BlizzCon Cometh...

Jesus fuck, has it really been almost a year since my last post?

My original plan here was to have my Diablo III postmortem finished, and have moved on to discussing what I wanted to see from Diablo IV, long before now, but it would seem that ship has sailed without me on it. So, with BlizzCon only days away, and rumours swirling once again that they'll actually announce D4 this time, really, I guess I'll skip to the end, and then backtrack.

What do I want from Diablo IV? Honestly, nothing.

That's going to seem very strange, given how much time and head-space I've clearly given to D3, but I'm honestly not all that excited for D4. I've already decided that I won't be playing it at launch, or even in the first year, after the debacle of D3's launch; and, given what other news is swirling around ActiBlizz lately, I don't believe that announcing D4 at this late stage of the game will change their narrative all that much. People who've made careers out of their Blizzard fandom are deleting their accounts and resolving never to buy another Blizzard game ever again; it seems that the least I can do, having also vowed never to spend money on another Blizzard game ever again, if for different reasons, is join the boycott.

But, really, boycotting Blizzard at this point is just a formality. The truth is that I've already moved on from Blizzard's games. I don''t have any expectation that today's Blizzard will bring a new Diablo title that actually innovates or pushes the genre forward; meanwhile, Grinding Gear Games are constantly innovating and trying to push the genre forward, and have succeeded well enough that other ARPGs are now imitating Path of Exile, rather than imitating Diablo II. Blizzard, whose Condor/Blizzard North unit invented the ARPG, is now irrelevant to the genre, and has been for years.

Let's face it: innovating isn't something Blizzard have actually ever done.

Blizzard's game is to take something that others are already doing, but that nobody is yet dominating, and then perfect it: polishing off the rough edges, and adding interesting story beats and charming characters to make the whole package sing. They have always produced engaging, highly polished games, but those games were never inventive; they were streamlined, stripped-down versions of other games that already existed. WarCraft did not invent real-time strategy; World of WarCraft did not invent the MMORPG; Hearthstone was literally Magic the Gathering Lite with WoW's IP on top; Overwatch was Team Fortress 2 with more characters; and so on.

Blizzard North were the only innovators that Blizzard ever had, and they're all gone now... and if you needed proof of that, look no further than Diablo III, which was a god-awful mess at launch, and which is still fundamentally broken. This is a company that thought Diablo Immortal was a great idea, and something that long-suffering Diablo fans would embrace with enthusiasm; this is a company that thought banning and censoring free speech in one of the most outspoken fandoms in video games was a fantastic business move. They've lost touch with their fans completely, and I have zero faith in their ability to have listened to what fans were telling them about the Diablo franchise specifically.

That said... hypothetically speaking, what would Diablo IV need to do, in order to lure me back in?

1. Remember that solo PvE is the heart and soul of the ARPG genre.

Alternatively, if you want to make a Diabloverse MMO, commit to that and actually build and balance it like an MMO. Do not try to do both simultaneously; despite their similarities, ARPG and MMO do not actually hybridize well.

• Do finish telling the story that D3 started. Sorry, but you don't get a clean slate, here; you can't just drop all the dangling story thread that you didn't bring to completion in your last title and start over.

2. Move the genre forward

Path of Exile are dominating the ARPG genre right now, and other ARPGs are starting to iterate on their system. Diablo II is no longer the standard, so it's not enough anymore to just make the D2 sequel that people wanted, and which D3 wasn't. You have to do new things; you have to do things with nobody ever thought could be done with the form. And I don't just mean in terms of monetizing the fucking thing.

• Do a branching storyline, in the style of Octopath Traveller, except that the outcomes of quests form the decision points where the story branches. An ARPG really can't include a bunch of dialog trees without ceasing to be an ARPG, but you can use directional storytelling, and other storytelling tricks from visual media, so produce the same effect: having the story unfold differently depending on what the player does.
• Do voxel-based, fully destructible environments, of the sort that Everquest Next was working on before it was cancelled. And do free movement: no more invisible walls, no more cheap gating mechanics. Use proper level design to guide the players where you want them to go, instead. And do it without loading screens; seriously, Gas Powered Games was making ARPGs with seamless area transitions almost twenty years ago, and you should revive that tech. 
• Do proper RPG progression mechanics; do proper ARPG itemization; and add one character development mechanic that's unique to this game. Think PoE's passive web, ascendancies, and pantheon system, or Grim Dawn's constellations... you get the picture.  
• Don't make another game in which the only source of real power is loot.
• Don't worry about consoles; the next generation of consoles will have plenty of power, and SSDs, and should be able to anything that a gaming PC can do.

3. Your multiplayer content must add value without detracting from the core game.

Spend some time thinking about what a guild or community even looks like for this genre. Spend time thinking about, and building, features which those players will find useful, and fun to use.

• Do have proper match-making this time, for people that just want to play pick-up games without having joined a guild first.
• Do have a proper trading system, which caters to social trading but which discourages speculation. If you find yourself nerfing in-game drop rates to balance your trading economy, then you're done it wrong.
• Do have proper PvP, for those that like that sort of thing. Give players the tools to run their own PvE racing events, PvP jousts and tournaments, and challenge "leagues" with added rules and restrictions to increase the game's difficulty. You know, like PoE have already done.
• Do add built-in voice chat, this time. Seriously, why was this not already a thing?

4. Make the game free to play.

I am serious about never buying another Blizzard game, but I might try the game if no up-front risk is involved. If I like it, I might even be moved to buy additional stash space, or additional character classes, or cosmetic mtx.

• Do add a robust cosmetic mtx system from launch. D3's transmog system is weak shit; do better.
• Don't sell the game for full retail, and then lard it with "live service" bullshit.

5. Finish the fucking thing, and test it thoroughly, before releasing it.

I know that the trend in AAA video games is to release products in a beta stage of completion, and then release a road map of upcoming fixes and features that weren't ready for the game's launch, but we're talking about Diablo IV here, which is following up a game which was released broken, full of bugs, unfinished, and so badly designed that they did a complete redesign for its first expansion pack. Don't repeat any of those mistakes. Do take some other risks along the way, though.

• Do bring forward the NPCs from D3. Eirena the Enchantress, Kormac the Templar, Lyndon the Scoundrel, Covetous Shen, and Zoltan Kulle were some of the best characters in the last game of the series, with stories that were arguably better told than any of the player characters.
• Do pick up the story from where the last game left off, and build on it. The story events of Reaper of Souls killed lots of Sanctuary's people -- we're talking about Black Death levels of mass death, here, with half of the population, if not more, slaughtered in the streets by monsters that most didn't actually believe existed until that moment. What are the consequences of that? D4 shouldn't be a gothic horror story so much as a post-apocalyptic story.
• Do something new with the game's villain. Yes, I know the game is literally called Diablo, and that Diablo himself will make an appearance, but how you get to the story beat where killing Diablo is your goal should be something other than a straight line. Maybe the wave of death from RoS rang a cosmic dinner bell, drawing in Cthulu-esque monsters from beyond that can only be fought by the Nephalem, the Angiris Council, and Diablo himself... all fighting side-by-side together against impending doom? And then have Diablo turn on the group, and need to be put down like a rabid dog? Seriously, the options are limitless here.

Blizzard aren't going to do any of those things, of course, and are unlikely to have any hands-on gameplay ready to go, or even show, for Diablo IV. My prediction: A patented Blizzard cinematic trailer, with Blizzard's normal Hollywood-calibre production values, and very little by way of concrete details, all of it being overshadowed by the China/Hong Kong/protests story. But who knows? Maybe I'll be wrong.

Either way, we'll know for sure in a matter of hours.