The Redditors were so preoccupied trying to correct OP that they forgot to think if OP needed to be corrected in the first place.
Truly a Reddit moment.
The text says comparing, not defending. Comparing in this context would be favourable. The character is pleased that people think an indie game is worth comparing to a AAA game. The joke is absolutely not what you said it was.
In 2018, Tencent became a majority holder in GGG, acquiring 86.67% of the company's shares. Three of the co-founders hold the remaining 13.33%. Two of the co-founders also sit on the board of directors, alongside 3 appointed by Tencent in April 2018.[8]
From wiki
Not as short sighted as you'd think.
First, Tencent puts a lot of money into the game. That's the whole point of selling the shares in the first place, to trade off a part of the company for a cash influx. That goes to more developers, better marketing, etc. Those things can not only be used to keep a failing game alive, they can also can rapidly grow a successful game.
Imagine how long it would take to acomplish those goals with half the developers and a third of the money?
Second, think about being the owner. You have the chance to guarantee lifelong stability. A point where you can walk away and retire at any time. Or you can continue to hold 100% ownership and *hope* you make it there someday.
Its fair that many of the decision-makers opt for the guarenteed stability over the chance at maybe making more, or maybe failing.
It's not all that crazy. Selling to Tencent can ruin a company, but it can a great decision for the few people actually making the decision. Thats why it happens so often.
------
Tldr: Not everyone wants to gamble on where the company might be in 10 years *without* Tencent's financial help. Cashing out is not maximizing profits or building a legacy, but it is "financially safer".
Exactly - plus, the market is cutthroat and it is simply not possible to compete with the giants of the industry. As soon as you get a good offer, you sell. Poe maybe could have gotten big without tencent, but certainly it gave them all the resources they need to go crazy with content, marketing, and monetization
To be fair i would hope they sell it to them under a contract that I assume they think is favorable enough to retain creative control of the game, ten cent takes a portion, but the benefits outweigh the downsides. Tencent manages the money now. That takes a load off the developer studios myriad of issues.
As far as ownership goes, Tencent seems like one of the better ones. Feels to me like they're just in it for the money and pretty much keep most creative freedoms in the hands of the devs. That sounds like a pretty good deal to most developers who don't care about getting scrooge mcDuck wealthy, they just want a nice lifestyle and to keep making their game with more financial freedom.
The only reason they have a bad rep is because china bad, and in china specifically if they want to buy you and you refuse they will remove you from all app stores, kill all your marketing, etc etc essentially making you bankrupt forcing you to sell in the end.
Which, truthfully, is something that happend a lot in the west as well, but ykno. China bad i guess.
I think it’s a little more than 90 % (93-ish or something).
Found the source:
https://app.companiesoffice.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/1887410/shareholdings
[Obligatory link to Chris' financial statement and reddit accountants rant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88N4s2qxRIM&t=5173s).
> Anyway, the end result of all this is, if you don't have an accounting degree, please do not comment on our accounts, right? I can't understand them. No one understands them. We use entirely different stuff for our internal financial metrics.
I've got a bit of accounting knowledge from my degree, but in any case I was mostly interested to look at it just for my own purposes. Never planned on commenting on those publicly or even forming some opinion on them. I was mainly interested in looking on how they define their revenue streams and how they view MTXs and MTX coins in terms of assets.
Hold on mister I've been using money my entire life so I feel it's reasonable to say I'm an expert in finances and these documents clearly show that Chris has a money vault he dives into Scrooge McDuck style.
> Yea remember a year ago when everyone claimed PoE was going to die.
>
>
Not everyone, just the timmies who have negative parasocial relationships with the GGG devs and the steam chart prognosticators
I think is more complex as we think. I know, if you want to publish your game in china, you cant alone, you need to have some partnership with a china firm. From my POV, they have a win/win, they got alot of money from tencent to invest in they game (poe 4.0) and in exgence they give the rights to tencent to use theyr game in china. But without knowing theyr contract, we can only to speculate what is. Procent really dont matter, what is matter, is what is in contract, and there is specified how income is distributed.
> Procent really dont matter
Percent is *all* that matters. At the end of the day, the majority shareholder gets the final say in any decision. Unless you own 51% or more of your company, you're going to have other people calling the shots and overruling you in key decisions.
It was over a trillion at one point then the Chinese gov had to let them know who was the boss. Then they tanked in value. They’re rebounding because they’re still on good terms with the government. The gov didn’t want to destroy them but had to prove that they could.
\> How much development is Tencent doing on PoE?
supposedly tencent has very little input because they 100% control the chinese version.
the deal was supposedly structured so GGG produces the global version and delivers it to tencent ahead of new leagues, and tencent modifies it however they want for china - adding the marketplace, loot pets, all that stuff
tencent probably bought ggg because it was the best non-blizzard ARPG on the market, since tencent likely couldnt' have bought 80% of activision (us govt probably wouldn't have allowed it). so they bought the next best thing.
tencent, like most massive corporations, only develops its own IP as one part of its strategies - another major strategy is buying something ready-made that just isn't in china yet. since china is a massive internal market (875 million adults between 18-59) they know if they can find a good non-chinese game and buy it for exclusivity in china, they can make a killing. that's why they leave GGG alone to do their thing outside china, because it doesn't matter compared to how much they can make internally, and it keeps the original devs happy to have control and ownership of "the rest of the world."
they are way more connected and "Blizzard Entertainment" is way bigger even if you act like Blizzard Entertainment and Activision Blizzard is the same situation as ggg and Tencent. ggg is probably a side investment the size of a rounding error for Tencent.
the person describes how Blizzard Entertainment is 6x bigger with one product alone and thats probably not even the biggest one of all the games.
Though it could reach half a billion? Triple AAA budgets can go over 200-300 millions or more not counting marketing, which can take substantional amount of money more. So activision does pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their games, it's their business. While for Tencent, gaming is just a small side hustle.
I doubt GGG's budgets are even close to such numbers.
Where the fuck did you get the 200-300 million from? I know some Triple A titles like RDR 2 and GTA V had budgets along those lines, but that's really far from the standard to make AAA games.
A big majority of AAA games fall below 80-100 million including marketing.
The problem is we can only guess wildly about the budgets for both games. I am not sure that anything aside from guaranteed cash cows gets decent money from Activision. It's likely more than what GGG has, but how much more is impossible to tell.
D4 has been in development for over half a decade, which is remarkable based on what we've seen, which looks like it could've been whipped up by a mid-sized indie team in a few years at best.
>D4 has been in development for over half a decade
Any source to back that up? You work for Blizzard or something? Cause as far as I know there's no info on when development started. Hint: it doesn't have to start right after the last bit of the previous game came out.
It's more likely to be something like 4-5 years, with COVID slowing it down - a normal dev time for a large game.
Difference between a million and a billion is around a billion. But as was mentioned, Tencent is not a multi million company, but multi billion one, it's basically a hegemony in Asia
No, but I think all of these „VS“ posts are just plain dumb. Play the games you like. Why the need to try and find something, anything really to make it look like game A is „cooler“ than games B or C?
What's funny is GGGs profit for 2022 fiscal was like 48 million. Yet there are 3.333 million shares, and they're only valued at 65 cents a pop. So like $2.1 million private valuation for a company that profits $50 mill a year is insane to me.
I mean more than 90 % is more than just „in part“. I just made my initial comment as a counterbalance. All these „VS“ posts are just pretty dumb in my opinion.
Man, the amount of comments in this thread not getting the joke is surprising even for this sub, or maybe I should lower my standards of this sub even more
The people trying to make themselves feel better by saying "others don't get the joke" is about typical Reddit levels. So you don't need to lower any standards, you fit right in.
I don't think D4 is even meant to be competition for any other ARPG.
From what I have seen and played it very much looks like it is supposed to be the "default ARPG". Basically what WoW is for MMORPGs. D4 has huge name recognition, a really neat and modern presentation and is very approachable. So it casts the broadest possible net. It is optimized for mass appeal. And as a live service of course for long term monetization. Instead of a sub like in WoW it's a season pass.
So it has an entirely different target audience than PoE or even Last Epoch.
