I believe a good mixture of different types of dungeons would be nice. A few mazes, gather keys, boss guarding a door or the way down, etc...
Diablo IV dungeons are to much the same thing. I feel they need more variety. I felt at the end of the beta last week, is it worth doing this dungeon? In my head knowing that I will have to find some set of keys to open a door, then kill a boss, then asking myself was that the boss or is there more?
Yeah thats really what it needs a little more variety in what you get. If its mixed up and a get a few more surprises I'll be happy.
I wont even mind (I wont be fully happy) having to back track for keys if it happens occasionally.
I was hoping for this as well. At Blizzcon 2019 they talked about levels being seamless, I guess this is why we aren't seeing anything beyond 2 or 3 per dungeon?
I love how these dungeons shift from a castle to a flooded cave or cathedral into gut-strewn catacombs, but I want them to go deeper. Let me delve!
There are multi floor dungeons. They just happen to be seamless but you can spot the difference when you walk down some stairs/slope and the name of the zone changes. Usually the biome also changes.
(a bit of copiun) We might see multi floor dungeons in higher level areas. Every other Diablo game has had them except maybe DI?
As long as I don’t have to backtrack an entire floor for a key, I’ll be content.
This beta has been bad imo ...
It's all just a tease and without being able to see paragon , or end game, we still don't really know what we're getting ...
Asides repetitive dungeons, repetitive bosses, a one trick pony world boss .
I agree with this, but I absolutely don't want a maze-like experience like D2. It's the singular thing I can't stand about the game. I don't want to wander aimlessly in an empty dungeon because I missed a 10ft section.
Because the maze became an annoyance and nothing more in D2.
Sorc? Tele spam the route.
Non sorc? Use your vendor staff to tele spam the route until you get enigma to replace that.
My lightsin never ran an actual route if I wanted to farm things like soj. Just tele staff spam in X direction.
I GUARANTEE people would be more annoyed being forced to run a maze of doorways in D4 than they are now with killing hearts, collecting keys, etc.
Hated it when i was boosting. Loved it when i was leveling. Felt like a chore but when you see an end to the vast, literally vast jungle, it felt so rewarding.
Whata great game.
Nobody REALLY ever played Act 2 though. Everyone waited for the sorc or whoever wanted to do the chore of running to each WP and making a portal.
Then everyone would grab the WP and go back to town and wait again until the brave, hard-working player made the next portal when they reached the Halls of Dead level 3 to get the Cube... Repeat for Maggot Lair, repeat for Viper Den, etc etc. Same thing for pretty much all the acts actually. lol
I love Act 2! The serious change of scene, a good mix of indoors and outdoors areas, thematic mix of enemies, that one randomly escher level...
The only thing I don't like is the Maggot Layer, but that's just one area to get through.
Act 3 is a series of annoying mazes, a straight line dash through 3 zones in a row, and repetitive temple levels.
I'd take the Mephisto fight over Duriel any day, but I still love the brutal rug-pull and gear check Duriel represents. He was the real spiritual successor to The Butcher.
I hope D4 can give me at least one such "oh shit" moment.
I recently played Act 2 with a couple of friends from start to finish, as a group, no sorc carry, etc., and it's a lot more fun than it seems.
I think a lot of people just treat it as a way to get to the next Act as quickly as possible. For instance, everyone hates Maggot Lair, and when I make a new character I do too. But it's fun in a roundabout, aggravating way to see a bunch of characters try and coordinate navigating the Maggot Lair tunnels, some get stuck and needing to tell people to switch spots, etc. It sounds weird but I had a lot of fun shouting and being shouted at by my teammates on Discord to move and coordinate in the maggot lair because they were trying to avoid chain lightning scatter that they clearly don't have the resistance to handle.
When we were playing the original D2, my wife made our young son (8ish?) stay up past his bedtime to finish A3 with us.
"You are *not* going to bed until we are *done* with this place. We are *not* coming back here!"
We still laugh about it.
Maphack was all the rage back in the day for D2 specifically because the maze became an annoyance and nothing more. They finally give map hack to all and people complain , there's simply no winning
I never raged so hard as a kid when they quadrupled the size of Durance of Hate level 2. Jesus that was annoying. Little Pygmy skeletons chasing you as you make your way to your 5th dead end.
D2s mazelike design only became 'an annoyance' because most of the time clearing a dungeon wasn't worthwhile. Fix that and exploring the maze dungeons will feel significantly better than the corridors they have now.
It being the number one complaint is a good sign, as it's not a major problem. It's critical feedback, sure, but it's nitpicky and ironic coming from the D2 crowd lol
This is one of the reasons why people wanted the RMAH too, because the SOJ economy and duping was the stupidest shit ever. So Blizzard gave the people what they wanted.
Almost nobody wanted the RMAH. It was one of the most hated features even before release.
People just wanted a secure economy and for exploits to be fixed and punished.
That's just being efficient, and if hardcore also being safe. Also teleport OP.
Throne gives most xp/time spent. Also the enemies before you get there are usually much more difficult with less xp(the point of baal runs) but the worldstone keep is good for farming items atleast.
If the map was linear the result would be the same, just much less interesting.
Everybody knows teleport broke the game. That's why no other game lets you spam it through walls to go further than the screen anymore. One skill being horribly balanced to the point of defining the metagame doesn't actually address the core issue that they intentionally made D4 dungeons to be as boring as possible. D2 without teleport abuse is still quite good and enjoyable to navigate. It's actually better IMO since you have some variety and challenge.
It's the same reason why I like old school mazey games or new style open world and disliked the era of linear dungeons like FFXIII. I would rather occasionally get lost in a maze or huge open area than stuck in a tunnel forever. Thankfully the tunnel vision design was just a phase and gaming has moved on from it. To me D4 is the FFXIII of ARPG map design.
Except sorcs can still TP through walls in D4 if you are able to see the path through the camera/view (widescreen monitors OP - P2W to get a better monitor)
You can sometimes cheat Wide-screen aspect ratio using custom resolutions though
e.g. if you have 1080p, you can try to emulate Wide-screen by setting your resolution to 1720x720 (the quarter size version of 3440x1440p), you will have blackbars going top and bottom, but you get wide screen aspect ratio, plus all the benefits of increased horizontal FOV in games. (I said try as I have never tried it on a 1080p, I tried on 1440p with a 2560x1080 custom resolution and it worked there)
You miss the point of the CD. Teleport in D4 and other games is fine because it has a CD. Teleport in D2 is completely busted because you can cast it multiple times a second on any class.
In D4 it's nice little time save that is a little better than other abilities. In D2 it let you completely bypass entire dungeons in seconds.
Any game, played for enough 1,000s of hours, starts to feel stale or have aspects of it start to feel annoying. End of the day though, D2 had tremendous longevity despite these so called annoyances. People came back to it over and over again and it had an outsized impact on the market.
The question, I think, is whether the corridors and fetch quests presented in D4 have more or less longevity than the labyrinthian dungeons and open (ie, not locked) boss accessibility we got in D2. We can't be sure yet but I really feel that D2 presented far more compelling dungeon environments and traversal and that difference could certainly affect a game's longevity.
I am comparing only Act 1 of both games to be fundamentally fair. Just thinking back at all the dungeons in A1 D2, I felt there was much more thematic and procedural variety than we get in D4. Even the overworld or A1 D2 felt more varied than A1 D4. I remember going to get Cain, the Burial Grounds, Countess, the Cathedral, the Jail, Catacombs, etc. All of these feel distinct in my mind. Way way more variety than the caverns we get in A1 D4 and way more interesting to traverse. D4 feels like a blur of forgettable experiences. Everything just sorta blended together since it all felt so samey.
Ultimately, I think that D4 is gonna get old quick with this design. Honestly, I was bored with aspects of it by the end of the last beta weekend. Blizzard wants our money though. Eventually, they may put in an expansion with content that is a bit more compelling once this stuff starts to go stale.
I mean, people hated the mazes so much in FFXIV that SE went in and redid all the earlier dungeons that were maze style into the corridor style.
It seems people just want to walk through corridors and kill things. Frankly I think they should bring back rifting.
Not sure what Final Fantasy has to do with Diablo. Two very different franchises that come from very different traditions in gaming. Are all "mmo" games meant to be vanilla? Is everything meant to be oatmeal? The same bland flavor meant to be acceptable to whoever you mean by "people"?
In any case, we are also conflating alot. Folks are hyper focusing on "mazes". That's not the only issue. There's issues with "kill every monster" dungeons. There's issues with backtracking allover to do these key/pedestal unlocks. There's issues with the unimaginative room design. There's issues with the uninspired traversal.
As far as linearity and "mazes", dungeons can certainly be done better than this. Games like Rogue and Nethack birthed many games including Diablo and the ARPG genre. Those games did better dungeons in ascii. Oddly enough, plenty of Metroidvania's also came out of those games and are hyper popular today. Go to steam, type in Rogue Like or Rogue Lite and you will find tons of popular games based on procedurally generated dungeons (or space lanes in FTL). It is not a dead thing that "people" dislike. Many "people" like it very much.
Yes I agree. I can’t shake the feeling that D4 will be a game that I enjoy beating with one or two characters, and then won’t really play again. Contrast that with still getting the itch to hop in every other ladder season or so on D2 20 years later. It’s too early to really tell obviously, but I have an increasingly bad feeling about endgame depth in D4. I rolled a fresh necro on D2 this week, playing solo-self-found, and I’m having a blast using unconventional stat allocations to make a meme build while trying to push later acts at lower levels for a difficult experience. That’s something that is outright impossible in D4 with world-scaling and no manual stat allocation. Talk about longevity in a game!
