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S3 Ep265: Diablo IV
77 Plays2 years ago
SPOILER WARNING: Diablo IV
Join Dave and Jake as they are cast out to Sanctuary, where cloaks covered in snow they speak of the most dangerous threat to rise from the unspeakable machinations of hell... $25 cosmetics at the cash shop. Stay awhile and listen as they also cover the more angelic and infernal of natures of Blizzard's latest foray into the eternal conflict in this week's episode!
Intro:
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Join Dave and Jake as they are cast out to Sanctuary, where cloaks covered in snow they speak of the most dangerous threat to rise from the unspeakable machinations of hell... $25 cosmetics at the cash shop. Stay awhile and listen as they also cover the more angelic and infernal of natures of Blizzard's latest foray into the eternal conflict in this week's episode!
Intro:
- Diablo IV: Fractured Peaks Gale Valley
- Smooth McGroove - Oath to Order
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
There
Introduction and Setting the Scene
00:00:06
Speaker
is great evil here. The light can never be extinguished by evil.
00:00:46
Speaker
Let Diablo's death end the reign of the three. What the hell is that?
Life and Energy Drinks
00:01:06
Speaker
How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co-host who's always Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave?
00:01:14
Speaker
I think it's going, it's going all right. Yeah. It's been, it's been an okay Thursday. How about you? It's been all right. I had a, um, I took a little, uh, break in the middle of the day to run on the treadmill. Had to have to have the, uh, the mango run interference for the cat that's currently living there in the family room. But that was nice. Um, not because I don't have the time to exercise, but because I don't exercise.
00:01:42
Speaker
So wait, the cat interference is based off of, you know, any time that I wanted to exercise, I'm sure I could be like, Hey, could you like, would you love to pick up the adorable cat and carry them around or spend some time playing with them in the basement or something? Um, there's also an extensive period of time where the cat was not in the family room with the treadmill and I still chose not to use it. But any day that I do do a little bit of a run, it's kind of nice. Nice.
00:02:08
Speaker
It's always good to get some get some blood flowing Mm-hmm. I also I think part of the things that inform this is I tried um a new energy drink and Freakin and then I wasn't worth bringing up because I can't remember the name of it now but I hadn't I
00:02:26
Speaker
don't tell me the name tell me what it tastes like it tastes like so you remember did you try like the um the like stardust coke i have not tried a coke product in a while outside of the generic diet stuff
00:02:43
Speaker
Gotcha. Um, so it's like that. So that doesn't help you. Um, unfortunately I'm searching for energy drinks and all of them sound really weird. Mmm. So I'm probably not going to be able to find this. You know what? I'm going to Google it when you have a particularly apt thought later in the episode and rather than paying attention, I'll come back and I'll be like that. That's the, that's the energy drink type. Uh, come back. Oh, it was the energy drink pussy. Oh yes.
00:03:09
Speaker
I'll just shout that word in the middle of your thought. We were talking about energy drinks on Discord the other day. As I went to Amazon, I was like, oh, what energy drinks am I forgetting? I never tried Pussy, the energy drink. I had to put that joke in.
00:03:29
Speaker
I feel like a lot of it is just like the name as far as marketing. And then of course you're like, oh, it's a healthy alternative to blah, blah, blah. But I grew up on stuff like Jolt and Amp. And I remember being, again, teenager at the time, lover of sugar and caffeine, everything like that. And it just, it had me jazzed up. Also Balls Gorana was around that time.
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's more expensive and more rare, though, than something you can get at any corner store. So I sent it to you. I did find it during your long rant that I didn't pay attention to. It's called Alani. Alani knew, I think. And it looks very... Oh, I hate this shit. You hate it. Okay. Have you tried it?
00:04:16
Speaker
I tried one of theirs. I forget which one it was, but I had very much a kind of chalky experience with it. Interesting. Okay. I will say this particular one that I linked for you, it's Breezeberry. I think this was more expensive in the store than what it's looking like online. I got to start buying groceries online, geez.
00:04:37
Speaker
Um, but, uh, it tasted pretty good. It tasted pretty good. It tastes, um, it's not like cotton candy is too strong a flavor for me as an adult. I don't, I don't really like cotton candy flavored things generally, but it's like a slightly toned down, little bit more crisp cotton candy. Um, and it was very drinkable, which is dangerous when there's 200 milligrams of caffeine in it. Um, but I drank it. So.
00:05:05
Speaker
best part of waking up is oh god holy fuck yes your heart is freaking out uh-huh man the the Folgers energy drink would probably be a problem your grandma drinks it uh nobody else does
00:05:22
Speaker
You just hear rapidly knitting in the corner. Do you want a sweater? Do you want another one? That was pretty good. That probably inspired the walk there or the run, I should say.
Fitness and Gaming
00:05:38
Speaker
Usually my strat is to try to run a bit and then be like, okay, there are some realistic physical walls we need to push up against here and we're going to tone it down and we're going to slow it down.
00:05:47
Speaker
but let me seriously kudos to the exercise and the running back part i've tried i tried like a a jog for like a minute like a couple weeks ago and that nearly killed me i was like this ain't for me
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I made it much longer to be honest, but it was still okay. I did get a headache from that and I had to take some ibuprofen afterwards, but you know what? It's an uphill battle. We're working our way up the hill. If you turn the treadmill the other way, you're going to be a downhill battle. I'm so fucking fast.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, I don't I don't set the elevation at all. I probably should for like, you know, a better sense of pride and accomplishment. But I didn't believe it when EA was trying to sell it to me. I don't believe it when people in sports equipment are trying to sell it to me.
00:06:40
Speaker
If I'm going to like exercise for sub one mile in sub 10 minutes, like I'm not, I'm not looking to stretch out my time anymore by upping the elevation, right? Like that's going to hurt more.
00:06:58
Speaker
But other than that, I'm glad you're doing well. Um, I'm glad the cat next to me is sleeping pretty well as well. And we can speak of a video game as a throwback episode, probably at this point to the times of old, uh, yonder we want specific games. I think the last one was probably, was the last one Elden ring now, as we've talked about things since then, but not that many.
00:07:29
Speaker
I'm just gonna say sure without looking. Yeah, it's been a bit. It's been a while. Um, I hope it's not Elden Ring though. That's been like a frigging long time.
00:07:39
Speaker
You got you got to just you got to leave more video games at my house That's gonna be the key. This is the entire collection. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It really doesn't work I'd actually play like a raven with video games Someone's like have you tried this thing and you're like no like you should try the singer Okay, like Jake she plays game and you're like, I hope you die I'm like Jake that's awfully strong language for a mere suggestion
00:08:04
Speaker
What you got to do is just wrap it in tin foil and we'll be like, all right, we'll take that and we'll put it over here and we'll keep it. Because birds like shiny things is the implication. But today we're talking about Diablo.
Diablo 4 Deep Dive
00:08:19
Speaker
Oh, which oh, four. OK, I was going to ask, which one do you want to talk about? I'm going to vote for. OK, that's fair. I was like leaning towards one. But if you if you think four would be better, then that's fine, too.