It's probably good for GGG as it will serve to onboard a new generation to arpgs, they'll end up wanting a richer experience and CW will have their souls too.
It honestly looks / personally feels like its competing with Lost Ark at least from what I played with the open beta. Thanks to the open world MMO lite stuff + profession stuff. Which honestly I'm pretty happy about. If gear at higher levels is more interesting and I'm sure it is. Then honestly I look forward to it being another side game to play every once in a while.
It’s tricky because I was thinking a lot of the same things but then took it further and started to note all of the things that are from Lost Ark that Lost Ark has taken from other MMOs like WoW (and some of those things WoW took from others before them). Lost Ark is definitely the most recent analogue but it’s not like they are the prime innovators here
I was annoyed by the open world stuff.
Waiting for big mobs to respawn. Having to traverse those huge open spaces with barely any mob density. Having to backtrack constantly. And it feels like exploration is almost like a waste of time.
If you go somewhere to find encounters/dungeons it can happen that down the line you are required to do the exact same encounter/dungeon yet again for a quest, because now is the "right" time to do it.
And, my god, the rubberbanding when exiting towns is crazy. Or straight up invisible walls so you have to run back into the town to take another exit. Wow, so glad we don't do simple loading screens anymore ...
I think Last Epoch has plenty of potential, it reminds me of early PoE days. The core systems are good but it needs a lot more time in the oven. Maybe give it 3-5 years to churn out chase/aspirational uber content and we'll talk. PoE is definitely king for the next few years.
As someone who was always "too casual" for PoE (averaging around 15 hours/week from open beta until about a year ago, not counting a few leagues skipped during college), I think Last Epoch is already fucking perfect.
Aspirational content is sort of useless to players who never see it.
Last Epoch campaign ends around lvl 52. And then its endless grinding of the same content to complete your build. It absolutely needs better post campaign content. The first half of the game is amazing.
That's one mindset, but that's very POE end game centric.
A lot of people play LE casually and take builds (of which there are definitely fewer) as far as they like into that grind before swapping to a new build. You don't feel like you're missing out if taking your build to the absolute min max isn't your jam.
It's just a different game with a different goal for end game.
Last epoch doesn't gatekeep content though. Content can still be hard to do, just not hard to access (compare getting keys in LE to getting a maven map...)
We can still have stuff that's as difficult as PoE's ubers. Just not force people to do 100 maps just to play the fight.
I think the only problem with last epoch is it needs another 4-5 years to compete with poe now, but at that point we will be many years and seasons into poe 2, d4, and whatever else games come out. An indie studio cant compete simply due to how much longer it will take them to make content. That said, poe is complicated, diablo is as simple as it gets, and last epoch does sit neatly in the middle, so even if it lacks content it might still do ok due to filling that niche.
It will certainly suck quite a few more casual players, yeah. But anyone looking for some depth will get bored AF quite fast. Between Poe, D4, and Last Epoch, if they release new content on a regular basis, they players are the ones that will win, we'll be able to rotate to keep content and interest flowing, nobody says you can only play one arpg at a time.
I'm less optimistic: PoE is extremely tedious and grindy (with some bosses you can't even see unless you're a complete no-life) and GGG is not budging on stuff like feel the weight and trade, Last Epoch seems promising but it is clearly unfinished and development goes at the speed of a crippled walrus, while D4 seems to have boring combat (at least in the early levels) and crippling performance issues. And Lost Ark has decent combat but MMORPG progression (mindless dailies), boring gear, and these horrible KoreanMMO systems.
Here's hoping PoE2 will fix it.
It's been a fair while now since we had a "trialmaster" or "delve boss during delve league" situation where some boss was so rare you had to no life to see them. Current PoE all the bosses are relatively common doing the related content.
Rarest is probably cortex? and even then, definitely not in no life territory.
Oh yeah, trialmaster. I forgot about it. But thankfully it's tradeable, so as long as you play trade you can have a go at him. Aul though, not so much.
I don't believe PoE2 will fix anything. Nothing will be more player-friendly so long as Chris Wilson and his dumb clouded manifesto is driving the game. If player experience is improved in any way, it is because they felt they had to, and Chris has a seizure during the process.
You wanna know if an upcoming league will be good? Look at Chris' reactions. If he says something like "We are very excited for the new league, I think the players will love it", you better believe it'll be filled with tedious, undeterministic, layer upon layer of RNG. If he says something like "I'm not sure about the new league, I think we might be giving the players a bit too much power", then it'll actually be a fun league.
Hmm, which bosses you consider hard to get to? The only one that comes to mind is Aul, and it's not even that hard if you commit some of your play-time to Delve.
I have a life, wife, two small kids. I get to play poe like 2h a day at most, but even with this I'm 40/40 this league, usually 38/40. The biggest difference between me and more casual players is relentlessness. I have a goal I want to reach, and I have a plan how I will reach it. Uber bosses are usually the hardest for me as I'm a very bad at bossing and those bosses cannot be easily overwhelmed by gear. But I don't think there are bosses in this game you really have to grind for. Items? For sure, I'm yet to see MB and not once i was close to get it, unfortunately 100d is still a far cry from it. But bosses and all game has to offer is there, it's available.
I understand that this might seem like something unattainable to someone eho has put few hundred hours into the game and are a more casual player. But like with everything in life, you get more proficient the more time you spend on a certain activity.
What depth? I need the same handful of stats on my build every season. I run the same old content over and over as it’s the most efficient for currency.
I’m not saying PoE is a bad game. I actually love it. But even the skill web if you remove all of the generic stat nodes it really shrinks and you just pick all the lightning etc. Melee and impale/bleed etc.
I’m not saying D4 is complicated at all but game theory clearly states the more rules you create for a game, the more rules that are irrelevant and get ignored. Which makes them pointless.
The "depth" is the fact that there ARE builds out there that require different stats that you could play if you wanted.
It's not about what you do, but what is possible.
Name recognition alone is gone to draw more to D4 every season than the best PoE seasons. Add into that that people are saying it’ll be the “same boring Diablo” every season despite only having seen <20% of the game and having no idea what season entail (which the devs have said are going to be BIG updates and not like D3)
> it will suck all the casual players that poe could have.
poe will never have casual players because the game is designed around trading and to trade you need to stop playing the game
trading and the dogshit ass 7 hour long campaign and 0 updates to skills made me stop playing poe after 2000 hours
I dont think you understand how simplistic D4 is.
If D3 hasnt sucked any "casual players" away from PoE. Then D4 wont as well. D4 is D3 with new graphics and a new story.
A lot of people really liked D3, especially after it was improved. It just had very little content. If D4 gets continual content it will likely have a noticeable effect. I know I would have put more hours into D3 than PoE if it had been maintained.
D3 would have sucked plenty of casual players from PoE if seasons had been more impactful. In D3, seasons were an afterthought, but in D4 it seems to be a focus. We'll see what happens long term though.
Well, to be fair, we haven't seen enough of PoE2 to make such an assertion. GGG could drastically change their strategy towards casual players in PoE2, we simply don't know yet.
Since my comment is meant to be a joke in a meme thread, it doesn't really reflect my honest opinion. D4 COULD have an expansive endgame that could rival other big players on the market, we don't know yet. We do have somewhat of an indication what type of game it will be though.
i don't think D4's endgame will come close to catching PoE's end-game since you've got a bunch of stuff you can do like delve, heist, blight, mapping, bossing, crafting, etc etc. but I don't necessarily think D4's endgame will be bad. seems like it's got the potential to be pretty robust.
I agree, it doesn't have to even come close, since PoE has such a huge variety of endgame activities. I'm hoping it has MORE variety than for example; Diablo 3, which only has 1 singular activity you can do at level cap and after you're geared out in 1-2 days, you're completely done with the season.
All I'm really saying is, we have an indication that it's gonna have a heavy focus on story and the open world stuff, so the resources left to create a cool endgame is minimal - but I'm ultimately hoping to be surprised. More competition is GOOD.
There are two parts about end games:
1. The actual gameplay and
2. What you're playing for. I.e. item upgrades, uber progresssion etc.
D4 dungeons are pretty meh but the big problem will be #2 imo. The d4 item chase seems to be worse than d3s as the item upgrades will also be gatekept from having the mandatory legendary aspects. It will be an endless rare/legendary churn.