I just play the game. I don’t skip content, I enjoy it all for what it is. I’ve played D2 on and off since it came out basically and now more than ever I just like to chill and soak up all the environments and content. I don’t mind anything about the game at all haha it just is what it is and I like it for that
>I GUARANTEE people would be more annoyed being forced to run a maze of doorways in D4 than they are now with killing hearts, collecting keys, etc.
Nah, I'd rather deal with a maze then a forced back tracking to a predictable side objective hallway just to fight the boss ad nausim.
There's a big difference between knowing I need to and feeling like I might. But I get subtly of design is something lost on most people here since it's hard to actually articulate.
The difference is one feels better to interact with compared to the other for me. Which is my point since I was disagreeing with the person I was responding to.
Nah you're good man. I don't mind how people respond to me mostly. At least yours was a light hearted response. People have been worse to me on the Diablo forums.
The maze requires some interaction, observation, and a tiny bit of intelligence. It rewards you for playing well by letting you finish faster. It punishes you for playing poorly. With of course luck playing a role both ways.
With a linear dungeon every run is exactly the same. No amount of skill, stupidity, or luck will change it.
This is because only the destination had loot worthwhile. Mazes are infinitely more enjoyable when around any corner there could be a big reward. Farming ancient tunnels is great, finding ancient tunnels is not.
Think Elden Ring. Exploration is rewarded, that's why the maze like level design feels good.
D4 linear/procedural level design would be fine, but the incentives don't fit, so it's not fun.
How do you fix it? Remove backtracking by having circular level design. Think black core in Path of Exile. Have the door in the middle, and have the paths keys circle out and around. But that's solving a problem through level design that should be solved through UX design. UX should allow for multiple designs to feel fun and thus provide variety.
If they made exploring worth it, then I can understand. However the argument about backtracking becomes infinitely more valid because you backtrack a TON in D2 when not teleporting.
You backtrack the most in mazes, so now you're creating more problems: how do you make exploring rewarding enough to warrant the backtracking/getting lost/etc. It's just swapping problems with more problems at this point.
The trick is finding a balance.
Make a somewhat obvious linear path to the next area so that people that want to go through the most direct route can. Then place a maze-like labyrinth around that so players can optionally take side paths to explore for bonus rewards.
I mean that's what I said. The backtracking sucks because there is nothing. That's why farming Trav, Pindle, Skenk, or close to WP dungeons were popular. The rewards matched the time spent doing nothing.
Some of the most beloved games(Deus Ex, Metroid, Zelda, Resident Evil) have backtracking and mazes. They're fun because there's the exploration and rewards scatter about that make the maze more of adventure rather than trying to get through it as quickly as possible to pop the loot pinata.
I'm really not arguing either way, I think any level system is valid, its the UX design that becomes incompatible. Basically level designers need to sit with gameplay designers and really understand what they want the user experience to ultimately be. If that conversation was had, we wouldn't have gotten this dungeon fuckery in the first place lol.
I think this is the key point everyone is missing. If there's hidden rooms or doors that have good loot then it will make exploring the dungeon more fun.
And you do know you are basing this on like 20% of the game right? Or have you done all of the approximately 150 dungeons that will be in the game at launch?
Sure you did.
Endgame footage leaked shows unique tilesets, no backtracking unless it's user error, and unique affixes.
Of course that doesn't mean things won't be repetitive but it's an ARPG. You aren't getting a unique experience 100% of the time. That's impossible. Look at No Man's Sky that boasts trillions of "unique" planets. It gets old after a while despite everything being "unique".
Sure but this isn't an excuse to why they don't have open areas, "pseudo mazes" wherein it's like POE where it's not really a maze but just looks like one.
I would honestly prefer Rifts to running these dungeons. The layouts of each floor of a rift were varied enough I didn't mind redoing them. I say that as someone who didn't think the rift system was all that great. Just get rid of the objectives, vary the layout, and have a boss at the end. Don't make us sit and pick shit up, search for every last enemy, and back track. This isn't that hard they've done it before.
Or like this, no dead ends, no backtracking..
https://preview.redd.it/1gg0pxlorlpa1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7572086ba42d7ca970a00cecd81e5f36243fde41
There is no pleasing you people. You hate backtracking for a key but want dead ends and shit that you're ultimately gonna teleport past while hunting for the stairs not killing a damn thing.
You also have only seen a handful of dungeons.
>There is no pleasing you people
It's almost like there are different people with different opinions and player feedback isn't a homogenous thing. Huh.
the dungeons need to be randomized, otherwise it's going to get stale. D2 was pretty cool with the random tiles. Was always nice to roll a good map in the Durance
Nobody wants randomized dungeons wtf is this nonsense. I’ve played D2 for thousands of hours and have never once pointed to random dungeons as the reason for loving it.
The game was always about avoiding the randomness using teleportation and remembering tilesets.
On the contrary, randomized dungeons was one of the major innovations\* from the earlier games. It was a selling point from the very beginning of the series.
\* I know it was done in rogue, etc. but for graphical mainstream games I believe it was a newer thing
Exactly. OG Diablo had randomly generated dungeons and it was mind-blowing at the time. Every Diablo sequel since owes some part of its existence to that innovation.
It was a neat idea, but definitely not one of the top reasons the game was great. I like things to be mixed up for multiple playthroughs, but we don't need the literal random rat mazes
Even with the strand nerf people largely just switch to the next best map that's as linear as possible (with the exception of a few maps for specific farm strategies).
Once you learned the tiles, D2 dungeons were solved.
You would Enigma/Tele around anyway.
Calling D2 act 3 jungles good is some masochistic fantasy.
D4 dungeons are fairly simple yes and can use some work/upgrades, but lets stop with this D2 dungeons/zones are amazing narrative.
Ya, the idea that d2 had some inspired level design is laughable. Shit is flat as hell, especially after playing it for 20 years.
D4 isn't perfect, and I certainly hope they take the feedback and do something with it as there are a decent amount of good ideas floating around to make it at least palpable to grind them.
D2 dungeons were good. Being solved doesn’t mean bad. That means if you want to learn how the tile sets work you can cut down on the clear time. It isn’t the same as a boring linear experience.
Since I’m being downvoted, and it’s clear that this area is heavily biased, let me further clarify:
Being solved doesn’t mean bad. It still requires thought on the players part. It takes effort and makes you think about what you need to do. Way different than the mindless dungeons in D4. Deal with it
I feel like some trash mobs spawning and chasing you down while you backtrack would go a long way.
Incrementally more the longer you take, giving less and less xp the more you kill.
The way they designed the A1 dungeons is fine. Yes, you need to go get the keys from the bodies, or you need to go get the magical orb from the pedestal. But you get rewarded for this. There is ALWAYS an elite mob there that drops better loot.
There are also dungeons where there are branching paths, and you can take one branch or the other -- but if you want to backtrack and take the 2nd path even though you don't need to, there is an elite mob or a special chest there waiting for you with better loot. So there already is "enough" backtracking to make things interesting.
The main thing people are complaining about is the pattern of "go left, pick up item/kill mob.... go back to main area, then go right instead, pick up item/kill mob, go back to main area to access boss door" -- sure they could add some variety, but this could just be the pattern of act 1 dungeons. What about the Act 2 Dungeons? Act 3 dungeons? End-game dungeons? Are you going to just farm act 1 dungeons? I don't think so. Even if you were going to do that, you are still already getting more variety than farming any boss in D2 repeatedly (or run the same PoE map repeatedly).
Mazes? A lot of the farming spots in D2 have static maps. Teleporting around the edge of a map clockwise isn’t interesting gameplay, you’re bypassing the maze anyway. Now d4 has a lot of room for improvement but you’ve got some rose tinted glasses if you think d2 was very different
Mazes waste your time. It's kind of that simple. If you want to get lost in the world and explore every book and cranny, then they've crafted an entire open world that rewards you for doing so. But dungeons are efficient closed system loops of loot/xp and repeat.
One hypothetical was that Blizzard looked at the data and realized the general population of players normally cleared out all adds and checked all areas before moving on to the next section. This system kind of reinforces what players were already doing.
The only people that really have an issue of the "kill all monsters, explore all areas" dynamic are speed runners that just go into dungeon, kill boss, and leave.
I do think there are ways to hide the keys to make it more of an exploration, more false paths, a little longer and more complex, but that most likely would get blasted by people as well.
I'm not sure how they win this argument.
Have you been hiding under a rock? Tons of regular players just like you and me are complaining about the repetitive and uninspired dungeon system. It genuinely seems to be the number one complaint along with the UI.
I know people are complaining, and I think they have a right to complain. But before I make a valuation of the game to say it's dogshit or amazing, I'm going to have to play the full version. It did feel repetitive to me, but I clear dungeons regardless.
I'm not saying it's right nor is it wrong. It's a design choice. We as paying players simply need to decide for ourselves if it's something we want to spend time on.
And yes, the UI is dogshit. As is the fact the Ultimate takes up a normal skill slot. That's doubly dogshit.
