This will seem like a weird comparison, but functionally it’s the 2 big hitters in the ARPG space. The deeper I get into PoE2 the more dramatic the differences between Diablo 4.

The design concepts are really the big deal here, in the macro and micro space.

• Importantly, Diablo 4 has an overworld that is interspersed with timed events (Helltides), PoE2 doesn’t have anything like that as everything is instanced. Helltides are about the closest thing D4 has to PoE2 in construct, which is wild when you think about it.
• Diablo 4 has its end game activities wrapped up in War Plans, a meta progression that covers all end-game activities
  • Tree of Whispers: Meta achievements for loot boxes
  • Dungeons: A large pool of maps with bosses
  • Lair Bosses: Harder enemies with targeted loot
  • Infernal Hordes: Wave based single arenas
  • Undercity: Time-based dungeons with the ability to target types of loot
  • The Pit: Time-based dungeons meant to progress skill gems
• PoE2 has the end-game wrapped up in maps, which are procedurally generated and have one or more of the following events within:
  • Towers: A massive meta progression tree that modifies all other map conditions for better loot and harder difficulty
  • Breach: An expanding circle of enemy spawns that also gives currency for crafting rings/amulets
  • Rituals: Small arena-based events that give access to crating materials + uniques
  • Delirium: Map-based timed runs that increase difficulty over the run and duplicate bosses
  • Vaal: From the last league, a rogue-like dungeon creator.
  • Abyss: Chained enemy spawns that provide piles of loot and access to a cavern with more loot
  • Expeditions: Use explosives to uncover loot boxes or rune events
  • Exiles: Player-like enemies with loot drops based on their class
  • Summoning Circles: Summon bosses
  • Strongboxes: Kill enemies to open a chest
  • Runes: Wave-based events that provide runes + crafting mats
  • Summons: Unfreeze enemy groups.
  • Wisps: Follow them around and they will eventually upgrade an enemy to a harder version
  • Trials: Small rogue-like events that add difficulty markers during progression. Die and restart if you have the rare currency to do so. (Concepts are sound, but the execution is atrocious. These are worse than Infernal Hordes in nearly every conceivable way.)

Diablo 4 has a mechanic where each specific event cannot overlap with another. It is not possible to have Lair Bosses show up in the Pit, for example. If you want to do an activity, you are only doing that activity. This is why Helltides are my favorite content as the random events add some variety. Dungeons are not fun as they all play near identical – rush to the end and kill the boss. Infernal Hordes are likely the worst as they are time-based and unless the RNG gods are on your side, provide next to no loot.

PoE2 is way different. Every map contains 1 or more of any given event. Sometimes all of them (except trials). The meta progression changes some of the mechanics so that they can overlap in even more interesting ways. I’ve had multiple maps where I had bosses on the map, with a pair of Exiles, tripped a Breach and had an Abyss fight at the same time. There’s something to be said about the pure chaos of having 5+ mechanics all going at the same time, surviving it, and then being showered, absolutely showered, with loot drops. And that’s just a random map! The planned events alter some component of the map for pinnacle bosses (think ultra hard bosses). Rituals are something else, where you progress through 5 maps and the boss of each map follows you to the next one. The last boss fight has you fighting at least 5 versions.

It’s like the difference between going to Dairy Queen and then going to a real Ice Cream bar. DQ gives you a limited set of pretty decent options. Hard to get confused there. An Ice Cream bar has hundreds of permutations and options for you, and no two orders are the same.

The net effect is that every PoE2 map has something different to offer, and that something is going to reward you in some fashion. This design principle for end-game activity is focused on always providing more things to do rather than limiting your choice. The main challenge (and 0.5 does a great job of addressing this) is that having too much is about as appealing as having none. You need some guardrails of sorts to get kick started, learn the systems, and then choose to tailor what you want from it.

Which is going to be the last meaningful patch for Factorio, ending a 10 year dev cycle. And well, hundreds of thousands of engineer (player) hours. 2.1 is going to bring a lot of QoL bits but no actual content… fine, there are seemingly infinite mods for that!

Most of the design concepts of Vanilla were thrown out with Space Age, as production chains dramatically changed and ‘free’ material was the new foundation. No longer did you need to mine iron patches, you simply used free molten lava and had infinite amounts. The mechanical transport mechanisms of vanilla were sort of cut and pasted to the space versions, specifically relating to rockets.

