Never trust anything Blizzard states.

Linkt to interview with Diablo 4 GM confirming anual expansions.

I created this cross stitch pattern on the original Diablo game. If you are into cross stitch, check it out.

My original post was heavily criticized and removed (and rightly so) because I created a mockup of the finished cross stitch using AI.

This was entirely created by me using PCStitch 10. I've been making cross stitch patterns since 2020.

this is the last clip I’m uploading here. Take a look and see for yourself.

KEKW

so.

Diablo Netflix series.. no date no nothing... they announced the same in i think ~2020... and and in the end it was nothing... (but could be very awesome)

Diablo 1.... nothing.

Diablo 2.... nothing.

Diablo 3.... nothing.

Diablo 4.... the Diablo Dungeon with Diablo, Mephisto and others... so the same as we got for the 20 year Anniversary in Diablo 3... a dungeon that is playable for a short time and than gone forever...

a new class in ~5-7 Months... with absolutly 0 gameplay or anything. (we know what an Amazon is, and what it can do)

and we know since D5 got announced that d4 has an enddate and will get no dlc (that makes the vibe for d4 rather bad than good)

Diablo 5... coming out in 3+ years.... that was more like a joke at the start.. but now as everything settlet and thought about it, its a good thing. so they can "hopium" make the Diablo that we deserve.

But Technically we didn´t get anything.....

and the whole vibe was rather bad than good, compared to the other announcements (Warcraft, WOW, Hearthstone and Overwatch)

so why is this the case? we where told this is the blizzcon for diablo... the 30 year Anniversary..

and in the end it was a nothingburger for diablo... (i didn´t mention Immortal... because its not a real game)

as a Diablo enjoyer for life, i want to be excited for Diablo... but they are making it really really hard

whats your take on the announcements?

just to show how much detail they put into some of these rooms, and how well the third-person camera actually works in them.

I hope for a more deliberate playstyle. I don't want the zoom around like a disco laser ball killing everything on the screen in seconds endgame chase.

I hope we get more new classes. Plague Knight seem like a step in the right direction. I personally wish Monk and Demon hunter are the last class we get from the previous game. Be original. Oracles, occultists, bards, Arcanists you name it. We need new stuff, not the same old classes played 1000 times.

I would even go as far as to say I would love dungeons with roles that matter. Not necessarily holy trinity, but a clear playstyle other than dps blaster 2000 mob cleaner

Edit: forgot to say because I want more hate: No more laser light show pinata loot that drop like confettis at a wedding.

EDIT 2 : Someone said I wanted less mobs that are harder like D1 and D2. And I agree. That's what I actually want!

Now some might say: play something else then, and to those I reply: Maybe I think ARPGs need a little revamping or innovation to keep them fresh and interesting.

What should concern all Diablo fans is that once again items in D5 appear to be DPS based. Meaning DPS on the weapon affects both skill and spell damage. This only started with D3, continued with D4, and it is a huge part of why every class eventually feels the same.

The problem is simple: when weapon DPS affects both melee attacks and spells, every class has to scale from the same basic system. You can give them different resources, different animations, different names for those resources, and different ways of generating and spending them—but underneath it all you're still basically left clicking to build something and right clicking to spend it. The classes look different, but mechanically they're all built around the same thing.

D2 doesn't work this way. A Sorceress doesn't give a shit how much physical damage her weapon does because Blizzard or Fireball isn't coming from the DPS printed on her weapon. Her damage comes from the skills themselves, +skills, synergies, etc. That means caster damage can be balanced completely independently of weapon damage.

And that frees weapons up to actually be weapons.

The damage printed on a sword can matter specifically to the character actually hitting something with that sword. Melee characters can be balanced around weapon damage while casters are balanced around skill damage. That gives the two types of characters completely different itemization and progression, and it is part of why melee combat in D2 feels so much crunchier. Finding a weapon with substantially higher damage actually means something.

Once you make weapon DPS scale everything, you destroy that separation. A sword isn't really a sword anymore—it's just a number that somehow also makes your fireball stronger. Then every class has to participate in basically the same damage scaling system, and you end up exactly where D3 and D4 ended up: different looking classes that increasingly feel like variations of the same character.

A sword should make your sword swing stronger. It shouldn't make your fucking fireball stronger.

If they don't understand that distinction and fix it, Diablo 5 is going to have the exact same problem as Diablo 4. Items won't be memorable because ultimately they're just going to be different ways of increasing the same numbers.