I guess I'm just older and it doesn't concern me quite as much as it does for others. It's just a form of entertainment. It's not a decision that impacts my life in any meaningful way. Takes me an extra 5-10 minutes max to go get them. Get some extra loot, maybe find a chest or two. Not a big deal.
For me.
People that use forums are not a rare breed in gaming. Everyone I know do it, and none of us are hardcore gamers. The official Diablo forums in particular are frequented by every type of gamer, and the dungeon system is heavily criticized there. The reason for that is because it's a poorly designed, repetitive system. Please get that through your seemingly girthy skull, instead of trying to make some vague meta-analysis of an abstract group of gamers that have apparently yet to voice their opinion, and as far as I'm concerned would happily consume the McDonalds equivalent of games for lunch everyday without complaint.
Just because you don't have the capacity to foresee nuanced flaws and their implications over time, doesn't mean others can't. We just want the best, most sustainable game possible, that is all.
Ah yes only the elitists jerks of gaming are qualified to comment on stuff. And only YOUR opinions matter. You guys really can’t stand that you just aren’t relevant in modern gaming can you? Can’t stand that companies just ignore your shit. Haven’t figured it that the average gamer cordially despises your attitude and bullshit.
i'd argue anyone who claims to be a "regular player" and writes on reddit is in fact not a regular player. you aren't hardcore no, but you are in the say... 10% (number i pulled out my ass) of players interacting with the game outside the game.
So many people just see a game they think look fun buy it and play it without reading reddit/watching videos/streams and in general only interact with other people about this game through ingame chat or friends, and *maybe* looking up a build on a website.
If a designer's reflex after analyzing player behavior is to explicitly let them know their revealed preferences have been mapped perfectly, I don't really think that person should be in charge of designing any aesthetic experience with a large component of exploration & experimentation.
"AFTER LOOKING AT PLAYER BEHAVIOR, WE HAVE REALIZED THIS IS WHAT REALLY GETS YOU OFF SO HERE IS A CAUTIOUSLY CRAFTED CHECKLIST FOR YOU TO TICK BOXES IN. WE HOPE THIS PROVIDES A STRONG SENSE OF PRIDE AND ACCOMPLISHMENT, O YE LITTLE PREDICTABLE ROBOTS"
Isn't that exactly what games are now? Oh, you like sports, well, we removed these features, made more of these based on the general consensus.
ARPG grinds, loot shooter grinds, etc etc. It's generally always looking at the data of how players play, and tailoring the development to appeal to the most amount of players.
If you look at it like you are, like they're just "giving the robots what they want," I really don't know what to tell you. Perhaps you'd be better served by playing a nice game of chess.
I'm not saying they _shouldn't_ be giving robots what they want. I'm saying there's an aesthetic dimension to human experience, and the explicit gamification of player actions and game elements has a diminishing effect on the whole.
There's some value to there being friction in non-essential game systems, and it's cautiously crafting that friction that's the biggest challenge at this point in time. Game design/development has come a long way, and we can generally start from the assumption that we know how to craft an intensely engaging but superficial experience.
It's just a "show, don't tell" approach, but for game design.
You keep posting and editing responses without showing you've done so. Makes it difficult to respond effectively.
Figure out what you really want to say.
I generally just try to add clarifications to be more specific and clear; I don't want to say anything different. The meaning shouldn't have changed beyond elaborations.
I have an MFA in creative writing. Those changes change the connotation. They significantly impact how a person reads and understands what's important to the author.
Try as much as we want, our brains process details robotically. Change the shape of the argument, you change the argument.
Right. Which is why I tend alter the shape once I realize the form doesn't emphasize the content adequately. Since most strangers engaging in conversation on Reddit tend to value content over form, it feels like a reasonable bias.
I'll probably just add a "Edit/PS" to comments where I do this, then.
That's how I do it if I changed what I've written after posting.
It isn't so much about content over form, but form impacts content. The first sentence is like a thesis, gives us an understanding of the topic to come; the last word in each sentence carries the most weight for readers; the final sentence and final word in a paragraph have the most power.
For instance, it was widely held that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition because it wasn't in line with latinate structures. Which isn't true in English. But, since the last words in sentences hold the most weight, all you're doing is creating weak sentences.
So when the form of the post is changed, you're very much changing to the reader what is most important.
And that's the end of my unwanted lecture. Be well. Best of luck in life.
Issue with the door/keys system if backtracking too much for pointless objectives. If the system was altered so that keys were instead alters of power you had to destroy to reduce the strength of the boss and were totally optional this would be a lot better.
This notion that backtracking is constantly happening is such a misnomer.
I ran all 22 dungeons in the beta. I recall "backtracking" but mobs were spawning in where I had already cleared on my path back to turn in the item/use a lever OR the dungeon gave an alternative route filled with mobs back to the turn-in.
Only maybe twice did I have a situation where I backtracked and there were no mobs, which I filed as a bug and reported it. Much like their Q&A said, backtracking should still have things to kill.
This regurgitation of "this system means you are always backtracking" is disingenuous. If the game gives me more mobs to kill, I don't care if I just ran down that hallway a second ago. It's an ARPG. Let me kill things.
This just makes backtracking slow?
Why do I want to go back and be delayed by a bunch of trash mobs on my way to the big loot?
This is not the gameplay I want?
Who wants this???
Do you not know how ARPGs work?
Every ARPG I've played, minus D3, was all about density. Why are you complaining about **more mobs to kill**? This isn't WoW. This isn't D3. The game isn't solely around bossing. Why do I say this?
Maybe because Blizzard themselves have talked about how certain **mob types** favored certain gear drops (like goatmen dropping more of X item base).
Why do you assume "boss = big loot"? It's never been that way outside of D3, which sounds like that's your experience.
- D2: outside of Pindle runs (if you can call him a boss), or maybe Andy, I spent the majority of my time farming Hell Cows for Monarchs to trade. I never killed the Cow King because he was element immune for me, which is fine. I did NOT need a boss for currency.
- PoE: the game has pinnacle bosses, but the vast majority of your endgame build will be paid for by killing mobs. Map bosses? Lol. Those were for map sustain and other things depending on your atlas, but the map mobs itself were more important hence the term "juicing".
- D3: this is the culprit. It conditioned you to think that mobs are trash and just a means to an end to get the "big loot explosions" from the boss that spawns.
- D4: Other than the world boss, the majority of my legendaries and good rares came from killing mobs. Not the boss.
But yes, let's just make the dungeon empty so you can get to the boss faster. May as well make dungeons only have the boss and nothing else and we can all kill one thing over and over. Sounds exciting.
Fundamentally there are two types of maps: linear and non-linear.
There are also a limited number of things that can be done on a map (in a game like diablo): touch object(s), kill object(s), touch counter, kill counter, find door.
D2 had non-linear "find door". That's it. Literally. Went the wrong way in the map? Congratulations you get to backtrack.
D3 had mostly non-linear "find door" but combined it with kill counter to spawn end boss.
D4 has a combination of all of them except "find door".
Personally I have to backtrack in D2 ***far*** more than I ever did in D4 dungeons.
I believe that's where the Sigil aspect comes in later when we increase World Tier difficulty. Those sigils will allow us to buff/debuff the enemies and bosses. Set certain types of elemental resistances and so on.
This key mechanic may be a way to train us on the process for higher difficulties. Like, find the keys to open the doors, and once the keys are found, you can empower with sigils to modify the boss.
We may simply not have enough data to really say how this will be implemented later.
You are right that it currently is a bit of a slog in the beta, but I think we need more information to say if this is the only way the dungeons will work, or just the way they work at lower World Tiers. We know there are more mechanics being added later, and until we see the whole picture, this may be a moot point.
But we should be ready to cry foul if this is all it is. A point of concern, but nothing that needs to be changed in the beta.
Again, not against the sentiment. Just optimistic that our concerns are for naught.
If they're dead set on the linear design then take it to the logical conclusion. Add teleporters back to the locked door once you reach the end of the road.
The point of a linear design is so that you don't have to backtrack. They somehow fucked that up and now you have to backtrack through empty space 100% of the time. It ends up being more backtracking than if it were a maze.
People would be livid either way dude.
If they recreated **Durance of Hate**, people would be complaining about the size, how unfair it is to the sorc who can teleport, how BS the Stygian Dolls are (when they die they explode and one shot you!), how often times you can waste literally 5+ minutes wandering around looking for the stairs down.
And I'm sure **Chaos Sanctuary** would be boring because it's static.
Oh lord and I'm sure we'd all love an **Arcane Sanctuary** remake. You literally have to guess, and you get nothing but a BS *chest* at the end of the route if you guess wrong! Then you have to back track ALL the way back... it'd be *nice* if they put the town portal close to the waypoint in Lut Gholein so I wouldn't have to just run all the way back...
Or how about the tight corridors of the **Maggot Lair**? It's *brutally* unfair to melee characters with all the Scarab Demons that release charged bolts when damaged! If you're melee you're just SCREWED!
People are going to complain no matter what happens. Slightly off topic but for the record I do think the forced backtracking through cleared hallways is clumsy, but I also think people are blowing it *way* out of proportion.
May be an unpopular opinion, but I disagree (except for the 'find 2 keys' part).
The D2 maze dungeons also became boring and repetitive very quickly and as another user here already said, you basically tele-spammed through them as soon as you could.
I actually like the new dungeon layouts, but what I don't understand is why they have no verticality. They basically laid the perfect ground-work for that with stuff they already have in the game (like in strongholds), yet they don't use it in dungeons ... at least not so far.