Trains used to be required on Nauvis, not a little required, like a LOT required. They generally operated on a single concept of maximum efficiency of moving 1 type of material from one place to another. Need another type of material? Build another train. The investment cost of trains is exceptionally low, and they are mostly sunk costs. The ‘challenge’ with trains was making sure that railways didn’t conflict. Blueprints solved this.

Rockets in Space Age are treated as disposable, and somewhat expensive, trains. You load them up, shoot them up, and move on. The ‘challenge’ here is on the actual platforms and landing pads, a give an take of requests and availability. If you need 15 of something, the rocket will generally only send you a full stack of 100. If you don’t have a stack of 100, you won’t get any items. You can certainly manually change this, but it’s painful. And in the early stages of Space Age, this is very costly. Even late game, the method of delivery of parts means that you can only effectively build platforms around Nauvis, as all other planets will have asteroids attacking you and no real way to defend them.

2.1 is going to modify the logic on the pile of this. Rockets will be able to ship partial stacks, based on requests. You’ll be able to ship between platforms. You’ll be able to apply better logic on requests so that you can pick up a material from any planet, rather than just one. Very useful QoL bits here and will certainly smooth out some rough spots. For those struggling to ‘kick start’ Space Age, this is a welcome change.

Of all the items, I have only seen one mechanical item of note. What 2.1 is also bringing is the death of space casinos but for some reason keeping the LDS shuffle. Space Casinos are space platforms that upcycle material to legendary, notably iron and coal using rarity mods. In 2.1 rarity mods will be removed from space platforms. This is odd since casinos are actually a pain to build, while the LDS shuffle remains (recycling legendary low-density structures give MORE material than you invested, meaning free LDS, copper, and steel.) It is entirely possible to get legendary iron and coal from other means, though admittedly scaling those is it’s own challenge. To me though, this doesn’t address the core issue – that legendary items exist in the first place. I like the benefits legendary items provide, it’s just the mechanisms to get them that are broken and burdensome. But hey, there are mods that just permanently unlock legendary once researched, and I would think that is the likely end-scenario here.

Given 2.1 is just around the corner, and marking the end of an era, it’s bittersweet to see it come to a close. Factorio isn’t just a great game, it’s honestly a gold standard for the genre where there are dozens and dozens of imitators. What was achieved with an insanely small team of absolutely dedicated developers is beyond impressive. Now for the modding community to figure out what’s next…

It’s been nearly a year since patch 1.1, which was mostly QoL stuff as a result of the massive 1.0 launch. Well, 1.2 is here and there are a few notable changes.

• Rain is back, which was removed to do occlusion issues (it rained indoors).
• Additional game mode where you can set the resource costs and node richness values. This is a sort of middle ground to ‘build for free’ mode. Tweaking power consumption is a nice option.
  • Related, Space Elevator costs can be tweaked if you want to turn on ‘hard mode’
• Vehicle pathing and reworks. This is more like trains now. I’ve always thought the concept of vehicles was good, but the execution was really quite random. Trains are almost always a better option, and at the end game, drones run the show.
• Trucks can now transport fluids. This is good for mid-game options, where for some reason you don’t want trains.
• Daisy Chaining for power connections between buildings. Never really had an issue with this outside of the start of the game, but certainly a ‘cleaner’ view of power poles.
• Pipeline T-Junctions. This one is weird. Fluid dynamics in Satisfactory are physics-based, which really shows up when you make aluminum. Should make for cleaner pipes… should.
• The recipe list also now shows alternative recipes prior to you unlocking them. I really like alternative recipes, as much for efficiency as flexibility. This QoL thing effectively removes the need to alt-tab to a wiki.

In total, the majority of this is also in the QoL space, though vehicles are the bigger piece. Which brings to topic the choice of when to use which vehicle. First, the list:

• Belts & Pipes
  • Belts go from 60 to 1200 items per minute and can span the entire map. These generally make for ugly maps if you rips belts everywhere, but for short distances they absolutely rock.
  • Pipes are 300 or 700 per minute. Liquid piping usually isn’t too bad and due to transport issues, often better than all other options. Gas piping… this actually impacts your factory locations. Very rare to ship liquid in mass quantities for long distances.
• Terrain Vehicle
  • Truck – Unlocked at tier 3. Uses for medium deliveries (25). Uses fuel. Needs a dedicated path.
  • Tractor – Unlocked at tier 5. Used for larger deliveries (48). Uses fuel. Needs a dedicated path.
• Rails
  • Trains. Unlocked at tier 6. Used for long distances and very large deliveries (32 per car). Uses electricity. Needs a rail.
• Air
  • Drones. Unlocked at tier 7. Uses for very large distances and smaller deliveries (9). Can only deliver material, not liquid. Uses fuel. Auto-maps.

