Diablo Boss Leaves Blizzard After Heading the RPG Franchise for Five Years

I know its not a popular opinion to like diablo 4 but I really love the game. I haven't played it for a while because my prioritys have been sim racing and it's very much become my obsession as you all may be aware. I just need the time to dedicate some serious play time to diablo as an hour here and there just dosnt do the game any justice. And then there's path of exile 2 looming over the horizon as well. Arpg lovers are certainly well catered for at the moment.

The problem is that Path of Exile 2 exists and simply does everything, outside of telling a story, better. D4 pretty much shows you everything it has to offer in the opening hours, it then holds your hand through the rest of the game as you fight level scaled trash mobs and samey boss battles until the finale. Enemies explode in showers of near useless loot, character builds are streamlined to near linear and the end game loot is gimped by the need to keep powercreep as minimal as possible so they can drag it out as a GaS for years. PoE2 goes the other route, it's not beginner friendly but it lets you experiment with insane builds, loot is actually meaningful and combat is challenging.

Got this game on a Black Friday sale. This is a game I just can’t love. If it wasn’t marketed as part of “Diablo” franchise, it might be a decent standalone title. I gave it about 100 hrs over 3 characters. I’d say that’s a pretty fair try. Went back to the remastered Diablo 2. Still can’t see why they took what made Diablo amazing and changed it all (area scaling vs level scaling, mp xp share, leveling up stat points etc…). Oh and they still try to keep the price high, as if it deserves it because of the name alone or something. D3 was even a lot closer to the franchise than what this game was. It’s like blizzard took people who had no clue why the first 2 (and expansions) were played soo much, and put them in charge. Or they knew and purposely tried to ruin the franchise. All that said. If you don’t think of it as Diablo, it’s palatable.

@AgentMantis Both games have a place depending on your needs.

You can make a solid argument for PoE (either of them) being the better game but you need to have the time available to invest to get the most out of them. If you do not have that time available PoE is a bit of a slog and progress can seem marginal.

That is when D4 shines if you just want to go in for a couple of hours, blow up some monsters and make some progress that is possible.

I can have fun with both PoE's & D4 and I think they all have a place in the current market.

(Would still pick Grim Dawn as the best game of this type over the PoE or Diablo franchise though 😉)

I love D4. Yeah its not the D2 I grew up with. Yeah D4 felt like more of a spinoff but the one thing it does great is respect your time for the most part and I love that. Working 50 hrs a week and still being able to make headway in an ARPG is Huge. Yes POE2 is insane, its amazing but I just dont have the time to invest in a game like D2 or POE2 like I did before. This is why I enjoy D4! Btw I have been having a blast with S9! Its been great fun! Just cleared T4 balial solo last night with my Boulder Druid.

@RiverGenie grim dawn..what a game and a crying shame its never made it to the consoles..

Diablo IV is good. But the live service aspect killed it for me. Just doesn’t feel right. I completed the story then stopped playing. Already Molag Bal’s deep into ESO so another “MMO” would’ve been too much.

I've been a huge Diablo fan for my whole life, but I knew D4 was gonna be terrible with the way Blizzard was heading.
Been playing it since last month expecting a great campaign and terrible endgame, but was met with the worst campaign of the whole franchise.
I'd rather go back to the original Diablo then play this crap.

Diablo 4 was good until patch 1.03. Since that it's one-time wonder, where you cannot experience exploration with another character. It is sad D4 completely lost it's randomness so there is no need (or option) to play it again. And monster level scale and respawn completely killed it atop.

Diablo IV is far from the worst game ever released, it’s a good game marred by major identity issues. That being said, Rod has been a problematic presence for a number of reasons but chief among these is acting like the one Bethesda designer (forget his name, the guy who threw a fit on Twitter and gaslit people for not liking Starfield) and slamming competitors, or making sarcastic comments when someone speaks poorly of recent update for his games. He acts like a manchild, and we need less of that and more people who let the product speak.

I wish him well on his future endeavours, but perhaps some time to himself is best for now. He doesn’t have the best optics right now, never really has but also wasn’t as insufferable as he’s been in the last couple years.

@Northern_munkey Grim Dawn never made it to Playstation consoles but it's available on Xbox.

@RiverGenie that sucks..

@shedX75 With the way this industry is… You can’t get comfortable. Big tech over the last decade has shown us they’re not jobs you really retire from. If you’re not consistently thinking about your next move, you’ll get left behind.

@Leetware1 I agree that diablo 2 resurrected is the best of the diablo franchise. I think diablo 4 was designed with the more casual of gamers in mind. Diablos 4 skill tree is much better than D3's but not as good as D2's. It's a strange game because a lot of it is bloody good and feels really solid and then some of it is quite bland and a lacking. It reminds me of the first watchdogs game where ubisoft built this incredible open world but had no idea what to do with it. That's how I feel about D4 even though I love it.

@Overmind that's the most important thing. If you are having fun and enjoying it nothing else really matters.

I like Diablo until you hit end game stuff, it's ridiculously boring now, I can literally get my buffs up and then hold one single button to engage Dance of Knives and just destroy everything in my path, it's so tediously mind destroying boring
I know I made the build but it should never be this easy

Unfortunately, Diablo 4 is unbearably boring game.
I can only hope that future updates may bring some level of solutions.

We never know if things are gonna get better or worse when a figure like that leaves. That being said, people are actually too reactive to Diablo in general. The game is actually in its best state. I'm sure come expansion two some lingering issues will be ironed out, but people are gonna complain regardless, such is the internet. Some guys play every single season, have hundreds of hours clocked and say there's nothing to do.