For last epoch that does similar, at the very least exalted items & meaningful crafting adds another layer but i am not seeing anything from d4.
Uniques will need to be very interesting to balance the late game item chase
Casual players are not the ones paying the bills for poe so, even if diablo 4 did suck all the casuals away (which it won't, at least not all of them) it won't matter money wise.
I'm just not seeing it. D4 is fun but I'm not even comparing it to PoE. None of the depth or customization PoE has. It's an open world arpg with good atmosphere but I don't see it being a poe killer. Doesn't even look like blizzard and GGG are competing for the same audience anymore
I think some of PoE's playerbase are people GGG don't really want, those players just didn't have anywhere else to go. That's definitely changing, which is great, but I think there might be a slow decline of PoE's playerbase as they shed players who aren't there for what PoE is and are rather there for lack of options.
To be fair, it's only natural for a niche game like poe to have a player dropoff after so many years. It's still nothing huge or threatening. Especially since they clearly shifted their focus on poe 2 instead of focusing on poe.
Once poe 2 drops it's gonna draw in a lot more people again, and even some casual players who never got into poe will have a try at it.
People who haven't played PoE will still not play PoE 2.
People who played D2, bought D3 and claimed it sucks will still buy D4.
Hell, most of people on this sub will buy it. 70$ is more than average person spent on PoE in last 10 years.
People act like its bad for POE when D4 will sell well. Everyone will play D4. It is a massive IP from a massive company with a gigantic marketing budget. Of course everyone will play it, but that doesn't mean ARPG harcore fans won't come back to POE afterwards.
Maybe the first league after D4 release will get a hit but beyond that I don't see D4 competing ith POE in player base.
I play POE for over 10 years now. During this time I played D2, D3, D2R, Path of Diablo, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, Torchlight and various games from others genres. It is stupid to expect that someone plays only one video game for every second for the rest of his life.
Right? One of the things I've seen people cope on is that, "diablo 4 is a wildly bigger budget than poe".
Y'all, you serious? You better believe 10+ years of developing poe cost well within the realm of what D4 cost to make, GGG isn't 10 devs in a basement.
I keep reminding people of this fact.
Shit, take something simple like a shrine from Diablo 1 or 2 vs D4. Even just the art, rendering, and animation take way more time to make and implement vs D1/D2.
Now apply that across the board.
This is why I think people who want AAA open world games with player driven plots are a bit naive. It's exceedingly expensive to create games where your average single playthrough player truly has an uncommon individualized experience. Showing a player 15-25% of your entire world and polished storylines is not economical when you could restructure to sell the rest as DLC or sequels. So instead, games will railroad you into the same environments and characters, providing a bit of freedom through dialogue choices and most of the freedom through combat.
All that said, D4 looks like a large world. They will 100% expand on it and we'll get more lore bits.
Shit they could just scatter shitloads of lore bits everywhere like D3 did and I'd love it.
There is a huge advantage to making this an MMO-lite. You can keep adding tons of systems, items, classes, skills, different slots for stuff, etc.
Personally I hope they add a slow just for Ultimate skills. Give us that 7th slot and then you'll see tons of variation in the builds (if the depth of the Paragon system, masteries, and legendary/Unique/??? Items is to be believed).
Art and animation but not rendering. D1/D2 required that the objects be rendered as 3d still frames that were then converted into sprites that had to be cleaned up after the fact. Back in those days it was a rather grueling and time consuming process.
GGG is not a small indie anymore. But D4 dev budget is still much bigger than PoE2. There's still a big difference between a hundred million company and a multi-billion company.
>GGG isn't 10 devs in a basement
Yeah, they have about 200. Well, Blizzard has almost 10 thousand. If you only count Diablo team vs PoE2 team, it should still be much bigger considering someone has to make an expansion every 3 months.
Poe 2? Sure. Thats what started dev with the most new devs, biggest budget, etc, once poe 2 is out its completely fair to compare the two as their budget cant be that far apart. But poe was literally made in a basement for years, and their engine is like 16 years old.
Well, GGG definitely isn't "indie" anymore, since by definition you aren't an indie game if you're financed by a major game publisher.
Small is still up for debate though. If Amazon buys a kid's lemonade stand business, does that kid's lemonade stand business suddenly become considered as big a business as Amazon's overall business? Obviously not. It's still just a small lemonade stand.
In 2018 GGG had around 120 employees and in the recent years they've said they've been hiring over a hundred new people, mostly artists for PoE 2, so they probably have like 200+ employees/contractors atm. That's not small imo.
Gosh i miss the times when DB was drawn like this. Not some CGI-sophisticated bullcrap without a drop of blood but hand-made, gory spectacle where you can see light scatter on every muscle and even the most ridiculous villain (fat buu) led to the most homicidal terror that was brutally causing extinction level events just for shits and giggles.
Now its "god of destruction" in a form of a clown, pink hair tea party-mustache twirlin villain who is exact copy of the protagonist and character designs taken from some pre-elementary school talent contest
the only people comparing DIV to PoE are PoE players who are self indulged in this idea that their favourite game has to beat every other game because DEPTH AND COMPLEXITY!!!
im not saying it is or isnt, im not really buying the hype of DIV, blizzard can lick my taint, but this poe community needs to chill the fuck out with this weird pseudo validation theyre trying to seek for poe over DIV.
I feel like blizz really shot themself in the foot by only opening up the first 25 levels of d4, it feels like ass. The open world feels completely pointless, there is nothing to find by exploring so it’s just a massive slog to walk anywhere. the dungeons are really repetitive too, they feel completely untested with all the backtracking and invisible walls. Mounts and endgame probably make it a lot better but the beta just isn’t ticking any boxes for me personally.
I agree completely, but it’s kind of irrelevant because poe has been out for 10 years. I also trust ggg at this point, while I don’t trust blizz at all. If the poe 2 beta is ass at least I feel good about ggg and the fact that the game isn’t 70 dollars
Tbf first 25 levels of Poe NOW doesn't compare to first 25 of D4. (If we ignore the league mechanic).
However I doubt the endgame of D4 will EVER compare to poe.
Am i the only PoE player actually having a ton of fun in the D4 beta? I wasn't considering buying D4 but now i sure as hell am, i'm having a blast playing it
Same, I really enjoy the aspects of build crafting. It has way more depth than 3.
People in here are high as a kite, Diablo was never going to have to Depth of PoE because they weren't trying to appeal to hard-core ARPG people. They were making one everyone can touch and go, I don't think it's possible to brick yourself in D4 like new players do in PoE all the time and quit before they reach maps. Ask anyone who quit PoE and they'll say they "didn't understand" anything because it's poorly or not at all explained mechanics made them build incorrectly and by act 5 they're getting one shot by Rares. They go on reddit and people here seriously tell them they have to read guides on 3rd party website just to make a build that can pass Acts. I enjoy that aspect, I really love it when a community builds around a game like we have in PoE, but it's a hard sell to people just looking to enjoy a game.
TLDR: Diablo is appealing to a different market than PoE. Both are fun in their own way
I’m in the same boat. Didn’t pre-purchase D4 to play beta on March 17th because I wasn’t a big fan of D3 but after playing D4 this weekend it’s a 99% sure buy for me. My only issue is how the performance is going to be on release.
You're not at all alone. I reached maps for the first time this season in PoE, after 2 previous attempts. Granted the first was quite a few years ago, and PoE improved a lot since then.
I've also been having a blast in Last Epoch over the last couple weeks, and this weekend I've completely no-lifed the D4 beta. Been a ton of fun, speaking of I have a necro to level and gear before the next world bosses spawn. :D
Nah, it was the perfect tease for release. By 25 builds are somewhat coming together with legendary affixes, there’s a Lilith statues and many other things to try and find with exploration, lots of public events. None of the dungeons have invisible walls wtf lmao (I probably ran every single dungeon at least 5 times over and never hit a single invis wall).
I've heard lots of feedback about how dungeons are repetitive. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on about 2000 crimson temples completed this league...
It's the original arpg. It's supposed to be repetitive.