00:08:35
Speaker
I'm a wandering man. I think listening to you like the I'm a wanderer. I wander around, around, around, around, around to like the cut scenes of Diablo and Diablo two walking forth and like spreading flames all over the place and evil in his wake. Tonally inconsistent. I think they probably should have picked a different song. It would make a good tick tock because having things that are discordant or
00:09:05
Speaker
I guess, yeah, just kind of disjoints, it seems to work well for them. I know we have to talk about Diablo. It's a Diablo themed episode, but the Discord and TikTok things remind me of the like Latin Christian singing, like Latin monks singing, Anno Domini or something like that. And they're like burning a Korok above like a giant pit. Oh, yeah, Domini. Domini, yeah.
00:09:37
Speaker
It's so good, so good. Sorry, Jug's position was the term I was looking for specifically. Gotcha. Which originally- No, you doted too. You're thinking of dota, yeah. Yeah, Diablo 4 came out recently, some would say.
00:09:55
Speaker
looks at clock and calendar yeah it's been like a month or so two months yeah i think it's been a month uh the official release was six six that's that's the reason i remember it of course they were um they were too cowardly to wait for until 2066 and uh they didn't have the technology to go back in time to 2006 so they did what they could
00:10:23
Speaker
Well at least they really should 6pm for my time zone. They did. They did actually. The real time zone, right? No, the real time zone. But yeah, game launched. I will admit with some chagrin
00:10:42
Speaker
that I was playing it a little bit before the official launch because I spent the the more fool bucks edition where it's like if you are a fool you can spend additional bucks and play it early I don't know how I feel about that but it was still fun when it worked
00:11:04
Speaker
I personally do not feel great about it because I did not buy into it. I think I had some plans over that initial weekend. And then everybody who was on the hype train, which I was like, I'll purchase a ticket to the train and everybody's already on the hype train. They played so much over the weekend and now it's like dead quiet.
00:11:26
Speaker
Like there's me and like maybe two other people were kind of like, it's like a place in Diablo a little bit. I know that there's groups of people playing it. I actually have talked to like two.
00:11:41
Speaker
people at work, I think. Yeah, definitely two that are like very aggressively playing it. Actually one of them I can name by name because he's a special guest, Nate, who is, he's got like a friend group and they're playing. So they're like, all right, it's game time, let's log in and do that. Which I mean, you have that for Dota. If people out there have a friend group where you're playing a game and it's like, hey, this is our nighttime game, that can be pretty awesome. That's a good vibe to have.
00:12:10
Speaker
I could see this game being really good for that. I probably have been disjointed from like the levels people or others are at. So like if I'm playing with Dave, Dave is like, OK, we'll put on like the kid gloves. We'll go down, you know, a couple of torment levels or whatever the equivalent is here. Yeah, we can fight literal children if that's what you need to do to make progress.
00:12:38
Speaker
I wouldn't say you're that far behind, but it definitely is relative because I played some with a friend of the show and guest, DICE, and he just, he's burning through stuff. He found his optimal build and probably all the gear for at this point. And he also like plays efficiently. Whereas I'm just like, I want to do one thing and try and do that one thing really well, even if it's not good.
00:13:09
Speaker
That's fair. I mean, we can talk and get into more of the efficiency and stuff maybe as we get to the late game. We started talking about the launch a little bit. How was your launch experience?
00:13:21
Speaker
If the game launched, that was my experience. I had more issues with the beta as far as latency and some snapback. That's fair. I still will get it occasionally, and I'll get rubber banding mostly with horse stuff, or it just seems to get stuck, or the horse has a spin-up time.
00:13:46
Speaker
I don't know if you understand how this is supposed to work, Horace. You have to do a little clockwork toy soldier back crank thing for the Horace. He's just turning the crank. And you let it go while it buzzes across the table.
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah, that and also I'm having some graphics issues of where it's like hey change a lot of particle effects don't Yeah, so it's so like a very pretty game. I don't want to take my experience and apply it to everybody's Because it looks good like at a 4k resolution in those trailers and some of the subjects in game very nice. Oh, yeah But it definitely has impacted my experience a little bit having to throttle some things back and
00:14:31
Speaker
I played some other games recently that had no goal of graphical fidelity whatsoever, and I've come around, I think, on the opinion. Actually, that's not really fair to say. I've never cared that much about graphics. If they happen to be great, then awesome. But I played Crysis. None of you guys are living up to that, so I don't even know. No, I mean, legitimately, no hyperbole. I would trade graphics for performance any day.
00:15:01
Speaker
I'm not talking about like in a shooter where you're like I'm gonna disable the grass so I can shoot people I would do that too I'm talking about like if it's something where in this case Diablo takes so much VRAM that if it starts to like run out and starts using like your page file
00:15:20
Speaker
I don't know if it's the page file or system ran at that point someone who's more technical can correct me in the comments That's when I started to see that like rubber banding action where I kind of like got held back a little bit and the way you can tell this this is the the pro tip for those out there in the comments is if you
00:15:40
Speaker
Have like YouTube up on the other screen or something like that. And then YouTube freezes at the same time that the game freezes. That's when it does. That's when it hits. Yeah. And I was like, ah, this is definitely a graphical thing. Otherwise there's no way that it would impact YouTube. Um, I'm hoping some of that can be fixed with like some drivers and crap like that, but the developers get zero points for that. You're responsible for developing a game that can be played with the drivers that exist now pre-optimization and.
00:16:12
Speaker
You should let me turn them all the stick figures and not have a bad experience, basically. That's my take. I mean, that's been an ongoing thing for forever. I think Cyberpunk was another example of that. Of course, that's like the whipping boy at this point. But you can't assume that everyone has the highest possible end graphics just to play your game. And then if it's bad performantly, it's on them.
00:16:37
Speaker
No, no, no. Again, like so many people probably still have like 1080s or less, or they have just an old laptop or a fucking hand-me-down e-machines with a giant CRT monitor, right? And they should still be able to access the game. It doesn't need to be at the same graphical fidelity, but it needs to be able to play. Just a consideration. And you know how the format movies to somebody's screen
00:17:06
Speaker
We can do that with games, think about it. How cool would that be? You can do that, yeah. Consoles get it for free, right? And that's basically the example. I think you can turn the graphics down a ton, and that does help, but...
00:17:22
Speaker
Like the issue kind of is that the graphic should look a little bit better and the performance should be a little bit better on like medium, right? It's not optimized for that. And that is a little bit unfortunate, but it has gotten better. I think latency was also a big part of it. Like you, I had more issues with the open betas than like the game proper once it launched. And I think I've only had like two crashes or something like that.
00:17:49
Speaker
Um, which I mean, I'm glad I'm not playing hardcore, but, uh, I don't know. It could be worse. Sorry. Again, you referenced cyberpunk, so it could be worse. Cyberpunk lagged when you opened the map. If you had RTX on for me, at least. Um.
00:18:09
Speaker
But yeah, graphically very impressive. Blizzard back to, I guess, classical form with like that opening cinematic with the horse and the snow and all of that just absolutely gorgeous. I want to say.
00:18:24
Speaker
Because a lot of this will be me complaining about things that I wish they had as improvements. I will do the early disclaimer of overall, I've enjoyed my time with the game. I'm still enjoying my time with the game. But there's a lot of things that would change. One of which is they're opening and closing cutscenes. Amazing. But the whole game's fucking book ended. Because in the middle, there is fuck all. There are fuck all for like actual rendered cutscenes.