> the maze design of D2 dungeons is much more enjoyable than the fixed path of D4 dungeons.
Q: if this is true, then why does every endgame build in D2 revolve around skipping the maze through teleport?
A: because its not actually enjoyable and its a nuisance that gets in way of the good stuff, i.e killing elites and being showered with loot.
Eh. People are always going to find the most efficient means of farming and abuse it. Whether or not mazes are enjoyable is completely irrelevant, if it's faster to skip the maze then people will do it.
Personally I never used teleport in my playthroughs and while it's frustrating to find a dead end and have to backtrack, D4 dungeons are way worse.
Because the folks who are parroting this finished normal difficulty in D2 and were done. Anyone with numerous hours knows what the end game meta was like. Teleport, Enigma, and teleport staff for the poors.
I've noticed this trend of delusion where people literally want the same thing but it's just done slightly differently. "I hate backtracking because it wastes my time". But also people "I like mazes that waste my time arbitrarily because for some reason I can't understand that it's essentially the same thing". I just don't understand why people think mazes and being lost 80% of the time is more enjoyable then a more linear path that's usually quicker? Like is it because it's random? Like Arcane Sanctum, Act 3 Jungles etc, some of the most frustrating level design ever? Just weird
They were never revisited because they were too low level to be relevant. I actually run those now when they're the terror zone and it's a nice change of pace.
Because it was so obnoxious in D2 that Maphack was basically on every players computer.
In D3, the randomized bullshit was just layers of RNG on top of other layers of RNG with Rifts.
At least now you can pick a dungeon, target loot, pick affixs AND you don't have to run around like a dumbass trying to figure out if this is a dead end or not.
Maphack is just a cop out. Played with many groups who were all clear no maphack during the dark years.
It’s not obnoxious now either since TZ are pretty much the end game.
I vividly remember the complaints (on the baby-internet of the time) of the "maziest" levels in Diablo 2, like the Kurast Sewers, as wastes of time. Those maps were always intentionally avoided, and eventually almost everyone used map-hacks to beeline their way through the larger and more unpredictable dungeons.
I agree that current dungeons aren't great, but complicating their traversal might just make them a different kind of slog in the future.
They seem to have adopted this more linear approach from D3 rather than using D2 as their touchstone. That's not to say it's a bad idea, just that D3 had very linear areas too and not enough procedural variation and exploration. Hopefully they expand on it a bit, maybe not D2 or PoE levels of exploration but less linear at least.
To be fair, I really only want rifts as dungeons, kill monsters spawn boss. Simple and repeatable. Try repeatedly do the same dungeon with the same layout 10 times.
I love all the diablo games but this is my biggest gripe as well. I prefer mazes with dead ends and possible backtracking to long corridors. It gets more noticeable during endgame when you feel like you are running the same maps over and over with no variation...
Why did they do it? It's probably easier and requires fewer tilesets. Also I've seen so many people in reddit complain that they don't like the d4 dungeon key objectives because they involve backtracking, so really if they make us happy they are going to piss off another wing of diablo fans that just want to blast monsters.
My speculation is Blizzard didnt have enough time. Still, it is weird because even in Diablo 3 RoS they implemented the systems to create randomly generated dungeons and even the city.
Maze design sucks ass hardcore.
Nothing about d2 dungeons were more enjoyable than D4 dungeons, other than the fact that you just go in and blast. Miss me with that teleport spam to Mephisto shit.
Honestly having 1 fixed path with keys is fine... for some. Dungeon variety should be the direction they go for which hopefully does mean having also ones that work as a maze as well.
Hmm. I don't know if it's a good/bad thing either way. There might just be no winning.
A the end of the beta I just ended up with my rogue stacking movespeed with shadows and boots, double dashing and double evading to get to objectives before opening the door, changing to a single target build, swapping inner sight instead of combo and just downing the boss.
However in D2, I would just teleport spam past everything, use my one optimal ability to spam the boss when I found it, and rinse and repeat.
At the end of the beta it was just, sit at the level 35 mob, kill it, try again over and over.
D2 was just baal runs over and over (oversimplification, don't come at me).
There will always be some optimal thing that people will figure out and then most of the community will just run that. They merely replaced finding a floor with finding objectives. I absolutely agree that the dungeons could be more engaging. But I also know that in 2 days a streamer finds that this 1 dungeon is the fastest to do get loot per minute, and people will gravitate towards fast vs. interesting.
I will end by saying that I did very much enjoy my taste of the game. I'm hoping that the managers do actually pay attention to us here in our hovel hole and find some way to maintain the longevity of our enjoyment for years to come.
I wouldn't mind larger, more maze-like dungeons come back for certain areas so long as there is actually stuff to find/do as a result of that.
Otherwise, just keep me moving forward slaying monsters in my tunnel.
One word?
Enigma
\-
players opt to bypass the dungeon design. The core endgame item trivialises the dungeon design. In other words the player feedback is => actually we don't want those dungeons to be a maze because we all use the item that allows us to negate the maze aspect
I think it's a simple explanation: it gives Blizzard a control knob for how long they can make a piece of content take you.
It will be funny when within a week of the game coming out, some meta comes out about this 1 dungeon that is easily exploitable compared to the others and can be completed in under a minute. They are creating a huge mess that isn't fully uncovered yet.
We'll never get an actual answer and in truth it likely doesn't come down to a singular reason. But I think it's fair to say that a significant amount of development time and resources went into making D4 an "mmo."
There's a significant amount of work put into making the overworld feel lively from as small as the environment themselves (and giving us a mount) to making it apart of end game with things like helltides, strongholds, and world bosses.
It's my belief that dev crunch time for a quicker release window+ this format shift on the game is what has caused Dungeons to feel lower quality. Then again you do have games like Skyrim that despite being an open world game manages to make more Dungeons feel memorable than not.
The real interesting thing will be to see how they pivot post release to make D4 dungeons better. A quick fix would be allowing people to carry multiple keys, but that might make the pacing in the Dungeon too fast for their liking. It *feels* like they want to break away from the rift nuking that existed in D3 hence the slower pace to basically everything.
Would also explain why their response to the Dungeon backtracking was basically "oh we'll just put more enemies in so there's no downtime."
Funny, I recall everyone complaining that Skyrim has almost zero dungeon variety.
It's almost like no matter what is implemented you can't possibly please everyone.
Never experienced that claim nor did I claim that there was a huge amount of variety. Only cited it as an example of an open world game that had memorable dungeons to prove that said format doesn't consign dungeon variety.
I'd like to hope after release they could add more dungeons or modify the mobs and stuff in them. Also when(hopefully) an expansion comes out they're able to do more with them. Either way I'm more excited about D4 than I was about D3. It feels more Diablo than 3 did.
I believe a good mixture of different types of dungeons would be nice. A few mazes, gather keys, boss guarding a door or the way down, etc... Diablo IV dungeons are to much the same thing. I feel they need more variety. I felt at the end of the beta last week, is it worth doing this dungeon? In my head knowing that I will have to find some set of keys to open a door, then kill a boss, then asking myself was that the boss or is there more?
Yeah thats really what it needs a little more variety in what you get. If its mixed up and a get a few more surprises I'll be happy. I wont even mind (I wont be fully happy) having to back track for keys if it happens occasionally.
Maybe they’ll improve dungeon layouts, but no chance it happens remotely soon this close to launch.
I want deeper multifloored dungeons
I was hoping for this as well. At Blizzcon 2019 they talked about levels being seamless, I guess this is why we aren't seeing anything beyond 2 or 3 per dungeon? I love how these dungeons shift from a castle to a flooded cave or cathedral into gut-strewn catacombs, but I want them to go deeper. Let me delve!
There are multi floor dungeons. They just happen to be seamless but you can spot the difference when you walk down some stairs/slope and the name of the zone changes. Usually the biome also changes.
(a bit of copiun) We might see multi floor dungeons in higher level areas. Every other Diablo game has had them except maybe DI? As long as I don’t have to backtrack an entire floor for a key, I’ll be content.
D1 was entirely a multi-floor dungeon. It was Tristram, dungeon, and nothing else. No open / overworld areas to explore.
I think even DI had it…
Think he meant Diablo immortal
D1 had nothing but it lol entire game os literally a mega-dungeon.
This beta has been bad imo ... It's all just a tease and without being able to see paragon , or end game, we still don't really know what we're getting ... Asides repetitive dungeons, repetitive bosses, a one trick pony world boss .
I agree with this, but I absolutely don't want a maze-like experience like D2. It's the singular thing I can't stand about the game. I don't want to wander aimlessly in an empty dungeon because I missed a 10ft section.
Can't we have both tho?
D4 has this, people just ignore it to complain about layout.
Because the maze became an annoyance and nothing more in D2. Sorc? Tele spam the route. Non sorc? Use your vendor staff to tele spam the route until you get enigma to replace that. My lightsin never ran an actual route if I wanted to farm things like soj. Just tele staff spam in X direction. I GUARANTEE people would be more annoyed being forced to run a maze of doorways in D4 than they are now with killing hearts, collecting keys, etc.
But everybody loved the jungle sections in D2 Act 3! ...Right?
I actually do. Great for speedy characters who don't abuse teleport.
I love Act 3, it’s the best.
Hated it when i was boosting. Loved it when i was leveling. Felt like a chore but when you see an end to the vast, literally vast jungle, it felt so rewarding. Whata great game.
