** Diablo 4 Thread **

Soldato
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David Kim shared a new update today.

TLDR:
Ancient Items: They agree that they aren't really purposeful enough, and are looking at them again and will share more details soon.
Itemisation: It's being worked on, and they are discussing ways to add more depth and complexity to items (including rares) due to feedback. More will follow soon in an itemisation update.
End-game progression: They aren't sure if they want finite or infinite. They are wanting feedback on this as there are pro's and con's to both.
Player Power: They state that power doesn't mostly come from items like it does in Diablo 3. It's more from skills, talents, and levelling, so builds are more important.

Personally I hope they remove Ancient items, although this is from a Diablo 3 perspective (assuming the hierarchy of items carries over into Diablo 4). I just don't think they're needed and are "cheap" chase items. It's good they are having items make less of an impact than they are in Diablo 3, but the majority of this came from sets and their insane multipliers to skills. Looking forward to an itemisation update though, and really glad to hear they are working on rares being viable.

David Kim said:
Introduction
I have learned over years of experience that the player community is an incredibly valuable resource to draw upon when designing and refining a game. By working together, we can achieve great things. The biggest challenge with parsing community feedback is that with so many opinions, the takeaways are rarely unanimous. Diablo IV is still very much in active development, but we plan to keep you in the loop as we continue to design and iterate so that you can be a part of what we’re building. I am so incredibly appreciative for all the feedback we’ve received so far and I’m eager to dive into some of the most talked about topics.

Itemization
We’re still working through all the feedback that came in regarding itemization and we’re actively discussing ways to add more depth and complexity to base items (including Rares), ways to add greater variety to item affixes to make those powers interesting and your choices meaningful, and ways to give players more freedom to choose how to customize items, so you can have fun exploring a wide range of effective gameplay possibilities instead of just looking up “the optimal build” online. We’ll go into way more depth regarding itemization in a separate post soon, but we don’t want to leave you hanging until then—so we’re going to update you on a few other topics now.

These are some of the topics that we’re seeing come up most often, but if we’re missing something, please let us know and we will try to share our thoughts on those subjects as well in future updates.

Elective Mode in Diablo IV
There’s a misconception that Diablo IV will lock skills to specific slots because of the BlizzCon demo user interface. Like many other things in the demo, the UI is not final and we will support Elective Mode-style skill selection. Skill selection and assignment will always be completely open for all players.

Ancient Items
We completely agree with the community sentiment—Ancients as they are don’t really serve a clear purpose in Diablo IV. We should have done a better job of explaining the role of Ancient Items in Diablo IV. We had a preliminary direction to share, but you’ve brought up some great points, so we’re revisiting our designs with your feedback in mind. We hope to have more details to share in the follow-up itemization update.

Endgame Progression System
We haven’t decided whether the character leveling and experience system should be finite or infinite. We’ve been discussing the pros and cons of both and would love to hear your thoughts. There seems to be some concern around infinite being worse because it will eventually overshadow all the power granted by other sources. However, we can control how much power each system gives, whether it’s infinite or finite. For example, say we’re talking about thousands of hours of gameplay... within those thousands of hours, we could choose to create a finite system that grants 1,000,000 times more power than an infinite system, making it practically impossible for the infinite system to catch up in power.

Also, power increase doesn’t need to be linear throughout the ranks—it can slow down as players reach higher levels. We believe the more important question is what experience feels best for players, and we can playtest various approaches to tuning to find the power curve that makes the most sense. We have a couple reasons for having a different experience system in addition to a level cap. A level cap gives us the ability to grant players a sense of completion. But for players who want to go deeper into the game, a second experience system allows us to capture the fun of achieving those really difficult endgame goals and ranks. We can also introduce additional depth through this system, because players will be more experienced with the game at this point. Ultimately, our goal is to create a meaningful system that provides clear choices depending on your preferred playstyle in the endgame.

Sources of Power
The community has shared many good points on the topic of power sources and we’re reevaluating how much power comes from each source at any given time. However, we want to clarify that in Diablo IV, power doesn’t come mostly from items. We want to have a good mix of power sources: characters naturally get stronger as they level up, skills have ranks that increase power, talents provide specific playstyle choices and additional character power, and of course items grant power and meaningful choices as well. Something else to keep in mind is Legendary powers are just one part of an item’s power, and they won’t invalidate all other Affixes due to how powerful they are. For example, two to three normal Affixes are currently equivalent in power to a Legendary power on most items.

Keyed Dungeons
A big question that’s come up is exactly how Keyed Dungeons are different from Rifts. Keyed Dungeons introduce greater challenges as their tiers increase through Dungeon Affixes. The majority of dungeons are real places in the world, and players will know some information about them including what types of monsters, events, and layouts to expect. With this information, as well as the specific Dungeon Affixes being displayed on the key, players will be able to strategize their approach before going into the dungeon. We believe this is the biggest change from Diablo III Rifts: the added planning and strategizing that takes place before you decide to run a Keyed Dungeon.

Please continue to share your thoughts—we want you to be involved in the Diablo IV design process. I personally believe in making the best decisions for the game based on the strongest design ideas, no matter where they come from. My biggest hope is for us to be able to constructively discuss and iterate on the topics that are most important to the community—so keep the feedback coming!

