Also the current production schedule for Diablo 4 was supposedly that they started a Souls-like in 2014, scrapped it, restarted development on the standard action RPG style Diablo in 2016. They would have been working on it for a couple years before BlizzCon 2018, and if they considered showing it then and decided not to, it absolutely should be playable this year with another year of dev time. As for release, it could easily be a 2020 title if they wanted it to, but they might want to put extra care into getting it right after angering pretty much every Diablo fan last year and release it in like June 2021 for the 20th anniversary of Lord of Destruction or something.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
Also the current production schedule for Diablo 4 was supposedly that they started a Souls-like in 2014, scrapped it, restarted development on the standard action RPG style Diablo in 2016. They would have been working on it for a couple years before BlizzCon 2018, and if they considered showing it then and decided not to, it absolutely should be playable this year with another year of dev time. As for release, it could easily be a 2020 title if they wanted it to, but they might want to put extra care into getting it right after angering pretty much every Diablo fan last year and release it in like June 2021 for the 20th anniversary of Lord of Destruction or something.
Yeah this was kinda what I heard - that it was sort of in development hell (lolz) for awhile there. I wouldn't be surprised if they WERE going to show it 2018 but they didn't feel it looked polished/good enough to show at the time. (I remember some sinister motives being suggested for why it was apparently pulled but honestly I'm just gonna subscribe to occam's razor for this one... If the rumors were true that it was supposed to be there, there's no reason to *not* show it other than it wasn't ready to show)
It would not surprise me one bit if after Blizzcon 2018's disaster they yanked a ton of people off other teams to help get the game in a presentable state.
Hey if it comes out sooner all the better.... but I still need to see if it is going to follow the D2 era refined style that has made PoE the powerhouse it is now (and to a lesser extent 'SP' iterations like Grim Dawn) or if it is going with the D3/modern Blizz distillation of everything possible route.
Actually sorry about that. I guess Blizzard will most likely go the same route because people buy the game even if it is a years later switch release. The switch game even sold well I guess. 30Million units from what I can see online for all sales across all platforms. But they would not be doing due diligence on GGG because last figures I saw were 10 mil annually in revenue from the game. The structure is competition.
Jubal77 on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I'll be surprised if they have actual skill trees in d4.
Its such a cluster. Like in WoW they have been going back and forth on build variety and complexity. GGG has existed so far as a competitor/alternative to D3 and pretty much solely that. The company sold for 100 mil and by my quick research right now is up to 15 mil a year in annual revenue.
I dunno. I think they they continue to ignore the market and try to sail by on "its diablo people will buy it" it may not work as much this time (it probably will though). Add to that also tencent owned Riot putting the crosshairs on blizzard with their own offering too. Its going to be interesting to watch that is for sure.
Its such a cluster. Like in WoW they have been going back and forth on build variety and complexity. GGG has existed so far as a competitor/alternative to D3 and pretty much solely that. The company sold for 100 mil and by my quick research right now is up to 15 mil a year in annual revenue.
I dunno. I think they they continue to ignore the market and try to sail by on "its diablo people will buy it" it may not work as much this time (it probably will though). Add to that also tencent owned Riot putting the crosshairs on blizzard with their own offering too. Its going to be interesting to watch that is for sure.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the importance of PoE relative to D3. The reason D3 isn't as active now is simply because Blizzard chose not to continue its development, not because gamers have spoken that they prefer D2-style mechanics.
Its such a cluster. Like in WoW they have been going back and forth on build variety and complexity. GGG has existed so far as a competitor/alternative to D3 and pretty much solely that. The company sold for 100 mil and by my quick research right now is up to 15 mil a year in annual revenue.
I dunno. I think they they continue to ignore the market and try to sail by on "its diablo people will buy it" it may not work as much this time (it probably will though). Add to that also tencent owned Riot putting the crosshairs on blizzard with their own offering too. Its going to be interesting to watch that is for sure.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the importance of PoE relative to D3. The reason D3 isn't as active now is simply because Blizzard chose not to continue its development, not because gamers have spoken that they prefer D2-style mechanics.
I mean I know I am not alone in saying that is exactly why I choose PoE over D3. Even if D3 was more active it just isnt Diablo ARPG to me. So no I do not think I am exagerating using empirical evidence to make a hypothesis. I know it is a big reason for the population staying with the company despite its own huge drawbacks such as lack of AH/decent trading system.
So I can see what you are saying and there is plenty to support that but I dont think it means this other side is greatly exaggerating at all. Especially since it could be argued that perhaps a reason D3 failed to continue to be developed is because of what it became. Overly distilled with no real end game roadmap. Also I just want to be clear that I am just arguing that they should take into account GGG and PoE as a competitor. Not that they will.
D3 wasn't monetized for a long tail so it doesn't have one. Sell a whole bunch of boxes and most people move on just about matched their business model. They need a different monetization strategy if they were to compete in the same space as GGG, such as the piles of MTX and lootboxes that PoE has eventually arrived at.
I don't think the PC version ever really recovered either and that RoS standalone sales disappointed. With such a big name they need to have their endgame in place on release if they want people to stick around, its not something that can slowly develop and grow in popularity like PoE did.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
D3 wasn't monetized for a long tail so it doesn't have one. Sell a whole bunch of boxes and most people move on just about matched their business model. They need a different monetization strategy if they were to compete in the same space as GGG, such as the piles of MTX and lootboxes that PoE has eventually arrived at.
