Behind the Pretty Frames: Diablo IV | Hacker News Reader

Behind the Pretty Frames: Diablo IV

mamoniem.com

83 pointsibobev41 comments

RenderDoc is amazing btw. I've only used it with Vulkan which has all sorts of custom debug hooks anyway, but RenderDoc makes it super fast and simple to just capture a frame and explore the whole pipeline to debug your shaders.

Lots of people talk about Blender as a FOSS success story used by real pros, but RenderDoc is also a tool used by AAA game developers, and no wonder.

Looks like the HN traffic killed it.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230628160349/https://mamoniem.... But archive.org is having a hard time with all the images.

it actually loaded pretty quick for me, images included. ymmv

Personally I'm heartbroken watching Diablo IV. There are many unpolished details, mounts rotate dead at the center, they simply seem to have no turning animation. Characters' feet slide instead of planting correctly on many scenarios. Blizzard didn't use to miss on these things.

Oh well, we will always have Nintendo.

I was also very surprised by the lack of polish visible in the first 15 minutes of gameplay. It’s still a very good looking game but there are enough rough edges that it’s noticeable and doesn’t seem up to Blizzard’s old standards.

Have.... you actually played d1 or d2??

Have you played D3? It's insanely polished.

It didn't really start that way! (=

For me, it didn't feel polished until few patches in... Necromancers, and Challenge Rifts, and Seasonal Content were what made Diablo 3 for me.

At launch, D3 was pretty dull. We ran through it, and were bored a day later. All it really had was Adventure Mode, and most of the sets were relatively weak.

Farming was just slow and tedious. Never felt rewarding to run around a low-density world map... the abilities and speed tuning was just off. To be honest, it was pretty boring.

A lot of people quit after getting to max level. Diablo was always a "dungeon grinder" but the grind just wasn't enjoyable. Like at all. At launch the grind just sucked.

There was this quirky little auction house, but it felt like a bolt-on after thought. I don't think anyone really used it.

Over time they really sped up the game play considerably with high-density Rift maps. All the set synergy, and class combo synergy, started to kick in. Adding The Cube, and The Vault, and a bunch of fun little things that sped up the game.

Arguably, inventory management didn't get "slightly less crappy" until fairly recently -- maybe a year ago? I forget when they added Search.

So yeah, like now it's polished. But 11 years ago at launch it certainly had some rough spots!

for what its worth, the person you're replying to is using "polish" in the narrow sense of look and feel. D3 was quite polished at launch, but had no real depth to it, as you say.

It may be now, but the first six month were an incredible shit show.

What they fixed along the years was the endgame gameplay, but even day one, it was a really polished game, and the first 10 hours or so were solid.

It broke down after that. The auction house that broke the looting dynamic, the lack of items with interesting effects, the limited amount of procedural generation, the focus on a single number (DPS), plus the usual balancing issues.

If you took the game just for the main campaign and stopped after that, you would have a great time. But most people don't play hack and slash like that, especially not the most vocal players.

> What they fixed along the years was the endgame gameplay, but even day one, it was a really polished game, and the first 10 hours or so were solid.

The first 10 hours where 10 solid hours of “Error 37” and “Error 3006” trying to log in to battle.net, and it lasted for weeks after release…

Cmon, D4 looks sexy as hell. Great style, detailed models, looks way better than D3. Not a perfect game but its a visual treat.

Yeah, I feel crazy reading these comments because D4 looks so much better than D3's flashy colorful-but-somehow-boring aesthetic. D4 brings it back inline with the D2 gothic era and its technological improvements over D3 are obvious and noticeable.

Does it really bring back the D2 gothic graphics?

To me, D4 just looks like a modern D3 but darker lighting and more gore. And D3 looked like WoW but darker. And WoW's style descended from WC3.

It seems like Diablo 3 & Diablo 4 are made by veterans of Warcraft instead of Blizzard North and it shows.

Diablo 2 has a very distinctive style that D3 and D4 don't follow.

I somewhat agree, but D4 feels closer to D2 in aesthetics than D3, to me.

I do wonder if some of D2’s distinct artwork has to do with the fact that it’s 2d isometric instead of true 3d. Well done 2d art is hard to replicate with 3d, imo, and blizzard we’re masters of that.

I’m not sure if your last statement was sarcasm? The latest Zelda runs like a dog and has extremely poor looking pixelation, I know the hardware is limited, but surely not that limited..

Oh, the hardware is pretty freaking limited. There aren't really any other games on the Switch that are as good looking + open world. Maybe an RPG or two?

The hardware being limited is not an excuse. It's of course much more work to polish high-fidelity graphics than it is to polish something on an old console where you only have a few pixels to work with. Zelda looks and runs abysmally compared to any modern non-Switch game. People should stop giving Nintendo passes for that.

> The hardware being limited is not an excuse

> Zelda looks and runs abysmally compared to any modern non-Switch game

Yeah, and all games for generations looked worse than Crysis on a souped up PC etc, but we all recognize that's a poor comparison.

We compare games to other similar games created and running under similar constraints (e.g. similar hardware, similar scope, similar budget) so that we can make useful comparisons. Zelda looks great compared to other 3D open world games running on the same hardware. It looks bad compared to Crysis. News at eleven.

