I logged into Honkai: Star Rail (HSR) once (after I wrote this) and that was it. I did manage to play Genshin Impact a bit longer (7 days) to complete the “Passage of Time” part of the Stellar Reunion (returning player) as well as the 7-day login rewards (but definitely not the I got started on the Natlan Archon quest (using the system that is new to me which allows getting a quick start when not having completed a prior requirement and where often times, you cannot even start it because a key NPC is “busy” in another story quest), but it’s already getting too long in the tooth.
There was a time when the story + open world exploration aspects were a key part of my enjoyment of playing the game. The problem over time (for me) with miHoYo’s designs for the game, is how too predictable/formulaic it is (for new areas plus new story quests). It’s just variations of the same hamster wheel (with a lot of filler to draw it out).
To their credit, they finally added a bunch of quality-of-life stuff (still nowhere as simple as it is in HSR when it comes to farming your progression materials though), but something like that is not enough to keep me engaged with wanting to login and play. To put it even more bluntly, my overall interest in playing games is nearly non-existent now.
That became really apparent when I got an e-mail (for one of my other Battle.net accounts) about the Diablo IV PTR. The last time I played was at the beginning of season 3. Everything after that, I had no idea since I stopped paying any attention to the game. I read their blog postings about the PTR (2.0 patch) and decided to (unwisely) watch the developer chat. I had to actually lookup some things (like what “the Pit”, “Infernal Hordes”, tempering/masterworking were). Seems in subsequent patches, itemization changes were gear from season 3 and earlier are now legacy (still a bandaid like how it was with Diablo III’s “Loot 2.0”).
The impression I came out with was “nice they are making these changes, but it’s not going to get me to resume playing. The Diablo IV tag documents my issues with the game. They are borrowing a lot of things from Diablo III for this patch 2.0/expansion build (including overhaul of the difficulty and progression). The World Tier design was ok, but I really didn’t like that whole Capstone dungeon design. While there is still a similar mechanic for progressing through the “new” Torment difficulties via the Pit, that is core to why D4 is not for me.
The Pit borrows the whole Greater Rift design from D3. I despise that sort of timed run system (in D3, that was your end game; pushing greater rifts to level up your legendary gems). Similarly, progressing through Torment difficulties along with leveling up your glyphs, will take place in The Pit. Nightmare dungeons are now for farming this masterworking material. The difficulty scaling in The Pit is what is used as the base for the new core difficulties/progression system in patch 2.0 for D4. That sounds like a recipe for something I don’t want to play.
I decided to give it a fair shot (downloaded the PTR). The gear on my old characters are marked legacy and I noticed a stat crunch on things like item level (they mentioned this in the chat of wanting to bring the numbers down so it’s not just gigantic damage numbers that end up being meaningless). At the new Pentient difficulty, my best characters (which handled WT4 fine) were definitely underperforming with their legacy Ancestrals (thus no tempering on weapons nor masterworked items). I then created a new character (to try and give the new progression difficulties a shot), but I just could not stomach playing for even an hour. There’s always been something about Diablo IV’s game play loop that doesn’t feel fun (this 2.0 patch with the PTR doesn’t change that for me).
Part of it I believe is me (my overall interest in games taking a huge hit) where the current design ethos is something that does not resonate with me (I always feel that underlying “current” of monetization-based designs/systems first). I sort of “refunded” Diablo IV that my friend had gifted me last year by sending them enough to get the Ultimate version of Vessel of Hatred (I have no plans to purchase the expansion let alone resuming playing).
