Oh it’s clearly going to be absolutely huge. That doesn’t mean we agree with all of their decisions however.
You kind of described the Diablo 2 skill trees there.
And I agree, that’s much better. The D4 is not organized well. It’s organized by what level you are, instead of organized by skill theme, etc.
I heard a rumor that a dev said that by the end-game respec costs will be so high that it would be easier to roll up a new character.
I sincerely hope that rumor is wrong.
Organized by purpose would be better yes but the real problem is it doesn’t fit on the screen and is unwieldy to use.
Can you find an attribution for that? At first glance, that sounds horrible.
Well, I guess it’s over. It didn’t kick me out, but I can’t reach the next area and if I try to fast travel anywhere it just puts me back where I was.
This would be very bad, because one of the fun things about the game this weekend was making weird builds.
And the thing is, builds at low level aren’t viable at high level, so it seems like you will NEED to be able to respec, otherwise you’d be playing through a ton of levels with skills that don’t synergize, just in preparation for having the later skills that make them work.
Plus, there were builds that only worked after you had a random drop that synergized with things.
If respec costs are that high, it would lead me to immediately stop playing Diablo 4 after finishing the campaign. No endgame grinding, I’ll be done with the game.
I don’t want to start a new character every season. I understand lots of people enjoy it, but I have zero interest.
My understanding is that there is an escalating gold cost per point of respec. In addition, as you go up in level, a complete respec will involve more points being reallocated. If the cost per point basically scales with expected character income, then respecing some points should never be an issue but a complete respec would be increasingly daunting.
I mean, that’s how the game appears to be designed despite whether the respec costs are high or not. Everyone’s characters and progress get wiped every season right, or am I misunderstanding? I’ve never played a game with seasons before.
No, the usual way it works is nonseasonal characters will simply continue. If you create a new one in the season it’ll be in there, then when the season ends it moves to be nonseasonal.
“High cost for a full respec at launch” is one thing; that would probably be fine, given mudflation gold will be hilariously inflated in a couple of months anyway. There’s a big difference between that and “we’ve made it so expensive you won’t want to do it”. That would simply make me hang up my hat. I have no interest in playing any class from level 1 more than once, ever.
Based on what we saw this weekend though, I just can’t believe they’d be moving in the direction of discouraging respecs. They seem to have worked hard to make a game with a huge amount of build variety, that they want to let people play with.
Moreover, tightly constraining respecs smells like the old, player-unfriendly Blizzard. The player’s adversary. Do they actually want that? It would sure be a shame, but I’ll play the campaign regardless, so they got my seventy bucks.
We didn’t even see all of that, the western third was unreachable. If you try to run there it pops up a message and teleports you back east.
Is that the entire game world?
No, Sanctuary has multiple continents. It’s either everything in the release version of D4 or all of act 1. From what I can tell, it’s the north-east corner of the Dreadlands.
I say only act 1 because prerelease materials talk about other regions like Kehjistan too. If so, and they’re all similar sizes and gameplay densities, it’s a downright gigantic game. Like Skyrim big.
The Dry Steppes are right there on the map. Maybe they didn’t follow it too closely.
Oh do they say act 1 is in the dry steppes? Didn’t seem very dry to me, although there was rather a lot of walking.
You couldnt get to the dry steppes. thats where the next bit with Lothan is.