Diablo 4 [PS4, PS5, XO, XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

I'm quite sure Activision will require this to become a "live service" with a monetization model. By the time it's released in 2-3 years, fans will have been gradually groomed out of their outage.
 
Various modern temporal reconstruction methods can fall apart with transparencies/translucents (since the data is probably dealt with via pixel motion vectors/velocity and such). idTech has TSSAA 8x, which I presume means that they're using 8 frames worth of information - you can see the trails easily with the holograms - but it generally works with Doom because A) the game is dark, B) the environment lends itself to opaque objects (no foliage). The trails are somewhat noticeable when the hell knight leaps at certain angles relative to your screen.

I kinda wonder how idtech go about it really. There's a greater chance of the oldest frames being pointless to blending with the current frame, but they could similarly treat it like a smart object motion blur where the oldest info is more transparent (this can be seen when waving your weapon in front of a hologram in Doom).


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If anything it makes for faster bullshots if they had a better photomode. :p (what kills photomode for me usually is poor gamepad controls & imprecise sliders - Shadow of the Tomb Raider & Arkham Knight are kinda not... great. Functional, but somewhat rigid. Forza is mostly great on there. Even DOA5 has some nice things about the camera controls. ) I digress....


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"Trimetric projection" is a new one to me... any material related to rendering on it?
 
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Yeah, nothing like PoE.

PoE is basically more of a successor to Diablo 2 than D3 ever was WRT game systems.
Quite! I had actually started playing a few years ago on PC, but I think I was spoiled by the gamepad controls of Diablo 3, so I kinda didn't have an interest in incessant clicking (enough Clicker Heroes) just to move. The console version (c. 2017) got me interested again because of how similar it was to DII, but the inventory management was a bit of a pain (still is). Seems like they're still doing some good updates to the game, so I might pick it up again (and further exacerbate that gaming backlog). Performance now seems better than I recall on base console. Anyways.

So, it's still based around a hub for each Act. The hubs are the only place you can randomly run into other players.

Diablo 4 is planning to have an open world with world bosses where you can randomly run into other players. And then you'll also have instanced dungeons like previous Diablo games or PoE.

Ah k. That seems like a good thing to have. So maybe something like Guild Wars 2 with the boss events. I enjoyed GW2 as a solo experience with sprinkled interaction with other players. :oops:

I have to say, after playing some more PoE, I definitely like it significantly more than D3. As I mentioned above it's more D2 like with your skills and your skill build being more important than your gear.

D3 is more about the gear, and then picking skills that synergize with your gear.

D2 and PoE is more about your skill builds and then picking gear that works well with your build. Some builds in PoE that can do all seasonal content at the highest levels don't even require special gear.

Yeah, it took me a little while to understand the PoE sockets and abilities in place of traditional skills/abilities. The main thing I like is the flexibility. The skill tree was originally a huge wtf-daunting thing, but I see it's more about improving your base stats in certain ways (the socketing thing there is neat too).
 
I'm quite sure Activision will require this to become a "live service" with a monetization model. By the time it's released in 2-3 years, fans will have been gradually groomed out of their outage.

Lots of time to focus-group the game to death and make sure it has the features "Gamers" want, like occult symbols ...
 
For D3 you don't need to click to move you can map a key to move forward and just steer with the mouse.
 
Temporal reconstruction of 8-16 frames would break down pretty hard if there is any significant movement of either objects or even worse, the camera.
Only I don't see why would it break if you aim for D2's look and fix framerate ( multiplied ) , except the offline prerendering is swapped for rendering over time, so time of day could be even rendered on a tile basis asynchronously? As I said there is lag on camera movements not blur.
 
Only I don't see why would it break if you aim for D2's look and fix framerate ( multiplied ) , except the offline prerendering is swapped for rendering over time, so time of day could be even rendered on a tile basis asynchronously? As I said there is lag on camera movements not blur.

The entire screen is basically constantly moving and then you have all the entities moving within the scene. There are so many ways in which things would break down at lower framerates.

It'd be like you were smearing the landscape and entities around the screen every time you moved the camera position.

Regards,
SB
 
Seems to be multiple years away.

From the D4 panel in Blizzcon: "We are not coming anytime soon, not even Blizzard soon"

Yeah, there's a lot of speculation that the only reason that Blizzard released any information on the game was to try to divert attention from their actions in relation to firing an employee due to comments made in relation to the situation going on in Hong Kong. And how they are trying to shut down any comments related to that. Going so far as to cancel some tournaments and live broadcasts so that there wouldn't be any chance someone might say something that wasn't flattering to China.

