Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: Self-Analysis/Reflection on Game Burnout

Quite honestly, even before writing this blog, I have been feeling fatigued regarding anything Diablo 4 related. Maybe my general disappointment with where Season 14 is going makes me want to pull back for a few months to feel refreshed about this game as I did spend a fair amount of time exploring the various changes to the systems, classes/builds and latest features. As I reached the majority of the goals I had in mind, I decided to do a different form of a review where I want to describe my burnout from this game, why this is a situation that frequently comes up in this game and where I hope the game can improve to avoid some of these problems. Perhaps, I have talked about some of these issues in the past but I’m hoping to have a more focused post to deep dive into my own state when playing a grinding type of game and compare how I feel with Diablo 4 to similar games or those in a relatively close genre.

Before going into Diablo 4 itself, I want to talk about myself as a gamer who enjoys the general RPG genre. I fell in love with RPGs partly with games like The Bard’s Tale (especially 2 & 3), followed up by Ultima 3-6, Wizardry, Might and Magic and the gold box series for the classic SSI Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I had spent grueling days, weekends and years grinding out XP to get my characters into an ultra powerful state where the game felt mostly easy to me. The most satisfying aspects was seeing my characters going from zero to hero with a meaningful progression system that rewarded you with time well spent.

Many of those old games I mentioned had their set of issues too usually caused by bad luck (RNG) or possibly very poor design. For instance, Ultima 3 had a very interesting character creation system where you could have hybrid classes that would split their core abilities in half if the class shared an ability with another class. But you get feel gimped out such as a Druid who could only reach 49 spell points, thus disallowing them higher levels of power and making them feel pointless to bring along. Or Might and Magic 2 suffered from very poor early game balance where even at the lowest difficulties a single encounter could wipe out your party because the game would allow for too many enemies while your party possessed little to no gold, gear and being of too low level/bad attributes. Then you would have a game like Wizardry 6 where the character creation process was nonsensically ass backwards in forcing you to spend hours just to roll up a single character because of how poorly conceived the workflow was.

Usually though, once you got over a certain hump, these games mostly were enjoyable. At the same time, even with their flaws, those games generally had no way of a system level update so you were stuck with any bugs that weren’t caught in QA and got shipped. Maybe later on the community might add patches in a few cases but generally those games remain nearly the same as they were originally conceived.

In a contemporary live service game like Diablo 4, you can expect that the game will see changes both good and bad, depending on how much the company wants to invest in the product. With Diablo 4 though, I have found that because it is a recent game with a ton of funding and eyes internally hoping for its continued success that the game itself is highly unstable. This situation can be good and very frustrating at the same time. Before talking about the frequent annoying changes, I want to walk through the burn out pattern I’ve encountered with Diablo 4.

A fresh season in Diablo 4 is fun for roughly the first week. Having a completely new character with the season journey incomplete and plenty of discovery/new things to conquer. Sometimes such as in Season 13, the top builds aren’t as fleshed out so there’s some freedom if you start the season early. If you haven’t played the game in some time (like a season or two), most likely there should be more changes that go into core especially as the player base have been calling for more permanent additions, which we’ve seen such as the new Nightmare Dungeons and bosses.

With everything reset like Mercenaries, your Paragon Board, stash space, etc. there’s more motivation to push forward as there’s plenty of clear goals in sight. During the early part of the season (the first few days), it might be frustrating as one starts to assemble a build. If by any chance any build guides exist by this point, then trying to structure ones build close can get you near the higher difficulties but not necessarily at the end game where you’re farming the highest tiers (unless you have help or know of a broken situation). Sometimes you can get supremely unlucky choosing the wrong class/build and need to start almost from scratch either by abandoning your current gear setup and/or ditch your character entirely for something else. At this early stage, that scenario isn’t horrible because there is generally a path forward as more builds come online and the meta starts to solidify (especially meta builds that rely on low hanging fruit type of solutions).