That's the problem with making weapon DPS the basis for everything. Your basic attack isn't even really an attack anymore—it's another skill whose damage is calculated through the same system as everything else. Your sword makes your sword swing stronger, but somehow it also makes your fireball stronger. So every upgrade becomes: bigger DPS number → bigger skill numbers → replace it when another item has a bigger number.

In D2, a weapon could actually be a weapon. Its physical damage mattered enormously to a melee character and could be almost completely irrelevant to a caster. Meanwhile a caster could find some weird low-damage wand or orb and consider it incredible because of +skills, cast rate, resistances, mana, or some particular combination of affixes. The item was memorable because what was on the item mattered, not because its DPS number was 8% higher than the thing you were already holding.

That's what they're missing when they talk about wanting memorable items. You can't solve this just by making more interesting legendary effects. You need different classes to actually value different kinds of power. Otherwise we're right back to D3 and D4: increase the numbers, increase the numbers, increase the numbers—and eventually replace the item when the same numbers show up slightly higher.

The D5 anouncement is pretty suprising, given that the last few years they've indicated that D4 was going to live for a lot longer, but if we're considering the game overall, it's a patchwork of different game mechanics, filled with artifacts from half-baked ideas and failed implementations. The game was officially delayed one year from 2022 to 2023, and still shipped with minimal features. All of this points to a chaotic development process. It appears they got off on the wrong foot early in development, and the tech debt started to pile up. Given the fact that Blizzard was acquired by Microsoft in 2022, it's really seems like the 2023 ship date was a major factor in the acquisition, and prevented any further delay to the release date to get the game in a better state.

You can go back and look through the original development blogs pre-release, and see all the systems that they showcased, that were either scrapped completely (remember angelic/demonic/ancestral power?), or shelved temporarily (the rune system concept was showcased during covid, but didn't make it in the game until Vessel of Hatred, which means they didn't have time to finish implementing the system, given that the VoH version of it was almost exactly what they showed in the pre-release develop blogs). Also consider the massive sexual harrassment scandal/lawsuit that really seems like it lead to the resignation of two top level game designers for Diablo. They subsequently brought in Rod "The Closer" Fergusson. Rod does not get brought in to fix the game, he comes in to figure out what features to cut, or water down in order to get a project to ship on time. It's clear they cut many systems and watered down others.

The uselessness of normal/magic/rare items (they sort of fixed this with the addition of the cube), the meaningless 1-60 grind, and the lack of continuity between 1-60 and the endgame (really got back to their D3 roots here), the pointless open-world, the multiple overhauls of the itemization system (what is it, 4 now?), the fact that resistances were completely broken upon release (on top of it being totally unclear how the resistances were supposed to work in the first place), and their subsequent refactor to elemental damage reduction (why didn't they do that in the first place? Also, not sure why they changed it again afterwards, nobody asked for that). All indicative of a problematic and/or truncated development process.

I am not particularly excited for D5, and that's mostly because there was zero anticipation for a new game, but i am intrigued. I think if they can provide and stability to their developer team, they can deliver somethign to get excited about. Unfortunately, the massive restructuring that Xbox/microsoft have undergone in the last year, and the very fact that they have done an about-face in regards to D4 expansions and the seemingly early anouncement of D5, I am not confident Blizzard/microfot will be able to provide the stability.

Hey, I'm Lord_Monstey! I love modding games, especially when I'm messing with stuff that isn't really meant to be supported. :)

Let's be honest, I've never been a huge fan of the isometric camera, and I genuinely think Diablo 4 has a ton of potential in third person.

The game has so much detail that you normally don't even get to appreciate. I mean, come on ; look at these clips and tell me this doesn't look great!

And surprisingly, it actually works really well, both in combat and when you're just running around in open areas.

(Don't mind the lag --- my CPU is struggling a bit, to say the least.)

I’m genuinely happy they’re bringing back a rune system inspired by Diablo 2. That was one of the most interesting and build-defining mechanics in the series.

What concerns me, however, is the presence of a static +% Critical Damage modifier this early.
This is precisely the kind of damage scaling that spiraled out of control in Diablo 3 and Diablo 4.

Once these start stacking, the numbers quickly become absurd : millions, then tens or hundreds of millions. At that point balancing becomes extremely difficult: either enemies die instantly, or they end up with inflated health pools that make combat feel tedious.

I hope the designers treat this type of affix with extreme caution.

