As per the title, there USED TO BE a time when their marketing and PR were decent. But it is obvious how the brain drain has hit every part of the company in recent years given how one content creator, managed to highlight just how terrible a trailer that Blizzard Entertainment published for Diablo IV Season 2 was. The faux pas in that now pulled trailer, exemplifies everything that is wrong with Diablo IV’s development (and higher level “leadership”). Everything has gone down notches (the people making key decisions, the designers, the programmers who write the server/client code, the lack of proper QA testing, etc) including the marketing/PR.
It’s why I see Season 2 as being nothing more than a bunch of bandaid fixes (since it doesn’t solve the core issues with the design of the game play loop, or bad itemization). The “they are trying” doesn’t excuse the poor state of the game past the campaign because they didn’t take most of the lessons learned from Diablo III, and tried not to repeat them. Just because there was yet another new team (though that team does have members who worked on Reaper of Souls) along with a revolving “leadership” door (as a result of the companies own internal dramas), does not serve as a good enough excuse when it was clear to regular employees that the crunch they were being presented with, was likely going to result in a product that was only “good enough”.
The earliest part of this blog (after Diablo III’s launch in May 2012) until November 2015, highlighted my descent as a once loyal customer of Blizzard Entertainment titles (where I bought most of the games without question), to one who stopped playing/buying them. As I’ve noted, Diablo IV was gifted (which is why I ended up playing it for a bit, but stopped back in July). So even though I did feel the base game (playing through the campaign) and base end game (which borrowed heavily from Diablo III) was in a much better shape compared to Diablo III when it launched, the end game play loop of Diablo IV has been generally unfun (not helped by the designed time sinks that includes these town layouts, which they are semi-addressing in the update leading into Season 2).
But the above tells a deeper underlying story of why the game is the way it is (the marketing team that put that together, couldn’t even get the BASIC math correct for the before/after with the XP), and why the designers currently tasked with addressing all of its deficiencies, will have a difficult time actually fixing the core problems (because like D3, the core issues are right down to the core design – meaning it will be a bandaid fix just like Loot 2.0 was with Reaper of Souls). Blizzard Entertainment has a “brain drain” problem with experienced/talented personnel across all of its functions, having left the company.
There was obviously no one to review the trailer prior to posting (where they had to quickly take it down). Them promoting this as a live service game also puts additional pressure to constantly deliver content that is meaningful (and not problem filled), and not always constantly locked behind an expansion paywall (*). Previously, Blizzard was never known for having an agile/quick design/development process. And that was with a much deeper bench of experience/talent to draw on; one that has been whittled away over the past few years by its own internal issues. The company couldn’t even QA a basic trailer. While I also laughed, it was AT Blizzard Entertainment’s expense since they haven’t been able to get out of their own way ever since BlizzCon 2019’s “do you guys not have phones” remark with Diablo Immortal (everything I had to say about this is under this label/tag).
(*) – Blizzard has already telegraphed this “yearly” expansion release cadence for Diablo IV which again highlights how the GM (Rod Fergusson) in charge of all things Diablo, is not the right person (and ought to step down IMHO) since it “lacks reading the room” regarding the state of the existing game. All this “clout chasing” bozo confirmed is how Blizzard intended to monetize D4 (with paid yearly expansions that IMHO, would be underwhelming given how Blizzard in general during “better” times when they had way more experienced personnel, took a long time to deliver expansion content).
Is Season 2 going to be better than Season 1? This one is fairly obvious; of course it will be (since some of the QoL changes is what should’ve been in the game from the start). But that is only some of the QoL stuff; we’re not even talking about the core game play loops/systems which need significant changes. In that department, I don’t believe this next patch will rectify that part of the game (except highlight its bandaid fix nature). I’ll be surprised if after a month of Season 2, that players are raving about how great the end game grind is with the changes that were introduced. Myself, I just see no reason to resume playing D4 until the stash design (one that was borrowed from D3 where it worked ok in a limited co-op setting, but would obviously fail in the MMO-lite design of its server shard design) is overhauled, and they address the deficiencies with itemization (since that is core to the entire loot hunt aspect of the game). I don’t expect them to figure out the ARPG angle (since that ship has long sailed with the company lacking that sort of design experience when most of the Blizzard North team left decades ago).