I don't think the PC version ever really recovered either and that RoS standalone sales disappointed. With such a big name they need to have their endgame in place on release if they want people to stick around, its not something that can slowly develop and grow in popularity like PoE did.
PoE took the Warframe approach to microtransactions, thankfully, and it has obviously worked out amazingly well for them.
I've no doubt that a future D4 will have microtransactions in it. However, I suspect it won't be of the Warframe variety and will probably just be regular ol' Activision "Give us all your money you feckless plebs!" variety.
Hrm. :sad:
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Well if you want to make cynical predictions, I bet there's no skeletons, skulls or bone-like imagery of any sort on account of China being the market to please now
Its such a cluster. Like in WoW they have been going back and forth on build variety and complexity. GGG has existed so far as a competitor/alternative to D3 and pretty much solely that. The company sold for 100 mil and by my quick research right now is up to 15 mil a year in annual revenue.
I dunno. I think they they continue to ignore the market and try to sail by on "its diablo people will buy it" it may not work as much this time (it probably will though). Add to that also tencent owned Riot putting the crosshairs on blizzard with their own offering too. Its going to be interesting to watch that is for sure.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the importance of PoE relative to D3. The reason D3 isn't as active now is simply because Blizzard chose not to continue its development, not because gamers have spoken that they prefer D2-style mechanics.
I mean I know I am not alone in saying that is exactly why I choose PoE over D3. Even if D3 was more active it just isnt Diablo ARPG to me. So no I do not think I am exagerating using empirical evidence to make a hypothesis. I know it is a big reason for the population staying with the company despite its own huge drawbac123k ks such as lack of AH/decent trading system.
So I can see what you are saying and there is plenty to support that but I dont think it means this other side is greatly exaggerating at all. Especially since it could be argued that perhaps a reason D3 failed to continue to be developed is because of what it became. Overly distilled with no real end game roadmap. Also I just want to be clear that I am just arguing that they should take into account GGG and PoE as a competitor. Not that they will.
I don't mean to denigrate PoE, for an indie game it's very successful. But D3 is a behemoth. It's sold tens of millions of copies. It lacked a business model that incentivized long-term dev support, which I expect Blizzard will rectify with D4. But I never got the sense that a significant portion of its playerbase was upset about the streamlining changes that were made vs D2. Its really big flaws at launch were the auction house and difficulty tuning.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
Well if you want to make cynical predictions, I bet there's no skeletons, skulls or bone-like imagery of any sort on account of China being the market to please now
Well if you want to make cynical predictions, I bet there's no skeletons, skulls or bone-like imagery of any sort on account of China being the market to please now
I'd call it more of a "realistic" prediction. "Cynical" implies there is a chance it won't happen.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
There are pros and cons to both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, and I've put hundreds of hours into both(as well as Grim Dawn). I expect Diablo 4 to be more complex in character builds than Diablo 3 but still more forgiving and accessible than Diablo 2 and nowhere near the complexity of PoE of course.
Diablo 3 was still aces in terms of polish and melee feel, but the issues to me were the simplified class builds, auction house, difficulty balance, and overall thematically feeling off compared to the first two games. Instead of evoking the feeling of The Fall of the House of Usher meets The Divine Comedy, Diablo 3 was more Conan the Barbarian meets Supernatural.
Though I will say Diablo 3, over games like PoE or GD has an excellent sense of class identity. Which can be an issue when you open a game too far in build options.
Its such a cluster. Like in WoW they have been going back and forth on build variety and complexity. GGG has existed so far as a competitor/alternative to D3 and pretty much solely that. The company sold for 100 mil and by my quick research right now is up to 15 mil a year in annual revenue.
I dunno. I think they they continue to ignore the market and try to sail by on "its diablo people will buy it" it may not work as much this time (it probably will though). Add to that also tencent owned Riot putting the crosshairs on blizzard with their own offering too. Its going to be interesting to watch that is for sure.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the importance of PoE relative to D3. The reason D3 isn't as active now is simply because Blizzard chose not to continue its development, not because gamers have spoken that they prefer D2-style mechanics.
I mean I know I am not alone in saying that is exactly why I choose PoE over D3. Even if D3 was more active it just isnt Diablo ARPG to me. So no I do not think I am exagerating using empirical evidence to make a hypothesis. I know it is a big reason for the population staying with the company despite its own huge drawbac123k ks such as lack of AH/decent trading system.
So I can see what you are saying and there is plenty to support that but I dont think it means this other side is greatly exaggerating at all. Especially since it could be argued that perhaps a reason D3 failed to continue to be developed is because of what it became. Overly distilled with no real end game roadmap. Also I just want to be clear that I am just arguing that they should take into account GGG and PoE as a competitor. Not that they will.
