In the early 2000's I had a falling out with MMO's (Massive Multiplayer Online RPG's) in that I felt they were too addictive and had bad effects on a person's actual life. I was an extreme example because I was so into this one game called "Dark Age of Camelot" that I ignored friends, family, school, and even lost a really cushy job because I wanted to go questing for hours and hours with strangers I never did meet in real life.
I feel as though they are potentially very destructive to a person's life, and at the end when I finally gave up on DaoC, I looked at what I had accomplished and realized that I didn't really even enjoy the game... it was a grind for the hopes that some special piece of gear was going to drop even though it rarely ever did. I equate it to being similar to gambling addiction: Even though you lose most of the time there is nothing quite like the sensation you get from winning.
So from that point forward in my life - except for a brief period when i dabbled with Guild Wars 2 - I never play MMO's anymore. I ignore them when they are released.
Enter: Diablo 4.
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D4 is NOT an MMO. However it does have a lot of characteristics of an MMO in that the game is never over and once you have completed the main story, which I will admit is really long for a game of this type, the story carries on and you work on other objectives to accomplish that get increasingly more difficult as you go along. Unlike actual MMO's, these objectives are quite easily accomplished and you likely will not need a step-by-step guide the likes of which would exist in a real MMO.
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This doesn't change the fact that there are a ton of options, perhaps unlimited amounts of them, and there are so many ways to play it.
Lately, I have found myself parking my ass in front of the PS5 and heading into something called "the Pit" where the only objective here is to do essentially the same dungeon over and over (it is procedurally generated so it is never EXACTLY the same twice) so that at the end you can power up glyphs that socket into your upgrade "tree."
This can be done for hours and hours at a time and the only objective here is to make yourself 10% more powerful than you were before so that you can...... run even higher powered "pit runs!"
It all seems a bit pointless in the end yet I find myself unwilling to try out anything else and when I do, I end up exiting that game and entering Diablo 4 anyway.
I see the same signs of addiction as far as my MMO days were concerned but I am not ignoring other aspects of my life because of it so it isn't really the same thing.
It does kind of beg the question of what exactly am I doing here though? If I was playing some other game like RDR2 or Horizon, the objective is to get through the game and do side quests, right? Well in this game there are those things but they are all pointing to just one objective and that is to become more powerful. The game has never-ending difficulty settings that is done using math to make your resistances to enemy attacks weaker, and to make the enemies take more hits to kill. As far as I have seen this never results in any sort of increased intelligence as far as enemy attacks are concerned.
So I'm not saying that people shouldn't play this game, they should. It 's a great game. But I think I have learned something about the industry that a lot of you probably already knew: If a game so much as had the words "endgame content" in the description, it is basically an MMO in disguise. It's a much simpler version of an MMO, and they don't call it an MMO, but let's be honest here: It's an MMO. :)
As of now I am going to start playing something else and when I feel like endlessly and mindlessly running dungeons in the unlikely event something worthwhile drops, I can always go back to it. The way it is now I can run right through almost all of the regular content without any real strategy, and there are only 6 buttons used so it's not like I am going to forget.
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once you have completed the main story, which takes about 20 hours, you are able to repeat these battles as often as you like and you don't even have to "walk"to them either. You can just teleport to them. I suppose this is a nice feature and perhaps it is something that exists in most actual MMO's today as well. The people over at Blizzard have done a great job making a ton of money off of this as even though the things you can buy with real world money are purely cosmetic in nature, I see plenty of other people running around with this stuff on.
I do not understand the mind of a person that would pay $20 for a digital outfit that basically nobody is ever going to see, but whatever man! it's their money.
I looked it up and Diablo 4 has over $1 billion in revenue and $150 million of that is from cosmetic upgrades. Wow! A fool and his money are easily parted indeed. that's a lot of shiny pairs of wings that cannot be found in game naturally.
I do like that the only public celebration that Blizzard had of these earning was when the crossed over $666 million. They managed to do this in just 5 days after the initial launch in 2023.