The tiers do matter. Tier 3 is Phase 1 of the elevator. Tier 5+6 are Phase 2. Tier 7 is Phase 3. This generally means that Tractors are somewhat irrelevant as Trains are way more effective and unlocked at the same time.

Picking the appropriate delivery model is primarily a math exercise… how many items do you need per minute? You would be surprised at how few items you actually do need near the end game and how many items you need for raw materials. Time to delivery is total (volume per trip * # of trips per minute). The distance and pathing matters. Small trips with Trucks are going to be faster than trains, and way faster than drones. Medium trips for trains work well enough. Long trips, trains and drones are king. Something like 200 items or less per minute across medium/long distances, drones are amazing.

I tend to apply a rule of thumb here. If I can see it, I will belt/pipe it. If I can’t see it, and I only need a few, then I will drop a drone. If I can’t see it and I need a lot, then I’ll add some cars to a rail. Trucks are used for a very niche set of work on micro-factories, which are primarily Sulfur or Carbon related as those recipes aren’t used all that much and the nodes are in weird spaces.

Which gets back to 1.2 and vehicle changes. These are good changes, yet apply to a niche deployment. They don’t move fast enough or transport enough to make them viable alternatives to trains. This patch has a lot of work in it, no question there, but the net effect for a playthrough isn’t actually impactful.

This is certainly different.

There’s an inherent challenge in any long-running series (21 years now since the first God of War) that has wholly been defined by a single character. A character that has been generally consistently portrayed too! Think about it – what other gaming series is so defined by one person? Halo maybe? None of the Nintendo games fit the bill, the characters have all gone through a ton of iterations.

I like the God of War series, but I also know what I’m getting. I am getting a fish our of water experience, with a brute as a protagonist, and some absolutely jaw dropping battles along the way. Kratos is God of War and God of War is Kratos.

That said, I am interested in Laufey as a character. Anyone who can ‘tame the beast’ and act as a peer is certainly full of mystery and potential. The question of how has some value here, but the real story question is why. The beauty of art is that the why is often the one question that isn’t fully answered, and requires the audience to fill in the blank. You embody the art and come up with your own reasons, making the experience unique to yourself as it would be to others.

Which makes the announcement of God of War Laufey all the more confusing. I like the mystery of Laufey. I think that character is best developed in drips rather than gulps, at least in the context of God of War. If this was an act within a larger storyline, like a flashback, then I can see how this would integrate well. Enough little additions to the context without fully pulling back the curtain.

This same argument applies to Atreus, Mimir, and Odin by the way. They are context to the larger storyline, they are not distinct storylines in and of themselves.

Counterpoint here is that the systems the Norse-series God of War have brought certainly have the flexibility to tell another storyline. The game engine and narrative structures can certainly be transposed to something else. That system is portable. The bridge to the next story has a generally logical one, and that is Laufey. In that I mean, if you were to pick any NPC, across the last 20 years, the one most worth exploring is her.

Sum, this is an odd gamble. The floor to entry is relatively low given the systems already exist. It also existed with Ragnarok, but that ended up costing twice as much as the first one. Not sure the market is going to give a return that justifies that type of investment. It’s an interesting pitch, and all interesting pitches come with a ton of attention and opinions. This certainly is one. The net effect is that people are talking about it though, which is generally a good thing.

The only true downside I see here, given current decisions, is that I’ll never have a chance to play it as I have no intention of buying a PlayStation console and Sony has stopped all efforts to port to PC. Likely won’t stop the dev and this will likely still sell like fire. I sure hope so, first-party games here have generally been amazing.

In an age where dollars seem to be the driving force behind large companies, Sony just, I dunno, is Sony I guess.

Is the PS5 a cool machine? Yessiree. Is it a gated community? Yup. Does it charge you for things you get for free on PC? Yes (though so does XBOX and Nintendo). It it more expensive than a Steam Deck? Yes. Is it worth buying? 85 million people think so.

