Escape from Diablov

"Diablo is now an extraction shooter, plumbing the pits of Hell for demon souls and runes to power your equipment."

I'm with you. 3 was great, I played from RoS on as well. 4 was trash. My specific gripe is it was way too much to get decent drops. Insanely hard. Yes you could get a set going but actually finding a perfect stat set for your build was a ridiculous grind.

I liked it gameplay wise, but the story … urgh. Typical comic book villain tropes. Taunting you with how awesome and cunning they are, just to vanish and leave you with one of their henchmen that you then slaughter. Repeat a few times, until they finally pretend to be really pissed off now and decide to spill their whole plan and why you have no chance of stopping them … just to be stopped.

The only thing the villains in D3 had was arrogance. Everything else was forgettable (to me).

Personally I liked D3 after it got rid of the AH bullshit. For the same reason that a lot of people disliked it: It’s relatively low complexity. People will look down on that as dumbing it down, but to me it’s just getting rid of uninteresting filler. I can’t stand those giant skill trees full of +x% this and +y that. It’s boring AND overwhelming. I have no interest in trying to make my own build in those games. D3 had a small number of choices that for the most part felt distinct enough to understand why you’d choose one over the other.

I also really liked that brief period in WoW where they changed the skill trees to those sets of 3 choices each level breakpoint. It was really interesting thinking about which choices would be most useful for any given situation instead of just looking up a guide then forgetting about it until next expansion.

Alas, they went back to boring number increases because people mistake complexity for depth. This is why I really enjoy roguelikes. The well designed ones give you those bite sized choices with big impacts on your run and the depth comes from understanding the system and your current situation rather than mathing out the optimal set of stat increases.

At launch, it was pretty bad. The story was awful. Bad writing. (Whoever wrote 'How tastes your fear?' needs to go back to school). Misogyny.

The gameplay was really bad at launch. The auction house borked it up. The game is essentially a lot of gear checks, and at launch you would slam into that wall pretty frequently. The same tactics would wipe or be a snooze based entirely on the numbers on your gear. Getting good gear was really hard, unless you used the auction house. It was deeply unsatisfying. Also most of the random boss powers were really annoying to play against.

Even after the expansion and updates, it tends to turn into disco laser rollercoaster. Personally, I'm not a fan of that. I preferred the original's more sedate, gloomy, mood. Holding down right click to shoot lasers and drop meteors for billions of damage is amusing for a little while, but it's so tactically shallow it doesn't hold my attention for that long.

I played it a lot anyway, because the first two games were favorites in my youth. I didn't even get 4. Fuck microsoft.

It is known that all Diablo games are bad until the expansion.

D3, D4, and D:I have all been disappointing to me, for different reasons. I’m quite certain D5 won’t be for me either. I am no longer the target audience for Diablo.

Which is a shame, because I adore D1. And it’s not just nostalgia: I replayed it last year for the first time in decades, and had a blast. And D2, although I have my gripes with it, is my most played of the series by a long shot.

The reasons you give are exactly why I don’t like the modern Diablo games. Except that to me, D1 was peak and even D2 was a step in the wrong direction. I don’t begrudge you your fun with D3, I only lament that it’s not for me anymore. And it’s clear that a lot of people agree with you, evidenced by the sales numbers.

3 was okayish after they removed the real money ingame shop, which they felt necessary as they wanted the share of the traded items that previously were sold on ebay at the time. D2 is the best of the series, as it's still a PC game at heart and not targeting controllers and not mini wow like d4 is. I think a Diablo 2 with a good story and ideas from the mod project Diablo would increase long term playability and get me the most.

I am betting they'll add movement sets from soulslike games and make it controller first gameplay. Just like path of exile 2. That alone will kill the game for me.

3 wasn’t awful, I got plenty of enjoyment out of it. Loved 2 and 2r, 4 was meh at best imo. Haven’t watched the trailer for 5 yet but will soon, am excited!

Oh God remember how awful the D3 RMAH was?

Not enough mana.

Diablo 4 will be six years old by the time this comes out (not including eventual delays), which seems like a decent time between major releases, and three years after the current expansion, which concluded the Mephisto story.

This used to be pretty standard! If it weren't for all of Blizzard's other nonsense, I might applaud this.

Last expansion was this year (I had to look it up). Didn't even remember it coming out.

Tablets only. Sorry.

What you have phone?

shouldve called it Mephisto&lilith .