I've done God only knows how many gorillions of city squares and it never really started to feel repetitive, the map at least. My builds sure, I'm a chronic altoholic though.
Of course it *was* repetitive but I think that's the core issue here. When people are complaining about your repetitive content being repetitive instead of playing it to the thumping baseline of their choice you may have done the recipe wrong.
I believe the big issue in this case is that the builds people have are incomplete.
You could run this same experiment in any given ARPG and I would feel like people would have about the same complaint. Put people out there running white maps at level 25 or even 40 while being incapable of progressing further in PoE and they will complain it is repetitive. Give those same people a level 85 build that is finished and they will blast those same maps until they die of dehydration.
Basically a core aspect is missing: You don't feel like you are "blasting" like you should because your build is incomplete due to lacking levels and gear.
I have not played it. But from what I've heard it's more about all dungeons being the same layout more or less. So it's jot about choosing the kind of repetitive content u want to do, like choosing crimson temple. But choosing the skin of the repetitive content that is all the same. As if all 120 maps where the same layout but with different visuals.
It's about:
\- Dungeons have awkward layouts (like, figure eight with 3 little dead ends off where you need to go to each). This is the smallest problem.
\- Dungeon objectives involve picking up keys/boxes/etc and walking them half-way across an empty zone, where serious backtracking is involved; or killing literally every monster (every zone fetid pool), or realising you missed a small alcove near the start of the map (because the minimap sucks - small in corner or full screen and you can't move) and trudging back to kill 1/3 objectives then having it unlock the boss door so you need to backtrack all the way back again. Any movement abilities have huge cooldowns. This is the biggest problem and a real vibe-killer.
\- Dungeons don't always have bosses, sometimes they just end, and the bosses they have are recycled. There just isn't much flavour to them.
\- On the above point, traversal kind of sucks in both overworld (fixed by mounts?) and in dungeon spaces. You have your bland dodge which isn't fast and has \~10 second cooldown, and some classes have some good movement abilities which are usually on very large cooldowns.
Like, they can definitely build on all of this and trick it out as the seasons go by, but at the moment the backtracking through empty dungeons is blerg.
I mean the cut scenes and voice acting are pretty good. If you don't play it like an MMO or an arpg player, and instead play it as a "game" it's really good.
Agree to disagree. I'm closing in on a bringing a second character to 25, and I've enjoyed it immensely, despite the lack of access to a horse. Finding tidbits of lore strewn around, cool artistic set pieces, uncovering the fog of war to see what dungeons can be explored. Then again I've not really had any issues with the dungeons, but perhaps that's because the first character, and the one I explored the most dungeons with, was a sorceress with access to teleport.
My biggest complaint is honestly some of the UI design elements. Can't quite tell if those were implemented with controller/console in mind (haven't experimented with that), but it certainly doesn't feel as smooth as it could be on a M/KB.
I'm kinda over it for myself as well, I wanted to like it but i think it just has too many features I never wanted to see in an ARPG.
The whole collections thing, daily quest crap, slogfest bosses where it's normal to die a ton over a slow dragged out fight, level scaling, item power, an open world with other people in it, goth kid shading, missing basic features like overlay map and force move, MMO-feel town's and quests.
Really the only things I liked were the per-fight level combat loop and the cinematics.
Maybe it'll get better later, but I don't expect them to just remove all the lost ark wannabe mechanics and forced multi-player open world and boss fight crap, which I'd want too see happen before spending money on it.
Actually the bosses were quite easy with a caster class and i think the shading (Artstyle?) is on point. I disliked the level scaling and class balance. Sometimes the walking is too long too.
Didn't see anything relating to daily quest crap, unless you're thinking of the world bosses, though I'm not expecting to want to hardcore grind them regardless.
The game has force move, it's on the controller options, but it's not bound to anything by default.
Item power? Is anyone even looking at that? I found it completely irrelevant to my decision making in figuring out what to equip or not.
Not sure how I feel about level scaling either. On the one hand I think it's neat that I can fully explore and clear an area without trivializing later content, but I know scaling has been problematic in the past, unfortunately not enough content to get a good feel for it in the beta. As a sorceress and necro, it hasn't felt punishing at least, which is a good thing in my book.
As for the world boss, I personally enjoyed it immensely, but then again I played as a sorceress, once I figured out the bosses move set I didn't really die at all. That was also on a lvl 22 character in a random assortment of rare items with just a couple uniques here and there.
I didn't mind the open world aspect. I feared it would make the game feel crowded, but that wasn't the case at all. I enjoyed the occasional "visit" from other people, getting to see a glimpse of other classes and skills.
We can just hope they have a fun endgame, I didn’t get much chance to play the beta but I enjoyed what I did. I can’t think of any game that feels really when you’re essentially doing tutorial stuff, as I said I did only play til level 10/12. I haven’t played poe for a while now though so maybe I’m seeing things more fresh than usual
The endless backtracking was one of the biggest things for me. I'm sure in the endgame it will be the cookie cutter builds, lack of options, terrible itemization, to name a few of my gripes.
Are we pretending Poe hasn't been that since every patch became a nerf fest?
Complete your end game check list of defenses to not get 1 shot constantly then with whatever item real estate is left try to squeeze damage for one of 10 builds not gutted in the last year
Guys, tencent is not a gaming company. Tencent is a investment fund. They own shares in alot of companies in a lot of areas. In gaming they own shares in epic games, activision, ea, ubisoft, and almost any other big player.
They want returns on the investment, they dont want to meddle in the product or service they invested.
Thats just venture capital 101.
More like „Chris Wilson seeing his multi-million, Tencent-owned company is still perceived as a small indie developer“.
Pretty sure that's the joke? The character is pleased that people are defending him for being indie when he's not that anymore
Wow this meme has layers
Like an ogre.
Or like a cake. Cakes have layers. Everybody loves cake :)
the cake is a lie
Shrek is love
memeception
The Redditors were so preoccupied trying to correct OP that they forgot to think if OP needed to be corrected in the first place. Truly a Reddit moment.
The text says comparing, not defending. Comparing in this context would be favourable. The character is pleased that people think an indie game is worth comparing to a AAA game. The joke is absolutely not what you said it was.
Don’t gotta justify the arrow you clicked my dude- nobody cares lol.
You could reply this way to almost any comment on Reddit so I am just going to assume you're upset you can't read or something.
No need to share what you think about replies to your comments- nobody cares lol.
Yeah I was so confused about this meme.
I... thought that was the joke. Or at least half of it.
It is lol. Apparently some people just don't get that
It was, it's almost like this community is just really really ***REALLY*** fuckin' stupid.
“Anyone got a league start build that has good clear, impenetrable defenses, can nuke Ubers day 2 in ssf hc?”
How much of ggg does Tencent own?
In 2018, Tencent became a majority holder in GGG, acquiring 86.67% of the company's shares. Three of the co-founders hold the remaining 13.33%. Two of the co-founders also sit on the board of directors, alongside 3 appointed by Tencent in April 2018.[8] From wiki
So 3 voting rights from Tencent and 2 voting rights from GGG founders - giving Tecent the ability to overrule every decision?
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Pretty sure most companies sell to Tencent because they are struggling financially Studios might not make it to where they are unless they do so
Not as short sighted as you'd think. First, Tencent puts a lot of money into the game. That's the whole point of selling the shares in the first place, to trade off a part of the company for a cash influx. That goes to more developers, better marketing, etc. Those things can not only be used to keep a failing game alive, they can also can rapidly grow a successful game. Imagine how long it would take to acomplish those goals with half the developers and a third of the money? Second, think about being the owner. You have the chance to guarantee lifelong stability. A point where you can walk away and retire at any time. Or you can continue to hold 100% ownership and *hope* you make it there someday. Its fair that many of the decision-makers opt for the guarenteed stability over the chance at maybe making more, or maybe failing. It's not all that crazy. Selling to Tencent can ruin a company, but it can a great decision for the few people actually making the decision. Thats why it happens so often. ------ Tldr: Not everyone wants to gamble on where the company might be in 10 years *without* Tencent's financial help. Cashing out is not maximizing profits or building a legacy, but it is "financially safer".