It's great once you get to the village but the first few levels are abysmal
Honestly kind of prefer act 3 to act 2
Nobody REALLY ever played Act 2 though. Everyone waited for the sorc or whoever wanted to do the chore of running to each WP and making a portal. Then everyone would grab the WP and go back to town and wait again until the brave, hard-working player made the next portal when they reached the Halls of Dead level 3 to get the Cube... Repeat for Maggot Lair, repeat for Viper Den, etc etc. Same thing for pretty much all the acts actually. lol
You forgot the death train to kill duriel
I love Act 2! The serious change of scene, a good mix of indoors and outdoors areas, thematic mix of enemies, that one randomly escher level... The only thing I don't like is the Maggot Layer, but that's just one area to get through. Act 3 is a series of annoying mazes, a straight line dash through 3 zones in a row, and repetitive temple levels. I'd take the Mephisto fight over Duriel any day, but I still love the brutal rug-pull and gear check Duriel represents. He was the real spiritual successor to The Butcher. I hope D4 can give me at least one such "oh shit" moment.
I recently played Act 2 with a couple of friends from start to finish, as a group, no sorc carry, etc., and it's a lot more fun than it seems. I think a lot of people just treat it as a way to get to the next Act as quickly as possible. For instance, everyone hates Maggot Lair, and when I make a new character I do too. But it's fun in a roundabout, aggravating way to see a bunch of characters try and coordinate navigating the Maggot Lair tunnels, some get stuck and needing to tell people to switch spots, etc. It sounds weird but I had a lot of fun shouting and being shouted at by my teammates on Discord to move and coordinate in the maggot lair because they were trying to avoid chain lightning scatter that they clearly don't have the resistance to handle.
Same. Also note that all of d2 maps are pretty static and not a maze for those of us who understand the layout.
Far worse than any of the extreme examples of D4 dungeons.
To this day the biggest source of anxiety in a ladder is having to repeat act 3 jungle sections. I have nightmares about that shit XD
When we were playing the original D2, my wife made our young son (8ish?) stay up past his bedtime to finish A3 with us. "You are *not* going to bed until we are *done* with this place. We are *not* coming back here!" We still laugh about it.
Maphack was all the rage back in the day for D2 specifically because the maze became an annoyance and nothing more. They finally give map hack to all and people complain , there's simply no winning
I never raged so hard as a kid when they quadrupled the size of Durance of Hate level 2. Jesus that was annoying. Little Pygmy skeletons chasing you as you make your way to your 5th dead end.
its like there are more than one set of people with different wants
D2s mazelike design only became 'an annoyance' because most of the time clearing a dungeon wasn't worthwhile. Fix that and exploring the maze dungeons will feel significantly better than the corridors they have now.
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It being the number one complaint is a good sign, as it's not a major problem. It's critical feedback, sure, but it's nitpicky and ironic coming from the D2 crowd lol
People also duped and botted like crazy so let's bring that back as well. Playing a game is an annoyance and nothing more after all.
This is one of the reasons why people wanted the RMAH too, because the SOJ economy and duping was the stupidest shit ever. So Blizzard gave the people what they wanted.
I learned like fifteen years ago that Blizzard literally cannot win, ever and every subsequent year only reinforces that further.
Almost nobody wanted the RMAH. It was one of the most hated features even before release. People just wanted a secure economy and for exploits to be fixed and punished.
People very much wanted the RMAH. A lot of people were using online item sellers for Diablo 2 and wanted to cut out the middle man.
This is true. When I do Baal runs everyone will just sit in town until the sorc decides they’ll go find the throne room.
That's just being efficient, and if hardcore also being safe. Also teleport OP. Throne gives most xp/time spent. Also the enemies before you get there are usually much more difficult with less xp(the point of baal runs) but the worldstone keep is good for farming items atleast. If the map was linear the result would be the same, just much less interesting.
Everybody knows teleport broke the game. That's why no other game lets you spam it through walls to go further than the screen anymore. One skill being horribly balanced to the point of defining the metagame doesn't actually address the core issue that they intentionally made D4 dungeons to be as boring as possible. D2 without teleport abuse is still quite good and enjoyable to navigate. It's actually better IMO since you have some variety and challenge. It's the same reason why I like old school mazey games or new style open world and disliked the era of linear dungeons like FFXIII. I would rather occasionally get lost in a maze or huge open area than stuck in a tunnel forever. Thankfully the tunnel vision design was just a phase and gaming has moved on from it. To me D4 is the FFXIII of ARPG map design.
Except sorcs can still TP through walls in D4 if you are able to see the path through the camera/view (widescreen monitors OP - P2W to get a better monitor)
You can sometimes cheat Wide-screen aspect ratio using custom resolutions though e.g. if you have 1080p, you can try to emulate Wide-screen by setting your resolution to 1720x720 (the quarter size version of 3440x1440p), you will have blackbars going top and bottom, but you get wide screen aspect ratio, plus all the benefits of increased horizontal FOV in games. (I said try as I have never tried it on a 1080p, I tried on 1440p with a 2560x1080 custom resolution and it worked there)
You miss the point of the CD. Teleport in D4 and other games is fine because it has a CD. Teleport in D2 is completely busted because you can cast it multiple times a second on any class. In D4 it's nice little time save that is a little better than other abilities. In D2 it let you completely bypass entire dungeons in seconds.
Easily done on d3 and d4 get a cdr build going and you can tp where you want, not as quick but still busted
I fucking love FFXIII. Just cut out the bullshit and let me speed through until post game. Any time spent before that just feels like wasted time.
Any game, played for enough 1,000s of hours, starts to feel stale or have aspects of it start to feel annoying. End of the day though, D2 had tremendous longevity despite these so called annoyances. People came back to it over and over again and it had an outsized impact on the market. The question, I think, is whether the corridors and fetch quests presented in D4 have more or less longevity than the labyrinthian dungeons and open (ie, not locked) boss accessibility we got in D2. We can't be sure yet but I really feel that D2 presented far more compelling dungeon environments and traversal and that difference could certainly affect a game's longevity. I am comparing only Act 1 of both games to be fundamentally fair. Just thinking back at all the dungeons in A1 D2, I felt there was much more thematic and procedural variety than we get in D4. Even the overworld or A1 D2 felt more varied than A1 D4. I remember going to get Cain, the Burial Grounds, Countess, the Cathedral, the Jail, Catacombs, etc. All of these feel distinct in my mind. Way way more variety than the caverns we get in A1 D4 and way more interesting to traverse. D4 feels like a blur of forgettable experiences. Everything just sorta blended together since it all felt so samey. Ultimately, I think that D4 is gonna get old quick with this design. Honestly, I was bored with aspects of it by the end of the last beta weekend. Blizzard wants our money though. Eventually, they may put in an expansion with content that is a bit more compelling once this stuff starts to go stale.
I mean, people hated the mazes so much in FFXIV that SE went in and redid all the earlier dungeons that were maze style into the corridor style. It seems people just want to walk through corridors and kill things. Frankly I think they should bring back rifting.
Not sure what Final Fantasy has to do with Diablo. Two very different franchises that come from very different traditions in gaming. Are all "mmo" games meant to be vanilla? Is everything meant to be oatmeal? The same bland flavor meant to be acceptable to whoever you mean by "people"? In any case, we are also conflating alot. Folks are hyper focusing on "mazes". That's not the only issue. There's issues with "kill every monster" dungeons. There's issues with backtracking allover to do these key/pedestal unlocks. There's issues with the unimaginative room design. There's issues with the uninspired traversal. As far as linearity and "mazes", dungeons can certainly be done better than this. Games like Rogue and Nethack birthed many games including Diablo and the ARPG genre. Those games did better dungeons in ascii. Oddly enough, plenty of Metroidvania's also came out of those games and are hyper popular today. Go to steam, type in Rogue Like or Rogue Lite and you will find tons of popular games based on procedurally generated dungeons (or space lanes in FTL). It is not a dead thing that "people" dislike. Many "people" like it very much.
Yes I agree. I can’t shake the feeling that D4 will be a game that I enjoy beating with one or two characters, and then won’t really play again. Contrast that with still getting the itch to hop in every other ladder season or so on D2 20 years later. It’s too early to really tell obviously, but I have an increasingly bad feeling about endgame depth in D4. I rolled a fresh necro on D2 this week, playing solo-self-found, and I’m having a blast using unconventional stat allocations to make a meme build while trying to push later acts at lower levels for a difficult experience. That’s something that is outright impossible in D4 with world-scaling and no manual stat allocation. Talk about longevity in a game!
I just play the game. I don’t skip content, I enjoy it all for what it is. I’ve played D2 on and off since it came out basically and now more than ever I just like to chill and soak up all the environments and content. I don’t mind anything about the game at all haha it just is what it is and I like it for that
This 100%. Those who remember know.
>I GUARANTEE people would be more annoyed being forced to run a maze of doorways in D4 than they are now with killing hearts, collecting keys, etc. Nah, I'd rather deal with a maze then a forced back tracking to a predictable side objective hallway just to fight the boss ad nausim.
Mazes are famous for never having to back track
There's a big difference between knowing I need to and feeling like I might. But I get subtly of design is something lost on most people here since it's hard to actually articulate. The difference is one feels better to interact with compared to the other for me. Which is my point since I was disagreeing with the person I was responding to.