For about a decent chunk of time, back in the PS4 days, if you waited a year or two, you’d see a first party game also launch on PC. Now, in almost every single case that port would be a bug ridden heap that needed months of patching, but it was there. (I will say that these crappy ports absolutely cost Sony money and bad press.) I know I picked up more than a few. With the PS5 currently near $900 (which, you know, holy cow), and the shakeup at XBOX, it seems that PlayStation is taking a hard turn on that model.

Sony Pulls Back From PlayStation Games on PC – Bloomberg

This only applies to single player ‘exclusives’, so Ghost of Yotei, Saros, and the upcoming Wolverine are unlikely to see the light of day on PC. As a consumer, this sucks as there’s less choice. I’ve purposefully avoided Nintendo games for a long time due to the frankly ridonculous price points, but it hasn’t been all that painful as I’ve functionally only missed … one Zelda and one Donkey Kong game. XBOX has lived on PC for some time now, and I can’t see them throwing the baby with the bathwater here…

PlayStation going ‘all in’ on hardware gating is a very weird thing to do, and at this point seems somewhat sunk given the PS5 footprint. We know the PS6 is around the corner, but with all the crap going around right now causing IT equipment shortages… this thing looks like it will come with a $1k+ price tag and only the scalpers making any sense of it.

Obviously in order to sell hardware, you need a damn strong selling point with software. (Hello XBOX!) Diluting that with PC sales, sales of which are on devices that cost less than the price of a console, is a tough pitch to make. Sony for sure has spent a few billion dollars investing here on the next big thing, and the last thing it needs is a relief valve on expectations. As a short/medium term decision to focus all it’s energy into the PS6, this makes business sense. As a consumer, I know where my habits stand, and there’s no real chance I’m getting a console that offers much, much less than what I already have. It’s a walled garden, and a pretty one at that. But my backlog of games actively prevents me from any FOMO. And dollars to donuts, it’s more than likely that Sony will revert in a few years anyways. Until then, I have a list to get through…

I played Call of the Sea as a free EGS game a while back, and this acts as a direct sequel. Buzz was positive and decided to give it a go. Impressed overall.

I enjoy puzzle games, there’s a zen in each of them when trying to put the clues together in order to get the final result. I really enjoy intuitive puzzlers, but those require a substantial amount of logic present to work. Return of the Obra Din is the highlight for sure, though there are a half dozen games that come close. Then you have mechanical puzzlers, and this is more like Myst where things need to go in a certain order within a machine to get you the final results. There’s a spot between both genres where you need logic and mechanics to move forward. Call of the Elder Gods is in that spot.

There are 7 chapters here, including a prologue. Each of them has 1 major puzzle to solve, along with a handful of smaller ones too. The wide majority of these puzzles are mechanical in nature, you need to simply find the instructions and sort of fill in the blanks. There are 2 exceptions here, a totem puzzle that is more like Obra Din on steroids, and then an Enigma box logic jump. Thankfully the game includes a very robust hint system that can nudge you in the right direction.

The story itself, well, it’s in the title right? It’s not a direct line to Cthulhu, but thematically it’s similar. The first game had much more horror baked in, while this one is much closer to an Indiana Jones vibe of discovery. The art style works wonderfully here, the voice overs are all solid, and the sounds eerie enough to keep you grounded. I will say that the story itself felt a bit short, like there are a couple chapters missing here to truly make sense of some of the later turns. Feels a bit like deus ex machina to close it all out.

That said, there aren’t many games in this genre to start, and Call of the Elder Gods hits a lot of good notes along the way. Steam says I cleared it in about 8 hours, so give or take a couple more for the general public. The best credit I can give to any game is one where you find it hard to put down – and this certainly is in that category. Hopefully the gaming industry can see what was done here and continue to make awesome games. We can all use more of that.

It’s been in my catalogue for a while now, finally got around to spending some time with it. The first Outer Worlds (Spacer’s Choice Edition) was quite impressive, and who doesn’t want a sci-fi RPG satire?

There are 4 important bits to understand about Outer Worlds 2.

1. This game is a direct response to Outer Worlds 1 but not a direct sequel. Mechanically it improves on the first one, and the story uses the same setting with different characters.
2. Obsidian somehow launched Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Grounded within 8 months of each other. This proved to be a marketing call, and certainly un-needed stress on the developer.
3. Outer Worlds 2 was launched at a very high price point (beyond AAA), and Microsoft was forced to reduce it after significant blow-back.
4. We won’t be getting Outer Worlds 3 as the game underperformed expectations, which is a consequence of items 2+3.

