Games

Yep. They're gonna Overwatch that shit. And everything else from now on.

that statement is seriously dystopian

Really sad what became of Blizzard.

They provided Diablo II (2001) with updates until 2016.
Starcraft (1998) became freeware in 2017 and received patches until 2022.

Look at what they just did for the new D2R ladder season. There were literally no patches at all. They just reset the ladder. It's not like there are any glaring problems cough cough mosiac cough cough that need to be fixed or anything.

Successful in terms of cash, which I'd imagine is the most common metric people look for. Now whether gamers will look back on bg3 or d4 more fondly? You decide!!

Oh fuck, is PoE supposed to be free? I've spent like $1000 on it in the last 10 years in cosmetics, stash tabs, and character slots.

After hearing what happened with Diablo Immortal I decided to wait a month before even considering it. Glad I did.

I'm always flabbergasted that 100h of gameplay is considered a failure of a product.

Probably because companies do their best to hide most metrics of purchases and players. Remember when some smart fella used the hyper accurate steam achievements to be able to derive how many people owned a game? Steam patched that out and now the best metric is based on number of review scores but that depends on the game, genre and score rating etc...

Endgame sucks.

Scaling content means there's little power scaling variety, viable builds are very narrow so there's not much build variety, the leveling curve is punishingly slow because they are trying to live service it, and seasons have lame rewards and boring features so far. Dungeon variety is nearly non-existent and poorly randomized with time wasting objective design.

Also it's a Diablo game where none of the endgame content takes place in Hell.

TL;DR: Designing games as a live service means designing around time wasting and anti-player choices.

Well compared to D2, the progression was reverse linear, you started off strong at Level 1, and cleared rooms and then you became weaker as you levelled up.

To maintain your strength, you needed to have the optimal gear in every slot (head, armor, gloves, boots, etc), and have an optimal spec.

The issue was that the items were egregiously generic, and were replaced pretty much on a constant basis, anything you picked up was an upgrade until Level 50, when "Sacred" and "Artifact" became a class, and your entire inventory was outdated.

The main issue was they began by making Diablo: Immortal, a mobile game and midway through development remembered it's a PC game and not a mobile micro transaction machine, and kept the MT shop in the game regardless (which retails for $100, mind you)

I'm a Diablo 1&2 Veteran, who has meleed Uber Diablo to death with a Fury Druid in 2022, soloed Diablo in 1996 with a Warrior, and I've never been more bored playing an ARPG than Diablo 4.

My best friend is a stoner, so he got far more value out of it. To be fair, he also gets a lot of value out of staring at walls, so there's that.

From my time playing it, the looting wasn't satisfying nor was the combat. In looting, the drop rate of things good or useful for your class seemed too low. For combat, it kinda felt like there were wild swings in difficulty that made level progress kinda disappointing. Some of this may have been fixed more recently; I have not played in at least two months.

They forgot to make it fun.

The short and sweet answer is that it's just not Diablo. It does not compare with any of the previous Diablo releases in the slightest. It might as well be a generic mobile game like immortal...

In D2 finding gear felt fun. Runes were rare but powerful and sets/legendaries offered different build paths. You also had control over magic find with the ability to lower your power to increase magic find.

D3 (much later) expanded sets so that a number of builds were viable per class, making it fun to find any piece of gear. They also added rifts to challenge yourself to no end. The devs liked watching people push higher tiers and celebrated it.

D4 does not have runes or sets. Every legendary effect can to removed from the legendary and added to any yellow piece of gear. As a result, you're typically chasing random yellow items for a .1% increase that all feels very samey until you find a unique. Currently, uniques are not even close to all being viable. Also blizz activity monitors unique drop rates and decreases them/bans people for finding ways to increase drop rates. The devs do not like people pushing harder stuff because that means they spending less time looking at the intentionally shitty (free) transmogs. They want you to grind away for days to get incremental success so you tire of your looks and buy skins and battle passes. If that explanation sucks, then I have no fucking idea what they're doing. Maybe they expect us to grind because they don't know how to create more content?

Just my 2 cents but could be the extra 2 Billion people in the world since release. When wow came out internet wasn't as widespread and fast as now, as well as anyone buying into wow after the 2nd or 3rd expansion might have trepidation with the sheer amount of content.