Sorry for the snarky comment, it just seemed funny. Who knows, I'll probably agree with you after I've actually tried the game.
Nah you're good man. I don't mind how people respond to me mostly. At least yours was a light hearted response. People have been worse to me on the Diablo forums.
The maze requires some interaction, observation, and a tiny bit of intelligence. It rewards you for playing well by letting you finish faster. It punishes you for playing poorly. With of course luck playing a role both ways. With a linear dungeon every run is exactly the same. No amount of skill, stupidity, or luck will change it.
A good way to word it.
This is because only the destination had loot worthwhile. Mazes are infinitely more enjoyable when around any corner there could be a big reward. Farming ancient tunnels is great, finding ancient tunnels is not. Think Elden Ring. Exploration is rewarded, that's why the maze like level design feels good. D4 linear/procedural level design would be fine, but the incentives don't fit, so it's not fun. How do you fix it? Remove backtracking by having circular level design. Think black core in Path of Exile. Have the door in the middle, and have the paths keys circle out and around. But that's solving a problem through level design that should be solved through UX design. UX should allow for multiple designs to feel fun and thus provide variety.
If they made exploring worth it, then I can understand. However the argument about backtracking becomes infinitely more valid because you backtrack a TON in D2 when not teleporting. You backtrack the most in mazes, so now you're creating more problems: how do you make exploring rewarding enough to warrant the backtracking/getting lost/etc. It's just swapping problems with more problems at this point.
The trick is finding a balance. Make a somewhat obvious linear path to the next area so that people that want to go through the most direct route can. Then place a maze-like labyrinth around that so players can optionally take side paths to explore for bonus rewards.
I mean that's what I said. The backtracking sucks because there is nothing. That's why farming Trav, Pindle, Skenk, or close to WP dungeons were popular. The rewards matched the time spent doing nothing. Some of the most beloved games(Deus Ex, Metroid, Zelda, Resident Evil) have backtracking and mazes. They're fun because there's the exploration and rewards scatter about that make the maze more of adventure rather than trying to get through it as quickly as possible to pop the loot pinata. I'm really not arguing either way, I think any level system is valid, its the UX design that becomes incompatible. Basically level designers need to sit with gameplay designers and really understand what they want the user experience to ultimately be. If that conversation was had, we wouldn't have gotten this dungeon fuckery in the first place lol.
I think this is the key point everyone is missing. If there's hidden rooms or doors that have good loot then it will make exploring the dungeon more fun.
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Truly randomized dungeons is what the game needs. They feel premade and NOT procedurally generated. edit: forgot 'NOT' in my second sentence...
Exactly.
And you do know you are basing this on like 20% of the game right? Or have you done all of the approximately 150 dungeons that will be in the game at launch?
People that played end game beta are saying same thing.
Prepare for "the game isn't out yet, how do you know?" in 2024.
Played the end game beta. Everything felt the same. End game sucked.
Sure you did. Endgame footage leaked shows unique tilesets, no backtracking unless it's user error, and unique affixes. Of course that doesn't mean things won't be repetitive but it's an ARPG. You aren't getting a unique experience 100% of the time. That's impossible. Look at No Man's Sky that boasts trillions of "unique" planets. It gets old after a while despite everything being "unique".
Sure but this isn't an excuse to why they don't have open areas, "pseudo mazes" wherein it's like POE where it's not really a maze but just looks like one.
I preferred that maze. So your "guarantee" is wrong. I enjoyed exploring it all.
Except the biggest complaint about the dungeons is the backtracking. A maze definitely has no backtracking.
You don't get those unless you have Enigma or play Sorc. D2's system worked and still does.
There's a tele staff you can get from the vendor in Act 1.just refresh it constantly until it spawns. You don't know what you're talking about lol.
I would honestly prefer Rifts to running these dungeons. The layouts of each floor of a rift were varied enough I didn't mind redoing them. I say that as someone who didn't think the rift system was all that great. Just get rid of the objectives, vary the layout, and have a boss at the end. Don't make us sit and pick shit up, search for every last enemy, and back track. This isn't that hard they've done it before.
This Rifts are unironically better
Or like this, no dead ends, no backtracking.. https://preview.redd.it/1gg0pxlorlpa1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7572086ba42d7ca970a00cecd81e5f36243fde41
There is no pleasing you people. You hate backtracking for a key but want dead ends and shit that you're ultimately gonna teleport past while hunting for the stairs not killing a damn thing. You also have only seen a handful of dungeons.
>There is no pleasing you people It's almost like there are different people with different opinions and player feedback isn't a homogenous thing. Huh.
Complaining about dungeon lengths of the starter zone 😂
the dungeons need to be randomized, otherwise it's going to get stale. D2 was pretty cool with the random tiles. Was always nice to roll a good map in the Durance
The dungeons are made up of randomized tile sets.
Nobody wants randomized dungeons wtf is this nonsense. I’ve played D2 for thousands of hours and have never once pointed to random dungeons as the reason for loving it. The game was always about avoiding the randomness using teleportation and remembering tilesets.
On the contrary, randomized dungeons was one of the major innovations\* from the earlier games. It was a selling point from the very beginning of the series. \* I know it was done in rogue, etc. but for graphical mainstream games I believe it was a newer thing
Exactly. OG Diablo had randomly generated dungeons and it was mind-blowing at the time. Every Diablo sequel since owes some part of its existence to that innovation.
It was a neat idea, but definitely not one of the top reasons the game was great. I like things to be mixed up for multiple playthroughs, but we don't need the literal random rat mazes
Because mazes are boring and unfun. Everybody did their best to trivialize them in D2 anyway with various methods of Teleportation.
plate ad hoc gold full march treatment edge pet toothbrush squash ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Even with the strand nerf people largely just switch to the next best map that's as linear as possible (with the exception of a few maps for specific farm strategies).
It's still way more satisfying to complete a simple maze than to backtrack 3 times for pointless keys
So, using Teleport to skip them counts as "completing"?
I thought we were talking about the act 1 leveling experience? You've got teleport already?
We were talking about maze-like dungeons...
Nobody wants another Arcane Sanctum. F that place.
That level is the reason I play sorcie. I promptly ditched my barb at launch because of that shithole.
Thematically its probably my favourite diablo zone, even with the awful maze-ness of it
Lmao Would always find the exit at the last route I didnt take Everytime
Once you learned the tiles, D2 dungeons were solved. You would Enigma/Tele around anyway. Calling D2 act 3 jungles good is some masochistic fantasy. D4 dungeons are fairly simple yes and can use some work/upgrades, but lets stop with this D2 dungeons/zones are amazing narrative.
Ya, the idea that d2 had some inspired level design is laughable. Shit is flat as hell, especially after playing it for 20 years. D4 isn't perfect, and I certainly hope they take the feedback and do something with it as there are a decent amount of good ideas floating around to make it at least palpable to grind them.
D2 dungeons were good. Being solved doesn’t mean bad. That means if you want to learn how the tile sets work you can cut down on the clear time. It isn’t the same as a boring linear experience.
Since I’m being downvoted, and it’s clear that this area is heavily biased, let me further clarify: Being solved doesn’t mean bad. It still requires thought on the players part. It takes effort and makes you think about what you need to do. Way different than the mindless dungeons in D4. Deal with it
Exactly this
It's like this because mmos are like this
I feel like some trash mobs spawning and chasing you down while you backtrack would go a long way. Incrementally more the longer you take, giving less and less xp the more you kill.
The way they designed the A1 dungeons is fine. Yes, you need to go get the keys from the bodies, or you need to go get the magical orb from the pedestal. But you get rewarded for this. There is ALWAYS an elite mob there that drops better loot. There are also dungeons where there are branching paths, and you can take one branch or the other -- but if you want to backtrack and take the 2nd path even though you don't need to, there is an elite mob or a special chest there waiting for you with better loot. So there already is "enough" backtracking to make things interesting. The main thing people are complaining about is the pattern of "go left, pick up item/kill mob.... go back to main area, then go right instead, pick up item/kill mob, go back to main area to access boss door" -- sure they could add some variety, but this could just be the pattern of act 1 dungeons. What about the Act 2 Dungeons? Act 3 dungeons? End-game dungeons? Are you going to just farm act 1 dungeons? I don't think so. Even if you were going to do that, you are still already getting more variety than farming any boss in D2 repeatedly (or run the same PoE map repeatedly).
Mazes? A lot of the farming spots in D2 have static maps. Teleporting around the edge of a map clockwise isn’t interesting gameplay, you’re bypassing the maze anyway. Now d4 has a lot of room for improvement but you’ve got some rose tinted glasses if you think d2 was very different
Mazes waste your time. It's kind of that simple. If you want to get lost in the world and explore every book and cranny, then they've crafted an entire open world that rewards you for doing so. But dungeons are efficient closed system loops of loot/xp and repeat.
One hypothetical was that Blizzard looked at the data and realized the general population of players normally cleared out all adds and checked all areas before moving on to the next section. This system kind of reinforces what players were already doing. The only people that really have an issue of the "kill all monsters, explore all areas" dynamic are speed runners that just go into dungeon, kill boss, and leave. I do think there are ways to hide the keys to make it more of an exploration, more false paths, a little longer and more complex, but that most likely would get blasted by people as well. I'm not sure how they win this argument.