See you in Hell,

David Kim
Lead Systems Designer
The Diablo IV Team
 
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Soldato
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They've released part 2 of the system design talk, and they've made some good strides in listening to the community with regards to the changes. I'm really glad to see ancient legendaries gone, and that they are making rares as useful as possible.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/diablo3/23230076/system-design-in-diablo-iv-part-ii

Here's some key parts:

Here are the changes we’re considering:
  • We’re increasing the total number of affixes on items, including Magic (Blue), Rare (Yellow), and Legendary (Orange). This should raise the overall importance of non-Legendary affixes on your character’s overall level of power.
  • We are also introducing three new stats:
    • Angelic Power, which increases the duration of all beneficial effects (like self-buffs or healing)
    • Demonic Power, which increases the duration of all negative effects (like debuffs or damage over time)
    • Ancestral Power, which increases the chance of on-hit effects (aka increased proc chance)

Based on your feedback, we’ve changed Attack to only be found on weapons, Defense to being only on armor, and we’ve removed both Attack and Defense from jewelry entirely. The goal here is to better embrace the fantasy of each type of item.

We are going to remove Ancient Legendaries from the game in their current form entirely. Our newest proposal hits a couple different feedback points: addressing the usefulness of Rare (Yellow) items as well as increasing the depth and complexity of player gear choices in the endgame. We will be introducing a new type of consumable item (which we haven’t yet named). This item would be earned by killing monsters, just like other items. It would have one random Legendary affix on it, drops only in the late endgame, and can be used to apply that affix to any non-Legendary item.

This means a few things:
  • We create an “elective mode for items” that is experienced after players have had time to experience Rare and Legendary items normally, as well as familiarized themselves with a variety of affixes
  • This adds a way to introduce new methods of play without adding even more power to endgame items
  • Rare items with the best affixes on them are always useful and retain value
 
Soldato
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New quarterly update for June:

Introduction
Team Playtest
A Word About Blockout
Storytelling
Open World
Multiplayer
Items and Progression
Other Thoughts

There's some nice insights into how they are creating the world in this game update. The blockout information was interesting, as was their approach on storytelling and how they are using real-time cutscenes to keep the players emerged. They cover a lot of information that they are using for the game, and how they use play-test data from the beta to improve aspects. The multiplayer stuff was interesting, and I'm glad they stated that:

"We find that the game stops feeling like Diablo and the world feels less dangerous when you see other players too often or in too high numbers."

Itemisation is definitely improving from the screenshots they gave and the direction they state they are taking. There's good presence from the community managers on reddit also and they discussed that itemisation is very much still a work in progress, and the article states they'll have a juicier big update on itemisation later in the year.
 
Soldato
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Players are sharded out when you need to clear monsters to regain camps - that isn't fun or exciting, it's going to be oh I need to spend x time clearing trash to regain NPCs and the waypoint before players are magically sharded back into my game.
If you lose a camp you should be required to group up to clear it and engage with players, no sharding - it kills immersion. You should feel like you accomplished something when you regain a town or camp. The group should be rewarded for saving them.

Mount trophies for killing a boss in act x? Doesn't get me excited. Also makes me question whether this stuff will be used for seasons or other nonsense as rewards. The problem is that Diablo 3, WoW etc aren't challenging which makes these rewards feel much less significant.

Weekly world bosses. The update made it clear we didn't even need to party up, just zerg for your loot. Granted they didn't call it weeklys, but given quite a bit has been taken from WoW, it wouldn't surprise me.

Itemisation. It's worrying at this point but if we go by what we know so far. Magic and Rare items suck, legendarys are mandatory (which is frustrating!) due to the talent/additional skill/bonus abilities. Hopefully with the update later this year when they go into this more they'll give us a ton more customisation options and expand the crafting options giving players many different ways to craft and grind amazing gear.

The problem with Blizzard is that they push these quarterly updates because their terrified of backlash. Quickly asking us for feedback and getting an overwhelming amount of it back. We want end game to keep us playing and itemisation/crafting/end game progression is extremely important. GR's were great when introduced but look at the depth of other games, PoE has amazing end game, I hope Blizzard give us something equally as good.

We all know the story play through will be great, details, visuals etc will be top notch. But end game, man they need to get it right.
 
Soldato
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Blizzard are not that great anymore. They lost it after the shambles of diablo 3

If it was the finished product at launch, it would have been really impressive. How they got it so wrong with that loot system is beyond a joke.

I played it from launch and remember seeing athene, krip and even kungen way beyond me and thinking if their gear is still bad, I've got no chance :D
 
Soldato
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I am really looking forward to this.
I quite enjoyed D3 and still pick it up every now and then when a new season starts.

is there a release date for the game yet?
 
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I am really looking forward to this.
I quite enjoyed D3 and still pick it up every now and then when a new season starts.

is there a release date for the game yet?

No where near yet but I'm sure I read somewhere before coronavirus hit that it would be late 2020 but not 100% sure
 
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ED209 I believe its going be a while i been checking every month since january for release info but nothing for 7 months best bet is next year now
 
Soldato
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I hope D4 is closer to the second game in some respects.

I'd like the ability to trade items, not on an auction house in the way it was implemented in 3 but being able to open up a trade screen with another player and barter your goods.

Runewords would be cool too for that matter.

I'd like sets to be retained but I'd rather they not give ridiculous OP abilities, make them more understated and more of a collectors thing much as they were in 2.

I'm not expecting much either way, Blizzard have been dropping the ball for the past few years now.
 
Soldato
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No where near yet but I'm sure I read somewhere before coronavirus hit that it would be late 2020 but not 100% sure

ty, will keep an eye out and see what comes on the following months.

It was never coming in 2020 that's just absurd, it was only revealed at Blizzcon 2019 and was so early in development that back then it was a few years away.

I'm sure we'll get to see more before Christmas despite no Blizzcon this year. I'm sure they'll give us something besides the quarterly update (or give us a bigger than usual update during the next one).
 
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