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Comment by seventhtiger | Hacker News Reader

I think Diablo 4 is really well made but I keep getting surprised by some goofs in what I would consider the most important parts of the game.

Like even when I make a small scale RPG, my damage formulas and scaling and so on are my bread and butter. I obsess over them. I would accept being wrong about the resulting experience and having to adjust, but to me it's really unacceptable to have oversights and mistakes there.

So something like how broken resistance was, or different types of scaling implemented wrong. That's not disagreeing about the outcome. That's clear oversight in what I consider the heart of the game.

Or for example how the mount's controls with mouse were just remapped from joystick and you have to put your mouse at the edge of the screen to go fast.

I don't understand how to reconcile such a big and well made game with many baffling oversights in the game's core systems. Feels competent and amateurish at the same time.

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What makes you say that the game is well made of many of its core systems are defective?

If the implementation of a poor algorithm is robust and bug-free, that would be something that is well-made, despite being bad.

Consider a chair that is sturdy and load-bearing, while still being lightweight, but it wildly uncomfortable to sit on.

But they're describing a poor and buggy implementation.

The problems they are describing are bad design, not bad implementation.

Usually games with deep development issues have those issues show up everywhere. Not so in Diablo 4.

The art direction is great, they produced a massive amount of assets at a very high quality, the story is great by Diablo standards, the marketing was good, the tech is pretty good.

The player experience is still very good and very high quality. I usually find the only people who complain are the hardcore players. It makes sense because once you've run out of campaign content, you really have to rely on those core mechanics to keep the game going.

A lot of the people involved are competent and have a good track record. I just don't understand why the foundations are shaky. They're not even innovating so much on what an ARPG is supposed to be.

You hit it quite well on what I was getting at.

I think many of us did enjoy Diablo 4 but the systems that make an ARPG shine fell through the cracks which is surprising given Blizzard defined the category.

I am very much am aware they aren't the same people running the show now from Blizzard North, and they had some major team shake ups in D4s dev cycle, so that was part of the problem but it's hard not to have high expectations.

It's just those pieces or connections in-between the excellent departmental work that fell apart, along with the foundation of an ARPG being flawed, that a gaming generalist could have solved to bring it all together.

I imagine things would look quite different now if that generalist person or persons on D4 played ARPGs for decades, had Diablo DNA infused in them with equal experience in game design and systems, and had some authority they could have made the best ARPG all over again since D2 given how good D4 is in so many ways. They equally learned a lot from D3 and it's shortcomings but that knowledge all felt lost in D4.

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