Setting

It’s hard to fully describe Outer Worlds as most of the game gets by on a set of vibes. Corporate satire vibes more specifically. And let’s be honest about that, satire is a difficult thing to do, where writing needs to be top notch and the audience needs to be in the right state of mind. The first game really did an awesome job of this, frankly dialing it up to 11. You’re essentially led by an insane (?) scientist who’s trying to revive an ark full of people. Clear goals, and the enemy is a bunch of corporate selfish a-holes. Clean.

The sequel, you’re chasing a rogue agent who opened rifts… that don’t seem to do anything other than simply kill you when you get too close. The characters you meet all seem to be ‘normal’ rather than the broken husks you’d expect. There’s lacking a complete set of ‘dumb’ decisions that are made for ideological reasons. NPCs are generally nice, except the obvious villains – there’s a distinct lack of pure corporate greed here, which is odd.

I was hoping for more from the companions. I realize not everyone can be a standout, but was certainly expecting more glaring character flaws to present themselves, certainly in the earlier moments of the game. When you finally get the lot of them going, there are some interesting threads to pull on. Except Niles. Maybe it’s a design choice to have 1 terrible companion in every game, which contrasts the better ones moreso. Mass Effect is a shining example of this.

Outer Worlds 1 felt like you were in a fun house, with a lot of pieces dialed up to 11. Here it plays more like a regular sci-fi game, which is tonally odd.

Mechanics

Skills are your standard fare. Perks are pretty much what you’d expect, with the largest benefits with 1 skill point invested – things like Pick Pocket. Flaws are wild that provide some modest benefit for game altering penalties. Kleptomania forces you to automatically steal everything your cursor touches, but you can sell it for 100% more. Stealing = the town will attack you, so this is likely a bad call. Taking every flaw wouldn’t make the game unplayable, simply hilariously complicated.

Melee feels ok, with attacks having some weight. They don’t do enough damage though, especially in a game with giant mechs and guns everywhere. Not sure why anyone would bring a hammer to a gun fight…

Ranged attacks feel much tighter than the first game, but there isn’t much variety here. It’s not space wizards, that’s for sure. Thankfully, you won’t spend the game reloading all the time, which is a huge improvement. In nearly all cases, this is a massive upgrade from the first game.

Sneak / stealth is better but still bad. It’s really quite simple, sneak attacks do not deal enough damage. You are funnelled through areas with multiple enemies, and if you don’t 1-hit kill, then all stealth breaks down and it’s 10vs1. The concepts are here, just not fully executed.

I like that the skill checks don’t include some mini-game, you either have the requirements or you don’t. This means that there’s a good chunk of content that won’t be available due to your skill selection. Absolutely none of it prevents story progress though, so that’s a smart thing. And as with many of these types of games, you will find many more of these ‘locked skill checks’ in the first few hours than the last. There are just enough points to feel like your character has well, character I guess, without being a master of everything. A rare game that strikes this level of balance.

There is something to be said about the Dumb flaw, and Speech skill. The absolute best writing is behind both of these options, and they are generally exclusive to each other. The downside to this is that Speech is too often relied upon as an ‘I WIN’ option, which makes it significantly overpowered compared to something like Engineering, or Medical. The net effect is a sort of ‘golden path’ that is very obviously the correct one, rather than the multiple options you’d expect.

Expectations

This is the crux of it, right? Outer Worlds 1 had a solid story, with mechanical flaws. Avowed had a simple but effective story and mechanically improved on quite a bit – you could clearly see the Outer Worlds framework in place. I really liked the idea of moves with cooldowns since it changed the pace of battle.

Outer Worlds 2 simply came out too soon after Avowed. The story needed to be stronger. The mechanics more varied. Had it waited another 6 months or more, it would have had time to fully apply the lessons from Avowed and potentially tweaked a few other internal systems. It’s still a good game, just not a AAA-ultra-priced game. It’s greatest flaw is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and unfortunately was a poster for seemingly bad decisions by Microsoft gaming. Or, alternatively, had the game been priced at $40 instead of $80, this would have been an easier sell.

I didn’t expect to see an Outer Worlds 2, and so I’m not disappointed there won’t be a 3. Obsidian learned a lot of lessons here, and it’s still one of my favorite developers. There’s a ton of good here and getting it on sale is a very smart pickup. Now, if I can get more of Pillars of Eternity… then we’re talking!