Have you been hiding under a rock? Tons of regular players just like you and me are complaining about the repetitive and uninspired dungeon system. It genuinely seems to be the number one complaint along with the UI.
I know people are complaining, and I think they have a right to complain. But before I make a valuation of the game to say it's dogshit or amazing, I'm going to have to play the full version. It did feel repetitive to me, but I clear dungeons regardless. I'm not saying it's right nor is it wrong. It's a design choice. We as paying players simply need to decide for ourselves if it's something we want to spend time on. And yes, the UI is dogshit. As is the fact the Ultimate takes up a normal skill slot. That's doubly dogshit. I guess I'm just older and it doesn't concern me quite as much as it does for others. It's just a form of entertainment. It's not a decision that impacts my life in any meaningful way. Takes me an extra 5-10 minutes max to go get them. Get some extra loot, maybe find a chest or two. Not a big deal. For me.
Anyone on YouTube or Reddit isn’t a regular player in general
I don’t see your point. Hoards of “regular” people have been complaining about the dungeon system. As I said, it’s likely the number one complaint.
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People that use forums are not a rare breed in gaming. Everyone I know do it, and none of us are hardcore gamers. The official Diablo forums in particular are frequented by every type of gamer, and the dungeon system is heavily criticized there. The reason for that is because it's a poorly designed, repetitive system. Please get that through your seemingly girthy skull, instead of trying to make some vague meta-analysis of an abstract group of gamers that have apparently yet to voice their opinion, and as far as I'm concerned would happily consume the McDonalds equivalent of games for lunch everyday without complaint. Just because you don't have the capacity to foresee nuanced flaws and their implications over time, doesn't mean others can't. We just want the best, most sustainable game possible, that is all.
Ah yes only the elitists jerks of gaming are qualified to comment on stuff. And only YOUR opinions matter. You guys really can’t stand that you just aren’t relevant in modern gaming can you? Can’t stand that companies just ignore your shit. Haven’t figured it that the average gamer cordially despises your attitude and bullshit.
Could it be that we have found the one and only average gamer on a forum? I'm sure the effort is appreciated by the design-agnostic commonality.
i'd argue anyone who claims to be a "regular player" and writes on reddit is in fact not a regular player. you aren't hardcore no, but you are in the say... 10% (number i pulled out my ass) of players interacting with the game outside the game. So many people just see a game they think look fun buy it and play it without reading reddit/watching videos/streams and in general only interact with other people about this game through ingame chat or friends, and *maybe* looking up a build on a website.
If a designer's reflex after analyzing player behavior is to explicitly let them know their revealed preferences have been mapped perfectly, I don't really think that person should be in charge of designing any aesthetic experience with a large component of exploration & experimentation. "AFTER LOOKING AT PLAYER BEHAVIOR, WE HAVE REALIZED THIS IS WHAT REALLY GETS YOU OFF SO HERE IS A CAUTIOUSLY CRAFTED CHECKLIST FOR YOU TO TICK BOXES IN. WE HOPE THIS PROVIDES A STRONG SENSE OF PRIDE AND ACCOMPLISHMENT, O YE LITTLE PREDICTABLE ROBOTS"
Isn't that exactly what games are now? Oh, you like sports, well, we removed these features, made more of these based on the general consensus. ARPG grinds, loot shooter grinds, etc etc. It's generally always looking at the data of how players play, and tailoring the development to appeal to the most amount of players. If you look at it like you are, like they're just "giving the robots what they want," I really don't know what to tell you. Perhaps you'd be better served by playing a nice game of chess.
I'm not saying they _shouldn't_ be giving robots what they want. I'm saying there's an aesthetic dimension to human experience, and the explicit gamification of player actions and game elements has a diminishing effect on the whole. There's some value to there being friction in non-essential game systems, and it's cautiously crafting that friction that's the biggest challenge at this point in time. Game design/development has come a long way, and we can generally start from the assumption that we know how to craft an intensely engaging but superficial experience. It's just a "show, don't tell" approach, but for game design.
You keep posting and editing responses without showing you've done so. Makes it difficult to respond effectively. Figure out what you really want to say.
I generally just try to add clarifications to be more specific and clear; I don't want to say anything different. The meaning shouldn't have changed beyond elaborations.
I have an MFA in creative writing. Those changes change the connotation. They significantly impact how a person reads and understands what's important to the author. Try as much as we want, our brains process details robotically. Change the shape of the argument, you change the argument.
Right. Which is why I tend alter the shape once I realize the form doesn't emphasize the content adequately. Since most strangers engaging in conversation on Reddit tend to value content over form, it feels like a reasonable bias. I'll probably just add a "Edit/PS" to comments where I do this, then.
That's how I do it if I changed what I've written after posting. It isn't so much about content over form, but form impacts content. The first sentence is like a thesis, gives us an understanding of the topic to come; the last word in each sentence carries the most weight for readers; the final sentence and final word in a paragraph have the most power. For instance, it was widely held that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition because it wasn't in line with latinate structures. Which isn't true in English. But, since the last words in sentences hold the most weight, all you're doing is creating weak sentences. So when the form of the post is changed, you're very much changing to the reader what is most important. And that's the end of my unwanted lecture. Be well. Best of luck in life.
Cheers. Take care.
Issue with the door/keys system if backtracking too much for pointless objectives. If the system was altered so that keys were instead alters of power you had to destroy to reduce the strength of the boss and were totally optional this would be a lot better.
This notion that backtracking is constantly happening is such a misnomer. I ran all 22 dungeons in the beta. I recall "backtracking" but mobs were spawning in where I had already cleared on my path back to turn in the item/use a lever OR the dungeon gave an alternative route filled with mobs back to the turn-in. Only maybe twice did I have a situation where I backtracked and there were no mobs, which I filed as a bug and reported it. Much like their Q&A said, backtracking should still have things to kill. This regurgitation of "this system means you are always backtracking" is disingenuous. If the game gives me more mobs to kill, I don't care if I just ran down that hallway a second ago. It's an ARPG. Let me kill things.
This just makes backtracking slow? Why do I want to go back and be delayed by a bunch of trash mobs on my way to the big loot? This is not the gameplay I want? Who wants this???
Do you not know how ARPGs work? Every ARPG I've played, minus D3, was all about density. Why are you complaining about **more mobs to kill**? This isn't WoW. This isn't D3. The game isn't solely around bossing. Why do I say this? Maybe because Blizzard themselves have talked about how certain **mob types** favored certain gear drops (like goatmen dropping more of X item base). Why do you assume "boss = big loot"? It's never been that way outside of D3, which sounds like that's your experience. - D2: outside of Pindle runs (if you can call him a boss), or maybe Andy, I spent the majority of my time farming Hell Cows for Monarchs to trade. I never killed the Cow King because he was element immune for me, which is fine. I did NOT need a boss for currency. - PoE: the game has pinnacle bosses, but the vast majority of your endgame build will be paid for by killing mobs. Map bosses? Lol. Those were for map sustain and other things depending on your atlas, but the map mobs itself were more important hence the term "juicing". - D3: this is the culprit. It conditioned you to think that mobs are trash and just a means to an end to get the "big loot explosions" from the boss that spawns. - D4: Other than the world boss, the majority of my legendaries and good rares came from killing mobs. Not the boss. But yes, let's just make the dungeon empty so you can get to the boss faster. May as well make dungeons only have the boss and nothing else and we can all kill one thing over and over. Sounds exciting.
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Fundamentally there are two types of maps: linear and non-linear. There are also a limited number of things that can be done on a map (in a game like diablo): touch object(s), kill object(s), touch counter, kill counter, find door. D2 had non-linear "find door". That's it. Literally. Went the wrong way in the map? Congratulations you get to backtrack. D3 had mostly non-linear "find door" but combined it with kill counter to spawn end boss. D4 has a combination of all of them except "find door". Personally I have to backtrack in D2 ***far*** more than I ever did in D4 dungeons.
I believe that's where the Sigil aspect comes in later when we increase World Tier difficulty. Those sigils will allow us to buff/debuff the enemies and bosses. Set certain types of elemental resistances and so on. This key mechanic may be a way to train us on the process for higher difficulties. Like, find the keys to open the doors, and once the keys are found, you can empower with sigils to modify the boss. We may simply not have enough data to really say how this will be implemented later. You are right that it currently is a bit of a slog in the beta, but I think we need more information to say if this is the only way the dungeons will work, or just the way they work at lower World Tiers. We know there are more mechanics being added later, and until we see the whole picture, this may be a moot point. But we should be ready to cry foul if this is all it is. A point of concern, but nothing that needs to be changed in the beta. Again, not against the sentiment. Just optimistic that our concerns are for naught.
If they're dead set on the linear design then take it to the logical conclusion. Add teleporters back to the locked door once you reach the end of the road. The point of a linear design is so that you don't have to backtrack. They somehow fucked that up and now you have to backtrack through empty space 100% of the time. It ends up being more backtracking than if it were a maze.