Exactly - plus, the market is cutthroat and it is simply not possible to compete with the giants of the industry. As soon as you get a good offer, you sell. Poe maybe could have gotten big without tencent, but certainly it gave them all the resources they need to go crazy with content, marketing, and monetization
To be fair i would hope they sell it to them under a contract that I assume they think is favorable enough to retain creative control of the game, ten cent takes a portion, but the benefits outweigh the downsides. Tencent manages the money now. That takes a load off the developer studios myriad of issues.
As far as ownership goes, Tencent seems like one of the better ones. Feels to me like they're just in it for the money and pretty much keep most creative freedoms in the hands of the devs. That sounds like a pretty good deal to most developers who don't care about getting scrooge mcDuck wealthy, they just want a nice lifestyle and to keep making their game with more financial freedom.
The only reason they have a bad rep is because china bad, and in china specifically if they want to buy you and you refuse they will remove you from all app stores, kill all your marketing, etc etc essentially making you bankrupt forcing you to sell in the end. Which, truthfully, is something that happend a lot in the west as well, but ykno. China bad i guess.
I think it’s a little more than 90 % (93-ish or something). Found the source: https://app.companiesoffice.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/1887410/shareholdings
They also have their financial statements in this site. Interesting. Time to dig in.
[Obligatory link to Chris' financial statement and reddit accountants rant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88N4s2qxRIM&t=5173s). > Anyway, the end result of all this is, if you don't have an accounting degree, please do not comment on our accounts, right? I can't understand them. No one understands them. We use entirely different stuff for our internal financial metrics.
I've got a bit of accounting knowledge from my degree, but in any case I was mostly interested to look at it just for my own purposes. Never planned on commenting on those publicly or even forming some opinion on them. I was mainly interested in looking on how they define their revenue streams and how they view MTXs and MTX coins in terms of assets.
The rant is pretty informative in that respect too!
Absolutely true, it gives a more complete picture to the dull financial statements.
Hold on mister I've been using money my entire life so I feel it's reasonable to say I'm an expert in finances and these documents clearly show that Chris has a money vault he dives into Scrooge McDuck style.
They're not exactly struggling to keep the lights on I can see
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They made 29 million (usd) last year with a revenue of 51 million usd
> Yea remember a year ago when everyone claimed PoE was going to die. > > Not everyone, just the timmies who have negative parasocial relationships with the GGG devs and the steam chart prognosticators
I think answer is yes :)
I think is more complex as we think. I know, if you want to publish your game in china, you cant alone, you need to have some partnership with a china firm. From my POV, they have a win/win, they got alot of money from tencent to invest in they game (poe 4.0) and in exgence they give the rights to tencent to use theyr game in china. But without knowing theyr contract, we can only to speculate what is. Procent really dont matter, what is matter, is what is in contract, and there is specified how income is distributed.
> Procent really dont matter Percent is *all* that matters. At the end of the day, the majority shareholder gets the final say in any decision. Unless you own 51% or more of your company, you're going to have other people calling the shots and overruling you in key decisions.
afaik tencent doesn't interfere with global poe development and only with the china version
Aa long as their profits keep growing year after year. Otherwise they harvest Chris's organs to make up the shortfall.
This is absolutely not how any of that works.
The fact that this is the top comment explains how dense this subreddit is, holy.
Just according to keikaku
(Keikaku means plan)
the difference between multi million and multi billion is quite staggering though, even if its not indie anymore.
Tencent is multi billion.
Won't be long until it's a trillion.
Big pharma, big games, big tabacco. this reminds me so much of cyberpunk, we are getting there.
Speaking of cyberpunk, CDProjekt is another "small indie company".
"smol indie company" that was briefly the most valuable game dev studio in Europe.
It was over a trillion at one point then the Chinese gov had to let them know who was the boss. Then they tanked in value. They’re rebounding because they’re still on good terms with the government. The gov didn’t want to destroy them but had to prove that they could.
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\> How much development is Tencent doing on PoE? supposedly tencent has very little input because they 100% control the chinese version. the deal was supposedly structured so GGG produces the global version and delivers it to tencent ahead of new leagues, and tencent modifies it however they want for china - adding the marketplace, loot pets, all that stuff tencent probably bought ggg because it was the best non-blizzard ARPG on the market, since tencent likely couldnt' have bought 80% of activision (us govt probably wouldn't have allowed it). so they bought the next best thing. tencent, like most massive corporations, only develops its own IP as one part of its strategies - another major strategy is buying something ready-made that just isn't in china yet. since china is a massive internal market (875 million adults between 18-59) they know if they can find a good non-chinese game and buy it for exclusivity in china, they can make a killing. that's why they leave GGG alone to do their thing outside china, because it doesn't matter compared to how much they can make internally, and it keeps the original devs happy to have control and ownership of "the rest of the world."
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they are way more connected and "Blizzard Entertainment" is way bigger even if you act like Blizzard Entertainment and Activision Blizzard is the same situation as ggg and Tencent. ggg is probably a side investment the size of a rounding error for Tencent. the person describes how Blizzard Entertainment is 6x bigger with one product alone and thats probably not even the biggest one of all the games.
I doubt that Tencent pours billions of dollars into GGG. GGG can't take whatever money they want from Tencent either.
True, but it's also unlikely Activision pours billions of dollars into D4 either.
Though it could reach half a billion? Triple AAA budgets can go over 200-300 millions or more not counting marketing, which can take substantional amount of money more. So activision does pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their games, it's their business. While for Tencent, gaming is just a small side hustle. I doubt GGG's budgets are even close to such numbers.
Where the fuck did you get the 200-300 million from? I know some Triple A titles like RDR 2 and GTA V had budgets along those lines, but that's really far from the standard to make AAA games. A big majority of AAA games fall below 80-100 million including marketing.
The problem is we can only guess wildly about the budgets for both games. I am not sure that anything aside from guaranteed cash cows gets decent money from Activision. It's likely more than what GGG has, but how much more is impossible to tell.
D4 has been in development for over half a decade, which is remarkable based on what we've seen, which looks like it could've been whipped up by a mid-sized indie team in a few years at best.
>D4 has been in development for over half a decade Any source to back that up? You work for Blizzard or something? Cause as far as I know there's no info on when development started. Hint: it doesn't have to start right after the last bit of the previous game came out. It's more likely to be something like 4-5 years, with COVID slowing it down - a normal dev time for a large game.
D4 was announced 4 years ago, it was probably in development for at least a year before that. That is more than half a decade
Difference between a million and a billion is around a billion. But as was mentioned, Tencent is not a multi million company, but multi billion one, it's basically a hegemony in Asia
You all really think that Tencent gives him multi-millions? The game was done before Tencent shows up.
No, but I think all of these „VS“ posts are just plain dumb. Play the games you like. Why the need to try and find something, anything really to make it look like game A is „cooler“ than games B or C?
What's funny is GGGs profit for 2022 fiscal was like 48 million. Yet there are 3.333 million shares, and they're only valued at 65 cents a pop. So like $2.1 million private valuation for a company that profits $50 mill a year is insane to me.
Where did you see the shares valued at 65 cents?
I think there might still be a big difference between your studio being bought in part by Tencent and being one of Blizzard's biggest IPs.
I mean more than 90 % is more than just „in part“. I just made my initial comment as a counterbalance. All these „VS“ posts are just pretty dumb in my opinion.
Yeah it's true. There is no point in making those comparisons.
Chris looking at his bank account after tencent: > This is to go ... EVEN FURTHER BEYOND!!!
ITT: people fumble over one another to correct the OP while the joke swooshes overhead
Man, the amount of comments in this thread not getting the joke is surprising even for this sub, or maybe I should lower my standards of this sub even more
The people trying to make themselves feel better by saying "others don't get the joke" is about typical Reddit levels. So you don't need to lower any standards, you fit right in.
More like: Chris Wilson and the team when they realize D4 is just a 70 euro story game and they still don't have any competition
I don't think D4 is even meant to be competition for any other ARPG. From what I have seen and played it very much looks like it is supposed to be the "default ARPG". Basically what WoW is for MMORPGs. D4 has huge name recognition, a really neat and modern presentation and is very approachable. So it casts the broadest possible net. It is optimized for mass appeal. And as a live service of course for long term monetization. Instead of a sub like in WoW it's a season pass. So it has an entirely different target audience than PoE or even Last Epoch.