Where the game starts to taper off is when the progression slows to a near stop and you’re optimizing low percentiles for minor gains. Trying to get perfect Enchanting rolls, upgrading Aspects for the final levels, getting the highest value from Unique powers, etc. does not excite me much compared to the larger gains in the earlier stages of the game. Part of it is that the rarity in getting an upgrade like this relative to the power gain is to tiny that there’s not much to really excite. It’s a different feeling when, for instance, you find a 5th charm that unlocks the high end of your build. There’s a similar feeling with the whole +5 main stat meme/joke from Diablo 3; you can continue grinding indefinitely but it’s not exciting anymore.

Usually by this point, I might start up another character (if I haven’t already). Part of my alt-a-holicism is that I tend to reach a stage where the progression slows to a halt. Maybe the character I have feels stale. Generally, when this occurs, I think it’s because the routine no longer is fun or I want to see how other styles affect the environment for the character. This doesn’t exist only in Diablo 4 nor ARPGs but across RPGs and other games like this where the game to me is how I can alter the environment. When I say environment, I don’t mean having a mage that cast fireballs at flammable objects and watching things burn asunder. I mean the state of the game such as how one style can be altered because of the switch to a different character. An example of this is how I started with a Static Charge Blizzard Sorcerer that moved really slow but could demolish zones then swapped to a Companion Druid build for this current season, which moved fairly quickly and only required me to hit my cooldowns.

While gearing up those two characters, there was a certain level of excitement as I familiarized myself with the new systems from the expansion. Everyone was learning and the game was still changing (such as bugs that affected certain builds). From there, I would go on to create a Whirlwind Barbarian, which turned out to be my best character of the season, a Dance of Knives Rogue, an Apocalypse Warlock and eventually a Zeal Paladin. Leveling each character was fun mostly because they had their own play styles, although I was quite familiar with a few. But part of the motivation was seeing how certain builds changed like the Dance of Knives Rogue which no longer relied on traps compared to previous seasons or the Whirlwind Barbarian which now could use Dust Devils without the Aspect.

There was a major problem though in each of these cases. The issue was dealing with gearing especially in later stages and the funnel that became repetitive really quickly. While the new Horadric Cube does offer a massive improvement compared to previous types of crafting with more focus on being able to get the affixes you want, you end up dealing with heavy RNG to the point where a lot of times you feel like you go backwards. Transfiguration probably is the most endemic of this issue where a situation similar to Sanctification could occur. Unlike Sanctification though, the risk:reward structure in Transfiguration feels awful. Sanctification had bad outcomes too but it was partly mitigated by Ancestral Uniques and Mythics which could avoid the really bad outcomes. And the super rare multi Transfiguration outcome is simply that, too rare. In the case of Sanctification, the reward aspect was much higher because you could get Mythic aspects on gear, which could double the effect of certain ones (like double Ring of the Starless Sky). That made Sanctification exciting even though the other aspects of that season were in truth quite bland.

Then with War Plans, the start of doing these feels fresh because it’s new. But once you realize that you have almost no control over the layouts of the plans themselves and that you’re limited to rerolls, then the situation really stinks. You only have a very select few number of activities at your disposal and a very small number of modifications that you can obtain only after spending a very long time grinding on a single character. And when you want to switch things up, the cost is quite high so you just end up grinding even more.

But these are not progressive systems in my book. These are gambling systems where the game has quadrupled down at almost all levels in its over-reliance on RNG. The problem is that RNG becomes a substitute for original content by forcing the player to go through a system of regurgitation. You may hear me frequently belittle this situation things like fake carrot on a stick, the hamster wheel trap, bozosort, etc. But it really boils down to not respecting the players’ time for as little effort as possible.

The thing to me is becoming self-aware once this condition gets problematic. Usually, I end up feeling physically ill whether it’s from carpal tunnel, mental reluctance/lack of enthusiasm and sometimes straight out anger with a vile green sensation erupting from my belly. That’s the point where I know I’m becoming burnt out because the system is no longer fun and I’m simply in this horrible loop where I can no longer move forward. Worse yet I can move backwards with poorly conceived systems like Transfiguration.

