Let me preface this by stating that I didn’t really watch the livestream or read the patch notes about this season beforehand. I just decided to give it a try when I saw the e-mail about the new season and checked the info on their site (the things that stood out was the addition of WASD movement and Helltides being on most of the time except for a 5-minute break).
For season 2, I felt that it was a step up from season 1. Thus my expectation for season 3 was that it would build on season 2. It became clear that this wasn’t going to be the case as I played through the seasonal quest and engaged in the seasonal mechanic. It honestly felt worse than season 1 because the construct pet (and its enhancements), felt mostly inconsequential (like at least in both the first two seasons, you immediately saw benefits from their respective mechanics). Yes, there is that progress stopping bug with the brazier (it took me around 15 tries of relogging to get placed into a server shard that had a working brazier) that Blizzard acknowledged and plans to have fixed by next week (it is clear there is no longer the sort of QA testing that used to exist when server/client bugs like this go live) that has detracted from the experience for many. I thought it was humorous but not surprising considering the state of the company.
Once I completed the seasonal quest and did my first vault (part of the main seasonal mechanic), my first thought was this felt even worse than the malignant tunnels in season 1 while being a bigger regression from the season 2 mechanic where it at least felt rewarding (and tied into Tree of Whispers + leveling). The vaults are dungeons with annoying trap mechanics (you need to avoid taking damage from these in order to not lose your stacks of Zoltun’s Warding which allows you to open the other chest at the end of the dungeon). The thing is that even during the questing, the vault dungeons you had to do also felt unfun (the last one required retrieving 4 different objects to place in the pedestals to gain access to the boss room).
I managed to make it only to level 26 (around 3-4 hours of playing) before I logged off and calling this done because the entire thing felt unfun and unrewarding; a complete game play regression from season 2. I definitely wasn’t going to force myself to try to at least get to WT3 like I did with season 1 to see if maybe it got better (with the revised Helltide setup). I didn’t even bother trying to reconfigure for WASD to test it out.
It’s really clear now this team (starting at the top with the franchise head) doesn’t have a clue when it comes to Diablo IV’s end game when there is this seasonal disconnect (of it being this regressive). I then decided to check out the livestream and promo videos where I came away feeling like these people, spend very little time in the seasonal game play loop. I mean I do get it; they are actively dealing with the game and its issues where they end up being able to spend only a cursory amount of time playing it (or choose to take time away from the project they are working on). It’s a stark contrast where the hype they are espousing, comes across as out of touch gaslighting. But this is what one has to expect going forward until the first expansion (even there, I don’t expect a lot of the issues to be addressed because the root problem is a design team that doesn’t really have a clue about what makes ARPG’s addictive/fun).
I am on the verge of giving my friend their money back (for gifting me this game). Even though Diablo III was as bad as it was at launch and leading all the way to patch 2.0 and Reaper of Souls, I still got over a thousand hours of play time pre-RoS (I still enjoyed playing wizard in Inferno, leveling each class, and also sinking a lot of time into hardcore). There’s just something intrinsically missing in D4’s game play loop that I cannot even get that sort of entertainment (and that is saying a lot given D3’s lack of adventure mode where you needed to resort to that dysfunctional play style of loading the appropriate part of the story quest chain to farm bosses).
To put it simply, the design decisions aren’t even selling me on the notion that the expansion(s) will be any better (the graphics will be good because the artists are pretty much the sole remaining bright spot in the company). Since I wasn’t even going to buy the game to begin with (and only played it due to this gift), I just don’t see myself wanting to play this in future seasons let alone, the expansion. Basically, this highlights just how much of the talent that Blizzard Entertainment used to have, has indeed been ravaged by all of the internal drama/scandals and the resulting fallout (where those who weren’t directly involved in all that, decided to leave what was a toxic environment).