Likely the last post on this topic for a bit, the rest still needs sorting. Lord of Hatred restructured the end game, where we had 4 Torment levels and now have 12. This was meant to ‘ease the curve’ between the prior levels, and increase the overall difficulty level to map to the addition of set talismans. And in that regard, it certainly does. The difference between individual torment levels is much easier, where prior something like T3 you would be a walking blender and in T4 you would be the puree. So good on that.

What wasn’t clear however was the number of systems that are gated behind these levels. In general, you level in normal, and then get enough gear to hit Torment 1, which is all legendary gear without any passives, no glyphs, and no real investment in the paragon system. Not exactly a huge hurdle, but you’ll need to craft the legendaries to get there most likely.

You should spend a grand total of zero time on Hard, Expert, or Penitent unless you are trying to unlock a season goal.

Monster Power

Every rank of this is like +1 Torment. Some War Plans add this. Lair bosses naturally have +3. Greater Lair bosses are +6. You will see this marker next to their hit point bar. I would suggest lowering the difficulty before taking on Greater Lair bosses so that the Torment levels match – this won’t impact War Plans. Generally, if the battle takes less than 5 seconds, you’re good to move up one difficulty. At 10 seconds, you will hit boss mechanics and some are 1-hit-kills, for very little additional reward. Lilith, Belial, and Mephisto are on another level, you’ll figure that part out.

Gains Per Level

Every Torment level increases monster difficulty, gives more XP, more gold, and more items that drop. The % of an item being legendary stays the same, but the number of chances for items increases. Loot filters are all but required for your sanity. Note when I say ‘starts dropping’ there are chances you see it before, but those are so small they effectively don’t.

If you want a comparison, the (#) is the equivalent in the Pit, which remains the measuring stick for difficulty.

• Torment 1 (10): Ancestral items (level 900) start dropping.
• Torment 2 (15): Legendary Temper Manuals start dropping… to get more legendary passives. This is much lower than you’d think. Pretty much when you start farming Lair Bosses.
• Torment 3 (20): You’ll notice a big boost on set charm drop rates, and you’ll get a penalty on armor/resistances.
• Torment 4 (25): Neathiron starts dropping. You need this for end-game rerolls.
• Torment 5 (30): Legendary Runes start dropping. Very few builds actually need these, but hey.
• Torment 6 (40): Greater Lair Keys start dropping. Considering these bosses drop the best uniques, you want this.
• Torment 7 (50): Primordial Dust starts dropping. Big deal for late game re-rolls.
• Torment 8 (60): Unique Charms start dropping. There is 1 per build, and it does make a difference. You can now fight Echo of Lilith… I wouldn’t.
• Torment 9 (70): Kullean Tuning Prisms start dropping. For cube recipes where you target specific outcomes, very useful.
• Torment 10 (80): Mythic Seals start dropping. There are god-rolls here and then head scratchers. Odds are you’ll never see one. Echo of Mephisto here, and that is a hard fight!
• Torment 11 (90): Resplendent Spark for Mythic Uniques starts dropping.
• Torment 12 (100): Everything unlocked, 1400% xp, and you need near perfect rolls to survive.

If you’re wondering how this maps to the prior difficulty, the Pit tiers help. T4 in season 12 was tier 55 in the Pit, which is now between T7 and T8. It’s not a perfect mapping, but having twice as many steps certainly smooths out progression. And with 4 more tiers to come after that, that’s a significant boost for those looking for more challenge.

Now, in my own personal opinion that I use this blog to share, I would consider your season journey done when you can clear your first Greater Boss, as everything past that point is just more numbers and not more content. This was not the case in season 12, as you’re going to spend a ton of time getting to T6 now. I’m not a fan of gating that content as those bosses are essential to get specific uniques which are absolutely build-defining, but hey, Diablo be Diablo.

Is it better than Season 12’s Torment model? Yes in that the scaling is much more appreciated. Meh in terms of the sheer amount of gating at each step.

A bit more time here, a bit more thought on the sort of defining end-game features.

Legendaries

The game is currently quite anemic until you get into the higher torment levels on the number of legendary drops. The passives on these items are build defining, and a huge inhibitor to progress. To give you an idea, getting near perfect rolls on rare gear is enough to close to Torment 1, but not in it. You need at least 1 passive legendary boost to get over that hump.