There are going to be pundits who try to defend this system. My belief is that those people aren’t real experts on this type of thing but actually have an undiagnosed gambling addiction. I’ve seen people on stream who really believe in the RNG system where they tie the long grind to this unattainable thing. They get high once they reach this pinnacle and continue seeking this euphoric state much like a drug user seeking out a new high. They can’t admit that they have a major issue and use any excuse to defend their state of mind.

For myself, I don’t get the endorphin rush in the same manner. I am not addicted to that type of thing since the addiction for me is the satisfaction of actual growth as a result of the effort I put in. What hampers that sensation is the opposite for me where failure simply puts me into that opposite state where I feel sick as I mentioned. Once that happens, the only way I can heal myself is by stepping back for a long period.

With regards to Blizzard’s game, I already knew of this social engineering type of design because it’s the same problem I had with World of Warcraft. I recognized that issue with the way gear was provided as a kind of gateway drug to staying in the game. When you could obtain the gear, there was an immediate rush of satisfaction. However, the way they introduced gearing for the end game is where the poison lie in connecting it to some RNG mechanism where week-in and week-out you were forced into the proverbial hamster wheel. If you were lucky, you could get out. And if you were really lucky, you managed to get everything you needed. But once that happened, there really wasn’t as much incentive to do those operations (at least for me). It’s basically an ass backwards system.

So with the way the game is moving, it feels like various design philosophies have gone into Diablo 4 where at some point, the game loses the novelty. In this latest iteration, the RNG crafting is basically salt over the wounds. I think if there was some QoL attached where the workflow wasn’t bad, then I wouldn’t mind as much. I have to refer to Torchlight: Infinite where their crafting system is more modern. You might be forced to grind more if you can’t get the thing you need at the moment, but at least you’re not enslaved to a bad UI/UX workflow.

I once said that Diablo 4 would improve if they removed RNG from crafting and now War Plans as the mechanism that controls how you play. I don’t mind the target farming for materials; my belief is that once you find the materials, you should be rewarded for that instead of adding on another level of silliness. Again, the crafting aspect itself wouldn’t be bad if the workflow management wasn’t so god awful and very “engineer-y” (to paraphrase how the VC woman from Silicon Valley described an app that the Pied Piper gang made in a later season).

Then there’s the other problem when it comes to live service games: instability. No piece of software is completely bug free. However, Diablo 4’s constant systems changes with the nerfs/buffs are insufferable. Because of the multiplier issue, there’s zero chance this game will ever be balanced because the mathematics are too complex and out of control to be properly tested.  At the same time, when you see the patch notes for Season 14 come in and it’s basically a decimation of all these builds, you have to wonder what’s the point? Eventually, the developers are going to update things all over again. But this cycle never ends. You think that they take one step forward but move 50 steps backward. I really don’t get it at this point. I personally think some people in the company figured out how to create job stability for themselves in doing the absolute lowest effort possible and this is the “content” the players receive. Then you compare this to other companies that can dish out a ton of content with smaller teams and less money and you have to wonder what’s going on.

At either rate, the main purpose behind this blog was trying to get a better understanding for myself on what’s going on and why I feel unmotivated to play as well as this negative cloud hanging over my head anytime I look over at this game. I just feel so disappointed all the time and it’s impossible to feel any enthusiasm because the game just keeps going around in this endless circle and doesn’t really improve by much. I’m honestly surprised that they managed to get something like War Plans and the Horadric Cube out. Neither looked special from a development point of view but I’m guessing that the itemization on the backend with all the tools that have been created for their game designers must have some truly terrible code behind them because it feels like a ton of stuff got refactored. The problem is that even if it makes the people’s lives in the company easier, it does little for the player base at large.