00:19:08
Speaker
There's there's a certain climactic cutscene towards the end of the game. That's not the true like end of the game. There's still, yes, stuff to do, including that's what I'm counting as the book ended one. That's fair. Yeah, it does. It does tend to peak at certain points. It's not like a consistent. Like high, high effort all the way through.
00:19:10
Speaker
Is that true though?
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think I would have liked to see more of that because like it for me is like a stark conscious from like, holy shit, this looks amazing to again, if I have my graphics turned down, they're like, hey, we're doing an in game cutscene. I'm like, Cheryl, those polygons are doing okay. Yeah.
00:19:46
Speaker
You don't need in-game cutscenes with ARPGs. We're not there yet. The technology's just not there yet. Give me a voiceover. Thank you. That's it. You can do the thing where you have painting on a scroll or something like one of those other easier art styles that everyone's using now.
00:20:05
Speaker
Oh the the weird slideshow thing. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah Or even comic book go back to comic books that hasn't been done in a little while that could be that could be novel Jake, do you care if I manically jump around a little bit? Sure What are you playing? What was your starting class picking picking this?
Character Builds and Skills
00:20:24
Speaker
I thought about just answering sarcastically with like a different game So I started
00:20:32
Speaker
uh with the beta and now as a necromancer um there wasn't enough characters for nikroman monmon which is unfortunate so i had to pick a different name
00:20:46
Speaker
you're putting so many of you can add you know uh... yeah well i guess of everybody sure you can put jacket of bone there you go if you can find that i don't think you can add people by that and i think you still need to have them on my battle over the blizzard idea
00:21:02
Speaker
But yeah, Necromancer felt pretty good as a minor spoiler. Your horse dies at the beginning. And I was like, all right, roll the dice, skeletal whores. Let's go, skeletal horse. And you unfortunately do not start with a skeletal horse if you picked Necromancer. So it was zero out of ten. Horse game. Oh, I actually have that comment in here for some of my notes. Zero out of ten. Yeah.
00:21:28
Speaker
How do you like Necromancer in this compared to previous entries? Oh, it's like so much better. It's ridiculously better, actually. I can't speak to Diablo 1, because it didn't have Necromancer. And I didn't play a lot of 3 Necromancer. I think it was like part of the last DLC. It was around Reaper of Souls. It was Reaper of Souls, yeah. Because I remember being pissed when they were announcing Diablo 3. I'm like, and Necromancer. And they were like, which doctor? I was like, who the fuck is this guy?
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, that was that's the weird thing is they had witch doctor and necromancer by the end of it. But those really are those are two kids with the same name in the same playground. And that's going to get confusing.
00:22:11
Speaker
It's me, Nasebo. Yeah. Pretty obnoxious and hot. But anyways, Necromancy is pretty good this time around. They did a lot of like economy balancing with like the bones, like the corpses to generate skeletons that wasn't present in two. Obviously, this is just a continuation of our episode for Diablo 2.
00:22:33
Speaker
Eight years ago But like there's there's some balancing things so that some of your basic abilities or other abilities could generate corpses So even if you're fighting a boss or something and all of your guys all of your your your man's Get cut down you can create more man's Through through the use of these abilities and that's really nice. That's a good quality of life thing and it kind of becomes part of the economy and
00:22:59
Speaker
in a way that Diablo 2 didn't care about. It's like, why would you bring skeletons against Mephisto? That's just dumb. They're gone. There you go. Yeah, Diablo 2 was very punishing in every regard. But you can tell when somebody had already assembled their army before logging off because they would join.
00:23:20
Speaker
and you just see like an army of like 40 guys kind of show up all with like their own little animations and like light bubbles just kind of like moving around the road and gamut. They faded them out in that game too I think for multiplayer if I recall correctly. I think to a degree yeah. And they do the same thing in Diablo 4 and it still gets absurd.
00:23:41
Speaker
Like there are some aspects and other things we haven't talked about yet that can make it so you have more, uh, mans in your, in your skeletal army. And, uh, it gets absolutely absurd. It's just cover the screen in it. Um, I wish it was more late game viable, but that's, that's theirs. What, uh, um, what about the classes you played? What'd you start with?
00:24:10
Speaker
So I think in the beta I tried necromancer first and the second one I tried druid and then with druid I'm like oh he has some oomph behind him he's got some meat I felt just more sustainable I liked that flow of combat more between just whacking on people and then shooting out some lightning
00:24:33
Speaker
So when the game actually launched, I did a druid first for my main, getting that up to end level. And it was nice just to be like, oh, is this bonus for lightning? Throw it in there. Yeah, cool. Want to do lightning? Is there a chance for more lightning? Yeah, cool. Throw it in. And then just all that. And it felt really strong and nice.
00:24:52
Speaker
Um, I just remember running around and you were like, look at that pot. Look at that bottom over there. Then just got struck by lightning. And so there is a passive thing where every so often, like lighting can strike something nearby. Uh, and it can also target breakable pots or things like that. So if you're walking around occasionally, like a box would disappear, like get fucked box. Um,
00:25:17
Speaker
But I will say it took me a little bit to land on Storm Druid. I feel like I tried everything else once I had like the key passives unlocked around level 30 to see like, hey, what makes sense for me? What do I like playing as? I didn't try anything with shape shifting, but I tried everything else for elemental. And boy, howdy, do some of them suck ass, in my opinion. Like when I was trying out rock stuff, I'm like, oh, let me go all rock.
00:25:46
Speaker
Do you remember when they made the Avatar movie? Mm-hmm. Yeah, and night Shyamalan and then they have the the earth vendors
00:25:54
Speaker
they have like pebbles or something like that they have like five people doing like some crazy jutsu shit and then it just like moves some like five with your hand small rocks yes yeah slower than a throw it was crazy shit david uh just shaking his head before goliath rocks will get to you
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of the things just didn't feel impactful. And I felt kind of like the same way when I eventually switched over to trying out Barbarian, where I'm like, a lot of these things are not, at least for me, viable or fun to play. I felt like there was only one of like three options where I'm like, this, this one, please. I would definitely say for like Necromancer, a lot of them were clearly like,
00:26:44
Speaker
You can do kind of whatever you want leveling up. The game's generally not too hard there and necromancer made it easier in some ways because you just run away like a coward and get more corpses and keep going. But like the capstone abilities were all very much like, hey, did you put all of your points into shadow?
00:27:01
Speaker
Damage like okay, you're in a shadow build pick that one are all of your points and bone skills you know pick this pick this capstone and That pretty much informed the build a lot even beyond the Or I should say in addition to the gear and aspects and legendaries and other stuff that play into it
00:27:22
Speaker
So maybe that's the same, maybe that was the same for druid. Like maybe there is some secret alchemy behind the curtain that's like, okay, maybe earth elemental druid is viable, but you have to have this specific thing that's like, all of your skill double damage or some nonsense, right?
