Why The Season 4 Diablo 4 Changes Are More Important Than You Think

Why The New Diablo 4 Changes Are More Important Than You Think

ARPGS or even RPGS for that matter have always had the same structure at their core, you start weak and then you get strong. This is done for the most part in two ways, you level up, increase your stats, and pick your skills.

Secondly, you find and improve your equipment. This may be a little reductive as any good ARPG will build layers of subsystems on top of this to add depth and complexity but we’ll touch on that in detail a bit more in a moment.

And it’s this journey of progression or improvement if you like that keeps us players engaged with pretty much most games. The biggest drop off in interest comes when progression plateaus, whether it’s the players’ own skill, the challenge of the content in the game, or what we’ll be talking about today, character power.

Where Diablo Went Wrong

Diablo 4 as it stands now is guilty of many things, but more disappointingly for a lot of people, it failed to meet the fundamental criteria of making the progression of character feel meaningful and rewarding.

This is in part due to the oversimplification of the many systems and in other words lacking those layers of depth I mentioned earlier, skill trees lack options and the paragon boards are filled with generic basic stat increases that’ll have basically no impact on your character.

Though it does seem that D4 does intend to work and improve on these systems this is not the focus today, because in all Argps, leveling always has an endpoint, level 50, level 100 whatever it might be it’s an inevitability, no surprises, just a steady and reliable increase in power, now this can be done well and it can also be done poorly.

Gear however goes far beyond this point, I don’t think I’d be wrong to say that most people don’t consider an ARPG game to have begun before you get to max level, though there are some outliers to this but it’s certainly the case with Diablo 4.

Equipment IS our carrot, if you can’t progress past a boss? get better gear, want to be able to survive the toughest dungeons? Get better gear, want to complete that quest faster? Get better gear.

Now I’m not saying gear is the only factor, of course, there is your skills and passives and how you have all that set up, but, then again it will quite often come back around to your equipment as you’ll likely need to compliment your shiny new build with shiny new gear that supports it’s strengths.

So gear is very important is what I’m trying to say haha, and as it stands gear/equipment in Diablo 4 does not feel rewarding or honestly do anything that interesting. Pair this with the maddening amount of bloat in the affix pools with things like “damage to enemies on taco night during an easterly breeze” and it’s easy to see why people get bored chasing this rank old moldy carrot.

D4 Saved?!

Then, will Season 4 fix this issue? I think so yes. It is starting to look like the game is moving in a direction that in my opinion brings the whole game up to a new level! Now we’re not saying the game is fixed, it’s a long road to redemption after all, but the new item changes will lay the foundation for what could potentially be the Diablo we were all hoping for initially.

Gone are the multitudes of mind-boggling stats like damaged to chilled or chance to execute an enemy under 10% life, Stats make more sense and have more impact now. Better still is the introduction to gameplay-changing mechanics, increased AoE, increased number of projectiles, and more! All things the game desperately needed it’s now getting.

And not only are we getting more streamlined gear with stats and effects that will actually be exciting to get but, we’re also getting a full overhaul to the crafting system to complement and enhance this new experience.

Tempering and Masterworking will add more control and more layers to gear customization which in turn means more play progression and build expression, season 4 crafting now looks to be reminiscent of Last Epoch’s crafting and I could get lost in that system for 100’s of alone.

Ultimately these improvements will not only improve every single aspect of the game as it is but also provide a solid footing for the content in the future, I am for the first time in a while quite excited for the future of Diablo 4. There is still a lot of trust to earn back but this does look like a turn in the right direction.