I don't mean to denigrate PoE, for an indie game it's very successful. But D3 is a behemoth. It's sold tens of millions of copies. It lacked a business model that incentivized long-term dev support, which I expect Blizzard will rectify with D4. But I never got the sense that a significant portion of its playerbase was upset about the streamlining changes that were made vs D2. Its really big flaws at launch were the auction house and difficulty tuning.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
I can agree with most of that other than they are not in the same space. If projections are to be believed PoE at least has grown into it. It sold several years ago for 100 million buyout and has generated up to 100 million since then... so while not the near ~.5-1billionish of resales to the newest console that D3 achieved to get to where it has gotten it is no slouch either. And they are growing every year rather than regressing or depending on resales to bolster numbers.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of actiblizz managements major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
materially d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of their major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Could you expand on that last paragraph @surrealitycheck ? I'm acutally SUPER interested in the thoguhts around this sort of thing as complexity/not and choice in game design is super fascinating to me. So not having played D3 (though i have a second hand copy on it's way to me as we speak - take that blizzard), i'd be real interested in the perspective. Personally i kinda hate the Diablo/Borderlands/Wow style talent trees where a lot of levels you're just increasing % modifiers though. I dont mind a talent system, but i'd rather it be that each choice is a punchy, interesting addition, not "I do 5% more of thing!"
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
materially d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of their major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Could you expand on that last paragraph surrealitycheck ? I'm acutally SUPER interested in the thoguhts around this sort of thing as complexity/not and choice in game design is super fascinating to me. So not having played D3 (though i have a second hand copy on it's way to me as we speak - take that blizzard), i'd be real interested in the perspective. Personally i kinda hate the Diablo/Borderlands/Wow style talent trees where a lot of levels you're just increasing % modifiers though. I dont mind a talent system, but i'd rather it be that each choice is a punchy, interesting addition, not "I do 5% more of thing!"
alas i am off to bed and in full this is something i could ramble about at length but very broadly:
there was a huge worry partly birthed from a very short-term consumer testing approach that the primary problem for player retention was friction. the more sharp edges and obviously difficult choices your game presented the player with the more opportunities they had to decide to stop, and thus logically the way to make game with high levels of universal appeal and replayability you had to remove all these kinds of choices and situations. this has been described as "childproofing" on occasion. the sort of positive mission statement here could be "easy to pick up hard to master" - give the player a bunch of simple to understand basic pieces, but with lots of combinatorial possibilities (you see this in early pr about how diablo 3 had "billions of builds" arrived at by permuting the number of skill combinations... rendered absurd, of course, by the skills having no contextual sensitivity to each other, thus making those permutations essentially meaningless)
there were worries about loss aversion. a huge chunk of how a game like diablo worked was forcing the player to engage in emotionally fraught decisionmaking by making them commit resources, take risks, etc. diablo 2 rowed back on this, but it had some elements of this type in other areas - most notably the skill system and corpse running / death penalties
however the friction in diablo 2 accomplished a huge amount of hidden work that was not really noticed:
1) precisely because changing your spec was difficult, the process of levelling a build was materially different (assuming you weren't just cow levelling like a huge nerd). when i made my dogshit singing barbarian levelling that character felt hugely different to levelling my throwing barbarian, etc. this is gameplay that allowing instant respecs simply removes: if you never have to relevel, the experience of making a new character and levelling it up stops being something you get any value from as a designer. it also gave a perverse emotional reward for masochists of course
2) by making it take significant quantities of time to build and test a new character (albeit less so as patches went on, especially on battle net), players could only explore the build possibility space at a vastly reduced rate. the time from "build concept" to "build completely executed and done, move on to next concept" was so short in diablo 3 it effectively meant that even though it barely had many build possibilities to begin with, you could explore almost all of them in a few hours. again, this massively increased the gameplay payoff of a given build space size, not least because this process (given you were levelling a new character) had its own internal structure, feelings of accomplishment, that moment where a build "came together" etc. a huge complaint for diablo 3 was people looking at every level 60 barbarian and thinking they were all the same bar their gear, which was mostly %stat multipliers, and looking at their skills and feeling like there were no unexplored possibilities there.
for games with systems like diablo, exploring the mechanical space afforded by your systems needs to be a process that has ebbs, flows, goals, false peaks, secrets, caves, dungeons, etc.
3) resetting the game to make a new character meant that for most players the presence (or otherwise) of an endgame was vastly less of an issue. diablo 3 released with character dynamics and game systems that were very close to what an mmo would have with none of the endgame or social structure of an mmo to keep people playing. one of my friends on launch streamed himself and 3 others playing a 4monk party cycling the 2second invulnerability with an 8 second cooldown on monks to beat inferno and the sheer danger that this demonstration of the emptiness of diablo 3s endgame presented forced blizzard to hotfix it.
4) if there is a material cost to the process of building a character, then you think a lot more about what you are building... players imbue their gameplay experiences with meaning that is partially enforced by material rewards and punishments in the gameplay systems themselves. remove that element and the emotional response of players is massively blunted to those elements, as they become a mild diversion with no weight
this is not to say that there were not also costs to those frictions. but they were approached as if you simply needed to file them off and you would end up with something that was simply Diablo, but Improved.
as far as complexity in and of itself goes - this is also a big one, but i think the simplest version of this is that complexity, especially aggressive systemic complexity, was felt to be in and of itself a Bad Thing. mechanics should try to be as intuitive as possible, very quick to be modelled by the player, and you should try to avoid the experience of being baffled or worried by being presented with large amounts of incomprehensible information. the counter to this was, and i barely say this as a joke, dark souls (and hey, the first iteration of diablo 4 was a dark souls rip-off). one could also argue that a clear-eyed look at the level of complexity found in any moba is enough to tell people that an analysis in terms of complexity is not enough... and again, now what you will find is that different designers with different aesthetic preferences (and dare i say it audiences) have come to very different conclusions, because it turns out that a lot of this stuff is not Good or Bad but in service of some end, effect, systemic purpose etc etc
one huge cheat method to get players over a complexity hump? get them to play a highly complex game with their friends...