00:27:41
Speaker
But something I want to bring up as like another pain point about the game is like as I'm trying this stuff out One thing that's really nice is you can just kind of reset all of your skills and reallocate them Mm-hmm cuz trying to do it piecemeal Sucks a whole bag of dicks. You can't remove that you need that for other keynote here. What are you trying to do? I'm trying to respect my shit
00:28:03
Speaker
So it's nice that that part is an option, but what they really need to do is just have loadouts because It's a pain in the dick for me to reallocate everything and do that But on top of that because your gear can have aspects which will affect your abilities Hey, if you're running whirlwind, you'll get this bonus. Okay. What if I'm trying out something other than whirlwind? do I need to have another set of gear in my
00:28:28
Speaker
stashed primarily or just on my personal times to switch out. No, that sucks. So it'd be nice to have load off for something because like as you're leveling, you're definitely trying stuff out. But what's really going to impact your build and kind of define it is when you find a legendary, it's like, hey, I make this thing kind of cool. And you're like, I guess I'll try this thing.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's very, it's very gear dependent. I didn't play a whole lot of time in late game three. And two is kind of, it's almost excluded from the conversation because I think you got like a respect per difficulty. And then if you like killed all of the Ubers or something like that, you could get like another respect, but you're not, you're not switching loadouts.
00:29:17
Speaker
But they definitely moved really far in the direction of just kind of just respect whatever you want in three. It was literally just click other buttons to allocate different passives and skills and things. And this is more restrictive than that. It definitely is.
00:29:34
Speaker
I think overall I like the skill tree more in four than in three, where the idea was just unlock everything and then just equip whatever you want at a given time. But the gear, like you said, it's much more restrictive. When we were last playing, Dave was like, what's your helmet do? And I looked at it again, because it had been a while since I played. And it's like, skeletal mages will cast
00:29:58
Speaker
Like small blizzards when they attack and I was like, okay Well, I've sacrificed my skeletal mages in this build for crit chance or something like that. So I actually have no mages That doesn't do anything So thanks for pointing that out
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's something I ran into a lot where I think a lot of times I was cognizant of it, but I just didn't have anything to replace it with. But essentially have like a dead spot where I'm like, okay, I'm not getting whirlwind descending at tornado bonuses because we don't whirlwind anymore. Yeah.
00:30:32
Speaker
In some ways I would say that they have mitigated this, right? Like there are some mechanics in play we should mention that allow you to play more with the aspects. Like just for some context, previous Diablo games, I think, I don't remember, you can correct me for two. I don't remember a tremendous amount of ability to reroll items. I don't know if that was the thing at all.
00:30:59
Speaker
Who didn't let you do anything anything? Starting with three I think they gave you the ability to reroll specific affixes on an item as like part of an enchantment system But the with four they took it all the way to the extreme and they're like hey if you get a legendary and there's a nice little block of text there That's like you can summon more man's You can just take that block of text off of the item the item will die
00:31:29
Speaker
So there will be a loss of an item you can have you a little sad funeral about that But you can take that block of text and put it on an item that doesn't have that special legendary block of text and now it's a legendary
00:31:44
Speaker
Which is really cool. You are shy one affix if you do that. I realized eventually I was like rares have one fewer other like kind of random affix modifiers. Yeah. Yeah. Then, then legendaries do. But.
00:32:01
Speaker
You could basically grab that from a piece of gear you otherwise thought was trash and put it on a piece of gear that you thought was awesome for some stats that you actually did care about. And now you've kind of custom tailored your own. You're doing some like artifice on these magic items to make your own special mix of really cool gear. And I freaking love that because that kind of lends some ownership and like contribution to the process of gearing up your character.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, that part is definitely... That part of it is nice. He said with a trailing dot, waiting to see if Jacob wore it before he... Oh, no. I mean, I really appreciate it. I haven't used it a ton yet, because I've always kind of been on the impression that if I ripped a bunch of aspects off of my legendaries, even if I really liked them, to put them on other good gear. Like, I'm still leveling. The good gear that I drop will probably be better.
00:32:58
Speaker
I think I'm just now kind of reaching the point where I could do interact with that system and not feel like I'm just going to outpace myself by leveling anyways. Yeah, for sure. When you're looking for like very specific stuff. Yeah.
00:33:15
Speaker
Just playing from the train of thought. That's the end of the thought. Oh, just keep going. I got it. Oh, we left the station. So even with that, and what we kind of talked about for some of the other build stuff, it still feels kind of restrictive for me, compared to, again, ARPG is slowed over here. Something like Path of Exile, or even back to the days of Diablo II. Now granted, Diablo II had a much more restrictive skill tree, and yada yada.
00:33:44
Speaker
But a lot of the stuff outside of class-specific set items was not restrictive. A fond memory I will always have was there was a barbarian I encountered just playing in a public game and barbarians are typically known for leap striking and whirlwind of beating the shit up people and going into frenzy.
00:34:08
Speaker
But no, this was a caster barbarian. So he had a lot of magic find. He had two hodos, which is too hard of the oak. By the way, where the fuck are rune words anyway? So he was all shout based. So he would like buff the entire party with his really like level 30 or 40 shouts for like defense and all these other things.
00:34:30
Speaker
And then would use a shout that like did like minimal damage in stone. But because of how many points he had in it, it's stun locked enemies. And then he would shout at their bodies to have them explode because there was like a chance of magic. Like that was a separate ability. And I was like, oh, holy shit. What's up? What somebody in imagine they had like a, oh, this would be kind of like utility thing. They might try and use, put a point or two in someone's like, this is my fucking build. And they rolled with it and it was very cool. Uh huh.
00:35:00
Speaker
whereas a lot of stuff here like all of the affixes are specific to your class and you can't use them for summer across the board the very first the very first dungeon that you I think unlock
00:35:16
Speaker
it shows up behind you so it's kind of hard to tell but i think it's the first dungeon you unlock is an affix that if you attack if you do damage to an elite it gives you an overshield kicks in and it can kick in once every like 30 seconds or something like that right but that is
00:35:35
Speaker
Nobody's using that shit like game. That is some lovely leveling stuff. Great in the beta. It helped so much with the Shava. I think the name is the world boss. Yeah. Fuck. Fuck. Really nice. Really nice against them. But yeah, I think that the most of the time you're going to want an aspect that actually improves your build.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah, I just I wonder if maybe part of it is because their Aspects are they come much faster now the drop rate for legendaries is actually pretty high It goes up as you're playing through the campaign to Like as you level up, it just seems like legendary start to drop more and more and more But by the end of it like
00:36:21
Speaker
I pretty much had a legendary in almost every slot on my character and that's not crazy that's just like what it normally like what it kind of is when you get towards the end of the campaign but
00:36:36
Speaker
at least from my experience, because right now I'm doing a frenzy barbarian and I'm only using frenzy, which is a primary fair basic skill. Because if you use topaz and stuff, like weapons are like, Oh, we can make your basic skill better. And I'll just never use a core skill or anything else. So my entire build is based around that dumb idea. So I'm trying to make it work.
00:36:59
Speaker
And it seems to be doing okay in a lot of bad things. This is your shout barbarian. This is my shout barbarian, like many, like 15 years later. I like that part of it, but I still wish I could do more with it because so many things I'm trying to find are legendaries that will drop. You just don't seem to fit what I'm trying to do. Yeah. And that's going to have to sift through like, eh, shard it all, eh, shard it all, eh, shard it all.
