Diablo 4, Season 4, "Loot Reborn"

Seriously, that's what it's called.

Here are my takeaways:

• The D4 dev team are out of ideas. This one was obvious already, of course, but we now have confirmation.

• The D4 dev team are out of resources. There will be no more improvements to the game until the Vessel of Hatred expansion.

• D4 will not bring back lapsed players, or lure in any new players, with a Season of Loot. Only existing players care about this. Nobody who left unsatisfied, or who skipped the game entirely, will give a single fuck.
  

• Vessel of Hatred will flop. With interest in D4 at all-time lows, and the only draw of the latest seasonal update being modest improvements to core systems which should have been dialed in before the game launched, I expect VoH's retention to be in the same 15% - 20% range as D3's Reaper of Souls expansion.

 

So, that's it. They're done; we can stick a fork in them now. I'll be watching the VoH launch out of morbid curiosity, but I won't be keeping track of the game beyond that, unless Blizzard do the obvious thing with D4, and take the game free-to-play.

Diablo IV's Last, Last, Last, ... , Last Chance.

We really, really, really, ... , really mean it this time. Not just kind-really, either. Really-really. We pinkie swear.

I've been seeing takes all week about how D4 is running out of chances to turn things around. About how itemization is the game's biggest problem, but if they actually fix that one issue, this time, everyone who's quit will come flooding back.

Hell, Veiled Shot even got in on that action.

Fair is fair. This thumbnail actually is on point.

 

That said, though, I mostly agree with Asmongold's take on the current state of Diablo.

I don’t think the story is good, I don’t think the nuts and bolts of the actual interactions of the gameplay is good, I don’t think that the itemization is good, I don’t think that the bosses are good, I don’t think that the mob types are good, I don’t think that the open-world events are good, I don’t think that the world bosses are good. [...] I think the graphics of the game are great.

I don't like the graphics, either, but apart from that... yeah. This is 100% the state of things. 

And it only gets worse from there.

Dune, Part Two

I am a long-time fan of Frank Herbert's Dune novels. I've read, and enjoyed, all six of them: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune. I've also seen all of the prior adaptations of Dune, beginning with David Lynch's 1984 movie, and the SciFi Channel Y2K mini-series. I've even seen Jodorowsky's Dune.

Like a lot of long-time Dune fans, I have spent decades coming to terms with the apparent impossibility of successfully adapting Frank Herbert's work to the screen.

Dune is a big, dense, weird book. There's a tonne of exposition, and a lot of stuff that happens, with the most action-packed (and potentially cinematic) events happening in between chapters. There's more internal monologue than out-loud dialogue. There's a small child who has a significant role to play in the story's climax. There's a character, whose narration begins every chapter of the novel, who doesn't get a single line, either internal or spoken.

Adapting all of that to a visual medium is a daunting challenge, to put it mildly.

Interesting takes

One of the weird things about the first Diablo IV Season of Blood developer stream was the muted response to it.

Don't get me wrong; content creators did respond to it. My own blog post about the stream was mostly based on notes taken while watching Asmongold's full-stream reaction video, and DM:Diablo IV and Raxxanterax, among others, also posted their breakdowns, but there weren't nearly as many reactions to this stream as there were about the Season of the Malignant, a.k.a. patch 1.1.0.

It seems like people were, in general, much less interested in the stream overall, and much more restrained in their analyses. Apart from Veiled Shot, of course.

Love that "o" face. Work it, baby!

But developer stream number two, which was definitely the better of the two streams, and basically a case of Blizzard burying the lede on upcoming improvements to the game, has received a much more enthusiastic response. I'm seeing actual joy on the faces of Diablo IV content creators again, even as they continue to acknowledge that, no, Diablo IV will still not be "fixed" after these changes, and still needs a lot more work. 

Well, except for Veiled Shot, of course.

Seriously, dude, at least wait more than 2 minutes after the stream ends before posting your 12 minutes of "analysis." It's pretty clear that you'd already made up your mind before even watching the stream.

One of my favourites is Rhykker's reaction to the elemental resistance changes:

"First off, resistances, this was a big shock... We're done with this terrible resistance system that Diablo 3 introduced, where you just keep stacking resist infinitely, and you can't wrap your head around it. Now, it's like Diablo 2 and every other ARPG, where 25 fire resist is 25 fire resist. You got another 10? Now you have 35 fire resist. It's just simple to work out, it brings in back [sic] that fun itemization puzzle game where you want to be stacking resist on different pieces of gear because you have a maximum resist." [Transcription mine; emphasis added.]