But Diablo 4 looks bad and unpolished compared to the prior Diablo 3, a game that ran on worse hardware, made by the same people as Diablo 4. That's a very damning comparison, as there's no reason to do things worse in a sequel when the prior game made tons of money and was super popular and you've had tons of time to get things right with the sequel.

Maybe this is the benefit of poor taste but.... I honestly did not notice any of that!

We've been having a blast with Diablo IV, the gameplay is simple and fun, the setting is soooo much darker and truer to the original than Diablo III. The polish to me is evident in having accessibility settings be the first thing you see. You know engineering got everything done that they'd planned when accessibility got the proper treatment

Look everyone had to work on optimizing the game economy to make sure the seven in-game currencies all funnel into making sure players keep paying throughout the day, each day, every day. There's simply no time to fix irrelevant S3/P3 stuff like "giving models animations" or "pathing". Those things only generate dollars once, they have no value.

What are the seven currencies?

Also, I'm not sure the draw of a cosmetics only shop is that compelling. I haven't felt the need to buy a skin that doesn't do anything to gameplay.

D4 barely has any, especially compared to Diablo Immortal. The game is actually pretty good at handing out resources that farming doesn’t really become an issue.

> especially compared to Diablo Immortal

Which the company is and has been spending significant dev time on.

For a criticism like "everyone is busy working on X instead of good things", X doesn't have to be in the same game.

True, but the idea that everyone at Blizzard is working on cash shop items for the mobile game rather than the AAA title just doesn't bear even the most basic of scrutiny though.

The word "everyone" is obviously hyperbole. Both games have developers. But the idea that microtransaction cash influences the allocation of developers and artists is pretty reasonable.

Yes that's reasonable but the idea that somehow people who aren't inside the sausage-making process can assume that the reason they don't like the "horse turning" animation in Diablo IV is that people were assigned to cash shop items in the mobile game is not reasonable.

It's entirely possible for example that they had plenty of animators and but ran out of time. Or they had animators and time but found that they had to compromise on some animations because there was too much going on on-screen and otherwise the frames would drop or the minimum spec would get uncomfortably high or whatever. There are any number of reasons that could be the cause here and we on teh outside have absolutely no way of knowing.

I hate what they did with diablo immortal as much as anyone but we don't know enough to say how that affected diablo IV if at all.

Every Blizzard cash shop drifts towards selling player power eventually.

You seem either very confused, or to be talking about a different game.

Those two can absolute be the same thing. I was thinking Diablo Immortal.

I understand why people gravitate towards Diablo, nostalgia and the power the name Diablo carries, but Diablo has been a shell of itself since 3, and yes, 3 did improve substantially over time, but it was still a cookie cutter ARPG pretending to be the successor to Diablo 2.

Path of Exile is free with one of the fairest monetization systems of any F2P, has 10 years worth of content, is mechanically complex while allowing more casual fans to just have fun, has a very active and large community and tools, it looks great, feels great, and more importantly, is getting a new update called Path of Exile 2, which is more of an expansion to the base game with a whole new campaign, maps, skills and mechanics reworks... And it looks even better visually.

Somehow PoE is never even mentioned in the same room with Diablo, when it's more Diablo than Diablo itself.

The problem of PoE is that it's too complex for causal middle age gamers like me. I have no time to invest in learning PoE after every patch.

Took a break from PoE for about 2 years to focus more on work. I ask my coworker how things are looking at the moment. I don't remember to what extent things had changed (I expected plenty of new content and some balance changes) but even the main player currency had changed since then. I think my overall knowledge should still apply, but I do feel discouraged trying to learn anything when in a few months it might be useless again.

I still keep D2 with some QoL mods on a USB stick I carry with me, so I can always fall back to it and be right at home :)

The single most important problem I have with PoE is the campaign. That's it. Really.

Diablo solved a major problem by cutting anywhere from 10-15 hours of mindlessly repeated content each season. I still do not get why GGG chooses to ignore this issue when it's a major complaint in nearly every thread about the game.

>The game is utilizing D3D12, don’t expect something very fancy or crazy (Raytracing, VRS,…etc.), but at the same time don’t let that fool you. i do believe that it’s not a competition about how many of the API features you inject into the renderer. Just use what delivers the vision, and Prism seem doing just that!

seems like they plan to add ray tracing post-launch according to Nvidia RTX website [0]

[0]:https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/rtx/

D4 is great but Diablo 2 Resurrected is maybe an even more impressive technical achievement. Vicarious Visions (which has now been absorbed into Blizzard) reskinned the entire D2 game and it looks incredible. Probably the most technically advanced sprite based game? The best part is when you hit the G key it fades out and reveals the original Diablo 2 running underneath, synced in every way, to the new presentation layer. It is so cool!

Plus it has awesome usability features. Play with a mouse on your PC and the UI is authentic to the original. Plug in a gamepad and the whole UI transforms into a modern gamepad friendly UI… IN PLACE! No restart. You can bounce back and forth between mouse and gamepad. It is wild.

A great achievement overall

> reskinned the entire D2 game and it looks incredible. Probably the most technically advanced sprite based game?

Didn't they just re-develop it from scratch, using a 3D engine?

It is a 3D engine but still used sprites.

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