The most effective way to get legendaries to get the passives? Either you farm helltides, barter in the Den, or use the horadric cube to craft them from rares. This is actually a disincentive to play the game normally.

Once you do hit Torment 1 and beyond, drop rates start to make some sense. But don’t expect to get all of them, even by T6. Better odds of being in full ancient legendaries before you get all passives. Weird way to intro the system, which requires some tweaking to get right.

Talismans

Similar to legendaries, talismans make little sense until Torment levels, and even then only in the space of set charms. I really can’t stress enough how utterly atrocious non-set charms are in this game. And the game allows no method to upgrade them to a better quality. Eventually you’ll find legendary charms, but that’s a long way to go.

Seals… you only want legendary and the only stat that matters is +1 slot.

Set talismans however, all seem to have a 5 item build requirement for some impressive boosts. It’ll take a bit to get enough, and if you have duplicates you can re-roll them within a set. Once you have the benefits however, you’ll wonder how you ever played without them. +500% damage is nothing to sneeze at.

The stats on all charms are mostly meaningless, except in the space of min/maxing. You can re-roll them and have a 1/5 chance of getting the set charm you want and then the normal 1/100 chance of getting stats you want. Enchanting should be an option here, not re-rolling forever. It’s a good idea here, some tweaking needed.

War Plans

These are solo-only (next season will be fixed) and character only (which I have to assume will change, as it’s super dumb). Fine – that aside, it takes a very long time to gain levels here. You are capped at 7 points per War Plan (49 total) and my rough guesstimate is about 30 hours to get there, depending on RNG.

The events themselves are the same, meaning the incentives remain. War Plans add some contextual benefits to these activities, and some of them are arguably better than others. In personal preference:

1. Helltides. These have always been a good source of just about anything per hour, notably experience, materials, and items. The middle upgrade path gives you access to lair keys and materials for uniques, which are super important.
   • Always select this option
2. Kurast. These are quick events that can target specific drops with the right tribute. Technically the highest drop rate per hour too. The left and middle paths are good, giving better runs overall.
   • Always select this option and use your tributes
3. Lair Boss (only in Torment). If you can clear them, they are the fastest of all activities. All the path options are decent here, assuming you have the keys to unlock the boss chests.
   • Mostly select this option when you have keys
4. Nightmare Dungeon. Use keys you have on hand, ideally the ones with Whisper rewards. Not all of them are equal though, you’ll learn which are worth it. The right tree is the best, the middle one gives you access to Astaroth (not a fan of that system).
   • Mostly select this option when you have keys
5. Pits. It’s better than previous seasons, and great if you like leaderboards, otherwise it’s a very specific use case. Pick the tree upgrades that increase the number of glyph upgrades you can perform.
   • Only select if you need to upgrade glyphs
6. Hordes. This mode takes too long, soulspires still aren’t balanced, and the boss drops are anemic. The left tree has the best options, but require Bartuc to be killed (666 to spawn, and 400 for the chest).
   • Avoid this option
7. Tree of Whispers. You can’t select this, it just happens normally. Select the middle path for the Spark reward. This will take a very long while to complete.

I think the idea of War Plans is interesting. The tree isn’t exactly balanced at this point, as for most of them there’s a super clear ‘best choice’. Balance in these systems takes some time, and heat maps are going to be quite indicative of where player preference lies. There’s not a whole lot you can do to fix the problems with Horde mode by applying a coat of fancy paint. The trees need a bit more balance to either align with the larger game goals, or to offset the hurdles of the activities themselves (the Pit tree does this the best I think).

This launched on Monday, 7PM EST, and at 6:55PM EST, you needed to download 142Gb of patch wonder. The servers naturally melted, with 120minute queues, but this is frankly expected. Curious how this fits in the larger landscape of ARPGs… Anyhow, to the meat of it.

Lord of Hatred caps the story of Diablo 4 – I say that as the last cinematic has no cliffhanger, so what you see here is effectively all you’re gonna get until (if?) Diablo 5 comes around in 10 years, give or take. No meaningful spoilers here, the story hits the beats Blizzard tends to hit, and I’d argue it’s a full-circle type of bit at the end. I did enjoy the mechanics of a few of the bosses, including the last one. You’ll see that once, and if you only play the new campaign, you should end up near level 45 or so when done. Then you’re unlikely to replay the campaign again, which is frankly unfortunate as Blizzard has some really decent cutscenes here that should be seen more than once.

Mechanically there are quite a few changes here, some good, some questionable.

