On the subject of Gears of War 4's upcoming beta, Fergusson stressed that, similar to the Halo 5: Guardians beta, it is very much a "technical" beta, not anywhere near ready for launch.
"What you're going to play is basically an alpha build of our multiplayer," he said. "That means there's going to be issues, but it's an actual beta. It's not a fake demo; it's not a highly polished thing in the sense that it's set up as a marketing demo. It's actually, 'Hey, we have brand new technology on our servers and we have brand new features on our client and we want that to be tested at scale and we want your help.'"
IGN writes: "Rod Fergusson joined Blizzard in 2020 after leaving Microsoft's The Coalition. Fergusson previously worked on every Gears of War game across his time at both Microsoft and Epic Games. At Blizzard, Fergusson headed up the Diablo franchise, joining shortly after Diablo 4 was first announced."
I’ve always been a Blizzard, and diablo fan (old Blizzard) But Ive been playing Diablo V since I got it on PS+ and to be honest, its like the magic is lost. It no longer has what it used to. Im not sure what is missing, but it just doesn’t hit the same as it used to.
I've played Diablo 1 through 4 and yeah 4 is the worst. It's fun for a bit and then it's just not, even with friends.
it's a shame cause the art direction is actually really good in D4. They did say there was this summit and things are gonna be better but we heard those kinda things way too often to get me excited. Also where is the Paladin? with the theming of the vanilla game they definitely should have been in there.
Speaking to journalist Stephen Stephen Totilo at Game File (paywalled), the Fergusson explained that Diablo 4 players who rush through content are no longer the target.
This is a very big issue in game development right now. The loudest in the community are the influencers who get paid to play games and put 400 hours into a title and cry "nothing to do" on twitter.
when you make a game thats all about loot, ofc everyone is gonna try the fastest way to get all the loot, they wanna make an arpg now thats not for arpg players? A lot of those influencers have actually very nuanced takes, the people you mean aren't influencers, they're the twitter and reddit crowd.
I can appreciate not blaming it all on content influencers. I think they do add to what I'm saying though.
But it's clear to me that there is a lot of unnecessary pressure put on game devs today to cater to the 1% of gamers that "blast" through all the content in a week and then cry about how bad the end game is. When the rest of us with normal jobs, families, and other responsibilities haven't even completed 20% of the game at that point.
They're not going to build the game around people who play it 16 hours a day. Not hard to understand.
@slate if you look at the history of the d4 patches, you know its all on the devs. They messed up so much, they released the biggest patch of all time without beta testing it or asking for community feedback, basically made the game unplayable for 2.5 months.There is hardly any customization in the game when it comes to skills because the skill tree and how they set up progression for it allows almost no freedom, the loot is boring, they had 15 different stats that all did the same thing, gold prices for reenchanting items was ridiculous, the mount went faster if you moved your mouse closer to the edge of your screen, the game loaded every player's stash and inventory if you ran across them in the overworld, no endgame bosses besides Lillith, mob density was atrocious. When they did gameplay showcases you could see the person playing it never played the game before and those people are somehow supposed to make the game?
Also they have on of the biggest ips which they ask 70 euros for + battle pass + extra cosmetics + yearly expansions, I'm not feeling sorry for them at all. oh yeah and like 30 bucks extra for 3 days early access. Of course my expectations are gonna be super high if that is the price they want me to pay. Compare that to a game thats free, path of exile or some of the other ones that are better and just ask for 20 bucks once, the game deserved all the shit that it got.
They sure as hell wanted to make a game for the blasters, they were just incapable of making one after close to a decade of development.
"Blasters" Oh great a new buzzword invented to shame people for doing trivial things, George Orwell would turn over in his grave if he saw what the world is coming to.
Rod Fergusson writes: "Feels like the genre of "ARPG" is starting to mean a lot of different things. Much like "Souls-like" and "Rogue-like", I wonder if we could normalize "Diablo-like" for ARPGs that follow the Diablo formula..."
Yeah no that is not a good term for every ARPG. Just use Diablo-clone as they do already.
We used to call Diablo games hack and slash RPGs.
to be fair we used to say diablo-like since D2 but that tweet when POE2 presentation will go down in history.
From this day forth, im saying POE-like
No worries. Just give us the beta already.
Funny how devs have to state that their betas are actually betas and not demos lol.
Been waiting for the true follow-up to Gears 3 for what seems like forever now. Glad they're doing betas for most Microsoft games especially the multiplayer heavy ones like Gears and Halo.
Can't wait to hop on the beta in 2 weeks.
October 11 release.
That's fantastic news. Split-screen is so much fun in this series.