Reading a bit into my blog it becomes evident pretty quickly that I am a big fan of Diablo 4. To me it is kind of a perfect game in a lot of ways due to the scalable difficulty, the wide variety of locations in the game and until you complete it at least, the truly engaging and wonderful story.
I joined in this game in the middle of season 8 and never really thought to even try it prior to that because while I liked D3, I didn't really like how the people that were playing it just seemed to do so endlessly with the only goal being the slight chance that an amazing and incredibly rare drop would happen at some point. Other than that, there didn't seem to really be much of any other reason to ever play this game.
Diablo 4 was always going to go down this same path because it is sort of impossible for an ARPG that technically doesn't have an end not to. It's built into it and that is why these games remain valid and "fun" long after they have been released. I played season 8 for a very long time but eventually, after running a nightmare dungeon for i don't know, the 400th time and realizing that putting the game on too difficult was taking too long and putting it on too easy resulted in completely effortless runs, that it wasn't really fun anymore.
Plus, the fact that the only thing that you were really grinding for was upgrade materials that would sometimes roll "incorrectly" for your build would mean that you would have to complete this process all over again.
Despite this it still stays fun for the most part for a very long time but I think that right on queue, the affection for Diablo 4 season 8 has basically completely dried up and lo' and behold, just in time for season 9 to be released in just a few days.
In season 8 there was a large focus on people being fixated on boss fights but eventually the leadup to these fights became tedious because as you would expect, people, including this person, just ran those bosses over and over again only to discover there there wasn't much point in taking on the boss at a higher difficulty level because this did NOT increase the quality of loot it would potentially drop. For the most part it just increased the amount of terrible loot that it would drop because according to the devs, higher difficulties increased the amount of total loot dropped, not the chance of getting something good. yes, I can math, so I know that more shit on the ground means more chances to find gold, but that isn't exactly what people were looking for because I could kill the same boss 4 times in a row a LOT faster than I could kill it once on 4x the difficulty amount. If that makes sense.
In Season 9, Blizzard has told us that they are focusing on Nightmare dungeons being of increased importance and inside these dungeons there is a chance of a "Horadric Strongroom" appearing, which will be a "dungeon inside of a dungeon" so to speak. This could be a lot of fun for players because while there will be ways to guarantee that this strongroom appears, it is mostly going to be left up to chance.
Another thing that they are introducing is the ability to make customized skills or spells using various components that you discover along the way.
Now I already know how this is going to end up for most players in that a vast majority of the options are going to be ignored by the players and instead, they will head to the internet where some math nerds have discovered what the optimum damage output is and everyone is going to use that particular custom skill and I guess it will be boring as everyone just ends up being exactly the same on the battlefield.
Since I play mostly by myself I will not go this route and plan on exploring all the various options according to what I consider to be fun - which to me is what gaming is all about. I rarely join groups and if I were to join one where they were to state that I am underpowered and told me to "git gud" I would happily leave their group because I don't need that sort of competitive ass-hole-ish-ness in my life.
This game kind of gets ruined (in my mind) by how devoted the YouTube and Twitch streamers are in investigating every imaginable aspect of the game and revealing what the best builds are before the new season even begins.
I didn't even look at this sort of content until I had already played D4 for 30 hours and for this season I am going to do the same. It's not like you are going to have to grind out a new character from scratch if you do it "wrong" and want to have another look because you are able to respec all of your skills and whatever the hell the other points are called at any point in time for free. I think it is better to play around with the game a bit and find what you like to do rather than focus on what does the most OP damage right out of the gate. If there was a high cost associated with re-speccing I guess I would be able to relate but honestly, once you reach max level and start upping your skill point (or whatever they are called - the skill tree) you can in just 5-10 minutes completely respec your character by following one of the hundreds of guides which are suspiciously similar to one another.
Something called "horadric spellcrafting" is being introduced on July 1st as well and if you just play with this and see what it does, I think it will be a lot more fun than if you try to follow some online guide for a lot of reasons.
1> If you follow the guide you end up not so much as seeing the other options and
2> The pieces that the ultimate-best-ever-ass-kicker-spell! are going to end up being some of the most rare pieces on the game that you are very unlikely to ever encounter as a dirty noob player anyway.
I think season 9 is coming at the perfect time for me because I have basically stopped gaming recently due to my relative disdain for the 3-4 games I have tried out since I got bored of season 8.
Will it be better? Well it is impossible to say but my honest opinion is that people should just get in there and play at first... save the uber guides for later.
Oh and big news that I will write more about in a later article is that Diablo 4 is about to become free for all PS-Plus subscribers starting July 1st. This is a very big deal and to me, it indicates that this could likely be the soon end of Diablo 4 support. Traditionally once Blizzard starts to give stuff away, it is because they have seen a huge drop off in sales and are basically throwing in the towel before they start to focus on whatever it is that they have coming out next.