00:37:29
Speaker
So it'd be nice if I understand that can't make everything specific before whatever my neurotic brain wants to do But at least then maybe give me like an item filter Hey, I don't give a fuck about any rares or anything that focuses on this stat So can immediately market for like hey, we don't give a fuck about that
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, that would be just quality life an awesome quality of life edition I do think that what you're describing though is kind of part of a Faustian bargain, right? Because I think in diablo 3 And probably 2 they had more of those types of items that could fit into any build because it's just like this is just really good this makes you do plus 300 fire damage on hit or something like that and you're like
00:38:12
Speaker
It doesn't matter what else I have in the build, like that's gonna be great. Whereas in Diablo IV, because there are so many skill specific affixes, or like aspects, I'm gonna clarify the difference. When I use the word affix, I just mean like a bar of text on the item, and an aspect is basically a legendary bar of text or bar of text that you get from a dungeon, you can slap it on an item.
Game Mechanics and Systems
00:38:38
Speaker
But it might be like increases your corpse explosion skill for necromancer. And the aspect could be your corpse explosion skill now propagates or does something crazy like that.
00:38:50
Speaker
And that piece of gear is completely useless if you take corpses explosion off the bar, right? That's the limiting part to it. But if it was just like, Hey, you deal more damage or it gives you more crit or something like that. I mean, that's probably going to be good regardless. Um, but because every single piece of your gear is a potential spot for one of these massive power spike aspects, it gets harder to swap them out. Yeah. That's.
00:39:19
Speaker
So a lot of these things I'm describing, I feel like can be solved by a couple of different things. One of which is just, if you had loadouts, I probably wouldn't care as much about some of the other stuff because yeah, yes, we can still have the aspects be very nuanced. Okay. But like, let me then work with them in a more convenient way if I want to change it versus just flattening something out and being like, oh, it's crit attack speed, life, yada, yada. Just very generic stats that apply to everything.
00:39:46
Speaker
Yeah, I actually, I don't have a, I don't have a good argument against just full support for loadouts. If that loadout is you hit a button and it changes all of your gear and all of your skills to something that you've already set. Um, I would love that. I think that should be in the game and it would definitely, I agree. It would help mitigate some of these concerns with having your gear lock you into a build so strongly like it doesn't for. Yeah.
00:40:16
Speaker
That's what it builds. How do you feel about it? Unless you want to tune the train of thought. No, no, no. I'm good. Well.
00:40:24
Speaker
I don't know, I do think there's some crazy, I will say in the space of builds, there are some crazy things you can still do, but it really has to be determined before you put a bunch of points into skills, or you put a bunch of points into gear, I should say, like spend a lot of time getting gear. I saw a necromancer build where their left click and their right click were both curses. I love cursing, it's so funny.
00:40:51
Speaker
It was Iron Maiden and Decrepify. And for people who haven't played the game, that doesn't mean anything. But if you've played the game, that's absurd. Usually you're trying to build up essence and stuff like that. But the reason this works is because if you use skills in a certain way, you don't have to have a basic skill to build essence at all. You can just curse everything.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah. And that's cool. That's pretty neat. There's also part of me that is pretty much living in the past because I'm like, I miss the old days of Diablo where you had only two possible skills at a time. But theoretically, you can have other things equipped to balance like different function keys. But it wasn't a great system.
00:41:47
Speaker
But now with like what they've done in three and four They've made it like hey, here's your bar of four things now. It's technically six But I don't know why there's just some part of my brain that is still I want it to be Difference, but I don't know what I want it to be. Uh-huh
00:42:08
Speaker
That's the problem with being a consumer though, right? Or a person playing games and not a game designer. And the traditional axiom is like, your players can tell you when something is wrong, but they won't be able to tell you when something is right. Like they might not, they might not be able to tell you the solution, but if they tell you that something's not working, you should probably listen to them. Don't listen to me on that. I don't really actually have a good idea on it, but yeah.
00:42:37
Speaker
Everything that you're describing, I do kind of wish was in the game to be fair. Um, because I'm a fucking genius. I've been saying this for years. Like I can't think of a good argument against rune words because rune words were basically the, the McDonald's monopoly game.
00:42:55
Speaker
It was the same thing. It was the fucking best, dude. It was the fucking best. Let's say you first started out playing the game and you're like, oh cool, I just have a rune. This kind of works like a gem where I can put it in some gear. It will give some bonus stats or something. Oh, I need an F for a fucking missile defense, which nobody used ever.
00:43:15
Speaker
And they're like, oh, this one is more slot more slots I can put in more runes cool and then you accidentally stumble upon or looked up in the the game guide a Specific combination of runes and it's like hey, you now have this magical power. You know, oh shit jaw if burr now I can teleport it was huge but it was also nice because a leaf is so fucking
00:43:38
Speaker
Anyway, before I go off the whole thing, it was a nice way through leveling where you didn't need to just have, oh, number do better type gear pickups where it felt like you kind of guide some of where your build was going into or at least help with the leveling. Yeah. Which was necessary too. Also, yes. But I liked that thematic part of it and also kind of the way they did sets.
00:44:08
Speaker
Where, granted, the likeliness of you getting a full set of anything, highly unlikely. But it felt cool to get another piece of a set and then see those bonuses come into play as you were leveling.
00:44:21
Speaker
Because again, for me, it's the power spike of like, oh, we big dick now. You get to do something new and cool and stomp on the enemies. And a lot of Diablo 4 doesn't seem to have that for me, because everything scales with your level. I'm like, OK, cool. Where's my power spike moment? Where do I get to fucking pop off?
00:44:44
Speaker
They're like, we'll think about it in a nightmare if you get an insanely good thing that just somehow exceeds the 45 degree angle XY graph we have going on here. I'm like, okay, let me know when that is, please. Yeah, we definitely can talk about the level scaling because it seems like it's the most popular
Level Scaling and World Design
00:45:07
Speaker
A really popular addition to RPGs recently. I shouldn't say recently. Skyrim came out literally 10 years ago. And Oblivion had level scaling before that. I know because I would beat it at level 4. And the final boss is not that strong if you're a super twinked out level 4 character.
00:45:28
Speaker
Um, but, uh, like, so the upside is content doesn't become irrelevant, right? If you were to go back and like run a lower level dungeon, there's no such thing as a lower level dungeon. It's always going to drop gear that would be applicable to your level. Um, it does remove sort of that ability to farm things that you could kill faster.
00:45:56
Speaker
I think, and that kind of sucks to lose. But pretty much whatever you kill in Diablo, it has a chance to drop a legendary, it feels like, and it has a chance to drop something that's relevant to your character right now, which is kind of an upside. That's basically the trade-off.
00:46:16
Speaker
I agree it doesn't feel good though. It does actively harm the power fantasy when every time you level up everything else seems to get stronger too. I do think that it kinda caps out when you hit max level because it doesn't scale the dungeons based off of your power.
00:46:33
Speaker
It's based off of like your level. And then once you're in the end game, the like nightmare dungeon tier, right? So you probably absolutely stomp your way through a nightmare tier one. Um, whereas I'm like, this is doable. Right. Um, but yeah, I don't know. There's pros and cons to it for sure.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah, I, I agree with what you're saying. Like because of how open this, like the way the game is laid out is giant open map. You can go anywhere. Certain stuff as you go through the campaign is like level, I shouldn't say gated, but like it's meant for a certain level of content. And if you're not there, you can't struggle for sure. There are minimum levels to certain areas.