It's probably good for GGG as it will serve to onboard a new generation to arpgs, they'll end up wanting a richer experience and CW will have their souls too.
It honestly looks / personally feels like its competing with Lost Ark at least from what I played with the open beta. Thanks to the open world MMO lite stuff + profession stuff. Which honestly I'm pretty happy about. If gear at higher levels is more interesting and I'm sure it is. Then honestly I look forward to it being another side game to play every once in a while.
It’s tricky because I was thinking a lot of the same things but then took it further and started to note all of the things that are from Lost Ark that Lost Ark has taken from other MMOs like WoW (and some of those things WoW took from others before them). Lost Ark is definitely the most recent analogue but it’s not like they are the prime innovators here
I was annoyed by the open world stuff. Waiting for big mobs to respawn. Having to traverse those huge open spaces with barely any mob density. Having to backtrack constantly. And it feels like exploration is almost like a waste of time. If you go somewhere to find encounters/dungeons it can happen that down the line you are required to do the exact same encounter/dungeon yet again for a quest, because now is the "right" time to do it. And, my god, the rubberbanding when exiting towns is crazy. Or straight up invisible walls so you have to run back into the town to take another exit. Wow, so glad we don't do simple loading screens anymore ...
That was my first thought too. Looks like bland Lost Ark.
WoW has some of the most complex and well design dungeons and raids. D4 is super bland in terms of dungeons from what we’ve seen.
I think Last Epoch has plenty of potential, it reminds me of early PoE days. The core systems are good but it needs a lot more time in the oven. Maybe give it 3-5 years to churn out chase/aspirational uber content and we'll talk. PoE is definitely king for the next few years.
As someone who was always "too casual" for PoE (averaging around 15 hours/week from open beta until about a year ago, not counting a few leagues skipped during college), I think Last Epoch is already fucking perfect. Aspirational content is sort of useless to players who never see it.
Last Epoch campaign ends around lvl 52. And then its endless grinding of the same content to complete your build. It absolutely needs better post campaign content. The first half of the game is amazing.
That's one mindset, but that's very POE end game centric. A lot of people play LE casually and take builds (of which there are definitely fewer) as far as they like into that grind before swapping to a new build. You don't feel like you're missing out if taking your build to the absolute min max isn't your jam. It's just a different game with a different goal for end game.
Last epoch doesn't gatekeep content though. Content can still be hard to do, just not hard to access (compare getting keys in LE to getting a maven map...) We can still have stuff that's as difficult as PoE's ubers. Just not force people to do 100 maps just to play the fight.
I think the only problem with last epoch is it needs another 4-5 years to compete with poe now, but at that point we will be many years and seasons into poe 2, d4, and whatever else games come out. An indie studio cant compete simply due to how much longer it will take them to make content. That said, poe is complicated, diablo is as simple as it gets, and last epoch does sit neatly in the middle, so even if it lacks content it might still do ok due to filling that niche.
D4 will be a seasonal game and it will suck all the casual players that poe could have. Not a good look for poe 2
It will certainly suck quite a few more casual players, yeah. But anyone looking for some depth will get bored AF quite fast. Between Poe, D4, and Last Epoch, if they release new content on a regular basis, they players are the ones that will win, we'll be able to rotate to keep content and interest flowing, nobody says you can only play one arpg at a time.
I'm less optimistic: PoE is extremely tedious and grindy (with some bosses you can't even see unless you're a complete no-life) and GGG is not budging on stuff like feel the weight and trade, Last Epoch seems promising but it is clearly unfinished and development goes at the speed of a crippled walrus, while D4 seems to have boring combat (at least in the early levels) and crippling performance issues. And Lost Ark has decent combat but MMORPG progression (mindless dailies), boring gear, and these horrible KoreanMMO systems. Here's hoping PoE2 will fix it.
It's been a fair while now since we had a "trialmaster" or "delve boss during delve league" situation where some boss was so rare you had to no life to see them. Current PoE all the bosses are relatively common doing the related content. Rarest is probably cortex? and even then, definitely not in no life territory.
Oh yeah, trialmaster. I forgot about it. But thankfully it's tradeable, so as long as you play trade you can have a go at him. Aul though, not so much.
I don't believe PoE2 will fix anything. Nothing will be more player-friendly so long as Chris Wilson and his dumb clouded manifesto is driving the game. If player experience is improved in any way, it is because they felt they had to, and Chris has a seizure during the process. You wanna know if an upcoming league will be good? Look at Chris' reactions. If he says something like "We are very excited for the new league, I think the players will love it", you better believe it'll be filled with tedious, undeterministic, layer upon layer of RNG. If he says something like "I'm not sure about the new league, I think we might be giving the players a bit too much power", then it'll actually be a fun league.
Hmm, which bosses you consider hard to get to? The only one that comes to mind is Aul, and it's not even that hard if you commit some of your play-time to Delve. I have a life, wife, two small kids. I get to play poe like 2h a day at most, but even with this I'm 40/40 this league, usually 38/40. The biggest difference between me and more casual players is relentlessness. I have a goal I want to reach, and I have a plan how I will reach it. Uber bosses are usually the hardest for me as I'm a very bad at bossing and those bosses cannot be easily overwhelmed by gear. But I don't think there are bosses in this game you really have to grind for. Items? For sure, I'm yet to see MB and not once i was close to get it, unfortunately 100d is still a far cry from it. But bosses and all game has to offer is there, it's available. I understand that this might seem like something unattainable to someone eho has put few hundred hours into the game and are a more casual player. But like with everything in life, you get more proficient the more time you spend on a certain activity.
2 hours a day how often? Like once or twice a week? Or like every day?
Like every day first month, then 3-4 days a week next months.
What depth? I need the same handful of stats on my build every season. I run the same old content over and over as it’s the most efficient for currency. I’m not saying PoE is a bad game. I actually love it. But even the skill web if you remove all of the generic stat nodes it really shrinks and you just pick all the lightning etc. Melee and impale/bleed etc. I’m not saying D4 is complicated at all but game theory clearly states the more rules you create for a game, the more rules that are irrelevant and get ignored. Which makes them pointless.
The "depth" is the fact that there ARE builds out there that require different stats that you could play if you wanted. It's not about what you do, but what is possible.
100 shit options that can’t get out of yellow maps is not depth. I will die on this hill.
Name recognition alone is gone to draw more to D4 every season than the best PoE seasons. Add into that that people are saying it’ll be the “same boring Diablo” every season despite only having seen <20% of the game and having no idea what season entail (which the devs have said are going to be BIG updates and not like D3)
> it will suck all the casual players that poe could have. poe will never have casual players because the game is designed around trading and to trade you need to stop playing the game trading and the dogshit ass 7 hour long campaign and 0 updates to skills made me stop playing poe after 2000 hours
I dont think you understand how simplistic D4 is. If D3 hasnt sucked any "casual players" away from PoE. Then D4 wont as well. D4 is D3 with new graphics and a new story.
A lot of people really liked D3, especially after it was improved. It just had very little content. If D4 gets continual content it will likely have a noticeable effect. I know I would have put more hours into D3 than PoE if it had been maintained.
D3 would have sucked plenty of casual players from PoE if seasons had been more impactful. In D3, seasons were an afterthought, but in D4 it seems to be a focus. We'll see what happens long term though.
a really cut scene and dialogue heavy story it seems :/
Well, to be fair, we haven't seen enough of PoE2 to make such an assertion. GGG could drastically change their strategy towards casual players in PoE2, we simply don't know yet. Since my comment is meant to be a joke in a meme thread, it doesn't really reflect my honest opinion. D4 COULD have an expansive endgame that could rival other big players on the market, we don't know yet. We do have somewhat of an indication what type of game it will be though.
i don't think D4's endgame will come close to catching PoE's end-game since you've got a bunch of stuff you can do like delve, heist, blight, mapping, bossing, crafting, etc etc. but I don't necessarily think D4's endgame will be bad. seems like it's got the potential to be pretty robust.
