Anybody playing that Satanic game?

I'm personally waiting till it's 50% off. Considering they essentially admitted releasing an unfinished product saying they will be adding more story every season and that they had 2 expansion in development before it even released. I get that is pretty much the entire industry but still. It is my favorite genre and I loved the first game but even in D2 seasons didn't initially exist. I don't like starting from 0 every season, it really makes me feel disconnected with my characters, aren't RPGs about feeling that connection? D3 had a very flawed foundation and the only way to overcome it was to give insane damage buffs apparently. I played the D4 open beta weekend and while I was enjoying it pretty much every step of the way I kept thinking "This is going to feel awful having to redo this every 3+ months"

So basically figuring once it goes on sale for 50% off there will have been several seasons of balancing and more story content added. So I will get more game for my money at the cost of some fomo cosmetics which the cash shop kind of ruins fomo anyway. Look at SoT very few fomo cosmetics that look better than anything we can get in the cash shop now. Also I played shadowlands for over a year and literally was hating my life but the sunk cost fallacy had me. I had already purchased the time and invested 17+ years into the game at the point. That feeling had me on the fence about even trying D4 since all the press around Blizz was so bad at the time. Then Immortal dropped and was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen monetization wise. At that point I pretty much checked out of everything. I did 1 month of WoW since dragon flight came out because token prices drop at expansion launches so I worked on some of the cosmetic grinds I never finished and it didn't take long to get disgusted all over again. They really didn't fix much of SL and the dragon flight changes everyone raved about weren't that impressive. I bought a bunch of wow tokens and loaded my bnet balance to the max ($350 USD) so when I am ready to buy another game I don't have to pay out of pocket. That said even though it's "Free money" Still not willing to pay full price for a Blizz product again. Especially one that is going to make you start over every 3 months anyways. What's the rush? I figure when I do buy it I can play a new class each season so it doesn't feel as bad starting fresh so I might get 5-7 seasons out of the game depending on how many classes they add each expansion.

Watching the news on wowhead though and seeing so many aspects of D4 being disabled because they are exploitable and they didnt properly test the game, nerfs of upto 70% on stuff... I don't think I have ever seen such big nerfs that's serious neglect on testing. History repeating itself though. The D3 beta lasted 8 months and the whole time they were like "trust us, end game is amazing" they only let us test upto the skeleton king, max lvl 13. Basically what became the games demo. 8 months of them testing what spells we should start with, then testing a real money auction house, game comes out and we hated end game and it took them a year to make it at least feel decent to play and an expansion with many more patches to actually become enjoyable.

Feels weird though. Overwatch is the first Blizz game I had no interest in (after they announced it would be pvp only) 70% of my PC gaming was exclusively Blizzard. I like the campaigns though, Never really did much for competitive warcraft or starcraft and never pvped in D2 (certainly not in 1) so now overwatch, immortal, D4, I did a bunch of heroes of the storm but mostly vs bots because it was more time efficient. are on my list of games I have had 0 initial interest in. I did buy overwatch with token money when it was 50% off but more for the cross game cosmetics than the game itself.

I guess it might be a bit ironic that I hate seasons in games and I quit SoT without giving them a chance and seeing how easy they were to complete but I had WoW to fall back on as it was in a new expansion but my disgust in how that expansion was done pushed me back to SoT. Though the size of these updates and gaps between seasons now is causing me to play less. When I first came back I had loads of ledgers to get so stuff to do every month. Now that I am caught up it's like a week of play every season. I haven't done the 30 chests of fortune but they said they would be moving around to different events but they will always be in the game so I don't see any rush on that so saving it as a longer term goal.

Path of Exile2 should be out before D4 goes to 50% off though so that might keep me busy as well. They don't really see the need to rush, they know they have a better product they even went as far as to mock immortal saying it isn't even a game. PoE plays a bit clunky and has the same awful seasonal end game but at least each season adds new game systems so it feels a bit unique instead of like D3, relevel the same gems, farm the same gear just higher % dmg boosts etc.