D3 launch was mostly people being unable to handle inferno difficulty with their crap items, and then quitting once they realized that playing the AH was the fastest way to upgrade. Only the few "good" players stuck past that friction point to find actual shallowness.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
materially d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of their major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Could you expand on that last paragraph @surrealitycheck ? I'm acutally SUPER interested in the thoguhts around this sort of thing as complexity/not and choice in game design is super fascinating to me. So not having played D3 (though i have a second hand copy on it's way to me as we speak - take that blizzard), i'd be real interested in the perspective. Personally i kinda hate the Diablo/Borderlands/Wow style talent trees where a lot of levels you're just increasing % modifiers though. I dont mind a talent system, but i'd rather it be that each choice is a punchy, interesting addition, not "I do 5% more of thing!"
Guess you haven't played retail WoW in a while because they changed the talent system away from the 5% more style thing years and years ago. And many people were and remain upset about it! A good chunk of the folks that quit retail for Classic that i know if did it for the 5% style talents. Idfgi.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
materially d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of their major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Could you expand on that last paragraph @surrealitycheck ? I'm acutally SUPER interested in the thoguhts around this sort of thing as complexity/not and choice in game design is super fascinating to me. So not having played D3 (though i have a second hand copy on it's way to me as we speak - take that blizzard), i'd be real interested in the perspective. Personally i kinda hate the Diablo/Borderlands/Wow style talent trees where a lot of levels you're just increasing % modifiers though. I dont mind a talent system, but i'd rather it be that each choice is a punchy, interesting addition, not "I do 5% more of thing!"
Guess you haven't played retail WoW in a while because they changed the talent system away from the 5% more style thing years and years ago. And many people were and remain upset about it! A good chunk of the folks that quit retail for Classic that i know if did it for the 5% style talents. Idfgi.
Oh, i know - But i havent played with that talent system, whereas i was familar with it.
I suspect it's an illusion of choice type thing? I dont really get it either. For me i really like to see clear consequences to my decisions. The best analogy i have is i like my character builds to be like working with say... Lego. Or maybe something like Technic/Knex/Ramagon might be better. Point is: Every choice visibly adds to the end goal. If i take a brick out, the results are noticeably different.
I suspect to other people, just the feeling of i made my numbers bigger is good. And hey, that's totally valid! I think if there's anything that can be taken away from this sort of discussion it's that there's no clear winner. I mean, i dont GET the appeal of 5% more talent systems - it's one of the reasons i've stayed away from BL3, because it's still doing that crap and aaaargh why. But it clearly works for a lot of people - dont have to understand it, but it's worth respecting.
Well if you want to make cynical predictions, I bet there's no skeletons, skulls or bone-like imagery of any sort on account of China being the market to please now
It isn't paywalled, but it might have some wierd ads that my blocker is blocking.
TLDR is that, China D3 is still full of zombies and skeletons, they just cut down the blood and gore. Even that is basically a bunch of guesswork to get something through government approval quickly rather than the result of adhering to clear laws or regulations.
Chinese games have skeletons in them. This isn't new.
It's impossible to describe a universal standard because there probably isn't really a standard to begin with, much less a universal one, but basically "Many developers, especially foreign ones, think that if they take out bones (and sometimes other things) from their game assets, it'll get approved by a relevant agency faster." The Ministry of Culture's guidelines are vague, and that could be a problem, but there's nothing about "no skeletons". There are things about "no promotion of gambling (that's important now), no obscenity, no incitement of racism, or harms the national interest."
So, something "ripped from the headlines" like Battlefield 4--which basically had you single-handed destroying half the People's Liberation Army in unrivaled detail--eventually got formally banned by the time of the inconveniently named China Rising DLC (as in "removed from the retail and digital marketplace", since there wasn't really much that could be done about people who already owned the game in China besides suggestions), fantasy games--included fantasy games that offer some vague understanding of Chinese or other Asian mythological traditions--have a lot more leeway to work with, and end up getting modified in strange ways, potentially unnecessary.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of actiblizz managements major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Can't agree here. There were people complaining about "Where's my skill trees??!?!?" and you can see this kind of thinking reflected in PoE's development, but the primary drivers of complaints about the game and the things they were worried about as a damage to the brand were things like dodgy connectivity at launch and the AH and itemization issues and a general lack of difficulty and endgame grinding to keep people engaged. And you can see the way they thought this too as it's reflected in the changes, sometimes pretty massive, they made to the game post-launch to save it. With all the changes they made, they didn't really fuck with the skill system at all. Instead they fixed the ability to have stuff to grind away at to get new gear, which was the core loop of the previous Diablo games too.
It's also important to note that at least with Blizzard properties like WoW and Diablo 3, any censoring they do to pass the Chinese approval process, those changes are not reflected in the U.S. or global releases of the game. The Chinese game client for WoW is different from the rest of the world.
Making claims that they're going to censor for China makes it sound as if a person expects the censorship to impact everybody else. It won't.