Can't risk pissing off China. There's word that the person was fired because someone in a position of power in China contacted Blizzard about the comments that were made.

Regards,
SB
 
I'm sure some of the reason was also due to the Diablo mobile game announced last Blizzcon and the reception from that.
 
With trimetric not really, because, there's no varying depth, no FOV to speak of in ordinary terms, just angle and zoom... Isn't it a bit of a stretch saying todays PC-s cannot prerender D2 quality sprites / "impostors" or tiles without loading screens?
 
"Trimetric projection" is a new one to me... any material related to rendering on it?

In general you can approach it within any game or even google earth (needs "KML file" ) by setting as low as possible FOV and zoom out . But latter exposes LOD limitations or in most cases, non-implementation of LOD so it won't work well. It's quite preferable for city building games or tactical gameplay because you can judge distances better. As far I can tell there's quite nice tradeoff between lag on camera vs. temporal reconstruction over x frames.
 
I'm quite sure Activision will require this to become a "live service" with a monetization model. By the time it's released in 2-3 years, fans will have been gradually groomed out of their outage.

Maybe. I'm not so sure though. Why would they do everything they can to cater to the original Diablo crowd right now if the real intent was to include predatory business models later and quite possibly piss away all of that initial goodwill.
 
Maybe. I'm not so sure though. Why would they do everything they can to cater to the original Diablo crowd right now if the real intent was to include predatory business models later and quite possibly piss away all of that initial goodwill.
Because that's what these big publishers do. The only good will they really care about in the end is to investors as their only real goal is to keep increasing profits year over year. It's not Blizzard anymore, Activision is not letting them ride on their old business practices anymore. The old guard are all gone.

Diablo 3 was meant to be a profit driver with the auction house but that was removed soon after release since it ruined the entire experience of Diablo. It started off in the game though. That left no ongoing income source for the game at all. There's no way they're going to let that happen again and they're letting everyone know from the start that it's an online-only game with player trading, mounts and pvp areas. You don't announce those kinds of features purely as something to excite players, they're going to be income drivers. Player trading alone opens up a whole Pandora's Box of monetization and pay-to-win scenarios (sorry, I mean "time-savers" and "convenience items").

The direction they're taking from the small amount they've shown is definitely big for the Diablo fans, it looks fantastic. And that will be used to keep a lot of fans interested over the next couple of years, building up the anticipation for them. Eventually once it comes to release, for most fans the desire to play the game will be much greater than any perceived distaste against the monetization.
 
That left no ongoing income source for the game at all. There's no way they're going to let that happen again...
Which is pretty monstrous if so, because D3 is the 10th best-selling video game of all time, maybe even better. 30 million in 2015 - I reckon it's shifted a lot more units since. If selling 30 million units isn't considered a good money-maker, the gaming industry is frickin' doomed.
 
If selling 30 million units isn't considered a good money-maker, the gaming industry is frickin' doomed.
And how many investor calls from these publishers have resulting in some top-selling game "not meeting expectations" despite them selling tens of millions of copies in a short period? For these ongoing franchises like CoD, if Activision doesn't sell a lot more copies than the previous high-mark for the series then it's performed badly.

It's not always about simply making a profit on a game either, it's about opportunities to make a lot more profit. Far more than necessary to cover costs of making the previous version and funding development of the next iteration. EA FIFA makes 500-800m per year from loot boxes, how much do you think it costs for the FIFA license and to keep spewing out the same game every year with some slight improvements and the same bugs?
 
Which is pretty monstrous if so, because D3 is the 10th best-selling video game of all time, maybe even better. 30 million in 2015 - I reckon it's shifted a lot more units since. If selling 30 million units isn't considered a good money-maker, the gaming industry is frickin' doomed.

It's not considered a good money-maker if the developer promised its publisher and/or investors around $1B in profits throughout a period of 5 years for that game and then it needs to revise it down to only $100M (made up numbers).

We shouldn't assume only investors and publishers are at fault here. Dev house heads are getting onboard, too.
Amy Hennig and Visceral's heads refused to do that for EA, but DICE did that pact with the devil promise for Battlefront 2.


Blizzard went for a full price + GAAS attempt back in 2012, and now they're unapologetically back at it again. I doubt anyone is pointing a gun at the studio heads to promise this.
 
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