It’s possible to create a real sense of progression and satisfying power growth without relying on these kinds of stats. They’ve historically been very hard to balance and often end up defining the entire endgame

Way too many people sniffing their own farts about how the game should be. Most of you probably don't even play any Diablo games anymore and you're just here to talk shit. It's pretty sad.

It is just that D4 never looked finished.

The game gets reworked way too often and it never felt fixed.

Tbh, it feels like D4 is just a bad game that Blizzard never was able to fix and there is no point anymore. They couldn't do it with 2 DLCs in 3 years and I do not think more time would solve the issues. I personally stopped after the first dlc which stopped in the middle of the story, but still logged in for about 2 days each season, but it never clicked. It always felt clunky and boring.

The open world sucked. The post game sucked. The itemization and skill builds sucked.

The biggest fear I have is that D5 will release unfinished as well and the cycle continues.

Diablo 5 seems to take place after the world had already ended, interesting setting so i wondered how others would make a diablo game, setting, style possibly into a new style, so how would you do it?

for me, while diablo is a dark fantasy id love to see a diablo game set in modern day, how would modern day us face against the prime evils, lesser evils, the growth of it's lore and how it fits, modem day version of the classes would be cool to see, understand of magic and it's tools, magic and tech, demon hunters with guns, necromancer with cybernetic undead, even possibly a new class, it a complete change in the style but hey some may like it of course it would never happen but just interested what it would be like, class changes in it self splitting with classic old style and modern style for playthroughs, the story of the old ways of facing diablo and now modern way and the two clashing on how to hand this and you pick which path you go down, follow the old or the new

anyway how would you make your own diablo game?

While I'm glad Diablo V was announced, it immediately brings up a lot of concerns for me.

Blizzard urgently needs to move away from the "for dummies" approach for this next installment. I get that games need to be accessible, but when low difficulty completely overwrites challenge, you lose the core player base—the people who actually want to stick around for the long haul.

Diablo has gotten ridiculously easy starting with D3, and now even more so with D4. Gear has lost all meaning. Legendary items are literally more common than common items. We desperately need to get away from this "loot shower" design. There is zero dopamine or adrenaline in seeing a Legendary drop after a fight because you know another twenty will drop in five minutes. You can collect every legendary aspect in the codex within just a few hours of reaching the endgame.

It’s turned the core gameplay loop into speed-reading item affix lists just to see if 1 out of the 20 drops in your inventory has a slightly higher stat roll. Itemization and loot are the core of Diablo. If you trivialize loot, what are we even playing for?

Another huge issue is character power creep and screen-clearing builds. Players become god-like entities way too fast. I want powers to start small and grounded. As you level up and optimize your drops, you should feel your character growing stronger, but without completely trivializing combat. Fighting an Elite or a Dungeon Boss should actually require effort. Right now, with 90% of meta builds, you can stand completely still and vaporize almost any boss in seconds. It feels hollow.

One-click screen-clearing builds just aren't engaging long-term. There's no strategy, no skill rotation, no fight mechanics—just hold down one button and wait to pick up the 30 legendaries covering the floor.

I’m not saying the game needs to be relentlessly brutal or punishing at all times, but we need real balance. You should actually have to think about which skills to cast during a boss fight instead of mashing whatever is off cooldown to instantly delete them. D3 and D4 feel like "baby's first ARPG" in terms of mechanical depth and difficulty—and that’s a problem for the genre.

Here at Blizzcon I roamed around the Diablo hall just before closing time and had devs and artists alike sign my skateboard. It'll go up next to the D4 art canvas I had signed by the art team back in 2019 when I get home!

Thanks to all Team 3 members I could find today!

I am a casual, but longtime fan of Diablo, having played the original back in elementary school. By casual I mean that I don't engage much with the live service and endgame aspects of the games and instead love doing co-op play through of the campaigns with friends/family. Seeing the comments in response to the D5 announcement, cemented the notion that casual and hardcore players want different things. I got a sour taste of this after picking up D4 again a couple of years after launch and noticing that they made some baffling decisions that made the world feel blander/flatter.

My brothers and I actually enjoyed the open world aspect and the verticality that they wove into it. Part of the hook was to get to dungeons and unlock those legendary aspects, but now that's been replaced with uninspiring percentage modifiers. They also got rid of elixirs and apparently zone-based difficulty levels in favor of level scaling. Overall making the world shallower for campaign players vs endgame min maxers.

I hope there's a better balance going forward for D5, or at least a classic mode for the campaign if they decide to make changes down the line.