Yes, Blizzard will censor games to get them into China. This is not news and coming in here and making these big accusatory claims is nothing more than trying to incite more anti-Blizzard sentiment. None of this is news and none of this affects the rest of the world.
I did a quick Google search. Here's a reddit post from 2016 showing some differences in the global WoW art and the Chinese WoW art. Yes there are differences. No, those differences do not ruin us westerner's experience of the game. So stop trying to make this into a big deal. Because it's not.
If you preordered the WC3 Reforged "Spoils of War" edition, the game is now available for limited beta. That kind of kills my hot drop launch theory for Blizzcon.
I installed the beta client. It only has two races available right now - Orcs and Humans - and there are only two game modes available right now - 1v1 and 2v2.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of actiblizz managements major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Can't agree here. There were people complaining about "Where's my skill trees??!?!?" and you can see this kind of thinking reflected in PoE's development, but the primary drivers of complaints about the game and the things they were worried about as a damage to the brand were things like dodgy connectivity at launch and the AH and itemization issues and a general lack of difficulty and endgame grinding to keep people engaged. And you can see the way they thought this too as it's reflected in the changes, sometimes pretty massive, they made to the game post-launch to save it. With all the changes they made, they didn't really fuck with the skill system at all. Instead they fixed the ability to have stuff to grind away at to get new gear, which was the core loop of the previous Diablo games too.
there were lots of issues! but it wasnt the presence or absence of skill trees as such, it was that the skill system itself could not be salvaged to make it fit for purpose - character building - without basically ripping it out. thus the itemisation changes they made, in effect, added the slow-burn of builds back through itemisation. sets that changed skill behaviour, changed the values of elemental runes that otherwise did nothing, etc... they moved "how do i make a character behave differently" partly into the item system
i remember being unable to play for 80% of the first week and remembering all those posters saying that it being an online only service wouldnt matter... posters... online
but certainly if you read the major feedback past launch troubles the big pain points were
1) story (everybody hated it) / artstyle
2) auction house
3) lack of character customisation / character building / lack of depth
3 was always there, especially once you move past the initial year and look at the continuing playerbase. this is not hard to find feedback - just check out any random battle net threads or reddit posts about d3 in say 2012/13
Until the point companies just start with the censored version because it's cheaper that way than to make 2 versions. That's the inevitable conclusion with the current global market, so yeah, it's a big deal.
Its speculative for games at this point, but Hollywood pre-censors its movies for China. (even if more edits are applied afterward.) Its not a stretch to imagine big gaming studios eventually moving towards that model. In fact its arguable that Overwatch's character backgrounds are kept out of game, precisely so it is easier to deal with localization.
You will see the reverse effect of something China-developed like Immortal not getting additional gore added for international release. If anyone here cared about Immortal that is.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
It's also important to note that at least with Blizzard properties like WoW and Diablo 3, any censoring they do to pass the Chinese approval process, those changes are not reflected in the U.S. or global releases of the game. The Chinese game client for WoW is different from the rest of the world.
Making claims that they're going to censor for China makes it sound as if a person expects the censorship to impact everybody else. It won't.
Yes, Blizzard will censor games to get them into China. This is not news and coming in here and making these big accusatory claims is nothing more than trying to incite more anti-Blizzard sentiment. None of this is news and none of this affects the rest of the world.
I did a quick Google search. Here's a reddit post from 2016 showing some differences in the global WoW art and the Chinese WoW art. Yes there are differences. No, those differences do not ruin us westerner's experience of the game. So stop trying to make this into a big deal. Because it's not.
Okay this bread everywhere is hilarious. Diablo IV would only be improved by having things replaced with bread. Strike a demon have it explode into bread.
Nephalam! The Black Soul Stone fell into a big bag of flour and the prime evils have been baked into bread. Only you can stop them.
Ooh. Post credit cutscene after defeating Diablo:
Some of his minions sneak over to his carcass and sprinkle yeast on him causing him to rise again. Story hook set for D5.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of actiblizz managements major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Can't agree here. There were people complaining about "Where's my skill trees??!?!?" and you can see this kind of thinking reflected in PoE's development, but the primary drivers of complaints about the game and the things they were worried about as a damage to the brand were things like dodgy connectivity at launch and the AH and itemization issues and a general lack of difficulty and endgame grinding to keep people engaged. And you can see the way they thought this too as it's reflected in the changes, sometimes pretty massive, they made to the game post-launch to save it. With all the changes they made, they didn't really fuck with the skill system at all. Instead they fixed the ability to have stuff to grind away at to get new gear, which was the core loop of the previous Diablo games too.
there were lots of issues! but it wasnt the presence or absence of skill trees as such, it was that the skill system itself could not be salvaged to make it fit for purpose - character building - without basically ripping it out. thus the itemisation changes they made, in effect, added the slow-burn of builds back through itemisation. sets that changed skill behaviour, changed the values of elemental runes that otherwise did nothing, etc... they moved "how do i make a character behave differently" partly into the item system
i remember being unable to play for 80% of the first week and remembering all those posters saying that it being an online only service wouldnt matter... posters... online
but certainly if you read the major feedback past launch troubles the big pain points were
1) story (everybody hated it) / artstyle
2) auction house
3) lack of character customisation / character building / lack of depth
3 was always there, especially once you move past the initial year and look at the continuing playerbase. this is not hard to find feedback - just check out any random battle net threads or reddit posts about d3 in say 2012/13
The problem here is you are assuming they fixed itemization because they, for some reason, could not fix the skill system. But there's no reason to think that. The more obvious answer, and the one consistent with complaints about the game in those threads you are talking about, is that they fixed the itemization system because the itemization system itself sucked. That the lack of anything to grind for and the fact that trawling the AH was the best way to kit your character out was the whole problem and that all their changes that directly dealt with this issue were in fact aimed at dealing with that issue and not a backdoor way to deal with a different issue.