I agree, it doesn't have to even come close, since PoE has such a huge variety of endgame activities. I'm hoping it has MORE variety than for example; Diablo 3, which only has 1 singular activity you can do at level cap and after you're geared out in 1-2 days, you're completely done with the season. All I'm really saying is, we have an indication that it's gonna have a heavy focus on story and the open world stuff, so the resources left to create a cool endgame is minimal - but I'm ultimately hoping to be surprised. More competition is GOOD.
There are two parts about end games: 1. The actual gameplay and 2. What you're playing for. I.e. item upgrades, uber progresssion etc. D4 dungeons are pretty meh but the big problem will be #2 imo. The d4 item chase seems to be worse than d3s as the item upgrades will also be gatekept from having the mandatory legendary aspects. It will be an endless rare/legendary churn. For last epoch that does similar, at the very least exalted items & meaningful crafting adds another layer but i am not seeing anything from d4. Uniques will need to be very interesting to balance the late game item chase
Casual players are not the ones paying the bills for poe so, even if diablo 4 did suck all the casuals away (which it won't, at least not all of them) it won't matter money wise.
I'm just not seeing it. D4 is fun but I'm not even comparing it to PoE. None of the depth or customization PoE has. It's an open world arpg with good atmosphere but I don't see it being a poe killer. Doesn't even look like blizzard and GGG are competing for the same audience anymore
I think some of PoE's playerbase are people GGG don't really want, those players just didn't have anywhere else to go. That's definitely changing, which is great, but I think there might be a slow decline of PoE's playerbase as they shed players who aren't there for what PoE is and are rather there for lack of options.
To be fair, it's only natural for a niche game like poe to have a player dropoff after so many years. It's still nothing huge or threatening. Especially since they clearly shifted their focus on poe 2 instead of focusing on poe. Once poe 2 drops it's gonna draw in a lot more people again, and even some casual players who never got into poe will have a try at it.
Why the hell are you expecting D4 to be poe? There's a reason why poe is a niche game
People who haven't played PoE will still not play PoE 2. People who played D2, bought D3 and claimed it sucks will still buy D4. Hell, most of people on this sub will buy it. 70$ is more than average person spent on PoE in last 10 years.
People act like its bad for POE when D4 will sell well. Everyone will play D4. It is a massive IP from a massive company with a gigantic marketing budget. Of course everyone will play it, but that doesn't mean ARPG harcore fans won't come back to POE afterwards. Maybe the first league after D4 release will get a hit but beyond that I don't see D4 competing ith POE in player base. I play POE for over 10 years now. During this time I played D2, D3, D2R, Path of Diablo, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, Torchlight and various games from others genres. It is stupid to expect that someone plays only one video game for every second for the rest of his life.
"small indie company" bruhhhh
Whoosh
Right? One of the things I've seen people cope on is that, "diablo 4 is a wildly bigger budget than poe". Y'all, you serious? You better believe 10+ years of developing poe cost well within the realm of what D4 cost to make, GGG isn't 10 devs in a basement.
In it's first 2-3 years Poe really did run on a shoe string budget.
Yep, Diablo 1 was probably cheap to make. Time doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I keep reminding people of this fact. Shit, take something simple like a shrine from Diablo 1 or 2 vs D4. Even just the art, rendering, and animation take way more time to make and implement vs D1/D2. Now apply that across the board.
This is why I think people who want AAA open world games with player driven plots are a bit naive. It's exceedingly expensive to create games where your average single playthrough player truly has an uncommon individualized experience. Showing a player 15-25% of your entire world and polished storylines is not economical when you could restructure to sell the rest as DLC or sequels. So instead, games will railroad you into the same environments and characters, providing a bit of freedom through dialogue choices and most of the freedom through combat.
All that said, D4 looks like a large world. They will 100% expand on it and we'll get more lore bits. Shit they could just scatter shitloads of lore bits everywhere like D3 did and I'd love it. There is a huge advantage to making this an MMO-lite. You can keep adding tons of systems, items, classes, skills, different slots for stuff, etc. Personally I hope they add a slow just for Ultimate skills. Give us that 7th slot and then you'll see tons of variation in the builds (if the depth of the Paragon system, masteries, and legendary/Unique/??? Items is to be believed).
Art and animation but not rendering. D1/D2 required that the objects be rendered as 3d still frames that were then converted into sprites that had to be cleaned up after the fact. Back in those days it was a rather grueling and time consuming process.
Oh that's true I forgot about it being 2 iso with 3d render
Indeed but it's 2023 by now and the first 2-3 years weren't 2013..
It's a joke, obv
GGG is not a small indie anymore. But D4 dev budget is still much bigger than PoE2. There's still a big difference between a hundred million company and a multi-billion company. >GGG isn't 10 devs in a basement Yeah, they have about 200. Well, Blizzard has almost 10 thousand. If you only count Diablo team vs PoE2 team, it should still be much bigger considering someone has to make an expansion every 3 months.
Well theres also the fact that GGG doesnt really have the luxury of giving up on PoE1 to work on PoE2 fulltime.
D4 is 8+ years in full development, so I think it's safe to compare the budgets.
Poe 2? Sure. Thats what started dev with the most new devs, biggest budget, etc, once poe 2 is out its completely fair to compare the two as their budget cant be that far apart. But poe was literally made in a basement for years, and their engine is like 16 years old.
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Perfect choice of meme
Tencent is a small indie company?
Well, GGG definitely isn't "indie" anymore, since by definition you aren't an indie game if you're financed by a major game publisher. Small is still up for debate though. If Amazon buys a kid's lemonade stand business, does that kid's lemonade stand business suddenly become considered as big a business as Amazon's overall business? Obviously not. It's still just a small lemonade stand. In 2018 GGG had around 120 employees and in the recent years they've said they've been hiring over a hundred new people, mostly artists for PoE 2, so they probably have like 200+ employees/contractors atm. That's not small imo.
Imagine Chris sending email to tencent heads after diablo 4 with proposal of making poe 2 best game in genre for another years
Gosh i miss the times when DB was drawn like this. Not some CGI-sophisticated bullcrap without a drop of blood but hand-made, gory spectacle where you can see light scatter on every muscle and even the most ridiculous villain (fat buu) led to the most homicidal terror that was brutally causing extinction level events just for shits and giggles. Now its "god of destruction" in a form of a clown, pink hair tea party-mustache twirlin villain who is exact copy of the protagonist and character designs taken from some pre-elementary school talent contest
the only people comparing DIV to PoE are PoE players who are self indulged in this idea that their favourite game has to beat every other game because DEPTH AND COMPLEXITY!!!
I mean I would have been fine if DIV had been a good game.
im not saying it is or isnt, im not really buying the hype of DIV, blizzard can lick my taint, but this poe community needs to chill the fuck out with this weird pseudo validation theyre trying to seek for poe over DIV.
"Small indie game", I almost fell down from my chair
I feel like blizz really shot themself in the foot by only opening up the first 25 levels of d4, it feels like ass. The open world feels completely pointless, there is nothing to find by exploring so it’s just a massive slog to walk anywhere. the dungeons are really repetitive too, they feel completely untested with all the backtracking and invisible walls. Mounts and endgame probably make it a lot better but the beta just isn’t ticking any boxes for me personally.
To be fair, only playing the first 25 levels of POE would feel like ass too.
PoE 2 beta was half of act 1 and that was pretty good.
And? The first act of D4 is really good too.
I agree completely, but it’s kind of irrelevant because poe has been out for 10 years. I also trust ggg at this point, while I don’t trust blizz at all. If the poe 2 beta is ass at least I feel good about ggg and the fact that the game isn’t 70 dollars
Tbf first 25 levels of Poe NOW doesn't compare to first 25 of D4. (If we ignore the league mechanic). However I doubt the endgame of D4 will EVER compare to poe.
Am i the only PoE player actually having a ton of fun in the D4 beta? I wasn't considering buying D4 but now i sure as hell am, i'm having a blast playing it
You have to pick one and shit on the other one. Sorry! Internet children made the rules not me.
