D4's Hail Mary Play

Well, they've finally gone and done it. With only a month to go before they launch their (doomed) Vessel Of Hatred expansion pack, the Diablo IV dev team have announced their own 2.0 reboot... just like Diablo III did.

From Kotaku:

Diablo 4's next big update arrives in October as part of the game’s next season, which is also coming at the same time as its first paid expansion. This new update, which is going to be tested by players in September, is changing quite a lot of things, including the level cap, how monsters scale, the paragon system, and much more.

There's a PTR, of course, since D4's devs have no feel for their own game and need players to tell them if it's good, and the changes basically adjust everything about the existing game... slightly.

1. The level cap is being lowered from 100 to 60, with this change being accompanied by a stat squish. Since there was never enough game in D4 to support 100 levels of grinding, this basically just shortens the amount of time it takes to get to D4's "end game," and is the second time they've tried to shorten the playtime-to-endgame metric.
2. Progression past 60 will be entirely Paragon level gain... just like D3 did it. And since D4's Paragon system is only slightly less boring than D3's, this means that players will have no feeling of progression past level 60 in D4, either.
   
3. D4's World Tiers are being ditched completely, and replaced with D3's difficulty tier structure, complete with multiple Torment difficulties. They did call one of the difficulties "Penitent," though, a delightfully archaic word with doesn't see nearly enough use these days, and which is confounding D4 content creators as they try to figure out how to pronounce it.
4. Each class is getting one more skill, one more skill-supporting unique item, and improvements to their "ultimate" skills which might just make them attractive to use. D3 also did this as part of their 2.0 reboot.

Changes are also coming for D4's end game, including an expansion of the game's Pit system which essentially just turns it into D3's Greater Rift system, and deprecation of the Nightmare Dungeon system, which was D4's attempt to mimic Path of Exile's modular end-game map system, and which was always terrible because the dungeons it was based on were also terrible. 

Crucially, though, these changes (and the upcoming PTR) are paywalled behind an expansion pack purchase, which means that they're not actually addressing deficiencies of the base game at all, since they won't in the base game. Just as they did with Diablo III, Blizzard are apparently trying to convince customers who didn't feel like they got their money's worth from a $70 USD purchase, that essentially the same game is worth an extra $50 USD.

D4's 2.0 reboot comes hard on the heels of their Loot Reborn reboot, which means that the game is now effectively on the 2.0 version of its 2.0 version. Diablo IV (2.0)², if you will. They've also definitely abandoned all pretense of D4 being inspired by Diablo II, which D4's devs had previously described as their "guiding light" and "north star." Not so much, apparently, since they're now just nakedly turning their game into the 2.0 version of Diablo III 2.0. Or maybe that's the 3.0 version? Or should we be calling it the 4.0 version? 

Does    Diablo III 4.0 = Diablo IV (2.0)²    ? 

I don't even know any more.

What I do know is that Diablo IV's Vessel Of Hatred expansion is still doomed. 

An expansion pack is meant to be additional content for a popular game that players love. It's not supposed to be the properly fixed and finished version of a game whose customers ratio'd it to hell and back on Metacritic. Rolling out a 2.0 reboot of a game that was largely not perceived as having earned its original purchase price, just a month ahead of the launch of its paid expansion pack, with a good chunk of the 2.0 improvements being paywalled behind that expansion pack purchase? That's exactly the playbook that saw Diablo III shed 80% of its player base, permanently.

And that's just the story of the Diablo franchise all over, isn't it? Blizzard had a team of passionate creative people in Blizzard North who'd spun a new IP and two excellent games out of nothing for them, but Blizzard didn't value them at all, and they shut Blizzard North down, scattering that team to the winds. That loss of institutional memory, of ARPG expertise, has clearly proved to be unrecoverable. Jay Wilson's team was forced to reinvent the Diablo game for D3 because nobody was left at Blizzard who still understood Diablo II, and they failed. 

Josh Mosqueira's team managed to more of less get a handle on the concepts when they rebooted D3, but the plug got pulled, that team got disbanded, and the institutional memory that allowed them to almost fix D3's problems was reset to zero again, leaving Luis Barriga and Jesse McCree faced with the task of reinventing the ARPG from scratch all over again... which they failed at. 

Fergusson, Shely, and Piepora weren't given enough pieces to pick up with they took over the project, and failed to finish that task of reinvention before their game launched, and are only now managing to get back to the point that Mosqueira's team had already reached a decade ago. Blizzard have wasted ten years getting back the same point they were at with the franchise's previous installment.

It's not nearly enough, and not nearly in time. 

Because Path of Exile II is launching only a month after Vessel Of Hatred, and we can already see how good that looks. And unlike previous GGG releases, PoE2 is getting a serious marketing push, and generating some serious buzz. Why would anyone shell out more money for D3 ((2.0)²)² when they can get Path of Exile II for free?

I'm standing by my last prediction: Vessel Of Hatred will retain only 10% of Diablo IV's original customer base, and Blizzard will either take the game free-to-play by the new year, or stop development on all future expansion content. Path of Exile II, by contrast, will be a huge hit, beating Path of Exile's previous records for both concurrent players and peak players, and earning reviews that can't help but acknowledge that Blizzard's offering looks impoverished by comparison.

UPDATE: Diablo IV's devs have confirmed that ARPGs remaing overwhelmingly solo and PVE.

I've been banging on about this for years, so it's nice to have confirmation coming from Rhykker.

"A whopping eight five percent of Diablo IV players currently choose to play solo. That is a staggeringly high number, much higher than I expected."

I've said it many times before, and I'll keep on saying it: ARPGs are overwhelmingly solo PVE games. They are not just MMORPGs with slightly fewer players on screen.