00:47:21
Speaker
But after you beat the campaign, they want to encourage you to still go to places and check stuff out. They'll have these things called Helltide where it's for a period of time, you can fight special enemies and then use a currency that's specific to that for chess for certain unlocks, blah, blah, blah.
00:47:38
Speaker
Yeah. It would be weird if that happened in like a level one area and you walk up like at all the 50 and you're just like kicking stuff in the shin. Yeah. Right. Or if it's like, Hey, you really only get gear for level one stuff. You're like, okay, then why would I do that? Yeah. So it still encourages you to experience the content throughout the map. Um, but yeah, I just, I want to be above that X, Y line so hard.
00:48:06
Speaker
That's fair. I will say it's kind of funny, right? Because I could think of a justification for going back to a low level area, uh, kicking rock and issue in the shins and like grabbing all of the stuff in his pants. Um, if like the gear could be applicable to another character, but because this game also uses the modern concept of gear of drop shaping, right? So almost everything that drops is relevant to your class. And looking back historically, it's not, I said almost everything that drops.
00:48:36
Speaker
I got a lot of things for Druid when I was playing through on Necromancer. I feel like part of it was bugged and the other half of it I think were actual just unique quest rewards that were actually specific to Druid. Do you find that's not the case? Do you find gear that's not at all applicable to your character?
00:48:57
Speaker
Um, I didn't mentally note if it happened a lot, but I was talking to somebody else who also plays on another discord and they were saying that apparently there was an issue where the druid loot table was also blended with the barbarian loot table. And I was like, why the fuck would I ever want barbarian gear on my druid? Like it's actively like, Oh, I can put this on. I have to try and maybe roll another character or hopefully I have that character.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think right now the way it works when it's working as intended, I should say. So maybe some points off if it's not working that way. Almost everything that drops is applicable to your character. Because I will say it sucked when you were playing launch Diablo 3 before they actually changed that game to have loot shaping.
00:49:41
Speaker
Um, when you're like finally beat the big boss is you've been grinding for a legendary for a while or knowing the item economy in that game, it's actually just a high level rare because legendaries were kind of trash in Diablo three. Um, until they, they buffed them later. Um, and it drops and it's like, this would be, this will be excellent. You can like grab it immediately and roll a sorceress. Cause that's the class it dropped for. And then you're not that right. Um,
00:50:10
Speaker
It just it felt really bad. Even if the gear was good to be like, I don't play that. Right. You know, when you do somebody has a video on this, but when you do like these crazy in-depth side quests and like Elden Ring, you're helping somebody out. You've met them like five times across the continent. You feel like you know a lot of their backstory and then they give you like a faith weapon and you're like,
00:50:34
Speaker
Well, that's on that's inconvenient for me Like I'm gonna kill you with it and it's gonna take a while I'm gonna shoot you for two damage. You know, I'm mad So I'm a big fan of shaping too, I think they learned so many lessons from three Towards like that single-player experience
00:50:59
Speaker
Like you don't have to play every class and you're not going to feel bad for playing one.
00:51:07
Speaker
But, I mean, enough about the drops in gear and stuff like that.
Endgame and Online Features
00:51:11
Speaker
You started to talk about some of the in-game things, and I think it would be good to mention some of those. You mentioned Helltide, that was big. I know there's like the Whispering Tree, and there's the Nightmare Dungeons, which we already mentioned. There's PvP, which I don't think you should do. Thanks for clarifying what the Whispering Tree is.
00:51:30
Speaker
At some point in the game, if you encounter a tree, it'll be like, ah, end game, I'll give you rewards if you do stuff. So it'll put indicators across your map of, hey, if you do this dungeon, that's worth five points. And if you get up to 10 points, you can cash that in for a little loot box. So sometimes it'll be legendary, but you'll get a choice of three, and it'll specialize in, hey, helms, rings, boots, so what are you feeling? What are you looking for? It'll be randomized.
00:52:00
Speaker
If you're just kind of has for looking for content to do that'll give you an outlet There are side quests which are ass. Don't do the side quests. They're not interesting They don't give you good experience. They don't give you good drops. Do not do them
00:52:14
Speaker
Helltide is a period of stronger enemies, and you can find those specific chests to cash in on. Again, it would be randomized for like, hey, this will be for rings. You're like, oh, I don't want rings. I'll look for another chest. And they will show up on the map. There are secret ones as well that do not show up on the map.
00:52:33
Speaker
Apparently I found this out the other day from from dice who's telling me Apparently there's a map of where the secret ones are Thank you gamers for doing that Nightmare dungeons is probably the biggest thing for endgame content because that will Increasingly scale if I do a level 13 nightmare dungeon, it'll be like here's your positive bonus of You will have extra thorns and here are the other three things. We're giving the monster shit. Okay, I
00:52:59
Speaker
uh-huh and that will I think it's three times the dungeon level or something for the monsters levels
00:53:09
Speaker
But like that will progressively get harder and you can keep getting higher level keys. And then eventually you can get to world tier four. And those are even crazier. That's where a lot of your late game is as far as major scaling. There are world bosses as well. I don't think they're tied specifically to late game though. I think you can do them at any point if you have it. No, pretty sure they scale. Yeah.
00:53:35
Speaker
They like, they scale, but they're, I don't know if they nerfed them off the beta or not. I haven't fought in any of the world bosses since the beta, but like we were freaking struggling in the beta. It was, it was hard.
00:53:48
Speaker
Um, we actually had to instance hop a couple of times and they only spawned, I think Ashava is the same, only spawned like once per hour. And we're like, uh, let's leave here. Cause these people are looking a little bit weak and we're going to try to like disconnect and reconnect until we find a group that looks like they, a fully populated instance that might be able to do it. I'm sure it's better now. People were level capped for the beta. Um, so it was pretty rough.
00:54:17
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I mean, so I guess you, you listed out a lot of those in-game activities. I mean, compare, how would you compare that to the end game of some others in the series? Um, you also, uh, there's the Paragon board also, um, for progression. Um, how does it land, you know, as, uh, our esteemed Diablo aficionado in our gaming community? Um, they're over on the desk.
00:54:45
Speaker
I'll push my glasses up for you. Thank you. From now on, since you're always wearing glasses when we record, I'd be like, Jake, push up your glasses. I have something cool to say.
00:54:56
Speaker
I like the system better as far as Paragon because it's kind of like another little tree where you can kind of choose what you invest into and they feel a little more meaningful as far as what you're putting points into because you get like five of a given stat. Whereas in three, the Paragon system was like, you're already max level. What do you want? Like 0.002 attack speed on everybody? Fine. Sure. Fuck whatever.
00:55:21
Speaker
Also, for three, it was insane how they had the scaling and how you could level someone up to max level in an hour and then just have them give all these extra points and it felt so meaningless as far as progression. So I'd like this system much more in that regard. Diablo 2 didn't have anything.
