After witnessing one of the most successful RPG releases in recent history, Diablo 4 seems to have lost all its viewership online. Being Blizzard’s highest-sold game ever, many expected the fourth installment in the Diablo 4 franchise to prosper, but instead, Diablo 3 has surpassed it suddenly.
On June 6, Diablo 4 was released worldwide as the game sold more than 10 million copies within 3 days of launch. This made it Blizzard’s highest-selling game of all time. However, it seems like the game continues to lose traction, losing more than 90% of its viewership since its June launch.
Rather Diablo 3 has surpassed its successor, even though it was released 11 years ago. With its new Season 29, Diablo 3 now sits at a weekly average of 3,000 viewers on Twitch with a peak of 5,600 viewers on September 17. For context, Diablo 4 has a weekly average of 940 viewers at the time of writing.
Diablo 4 saw a peak viewership of 940,000 at the time of its release, ten times more than Diablo 3 ever achieved. However, it has lost almost 99% of its peak viewership and sits at a weekly average of 940 on Twitch.
I still haven’t had the chance to play D4, but played a lot of D2 and some D3. Anyone here with some insight on what they fucked up with D4?
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.
Damn, really disappointing to hear. I felt like D3 was ok but for some reason couldn’t quite match up to D2, and so was hoping that D4 would deliver. But now I know to at least adjust my expectations if/when I finally play.
What’s a live service?
Basically a game that is designed to receive regular content updates and have revolving meta elements. It’s a game that is designed to not have an end.
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.
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The game industry seems to have been heavily infected with capitalistic bullshit. It’s really sad to see what was once a fun combination of art, entertainment, nerdiness, and tech turn into another soulless cash machine.
There’s tons of good indie games. And you don’t even need a 2000€ PC to play them.
I’m just sitting around playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon and, while id prefer something narrative driven, it’s been giving me the happies for quite a while.
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?
It’s just fucking boring and bland looking. It’s everything that sucked about 3 and then doubled down on the suck. I may be biased as fuck, but Path of Exile is infinitely more fun than D3 and 4 combined. I dumped hundreds of hours into D2 and then a bunch more into the remaster, but D3 felt like a chore and D4 couldn’t even hook me with the beta enough to buy the game.
I finished the campaign with my wife and we had fun do it together than after 90 hrs or so (we kept the screen a lot so I’m not sure its actually 90 hrs) I deleted it and went on, right when season 1 started. I tried to come back to it yesterday alone and it was just… Dull. The game was boring as hell playing alone, after 2 hours I deleted it again