Diablo

Consistently defeating the Dark Souls boss requires skill. You have to learn how to beat it. The improvement comes from within yourself, and your ability to recognize what you are doing wrong. Knowing how to beat a boss is like a puzzle or a skill, even if it's a trivial skill less useful than a party trick. You have to analyze the boss, form a strategy, and adjust your strategy until you reach the desired outcome.

Diablo progression is just beating a pinata until it pops. You do the same thing over and over again until you get the outcome you want. It's about as intellectually engaging as cookie clicker.

I don't understand how people can praise the game design of Dark Souls and then say that Elden Ring is better. Elden Ring is the trashy mass appeal cousin.

* Most major bosses are gimmicky

* The open world encourages running past everything across pretty but boring fields and eschewing interesting level design

* The platforming is goofy and bad and relies heavily on awkwardly not dying as you fall vague heights

* There's a huge amount of tedious content. And you're highly likely to encounter enemies that are genuinely too strong for your character that just kind of shits on you for exploring the wrong way; or likewise content that you arrive at and are disappointed to find it's pointlessly easy.

The game was still good but it would have been much better if they cut out 3/4 of the mini dungeons, chopped the map area in half, and put more love and effort into the legacy dungeons.

The latest updated tried to address this somewhat.

> Level scaling inside dungeons and most overworld territories has been adjusted in World Tiers III and IV. Monsters will begin to trail behind the player in Level after a certain point (up to a maximum of 5 Levels behind). This change does not affect World Bosses, Legion Events, Fields of Hatred, Helltide, or Nightmare Dungeons.

Due to the nature of level scaling, if you're 5 levels over an enemy you basically vaporize them. There is still level variance among the world zones as well. So with the combination of the two, you should always be able to find someplace a bit more challenging and when you're higher level you can find areas with lots of enemies lower than you. I haven't played enough post-patch to know if it's made the experience any better, but I'm not the type of Diablo player to seek out areas with weaker enemies.

What Blizzard wanted to avoid is having 4/5ths of the map no longer relevant because you're so far above the area level that you no longer get usable XP, loot or gold. In D3 there wasn't much to do at the high end other than run rifts. In D4 the entire world is a viable place to spend time during the late game.

> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions.

Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons and what builds are necessary to push to the true "end game". Diablo, the campaign, is and has always been trivially easy. Super high levels of these dungeons stack up so many resistance penalties and the level difference adds so much damage reduction (for enemies) and increase (for you) that it becomes much more of a skill based game. This is what I play these games for. Not the campaign that you can sleep through.

For my wife, the game ends when we kill the big baddie together on normal difficulties. For me that's when the content just starts getting interesting. There is a lot of grinding involved, but you're having to pay so much more attention to what abilities / upgrades / paragon selections you make none of which are important at all for the main campaign.

I caused physical damage to my hand with Diablo 1 and all the incessant clicking (vs the "hold to attack and keep attacking" mechanic in D2 and D3).

I had some good times in D2, played it pretty deeply until I got to the Physical Immunes. That's when I gave up because I didn't want to have to level up, regear, and respec a new character.

I played D3 when it first came out, the Real Money Auction House destroyed that game as it became a game of "gold", not gear. The "world wide" loot table just wrecked it. When you have a 1 in 10M chance of getting the right weapon drop, that's only "1 in 10" across a million players, but it's still 1 in 10M for you. You also had to become knowledgeable about not just your own class and gear, but every other class and gear so your Barbarian doesn't salvage some random Staff that may have been one of those 1 in 10M drops for a Sorcerer, and thus worth a heap of currency.

D3 rewards time invested, especially later on. It rewards skill to a point, but in the end, it's determination to grind long enough to get enough gear and to get the right level to clear the content. You watch videos of someone clearing high level content, and it's almost always the same map they're clearing as some maps are outright impossible to succeed on compared to others. When it's all boiled down, it makes the end game pretty moot.

That said, I like the dynamic playstyle of D3. An "ok" geared Demon Hunter is a cat on fire through the levels, obliterating everything and everyone, and it's just flat giggly fun. And I liked the story of D3, it was a great story.