And this is, again, consistent with what previous Diablo games leaned on for their long-term player retention too. Running around grinding out new drops.
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It came out of that big Jason Schreier expose, I thought.
Yeah this was kinda what I heard - that it was sort of in development hell (lolz) for awhile there. I wouldn't be surprised if they WERE going to show it 2018 but they didn't feel it looked polished/good enough to show at the time. (I remember some sinister motives being suggested for why it was apparently pulled but honestly I'm just gonna subscribe to occam's razor for this one... If the rumors were true that it was supposed to be there, there's no reason to *not* show it other than it wasn't ready to show)
It would not surprise me one bit if after Blizzcon 2018's disaster they yanked a ton of people off other teams to help get the game in a presentable state.
I dunno. I think they they continue to ignore the market and try to sail by on "its diablo people will buy it" it may not work as much this time (it probably will though). Add to that also tencent owned Riot putting the crosshairs on blizzard with their own offering too. Its going to be interesting to watch that is for sure.
I think you're greatly exaggerating the importance of PoE relative to D3. The reason D3 isn't as active now is simply because Blizzard chose not to continue its development, not because gamers have spoken that they prefer D2-style mechanics.
I mean I know I am not alone in saying that is exactly why I choose PoE over D3. Even if D3 was more active it just isnt Diablo ARPG to me. So no I do not think I am exagerating using empirical evidence to make a hypothesis. I know it is a big reason for the population staying with the company despite its own huge drawbacks such as lack of AH/decent trading system.
So I can see what you are saying and there is plenty to support that but I dont think it means this other side is greatly exaggerating at all. Especially since it could be argued that perhaps a reason D3 failed to continue to be developed is because of what it became. Overly distilled with no real end game roadmap. Also I just want to be clear that I am just arguing that they should take into account GGG and PoE as a competitor. Not that they will.
I don't think the PC version ever really recovered either and that RoS standalone sales disappointed. With such a big name they need to have their endgame in place on release if they want people to stick around, its not something that can slowly develop and grow in popularity like PoE did.
PoE took the Warframe approach to microtransactions, thankfully, and it has obviously worked out amazingly well for them.
I've no doubt that a future D4 will have microtransactions in it. However, I suspect it won't be of the Warframe variety and will probably just be regular ol' Activision "Give us all your money you feckless plebs!" variety.
Hrm. :sad:
I don't mean to denigrate PoE, for an indie game it's very successful. But D3 is a behemoth. It's sold tens of millions of copies. It lacked a business model that incentivized long-term dev support, which I expect Blizzard will rectify with D4. But I never got the sense that a significant portion of its playerbase was upset about the streamlining changes that were made vs D2. Its really big flaws at launch were the auction house and difficulty tuning.
PoE's approach to focusing in on the classic D2 style of game mechanics earned them a loyal following, but it's still a niche audience compared to the level Blizzard operates at. They made plenty of mistakes in D3, but from a business perspective, their choices to make respeccing easy or skill builds simple or things like that were not among them.
Come on, in Diablo? They'll just do the same sort of stuff they did in D3: https://www.techinasia.com/diablo-3-china-censorship
I'd call it more of a "realistic" prediction. "Cynical" implies there is a chance it won't happen.
Diablo 3 was still aces in terms of polish and melee feel, but the issues to me were the simplified class builds, auction house, difficulty balance, and overall thematically feeling off compared to the first two games. Instead of evoking the feeling of The Fall of the House of Usher meets The Divine Comedy, Diablo 3 was more Conan the Barbarian meets Supernatural.
Though I will say Diablo 3, over games like PoE or GD has an excellent sense of class identity. Which can be an issue when you open a game too far in build options.
I can agree with most of that other than they are not in the same space. If projections are to be believed PoE at least has grown into it. It sold several years ago for 100 million buyout and has generated up to 100 million since then... so while not the near ~.5-1billionish of resales to the newest console that D3 achieved to get to where it has gotten it is no slouch either. And they are growing every year rather than regressing or depending on resales to bolster numbers.
d3 replayability being absolutely dogshit on launch was a material hit to every single person i know who played it
one of actiblizz managements major concerns about d3 was that player response to the game was so bad it had materially damaged the brand long term!!!!!!!!! feedback about the skill system and builds is literally what led to the fact that they re-implemented staggered and slow build development through the backdoor via itemisation. diablo 4 will be more complex than diablo 3 on launch. i would put money on this if i wasnt actually a crab and therefore not able to get my claws on legal tender
one of the major realisations of the game industry over the last few years has been that all the late 2000s early 2010 game design dogma about complexity was comically wrong, and d3s specific design was a real nadir of this kind of thinking. i remember arguing with david sirlin on his blog about this around the release of d3 where he was trying to argue that diablo 3's skill system would be good because it prevented people getting stuck in bad builds, and a good system let people explore the space as quickly as possible so they could be competitive, and i still remember suddenly realising just how much a lot of people quite heavily involved in the game design space Just Didn't Get it
Could you expand on that last paragraph @surrealitycheck ? I'm acutally SUPER interested in the thoguhts around this sort of thing as complexity/not and choice in game design is super fascinating to me. So not having played D3 (though i have a second hand copy on it's way to me as we speak - take that blizzard), i'd be real interested in the perspective. Personally i kinda hate the Diablo/Borderlands/Wow style talent trees where a lot of levels you're just increasing % modifiers though. I dont mind a talent system, but i'd rather it be that each choice is a punchy, interesting addition, not "I do 5% more of thing!"
