The game is a heart breaking disappointment and a flagship example of enshitification. But the product managers delivered an amazing hack job. They retooled an existing engine, reskinned it tweaked some colors, and added item rolls and launched very quickly after the immortal failure.
The game delivered because the base design was functional, most of the failures came from the new loot system storing cache between players, not being able to scale mob size, lack of qa, lack of added art. All of which can be explained by the rushed time line. But the game sold ungodly amount of copies, just because of the name. Minimal investment and massive payout means it was a business success, although the players are still pissed that the original game designer had no idea what was fun. After the bad press activation did they try clean house but the damage was done.
Gonna need sources. I'm not a D4 apologist. It bored the hell out of me. I got about 50+ hours in and I stopped because I kept falling asleep near the end.
But to say it lacked qa and art, and was rushed?
It's an artistically gorgeous game. The details are amazing. It has a high level of polish. Not a single bug.
"Product managers retooled an existing engine and reskinned it and..."
Jesus fuckin christ dude, stop making things up. As an actual developer, I can with confidence say what you just wrote is complete and absolute bullshit and you either made it up or are parroting something someone else said.
The game lacked everything. I got it for free using points and was immediately bored and disgusted with its mtx. The story was not good, graphics were eh, and the gameplay was nothing new.
Diablo 4 sucked. It really did. I wanted my money back. Diablo 3 I replayed for years, lots of fun. But 4 just seemed like a grind with no real after win bonus play at all. It was a slosh to get through even once. And once done I didn't want to try it again from scratch with a new character.
It got a 6.1 metacritic user review, more negative than neutral, but its steam score is very positive with 70:20 split. Looks like most of the negative reviews were around launch time? It is a Tencent game, which is problematic, but it was also very controversial for bugs including duping items, and actually it looks like they're still in the middle of those controversies as discussions about the state of the game are actively being removed from various websites...
There were a lot of server problems at launch, but apart from that the game is REALLY good, even for people like me who spent 600hours on PoE.
I bought Last Epoch during Early Access and they have done so much good work, it's very impressive. The devs are very reactive to feedback, and when streamers said the game was bad in very early access, they listened to the complaints and made it better. Zizaran said they had the best reaction towards negative feedback.
I havent heard about the duping items things, and it is less owned by tencent than PoE is.
I liked last epoch. Got about 40 hours in with two playthroughs. Necromancer is just a blender of death, and old wizard man drops meteors on everything.
The end game is a little tepid and there's no ng+, so I'm done with it for now, but I feel like I got my money's worth.
PoE2 has been postponed for 5 years. It's the classic example of feature creep.
Will it be amazing when it comes out? Maybe.
You know what would have been amazing, having all those new animations and models for the past 5 years. It could have been an iterative work, nobody asked them to do it all in one go.