DiabloFans

Quote from Bleu42»

D4 is quite literally years away. At least three is my guess, closer to 4 most likely. What we saw is pre alpha. 2020's blizzcon most likely will show us at least 1 of the remaining classes to be announced, probably both. 2021 Blizzcon will either show the 2nd, or just the rest of the systems they decided on. Might get some beta news after, and if we're lucky a launch sometime late in 2022. 4

Yeah I would bet money on both classes being playable next year at the con. I can't imagine them not having a playable class and having to develop itemization, combat, etc., with only three classes. I feel like it would be like the baseline for moving forward on many fronts.

Also agree with @WishesHeHadBeta on the timeline. Makes sense on many fronts.

It's also usually the case that what we see at BlizzCon is usually a bit behind what they actually have internally. For instance, the next wow raid area they showed off in one of the panels was already datamined showing a lot more progress before the event.

Quote from Sinclair»

The only reason we got shown Diablo 4 this early in the devolpment cycle was to avoid/erase the cluster fuck that was Blizzcon 2018 and it's mobile/microtransaction disaster again. As cool as the statue is it is in no way tied to the actual game's release.

It was going to be announced last year but they delayed it at last second. It would've been announced regardless, probably.

Quote from NoVaRoCk»

https://www.blizzardgearstore.com/stores/blizzard/de/product/diablo-lilith-24.5--premium-statue/281877?categories=collectibles%2Cstatues-%26-replicas

Blizzard offers Lilith Statue with a deliverydate of 30.8.2020

so we can hope for a near releasedate of the game itself??

They said the game isn't even Blizzard Soon(TM) soon, so...probably like 2022 like most are saying.

Welcome back

Quote from user-13216883»

Here is the camera zooming out during the boss fight with Belial. This feature has been in the game since 2012 and people are now talking about it like it's the most unbelievable thing the gaming industry has seen. People claiming D4 has a new engine is so fucking unbelievable and appalling to me that it makes me throw up by how easy it is for Blizzard to sell their lies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQSd0LkzRcI&t=98

If you were responding to me right above you, I think you missed my point. It wasn't that it could zoom in, it was that once it was, you could see the models were much higher res/poly than D3. I think we all obviously know you can zoom in with D3

Yeah, the D3 models looking at them now look like paper dolls with low res paint and use the same like 5 animations for everything xD The difference is night and day. The cutscene graphics are the in-game graphics. My friends and I just kind of looked at each other when it started after the cinematic and almost shat ourselves. I think much of that detail is lost, though, when zooming out. You can zoom in with a keybind like in D3. Some effects like the dynamic weather/lighting/etc. are still obvious at that angle/distance, though.

This is just based on my play experience/my friends. Not sure what other people are seeing in videos online. I haven't really watched any.

Hi fren

Quote from WishesHeHadBeta»

Magistrate,

Ok that’s a huge relief. I guess I didn’t grasp that’s what the gameplay would be like after watching some YouTube gameplay videos, since I assumed that the low player numbers in a Demo wouldn’t actually reflect how it would be at release with a huge player base.

Yeah, you can pretty much just ignore total players. As you know, games like this don't group based on number of total players. Like in WoW, there's millions concurrently, but you only see like a couple in the zone, maybe half a dozen normally in a questing hub/town, a couple dozen in a city.

They scaled down that pretty big number of demo players for that tiny playable area--I'd assume you saw all those PCs in the demo area--pretty nicely. Besides the world boss and town I only saw 1 other person sometimes.

Quote from WishesHeHadBeta»

Magistrate,

I’m still not understanding how blizzard specifically said there will be hundreds of players in your “world”, yet somehow we won’t encounter them a lot when we’re out fighting monsters? How does that make sense? Like in WoW, certain “servers” have very high populations and you’ll constantly find it difficult to complete quests because of overcrowding. That’s specifically what I’m concerned about.

WishesHeHadBeta,

Because they're spread out over many dungeon instances and a huge open world, and phased according to the type of content being done. There's hundreds of dungeons, and that map is only one of, I want to say three. And we only saw a small portion of it. And it accommodated hundreds of demo players fine.

This is why they also said that the number of players you see depends on what you're doing. A huge world boss looks like a dozen or more and it zooms out to accommodate, but they also said these will be rare. Most of the content is scaled to only a couple players in your visible area.

Quote from WishesHeHadBeta»

Quote from Magistrate»

Quote from WishesHeHadBeta»

Quote from undefined »

*snip*

Like, that's literally how it will work. The game won't phase a hundred players on top of each other. It's how phasing works. Probably a couple hundred peeps in the demo.

So you’re saying that when blizz said ‘towns’ will have hundreds of players in them.... you won’t see the other players in that specific town? Because they won’t “phase” them together? What? Where did blizzard explain this?

I think you're talking about something separate. The quote I cited talked about a hundred players descending into hell--ie, the playable overworld where you do all the content, so not the town centers. Most of the content you won't have "hundreds" of players on screen. Like the demo showed and they said in the panels, most of that open world is tuned for like a couple people max.

Like I said, walking around in the overworld is pretty solitary.

And, honestly, even in a town I can't imagine them putting hundreds of players on screen at once. They don't even do that in WoW unless you're really trying to game the system.

Quote from WishesHeHadBeta»

Quote from undefined »

*snip*

Like, that's literally how it will work. The game won't phase a hundred players on top of each other. It's how phasing works. Probably a couple hundred peeps in the demo.

Quote from VegasRage2»

Where is everyone?

/wave 10char

Forums kind of faded out of vogue when social media and disc and stuff all became much more universal. I still like that it's separate.

Quote from Gaxuxa»

My initial reaction was same as OP. I was looking forward to something a little more new and courageous with the gameplay...theyre playing it safe and sticking with the same basic formula. Fine.

i like the open world idea as a fun factor - but at what cost to the immersion and story. D1 was intense because it was you, alone (or 1 to 2 max) descending into hell. Hows the story line going to play with 100 heroes running around - will they ignore it or will the world set that context? The trailor gave me home for a good story again, I just hope the gameplay can hold up even tho its unoriginal.

They said (and the demo I played showed) that the overwhelming majority of the time the, phasing, I don't know what they're calling it, limits it to one or two people on a screen when not in a party. I didn't start seeing other players until I got near an event, where I saw maybe 1-2 others, or the world boss, when there was a total of like 12 or so. Most of the time it felt very isolated.

I haven't really been on reddit or here since I got back, but I'm trying to understand why players are against the idea of an open world for the game. I have my reasons for liking it, but I'm trying to understand the insta hate for it.

What does it prevent you from experiencing?

Microtransactions can go a long way with only a small offering of services/cosmetics. WoW makes a huge chunk of revenue off microtransactions and they basically just put two pets and a mount out per year for it. They made like $6 mil just off a store toy and those funds went to support...I want to say the arena championship winnings? Maybe MDI.

It's a big return for really limited stress on the team for WoW, at least. The mount is about a month of art work for one artist and the pets probably less. They get money, the rest of the team can focus on developing the actual game and future content. The payment gating for things like race changes and server changes also has the added benefit of slowing down knee-jerk reactions to nerfs/buffs and the like.

These are only going to be cosmetic or similar. I can't think of a current Blizzard game where someone pays for gear or some endgame-ruining benefit.

My only hope is that any cosmetics won't be too crazy, over-the-top, but honestly as it plays out in WoW most players get these things and don't use them much after the initial purchase. My assumption was just because everyone knew they were purchased, not won from gameplay, so that kind of watered down the prestige of using them.