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alas i am off to bed and in full this is something i could ramble about at length but very broadly:
there was a huge worry partly birthed from a very short-term consumer testing approach that the primary problem for player retention was friction. the more sharp edges and obviously difficult choices your game presented the player with the more opportunities they had to decide to stop, and thus logically the way to make game with high levels of universal appeal and replayability you had to remove all these kinds of choices and situations. this has been described as "childproofing" on occasion. the sort of positive mission statement here could be "easy to pick up hard to master" - give the player a bunch of simple to understand basic pieces, but with lots of combinatorial possibilities (you see this in early pr about how diablo 3 had "billions of builds" arrived at by permuting the number of skill combinations... rendered absurd, of course, by the skills having no contextual sensitivity to each other, thus making those permutations essentially meaningless)
there were worries about loss aversion. a huge chunk of how a game like diablo worked was forcing the player to engage in emotionally fraught decisionmaking by making them commit resources, take risks, etc. diablo 2 rowed back on this, but it had some elements of this type in other areas - most notably the skill system and corpse running / death penalties
however the friction in diablo 2 accomplished a huge amount of hidden work that was not really noticed:
1) precisely because changing your spec was difficult, the process of levelling a build was materially different (assuming you weren't just cow levelling like a huge nerd). when i made my dogshit singing barbarian levelling that character felt hugely different to levelling my throwing barbarian, etc. this is gameplay that allowing instant respecs simply removes: if you never have to relevel, the experience of making a new character and levelling it up stops being something you get any value from as a designer. it also gave a perverse emotional reward for masochists of course
2) by making it take significant quantities of time to build and test a new character (albeit less so as patches went on, especially on battle net), players could only explore the build possibility space at a vastly reduced rate. the time from "build concept" to "build completely executed and done, move on to next concept" was so short in diablo 3 it effectively meant that even though it barely had many build possibilities to begin with, you could explore almost all of them in a few hours. again, this massively increased the gameplay payoff of a given build space size, not least because this process (given you were levelling a new character) had its own internal structure, feelings of accomplishment, that moment where a build "came together" etc. a huge complaint for diablo 3 was people looking at every level 60 barbarian and thinking they were all the same bar their gear, which was mostly %stat multipliers, and looking at their skills and feeling like there were no unexplored possibilities there.
for games with systems like diablo, exploring the mechanical space afforded by your systems needs to be a process that has ebbs, flows, goals, false peaks, secrets, caves, dungeons, etc.
3) resetting the game to make a new character meant that for most players the presence (or otherwise) of an endgame was vastly less of an issue. diablo 3 released with character dynamics and game systems that were very close to what an mmo would have with none of the endgame or social structure of an mmo to keep people playing. one of my friends on launch streamed himself and 3 others playing a 4monk party cycling the 2second invulnerability with an 8 second cooldown on monks to beat inferno and the sheer danger that this demonstration of the emptiness of diablo 3s endgame presented forced blizzard to hotfix it.
4) if there is a material cost to the process of building a character, then you think a lot more about what you are building... players imbue their gameplay experiences with meaning that is partially enforced by material rewards and punishments in the gameplay systems themselves. remove that element and the emotional response of players is massively blunted to those elements, as they become a mild diversion with no weight
this is not to say that there were not also costs to those frictions. but they were approached as if you simply needed to file them off and you would end up with something that was simply Diablo, but Improved.
as far as complexity in and of itself goes - this is also a big one, but i think the simplest version of this is that complexity, especially aggressive systemic complexity, was felt to be in and of itself a Bad Thing. mechanics should try to be as intuitive as possible, very quick to be modelled by the player, and you should try to avoid the experience of being baffled or worried by being presented with large amounts of incomprehensible information. the counter to this was, and i barely say this as a joke, dark souls (and hey, the first iteration of diablo 4 was a dark souls rip-off). one could also argue that a clear-eyed look at the level of complexity found in any moba is enough to tell people that an analysis in terms of complexity is not enough... and again, now what you will find is that different designers with different aesthetic preferences (and dare i say it audiences) have come to very different conclusions, because it turns out that a lot of this stuff is not Good or Bad but in service of some end, effect, systemic purpose etc etc
one huge cheat method to get players over a complexity hump? get them to play a highly complex game with their friends...
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Guess you haven't played retail WoW in a while because they changed the talent system away from the 5% more style thing years and years ago. And many people were and remain upset about it! A good chunk of the folks that quit retail for Classic that i know if did it for the 5% style talents. Idfgi.
Oh, i know - But i havent played with that talent system, whereas i was familar with it.
