. If you've taken the time to read this, thank you. I know I don't offer insight or valuable knowledge to this discussion I'm several months late to, so I hope at the least I've numbed your brain a bit so it doesn't hurt too bad from the headache that was learning Blizzard's actions as a company. I appreciate your time here with me, stranger. Me and my dad are going to see D4 through to the end together regardless of what ends up happening; We're both just hoping there's a cow level :) 🐄

"No game in history has gone from 7 million down to less than 40k in a few months." Blizzard sets yet another record!

Blizzard is the best example that greed consumes the brain. A company that was known for innovative and exciting games and fan service now feels like it’s made up of people who have no interest in fans but only see dollars in their eyes. It’s a pity, but the downfall was initiated at the latest with the acquisition by Activision. R.I.P Blizzard.

Outstanding job on this video. It’s sad to see the direction of triple A gaming companies.

Ive never fought a world boss alone, theres always a huge crowd and i still play every day

The main problem with this game was that end game really made you feel like you were wasting your life playing it. Most games are pretty good at masking this, Diablo 4 featured it.

Ever since Diablo Immortal we all knew where this franchise was headed.

I feel like a lot of the issues I had with it were flow issues. Like if you get a legendary instead of getting an item that gets used up on the next use it should be like an unlock you can use as much as you want plus it would cut down on item storage issues. The gameplay of it was very lackluster and they didn't keep the focus the story needed.

Grew up with D2 first, then D1. One of the advantages of being poor is you get a better sense of what you want more. When D3 came out, I was jobless, and my computer was not powerful enough to play it. And I didn't have the money to play online. A few close peeps got it first and told me it sucked. 11 years later, not jobless now, but still don't have the hardware powerful enough to run D4. Been doing better things with my time anyway.