00:55:44
Speaker
It's like, hey, do cow levels or something. Like there wasn't really a goal. I think it was almost always. It was hit the cliff, hit like get over the plateau to the next difficulty in Diablo two. Yeah, but like once you were in hell, it's like. Do you do hell cows? Do you do? I guess they added Ubers at a point for a chance to get like a torch. Diablo three had their
00:56:13
Speaker
It wasn't called a dungeon, it was called something else, but you'd essentially spin up a little generated instance. And I feel like you could add some modifiers on there, but again, they kind of seem to scale infinitely as far as what you could do.
00:56:31
Speaker
They were very, they were very akin to like nightmare dungeons in four, I think that was basically the carry over. They, they change rifts to be nightmare dungeons. But Diablo three is also very much about speed where you try and like fly through a rift and like, Oh my gosh. Yeah. If you did it in more than a minute, your build was bad, which that's not remotely an option in four. I don't believe.
00:56:57
Speaker
Uh-huh. I think both of those games. I don't think I've ever put enough time into a Diablo game to get there, but it's reminiscent of like watching high level Path of Exile players or like high level Diablo players. Everybody has like a teleport on the bar and their gameplay is they teleport half a screen away, basically to the edge of the screen.
00:57:19
Speaker
Hit their nuke button that blows up the entire screen. They teleport half the screen away. They hit their nuke button that blows up the entire screen. And I'm like, this isn't even a game anymore. Like, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah. It becomes like how efficiently you want to play for progression. Like I copied a build from a. A juices video where he was doing like a lightning Herald of lightning build. I was like, Oh, that seems cool as shit. Cause.
00:57:50
Speaker
If you remember when we were talking about what drew was like the passive, like your lighting would strike something every so often. But imagine it wasn't every 12 seconds. It was if somebody was, they had a debuff, a lightning debuff. Your thing was popping off. So you'd shoot some lightning at some people, then you'd just fucking book it, and then things are exploding around you. And it was very cathartic for me.
00:58:15
Speaker
Yeah, I liked having that tear of like, hey, the build's fucking popped off that hard. Mm hmm. For sure. Again, power fantasy. Yeah, it's it's nice. It's it's I love it when a build comes together to quote quote somebody else. It's cool, Bob. Yeah, Bob. I'm imagining Bob the Builder with like sinister undertones here and he's just like a mob boss or something.
00:58:46
Speaker
Bob Bob, there you go. I don't want to spend a ton of time running through all these points. There's a couple things I want to call out as pros and cons so far. Always online, I think, has overall. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I guess I would have been playing on battle.net anyways. So, you know, I don't have a strong opinion there.
00:59:14
Speaker
Like it's just where we're at. It just doesn't make sense. It's like, why do you do this? Like, well, we want to sell you stuff. And you're like, okay. But yeah, I guess we turn that into a question to throw that into your court for a second. Like, how do you feel? Because the difference for this one is in every single previous Diablo game to this.
00:59:34
Speaker
Um, unless you just had like an open lobby where people could just join in randomly, like you were relatively unmolested within your own world. And this one is like, it's basically an MMO. You can run across people wherever. How do you feel about that? Does it do anything for you?
00:59:54
Speaker
Oh, oh, it does something for me. Good, bad, and different. I mean, so typically with people, if you like load into an area, you might have a little bit of latency from everybody's assets saying this stream, but sorry, sorry.
01:00:13
Speaker
Fucking I never mentioned the worst but if you go to do like oh, here's like a little I want to call it a public event But I guess it kind of is or it's like hey they are. Yeah It's nice if you have other people who are also there to like help you kill stuff Maybe you do something in a timer maybe a little bit below what your damage should be and they can help you clear it That feels nice
01:00:35
Speaker
Obviously, world bosses would not really be possible without having other people in the world. Things like Helltide or the Legion events where it's just like, hey, we're going to spawn a whole bunch of people. My build can't fuck. It literally can't do that. I very much appreciate having other people in your body to cover my weaknesses.
01:00:57
Speaker
And then everybody emotes before, like, hello. And they're like, goodbye. Yes, yeah. It's very like, people don't type so much.
01:01:06
Speaker
I like the emotes. The emotes are the right level of commitment, I think. I'm a fan of the online aspect for similar reasons. Sometimes there's an event where I'm just like, ah, and then someone else just has a really optimized building. I can just backseat this. I'll just let the skeletons do their things before I sacrifice them all for crit chance. Or if you show up at the event right before Dan's like,
01:01:29
Speaker
Hey guys, what did I miss? Oh, thanks. And then. Again, another improvement. Uh, instance loot. Very nice. That one's good. Uh, fan of that. Don't have to fight or need greed over things, but you can still share that. Except in the PVP area. Yes. In the PVP area.
01:01:52
Speaker
The currency there is all, it's not instanced. So people will be left clicking like a motherfucker out there. Jake and I weirdly went into a PVP area as a team. And he didn't really fight each other for it. Well, Dave got kills and things, so occasionally I would get some drops. But man, my build made no sense for PVP. I think Dave asked me, do you have any way to deal damage to him? And I was like, if they stand in the dot, then yes.
01:02:18
Speaker
But otherwise, I think I was just feeding the rogues and barbarians. They would just appear out of nowhere in the rogues case or charge out of nowhere as the barbarian. But yeah, it was fun. The other thing I wanted to rapid fire was the class diversity in this one, top notch. Generally spellcasting in the previous games, it's like you're a spellcaster.
01:02:42
Speaker
Three gave you like a little bit more diversity if you were specifically like a sorcerer because they had some Special archon abilities and crap like that, but for the most part it was always just your ultimate That's the thing that really diversified you as a caster and this one every single class has their their mechanic Which I think is great it literally feels different like it feels Playing a different class feels like playing a different game moment to moment, which is crazy
01:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, I do like how diverse that is. I made a rogue for the second beta and it was too engaging. I was like, this was made for people who want to be like mashing all the buttons on their keyboard in a specific order very rapidly. And then I played rogue. It turns out I do not.
01:03:33
Speaker
I was like, I was not good at this in Final Fantasy XIV when I had to hit all the buttons in the right order at the right times. I'm not good at it now. But it was it was fun and took way more effort to accomplish the same things other classes could do with just like punch face, punch face button.
01:03:53
Speaker
And let's see, any other quick rapid fire hot takes you have for the game? Oh, so many. I'm trying to look at these. Do you kids like Diablo 2? Hey, do you remember Diablo 2? Diablo 2! We fucking get it. Oh, yes. Yeah. I have a note in here. It says, you cannot pet the Mephisto. Zero out of 10. There's no Diablo in the game. Zero out of 10.
01:04:22
Speaker
I think we should justify that though because when you're saying like do you like Diablo 2 it's Diablo 2 it's because like there was so much blowback for Diablo 3 like and they're like this is just a bright MMO type game this is not Diablo at all where's the where's the gothic horror where's the blood
01:04:40
Speaker
People were literally saying that back then. I get that. But I feel like they took too much from Diablo 2. Literally like, hey, do you remember this exact character? Hey, do you remember this exact boss? Hey, do you remember this exact? And I'm like, dude, I get it. Like, it was cool if they would have done one or two. But they're like, hey, Mephisto's a dog now. I'm like, I don't know what he has to do with anything. They threw Duriel in, which I'm like, there's a lot of maggots around. That kind of makes sense.
01:05:09
Speaker
I would have loved that they just had Andariel as like a little thing, a little homage. That's it.
01:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, I do think. Yes, at a point, even I realized it was pandering, right? That's the only word for it, I think, is they were pandering for that nostalgia. I don't know if I can hold it against them, though, right? It was pretty much a blizzard. Yeah, you can. You absolutely can. But I mean, like, the game wasn't worse for the pandering, I think.
01:05:43
Speaker
No, it didn't ruin the story. But I also wasn't super invested in it. And we didn't talk much about the story. We just had some rapid-fire spoilers in the last minute. We'll probably do full spoilers. But I think that's fine. The game's been out for a month. Also, to its credit, of the stories, this has been the best one so far.
01:06:09
Speaker
Yes. I like the theming of Diablo II. Again, nostalgia, all that jazz. But it didn't really have a story. Diablo III couldn't tell you anything about it. Diablo IV, I could at least tell you what happened. And I thought Lilith was an interesting character. Lilith is the most. The cutscenes were choice as hell. Interesting things were happening. It's just the side characters who were like, I think we should be doing this. I don't care if you lived or died type thing.
01:06:37
Speaker
I legitimately, when I was going through the story, Lilith is both, they manage, she does enough evil things that she's irredeemable, right? She's very much side of hell. But her character, she's kind of hot. She's at least horny.
01:06:56
Speaker
That's because she has horns in her head. But it's also like some of the things that she does, she literally is, until the end of the game, like, you could justify everything she's doing as being heartless, careless, maybe she doesn't care about the underlings and things, but ultimately for Sanctuary.
01:07:20
Speaker
and the fact that they never betray that she never has a villain like mustache twist at the end of the game where it's like okay it was all for power the whole time just kidding like haha like evil cape unfurl it was maleficent or whatever the whole time she doesn't do that and so up until the very end of the game you're like this might actually still be bad for sanctuary right like maybe we're containing hell but
01:07:45
Speaker
you know, angels might come down and screw us over at some point, or what if they could fight the demons, what would happen? There's lore implications to Lola's place in the game, and I freaking love that. I was actually disappointed that at the final segment, when she's putting you through like your mind prison, that you can't actually side with her. Because I was like, I kind of, I would have with my necromancer at least.
01:08:07
Speaker
Because like as a very brief as like I know I keep pushing is over and then you push this over then I push this over Sometimes yes, we've put some time in the game but with Mephisto as a I don't know what his role like he helps you out with some things He's like he's gonna help you out because I don't want to get marked by Lilith who is my daughter currently? Yeah
01:08:34
Speaker
And he's like, oh, I'm also a bad guy. So we'll need to be enemies at some point. But like right now we can be friends, right? Work towards the common evil, which is Lilith. I'm like, fuck you, dude. Yeah. Why would you work with him? There was no motivation given to me other than like, well, I mean, Lilith's not good. I'm like, true.
01:08:54
Speaker
You know what's funny about that though, thinking about Mephisto's motivations, I think the character motivations are just better in this game. That's one of the things I love about it. Like one of the characters you run across is just like, he's just been drunk until you show up because he just didn't have the means to actually do what he needed to do to fight back against darkness. And then you show up and you're like, by the way, I'm basically a god, I'm the protagonist. He's like, okay, I guess I'll sober up.
01:09:20
Speaker
But like all of the time like Mephisto helps you a ton actually in the campaign particularly towards the end against Lilith You just like betray him in a cut soon It's it's It's kind of it's kind of crazy. I wish the game had some choices which is not like something I expected to say for a Diablo game, right
Storytelling and Economics
01:09:50
Speaker
Which I think is good for this one. It would be nice. Yeah. Just because like your character is so fucking flat and bland. They are. Yeah. I will do good things. Uh huh. Okay. At least at least give me like the voice of the paladin from Diablo 2 while you say it and maybe I'll believe you know.
01:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely noticed that specifically for necromancer. I'm like literally walking from town to town with like my army of corpses that I've taken from other people that belong to me now. That's the necromancer thing. And I'm just like, yeah, I mean, I'm really just here for the people and I'll do whatever I can to help out and hurting people is wrong and go to church on Sundays. Don't do drugs. Um,
01:10:39
Speaker
And he's like so adamant about not joining Lilith and I'm like, it's kind of, I don't know, consider it, you know, just weigh your options, you know?
01:10:50
Speaker
But yeah, overall, I was, I agree. I was a lot more invested in the story to this one. Um, whereas the story to three, I think you could just throw into like a paragraph because people were so one dimensional. They're just like evil, evil plus deceit or good. Those are the three factions of the entire game. Um, yeah. So.
01:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Overall, I think it's a pretty good game. Don't spend any money on the shop. We didn't talk about that, but, you know, just to keep the balance on your eternal soul. If you do buy Diablo, don't spend money on the shop. Usually we say we leave that up to the individual and your own purchasing decisions. But I think we can just, you know, agree that it's wrong to do so here. So.
01:11:43
Speaker
Um, and I'm, I'm split on the season pass because they're going to be doing that thing. And I don't know. I got, I got like Paper Mario to play and stuff. I don't know. He's been saying that for a long time. Sounds like my dad couldn't offer smokes. Um, your dad's gonna play some paper Mario.
01:12:06
Speaker
Thousand year rule. That's fair. That's fair. But I'm curious to see more about the season. Pat, like if it is just like, Hey, here's like a fun seasonal thing you can kind of opt into. Yeah. Cool.
01:12:18
Speaker
Um, people want to do ladders for their own progression sake. Cool. I just don't want them to start adding in like, Hey, you got to get the season. You didn't do season three. Then you can never get this cool armored thing. You didn't participate. You got to pay money to do this thing. You got to pay money each season. Like, yeah. Um, I'm so fucking over destiny. Like I will play some group content with people if they want. I might do a dungeon.
01:12:44
Speaker
to get that one helm and I can quit permanently but like it's just I'm so tired of that model and I actively hate that like they don't make it good and fun and engaging and there's like there's asking me for money in different ways and I'm like please stop I'm so tired
01:13:02
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we've talked probably too much about season passes, so I don't want to spend too much on it, but generally my take is I'll probably do like one season pass for one game at a time. For whichever one I'm actually playing, but like you, I don't want to feel like I'm playing catch up for everybody else who's been dumping money into the game. And I don't want to, it's actually more.
01:13:29
Speaker
But my FOMO, my fear of missing out, a valid response there is actually fight or flight, right? It's either stay and pay or leave and flee. And leave and flee is actually a very valid option if games start asking you to spend a lot of money. It's like, oh, they have a bunch of cool stuff that you can't get unless you pay for it right now or you finish the battle pass. If you quit the game,
01:13:55
Speaker
That cosmetic does not matter. Right. Like so I think that's going to be the battle state and payer leaving flea. So I'm going to coin that right now, but it's yours. Thank you. Any other final thoughts, words of wisdom for those brave adventurers, the Nephilim out in sanctuary fighting the forces of evil and maybe the Angelic hosts and Diablo five who used to say.
01:14:25
Speaker
I mean, I could make a very wordy parallel to fighting a demon in your own life, but no, get the hell out of here. Okay. That was good. That was your pun. Now go. If you have better outros for us, suggestions for outros, you can send those in to soapstonepodcastatgmail.com, or you can join the hallowed hosts at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Goodbye.