• Skill trees have removed all passive benefits and added more ranks to skills as a result. e.g. no longer +to armor from a selection, but instead you get armor if you use a particular skill. This is pretty much a nerf all around, shifting the benefits to the Paragon system.
• Legendaries don’t have fixed stat pools, but are as random as any other piece. Related, you can upgrade rare/magic items to legendary. This is mixed. The upper stats of a character are now higher, but it also means that farming legendaries is much less meaningful as in most cases the stat rolls are not what you want. This will extend the loot grind further. I expect the math here to be tweaked based on data.
• +dmg has been shifted to %multipliers instead. This raises the overall stats of characters, but will take a bit to math out.
• Talisman sets are powerful. The stats themselves are random but the set boosts are not. I have not seen build-defining set boosts yet, though I gather they are somewhere.
• There are 12 Torment levels now, which means there’s very little difference between them and you’re unlikely to know which one you should be in. D3 had this issue, but D4 is mostly a solo affair so not really sure it matters much.
• The Horadric Cube works generally like you’d expect. Put 3 of something to get 1 of another. These are all functions the Occulist should’ve had, very strange.
• There’s a mechanic that remains from the pre-LoH that is explicitly removed in the main storyline. Still confused about this.
• War Plans … more in a bit.
• Much too early to talk about class balance.
• Still no reason to be in a guild other than a chat channel, which is a good reason to be in a guild.

The net result of these mechanical/stat/drop changes means it will take you forever to gear up as compared to what was there before, and that the majority of your legendary gear will be acquired through crafting rather than drops. Point of fact, that’s about the only way you’re going to get the necessary aspects to have a functional build.

War Plans

I think this particular item deserves a considerable amount of discussion. Mechanically, War Plans are a randomized list of activities that you perform in a certain order, which has a semi-meta set of boosts and a chest of rewards at the end. If you don’t like the set of events you can re-roll them, up to a certain limit.

Often in game design there are solutions presented without understanding the problems at hand. I think War Plans is such a case. The core issue is that the endgame activities are individually designed with specific purposes. Lairs are meant to target certain drops. Helltides mostly for experience and early gearing. Infernal for… I don’t really know. Nightmare Dungeons to get materials to do boss lairs. The Pit for glyphs, and for character pushing. Kurast for materials (and the best ratio of legendaries per hour). Once you know what you are aiming for, you pick the appropriate activity.

I’ll pick on Nightmare Dungeons for a second. These are often very poorly designed with dead ends or poor mechanics (kill all enemies is quite bad), with very poor rewards. Prior, you could pick a Nightmare Dungeon with specific affixes, like more experience or obols. Dungeons you didn’t like, you’d burn the keys. You can still use keys, but given you are running more dungeons, you’ll run out of “good keys” quickly, and then it’s just a normal dungeon run. And normal runs nearly always are a worse option than any other end-game activity.

The meta progression for War Plans is ok, in giving some smaller rewards if you run a lot of them. Maybe you get extra material chests at the end, maybe you increase monster difficulty. Sadly, these are bound to the character and not the account, and gaining levels here is very grindy. Having to repeat this for any alts is frankly bonkers. This really should be integrated into the Paragon system.

Also of important note is that War Plans are single player only. You can team up with people, but only the party leader’s plans actually progress and all other team members get no benefits. D4 already had some grouping challenges before, this is going all-in for a solo-experience as the shining feature of the expansion.

Dollars to donuts player feedback here is going to be very vocal on what works and doesn’t for War Plans, so I’d expect some minor + major tweaks as a result. At the minimum, the meta progression needs to be across the account. I will say that if the heat maps show that players have avoided certain activities, the way to address that is NOT by forcing them to run it. The concept here is cool, the implementation can use some tweaking.

Quick Summary

First thoughts is that LoH is in many respects a significant improvement over VoH and vanilla. It will take a couple weeks for the balance to sort out, and a couple months (likely the entire season) to patch what needs to be patched. Now, is it worth the price of admission if you haven’t been playing D4 for a while? Hell no. You’d pay 1/3rd the price for Windrose and get way more out of it, or any other game in your library. If you are actively playing ARPGs though, then yeah, this is about as smooth an experience as possible – very accessible to anyone. This does not appear to be RoS-level, if only because the gap that expansion covered was much larger than needed here. My gut here is that the game is going to need 4-8 weeks of patches (if not a full season) to get where it needs to be.