Many of Diablo 4's design decisions exist in direct conversation with that part of the fanbaseor in fear of them. 2023's Sanctuary is more dark, hopeless, and horrific than it's ever been before D2R ladder items, a desaturated, muddy world of miserable peasants and death. As if to say, "You can't call this one Diablo: Rainbow Edition, eh?".
Similarly the combat is slower and more restrained, much of that hand-holding around character-building has been removed, and the classes are all Diablo classics. On the face of it, they're sensible changesbut they're made purely in reaction to Diablo 3, not out of any progressive vision for the genre. Either unable or afraid to innovate in the action-RPG space, the game can only be a remix of its predecessor.
Without any new ideas, the slower combat does just feel like Diablo 3's fights dialled down a few notches. Without a confident sense of the setting's identity, much of the grimdark world just feels like a miserable filter over places we've already been, randomly populated with enemies we've already fought a million times.
Character building doesn't have training wheels, but the underlying skill system underneath isn't any more flexible than Diablo 3's, it just asks you to work a bit harder to find cheap d2r items its pre-assembled correct combinations.
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