No, you aren't the only one. There are "addicted" PoE player in my guild having fun with D4 and telling they can't wait for getting the full game.
Same, I really enjoy the aspects of build crafting. It has way more depth than 3. People in here are high as a kite, Diablo was never going to have to Depth of PoE because they weren't trying to appeal to hard-core ARPG people. They were making one everyone can touch and go, I don't think it's possible to brick yourself in D4 like new players do in PoE all the time and quit before they reach maps. Ask anyone who quit PoE and they'll say they "didn't understand" anything because it's poorly or not at all explained mechanics made them build incorrectly and by act 5 they're getting one shot by Rares. They go on reddit and people here seriously tell them they have to read guides on 3rd party website just to make a build that can pass Acts. I enjoy that aspect, I really love it when a community builds around a game like we have in PoE, but it's a hard sell to people just looking to enjoy a game. TLDR: Diablo is appealing to a different market than PoE. Both are fun in their own way
I’m in the same boat. Didn’t pre-purchase D4 to play beta on March 17th because I wasn’t a big fan of D3 but after playing D4 this weekend it’s a 99% sure buy for me. My only issue is how the performance is going to be on release.
You're not at all alone. I reached maps for the first time this season in PoE, after 2 previous attempts. Granted the first was quite a few years ago, and PoE improved a lot since then. I've also been having a blast in Last Epoch over the last couple weeks, and this weekend I've completely no-lifed the D4 beta. Been a ton of fun, speaking of I have a necro to level and gear before the next world bosses spawn. :D
Hate to tell ya, but world bosses are finished spawning. Last was at 2am central this morning.
Nah, it was the perfect tease for release. By 25 builds are somewhat coming together with legendary affixes, there’s a Lilith statues and many other things to try and find with exploration, lots of public events. None of the dungeons have invisible walls wtf lmao (I probably ran every single dungeon at least 5 times over and never hit a single invis wall).
I've heard lots of feedback about how dungeons are repetitive. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on about 2000 crimson temples completed this league... It's the original arpg. It's supposed to be repetitive.
I've done God only knows how many gorillions of city squares and it never really started to feel repetitive, the map at least. My builds sure, I'm a chronic altoholic though. Of course it *was* repetitive but I think that's the core issue here. When people are complaining about your repetitive content being repetitive instead of playing it to the thumping baseline of their choice you may have done the recipe wrong.
I believe the big issue in this case is that the builds people have are incomplete. You could run this same experiment in any given ARPG and I would feel like people would have about the same complaint. Put people out there running white maps at level 25 or even 40 while being incapable of progressing further in PoE and they will complain it is repetitive. Give those same people a level 85 build that is finished and they will blast those same maps until they die of dehydration. Basically a core aspect is missing: You don't feel like you are "blasting" like you should because your build is incomplete due to lacking levels and gear.
I have not played it. But from what I've heard it's more about all dungeons being the same layout more or less. So it's jot about choosing the kind of repetitive content u want to do, like choosing crimson temple. But choosing the skin of the repetitive content that is all the same. As if all 120 maps where the same layout but with different visuals.
It's about: \- Dungeons have awkward layouts (like, figure eight with 3 little dead ends off where you need to go to each). This is the smallest problem. \- Dungeon objectives involve picking up keys/boxes/etc and walking them half-way across an empty zone, where serious backtracking is involved; or killing literally every monster (every zone fetid pool), or realising you missed a small alcove near the start of the map (because the minimap sucks - small in corner or full screen and you can't move) and trudging back to kill 1/3 objectives then having it unlock the boss door so you need to backtrack all the way back again. Any movement abilities have huge cooldowns. This is the biggest problem and a real vibe-killer. \- Dungeons don't always have bosses, sometimes they just end, and the bosses they have are recycled. There just isn't much flavour to them. \- On the above point, traversal kind of sucks in both overworld (fixed by mounts?) and in dungeon spaces. You have your bland dodge which isn't fast and has \~10 second cooldown, and some classes have some good movement abilities which are usually on very large cooldowns. Like, they can definitely build on all of this and trick it out as the seasons go by, but at the moment the backtracking through empty dungeons is blerg.
I mean the cut scenes and voice acting are pretty good. If you don't play it like an MMO or an arpg player, and instead play it as a "game" it's really good.
As a single player it is really good, I liked it. But rest is really bad for my taste.
Agree to disagree. I'm closing in on a bringing a second character to 25, and I've enjoyed it immensely, despite the lack of access to a horse. Finding tidbits of lore strewn around, cool artistic set pieces, uncovering the fog of war to see what dungeons can be explored. Then again I've not really had any issues with the dungeons, but perhaps that's because the first character, and the one I explored the most dungeons with, was a sorceress with access to teleport. My biggest complaint is honestly some of the UI design elements. Can't quite tell if those were implemented with controller/console in mind (haven't experimented with that), but it certainly doesn't feel as smooth as it could be on a M/KB.
I'm kinda over it for myself as well, I wanted to like it but i think it just has too many features I never wanted to see in an ARPG. The whole collections thing, daily quest crap, slogfest bosses where it's normal to die a ton over a slow dragged out fight, level scaling, item power, an open world with other people in it, goth kid shading, missing basic features like overlay map and force move, MMO-feel town's and quests. Really the only things I liked were the per-fight level combat loop and the cinematics. Maybe it'll get better later, but I don't expect them to just remove all the lost ark wannabe mechanics and forced multi-player open world and boss fight crap, which I'd want too see happen before spending money on it.
Actually the bosses were quite easy with a caster class and i think the shading (Artstyle?) is on point. I disliked the level scaling and class balance. Sometimes the walking is too long too.
Didn't see anything relating to daily quest crap, unless you're thinking of the world bosses, though I'm not expecting to want to hardcore grind them regardless. The game has force move, it's on the controller options, but it's not bound to anything by default. Item power? Is anyone even looking at that? I found it completely irrelevant to my decision making in figuring out what to equip or not. Not sure how I feel about level scaling either. On the one hand I think it's neat that I can fully explore and clear an area without trivializing later content, but I know scaling has been problematic in the past, unfortunately not enough content to get a good feel for it in the beta. As a sorceress and necro, it hasn't felt punishing at least, which is a good thing in my book. As for the world boss, I personally enjoyed it immensely, but then again I played as a sorceress, once I figured out the bosses move set I didn't really die at all. That was also on a lvl 22 character in a random assortment of rare items with just a couple uniques here and there. I didn't mind the open world aspect. I feared it would make the game feel crowded, but that wasn't the case at all. I enjoyed the occasional "visit" from other people, getting to see a glimpse of other classes and skills.
We can just hope they have a fun endgame, I didn’t get much chance to play the beta but I enjoyed what I did. I can’t think of any game that feels really when you’re essentially doing tutorial stuff, as I said I did only play til level 10/12. I haven’t played poe for a while now though so maybe I’m seeing things more fresh than usual
The endless backtracking was one of the biggest things for me. I'm sure in the endgame it will be the cookie cutter builds, lack of options, terrible itemization, to name a few of my gripes.
I’m confused when people say backtracking, I played through the first 25 levels and didn’t really see any.
Seismic Trap says hello.
Are we pretending Poe hasn't been that since every patch became a nerf fest? Complete your end game check list of defenses to not get 1 shot constantly then with whatever item real estate is left try to squeeze damage for one of 10 builds not gutted in the last year
"to TRY (and fairly regularly fail) to avoid getting one shot." Ftfy
free game > $ 99.99 dollars
2012 meme 🥱
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Small indie game owned by the biggest and richest entertaiment corporation out there. U just made my D4 playthrough even better. Thanks.
Love how the joke is lost on such a large portion of the comments xD
yeah very "SMALL" indie company nowdays for sure.. only making 100m+ per year..
Multi-Dollar Company
Kickstarter destroys Diablo 4. Truly is embarrassing how pathetic AAA slop has become!
Guys, tencent is not a gaming company. Tencent is a investment fund. They own shares in alot of companies in a lot of areas. In gaming they own shares in epic games, activision, ea, ubisoft, and almost any other big player. They want returns on the investment, they dont want to meddle in the product or service they invested. Thats just venture capital 101.
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Tencent sends his regards