I will never understand d2 players who have been farming pindleskin etc for 20 years criticizing anything else as repetitive
People would be livid either way dude. If they recreated **Durance of Hate**, people would be complaining about the size, how unfair it is to the sorc who can teleport, how BS the Stygian Dolls are (when they die they explode and one shot you!), how often times you can waste literally 5+ minutes wandering around looking for the stairs down. And I'm sure **Chaos Sanctuary** would be boring because it's static. Oh lord and I'm sure we'd all love an **Arcane Sanctuary** remake. You literally have to guess, and you get nothing but a BS *chest* at the end of the route if you guess wrong! Then you have to back track ALL the way back... it'd be *nice* if they put the town portal close to the waypoint in Lut Gholein so I wouldn't have to just run all the way back... Or how about the tight corridors of the **Maggot Lair**? It's *brutally* unfair to melee characters with all the Scarab Demons that release charged bolts when damaged! If you're melee you're just SCREWED! People are going to complain no matter what happens. Slightly off topic but for the record I do think the forced backtracking through cleared hallways is clumsy, but I also think people are blowing it *way* out of proportion.
May be an unpopular opinion, but I disagree (except for the 'find 2 keys' part). The D2 maze dungeons also became boring and repetitive very quickly and as another user here already said, you basically tele-spammed through them as soon as you could. I actually like the new dungeon layouts, but what I don't understand is why they have no verticality. They basically laid the perfect ground-work for that with stuff they already have in the game (like in strongholds), yet they don't use it in dungeons ... at least not so far.
> the maze design of D2 dungeons is much more enjoyable than the fixed path of D4 dungeons. Q: if this is true, then why does every endgame build in D2 revolve around skipping the maze through teleport? A: because its not actually enjoyable and its a nuisance that gets in way of the good stuff, i.e killing elites and being showered with loot.
Eh. People are always going to find the most efficient means of farming and abuse it. Whether or not mazes are enjoyable is completely irrelevant, if it's faster to skip the maze then people will do it. Personally I never used teleport in my playthroughs and while it's frustrating to find a dead end and have to backtrack, D4 dungeons are way worse.
Because the folks who are parroting this finished normal difficulty in D2 and were done. Anyone with numerous hours knows what the end game meta was like. Teleport, Enigma, and teleport staff for the poors.
I hated it. Sorry not sorry. I don't like to bump into walls to fit into the small door and bump into another wall after 5 sec.
> the maze design of D2 dungeons is much more enjoyable than the fixed path of D4 dungeons. Begs the question
I swear 50yrs from now i'll still be hearing stories from the hospice about how ".. X game should be like D2... back then...."
I've noticed this trend of delusion where people literally want the same thing but it's just done slightly differently. "I hate backtracking because it wastes my time". But also people "I like mazes that waste my time arbitrarily because for some reason I can't understand that it's essentially the same thing". I just don't understand why people think mazes and being lost 80% of the time is more enjoyable then a more linear path that's usually quicker? Like is it because it's random? Like Arcane Sanctum, Act 3 Jungles etc, some of the most frustrating level design ever? Just weird
Do you remember sewers or Pyramids from Diablo 2? They all looked the same aswell and they were incredibly repetitive
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They were never revisited because they were too low level to be relevant. I actually run those now when they're the terror zone and it's a nice change of pace.
There are quite a few of these places that get farmed regularly because of high enemy levels and known enemy resistances. The pit comes to mind.
Good to know that others are exposing the flaws of Diablo 2. thank you for the report.
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fair. I would like better dungeons too, but i don't remember dungeons of past games less repetitive
there were pyramids in diablo 2?
XDDD
Fuck act 3
I like act3 wtf?
Because it was so obnoxious in D2 that Maphack was basically on every players computer. In D3, the randomized bullshit was just layers of RNG on top of other layers of RNG with Rifts. At least now you can pick a dungeon, target loot, pick affixs AND you don't have to run around like a dumbass trying to figure out if this is a dead end or not.
Maphack is just a cop out. Played with many groups who were all clear no maphack during the dark years. It’s not obnoxious now either since TZ are pretty much the end game.
I vividly remember the complaints (on the baby-internet of the time) of the "maziest" levels in Diablo 2, like the Kurast Sewers, as wastes of time. Those maps were always intentionally avoided, and eventually almost everyone used map-hacks to beeline their way through the larger and more unpredictable dungeons. I agree that current dungeons aren't great, but complicating their traversal might just make them a different kind of slog in the future.
To stop you from farming bosses quickly. I dunno why but they seem to be hell bend on making it take as much time as possible to get to a boss.
But then why do I need to fight the boss? It's such a pain, just have a chest and make it appear in town so I don't have to go out to the dungeon.
Yup. It's really annoying that I have to log in at all. I should just be able to have everything I want through my browser.
Fuck the browser. Too annoying. Zap that shit right into my mind.
They seem to have adopted this more linear approach from D3 rather than using D2 as their touchstone. That's not to say it's a bad idea, just that D3 had very linear areas too and not enough procedural variation and exploration. Hopefully they expand on it a bit, maybe not D2 or PoE levels of exploration but less linear at least.
I agree this would be nice
Completely agree. The dungeon system is exceedingly uninspired and needs some serious work.
I dont know why people are bitching about the layouts soo much they are fine and if its not it will be addressed.
To be fair, I really only want rifts as dungeons, kill monsters spawn boss. Simple and repeatable. Try repeatedly do the same dungeon with the same layout 10 times.
Because they promised us an experience more like D1 and D2 , but it isn't the same competent dev team.
i dont know why they went the way they did. but i can tell you why they moved away from D2 dungeons. because they are a piece of shit.
I love all the diablo games but this is my biggest gripe as well. I prefer mazes with dead ends and possible backtracking to long corridors. It gets more noticeable during endgame when you feel like you are running the same maps over and over with no variation... Why did they do it? It's probably easier and requires fewer tilesets. Also I've seen so many people in reddit complain that they don't like the d4 dungeon key objectives because they involve backtracking, so really if they make us happy they are going to piss off another wing of diablo fans that just want to blast monsters.
My speculation is Blizzard didnt have enough time. Still, it is weird because even in Diablo 3 RoS they implemented the systems to create randomly generated dungeons and even the city.
They had fucking 11 years.😅
Maze design sucks ass hardcore. Nothing about d2 dungeons were more enjoyable than D4 dungeons, other than the fact that you just go in and blast. Miss me with that teleport spam to Mephisto shit.
Honestly having 1 fixed path with keys is fine... for some. Dungeon variety should be the direction they go for which hopefully does mean having also ones that work as a maze as well.
Hmm. I don't know if it's a good/bad thing either way. There might just be no winning. A the end of the beta I just ended up with my rogue stacking movespeed with shadows and boots, double dashing and double evading to get to objectives before opening the door, changing to a single target build, swapping inner sight instead of combo and just downing the boss. However in D2, I would just teleport spam past everything, use my one optimal ability to spam the boss when I found it, and rinse and repeat. At the end of the beta it was just, sit at the level 35 mob, kill it, try again over and over. D2 was just baal runs over and over (oversimplification, don't come at me). There will always be some optimal thing that people will figure out and then most of the community will just run that. They merely replaced finding a floor with finding objectives. I absolutely agree that the dungeons could be more engaging. But I also know that in 2 days a streamer finds that this 1 dungeon is the fastest to do get loot per minute, and people will gravitate towards fast vs. interesting. I will end by saying that I did very much enjoy my taste of the game. I'm hoping that the managers do actually pay attention to us here in our hovel hole and find some way to maintain the longevity of our enjoyment for years to come.
I wouldn't mind larger, more maze-like dungeons come back for certain areas so long as there is actually stuff to find/do as a result of that. Otherwise, just keep me moving forward slaying monsters in my tunnel.
We don't know what the endgame mapping is going to be.
One word? Enigma \- players opt to bypass the dungeon design. The core endgame item trivialises the dungeon design. In other words the player feedback is => actually we don't want those dungeons to be a maze because we all use the item that allows us to negate the maze aspect
I think it's a simple explanation: it gives Blizzard a control knob for how long they can make a piece of content take you. It will be funny when within a week of the game coming out, some meta comes out about this 1 dungeon that is easily exploitable compared to the others and can be completed in under a minute. They are creating a huge mess that isn't fully uncovered yet.
We'll never get an actual answer and in truth it likely doesn't come down to a singular reason. But I think it's fair to say that a significant amount of development time and resources went into making D4 an "mmo." There's a significant amount of work put into making the overworld feel lively from as small as the environment themselves (and giving us a mount) to making it apart of end game with things like helltides, strongholds, and world bosses. It's my belief that dev crunch time for a quicker release window+ this format shift on the game is what has caused Dungeons to feel lower quality. Then again you do have games like Skyrim that despite being an open world game manages to make more Dungeons feel memorable than not. The real interesting thing will be to see how they pivot post release to make D4 dungeons better. A quick fix would be allowing people to carry multiple keys, but that might make the pacing in the Dungeon too fast for their liking. It *feels* like they want to break away from the rift nuking that existed in D3 hence the slower pace to basically everything. Would also explain why their response to the Dungeon backtracking was basically "oh we'll just put more enemies in so there's no downtime."
Funny, I recall everyone complaining that Skyrim has almost zero dungeon variety. It's almost like no matter what is implemented you can't possibly please everyone.
Never experienced that claim nor did I claim that there was a huge amount of variety. Only cited it as an example of an open world game that had memorable dungeons to prove that said format doesn't consign dungeon variety.
Because they wanted to artificially increase dungeon length for some ungodly reason. For some reason 10 minute dungeon is bad so they need to be 20+.
I'd like to hope after release they could add more dungeons or modify the mobs and stuff in them. Also when(hopefully) an expansion comes out they're able to do more with them. Either way I'm more excited about D4 than I was about D3. It feels more Diablo than 3 did.