I suspect it's an illusion of choice type thing? I dont really get it either. For me i really like to see clear consequences to my decisions. The best analogy i have is i like my character builds to be like working with say... Lego. Or maybe something like Technic/Knex/Ramagon might be better. Point is: Every choice visibly adds to the end goal. If i take a brick out, the results are noticeably different.
I suspect to other people, just the feeling of i made my numbers bigger is good. And hey, that's totally valid! I think if there's anything that can be taken away from this sort of discussion it's that there's no clear winner. I mean, i dont GET the appeal of 5% more talent systems - it's one of the reasons i've stayed away from BL3, because it's still doing that crap and aaaargh why. But it clearly works for a lot of people - dont have to understand it, but it's worth respecting.
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Can you sum that up for me, seems paywalled.
TLDR is that, China D3 is still full of zombies and skeletons, they just cut down the blood and gore. Even that is basically a bunch of guesswork to get something through government approval quickly rather than the result of adhering to clear laws or regulations.
It's impossible to describe a universal standard because there probably isn't really a standard to begin with, much less a universal one, but basically "Many developers, especially foreign ones, think that if they take out bones (and sometimes other things) from their game assets, it'll get approved by a relevant agency faster." The Ministry of Culture's guidelines are vague, and that could be a problem, but there's nothing about "no skeletons". There are things about "no promotion of gambling (that's important now), no obscenity, no incitement of racism, or harms the national interest."
So, something "ripped from the headlines" like Battlefield 4--which basically had you single-handed destroying half the People's Liberation Army in unrivaled detail--eventually got formally banned by the time of the inconveniently named China Rising DLC (as in "removed from the retail and digital marketplace", since there wasn't really much that could be done about people who already owned the game in China besides suggestions), fantasy games--included fantasy games that offer some vague understanding of Chinese or other Asian mythological traditions--have a lot more leeway to work with, and end up getting modified in strange ways, potentially unnecessary.
Can't agree here. There were people complaining about "Where's my skill trees??!?!?" and you can see this kind of thinking reflected in PoE's development, but the primary drivers of complaints about the game and the things they were worried about as a damage to the brand were things like dodgy connectivity at launch and the AH and itemization issues and a general lack of difficulty and endgame grinding to keep people engaged. And you can see the way they thought this too as it's reflected in the changes, sometimes pretty massive, they made to the game post-launch to save it. With all the changes they made, they didn't really fuck with the skill system at all. Instead they fixed the ability to have stuff to grind away at to get new gear, which was the core loop of the previous Diablo games too.
Making claims that they're going to censor for China makes it sound as if a person expects the censorship to impact everybody else. It won't.
Yes, Blizzard will censor games to get them into China. This is not news and coming in here and making these big accusatory claims is nothing more than trying to incite more anti-Blizzard sentiment. None of this is news and none of this affects the rest of the world.
I did a quick Google search. Here's a reddit post from 2016 showing some differences in the global WoW art and the Chinese WoW art. Yes there are differences. No, those differences do not ruin us westerner's experience of the game. So stop trying to make this into a big deal. Because it's not.
If you preordered the WC3 Reforged "Spoils of War" edition, the game is now available for limited beta. That kind of kills my hot drop launch theory for Blizzcon.
I installed the beta client. It only has two races available right now - Orcs and Humans - and there are only two game modes available right now - 1v1 and 2v2.
there were lots of issues! but it wasnt the presence or absence of skill trees as such, it was that the skill system itself could not be salvaged to make it fit for purpose - character building - without basically ripping it out. thus the itemisation changes they made, in effect, added the slow-burn of builds back through itemisation. sets that changed skill behaviour, changed the values of elemental runes that otherwise did nothing, etc... they moved "how do i make a character behave differently" partly into the item system
i remember being unable to play for 80% of the first week and remembering all those posters saying that it being an online only service wouldnt matter... posters... online
but certainly if you read the major feedback past launch troubles the big pain points were
1) story (everybody hated it) / artstyle
2) auction house
3) lack of character customisation / character building / lack of depth
3 was always there, especially once you move past the initial year and look at the continuing playerbase. this is not hard to find feedback - just check out any random battle net threads or reddit posts about d3 in say 2012/13
You will see the reverse effect of something China-developed like Immortal not getting additional gore added for international release. If anyone here cared about Immortal that is.
Okay this bread everywhere is hilarious. Diablo IV would only be improved by having things replaced with bread. Strike a demon have it explode into bread.
Nephalam! The Black Soul Stone fell into a big bag of flour and the prime evils have been baked into bread. Only you can stop them.
Ooh. Post credit cutscene after defeating Diablo:
Some of his minions sneak over to his carcass and sprinkle yeast on him causing him to rise again. Story hook set for D5.
The problem here is you are assuming they fixed itemization because they, for some reason, could not fix the skill system. But there's no reason to think that. The more obvious answer, and the one consistent with complaints about the game in those threads you are talking about, is that they fixed the itemization system because the itemization system itself sucked. That the lack of anything to grind for and the fact that trawling the AH was the best way to kit your character out was the whole problem and that all their changes that directly dealt with this issue were in fact aimed at dealing with that issue and not a backdoor way to deal with a different issue.
And this is, again, consistent with what previous Diablo games leaned on for their long-term player retention too. Running around grinding out new drops.