Diablo 4 Somehow Got WORSE... And So Did Blizzard 

Is anybody honestly surprised this keeps happening? It's like clockwork lmao

You gotta admit Blizzard really nailed the immersion because it really makes you feel like your in hell.

Blizzard is literally the definition of “but wait there’s more” to how terrible they can be

Telling the customer "You think you want it, but you don't" has never ended well for any company.

that Steve Jobs clip is pure gold, and applies to so many problems with so many companies. It takes a certain kind of hubris for the new corporate owner to take something that isn't broke, think they can fix it, AND make more money

Blizzard’s ability to become worse and worse while never becoming the worst they can be reminds me of a mathematical curve that is consistently approaching zero but never reaches it.

If the battle pass unintentionally screwed you over, it would be quite a mistake and a simple "oh oops, sorry, let us fix that" would remedy the situation. But the fact that the pass is perfectly designed to screw you, is so disgusting, I have no words. Shame on Blizzard, but honestly, if you still buy Blizzard games, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

"It is Man, so in love with Greed, that he has lost himself, and found only appetites." - Dutch Van Der Linde, 1899

I think that we should give our power to indie studios. In an ideal world, nobody ever buys bad games and the lack of profit puts blizzard in their place.

Blizzard: "We've hit rock bottom." Also Blizzard: "But we can dig deeper."

I hate how AAA game developers are talking about how baldur’s gate 3 sets an “unrealistic expectation for video games” basically saying you should be happy if a game is incomplete at launch

feel free to just turn this into a monthly series on the status of Diablo 4 & I will watch each episode at least 10 times

Stuff like this makes me respect IO Interactive so much. The amount of content they've released after Hitman 3, and are STILL releasing... FOR FREE, is awesome. Their patches are mostly QOL and player feedback updates. When the community disagrees with a certain change and become vocal about it, IO reverts the change to please their fans. I will FOREVER be faithful to IO Interactive. They know their fanbase and they respect them.

Funny thing is when you uninstall D4 (which everyone should do at this point) you get a safety mechanism: Battlenet asks you if you really want to do that and suggests deleting hi res assets to regain some disk space instead. Clown company.

"Give devs the same respect they give you" is a fuckin' statement to live by.

I love no matter how broken the game, how unstable the server, how slow the fix, the microtransaction and store are always working

Act Man says how it is. Without sugar-coating. We need this. We need in-your-face truth. More than ever we need videos like this.

The other day, I watched a review of Myth 2 by MandaloreGaming. In that review, he pointed out that while the game was being shipped to the stores, a third-party translator discovered a bug that could delete folders and files around the game files when uninstalling the game. The developers (which just happens to be Bungie) recalled the game because they thought that while they were going to lose money doing so, it was the right thing to do. This was during the Christmas sales in December. Mandy said that "It's a level of integrity you just cannot imagine from the AAA space nowadays." Then Activision proves him right.

Whoopi Goldberg being a Diablo fan is the strangest discovery this year

I didn't buy diablo 3 or 4. That's how you win.

22:16 TF2 might be a better example. That game is like 20 years old, hasn't had a major update in like 8 years and it's still gaining players.

Damage vs Cold and Damage vs Frost being seperate stats is absolutely abominable.

I've never seen AM get so mad before. I genuinely feel bad for the Diablo community here and I have never felt that way about any other gaming fanbase ever.

Same thing happened with me and OW. I used to jump on and play for hours on end even throught the massive 3 year drought but when OW2 came out it just felt like a chose to play the game and not entertainment. I dropped it after season one and tried to come back just now and holy crap it has not changes since i dropped it.

Damn it's really depressing when you have a former developer telling you that the company they worked at is now void of all dreams and magic it once held

The statements by Steve Jobs about Marketing and Sales departments killing their companies is 100% accurate. You will never find a group of people so convinced that they're good at business while simultaneously being so hilariously bad at it.

“You are a factory of sadness!!!” LOL that guy in the intro is amazing lol

What really pisses me off is that people comes to videos like this and act all smart and then keep buying blizzard's garbage

My dad worked for a major company for over 30 years, and he talked about people there that would put so much effort into avoiding work, that it became harder than the work they were avoiding. That’s blizzard. They are putting so much effort into forcing, tricking, and disguising their bad game, they probably could have just made a good game by now.

The "No preorders" rule is slowly evolving into "No buying for at least half a year after release" rule. Like, how do you change a 70$ game to be WORSE than it was on release holy shit my dudes

If only GPU companies can be treated like this the same way.

True, but I wouldn't go as far as blaming developers. As a developer myself on a big project I can say that you don't decide stuff, you can raise concerns and provide suggestions and ideas but is up to your manager or PM to decide. Even if you are a principal engineer, you don't decide things alone. I bet this issue was raised by devs and disregarded or deprioritized by upper management.

It's honestly really cool of bliz to go out of their way to reenforce Act's points about D4. Not many people would do that.

My favorite part of D4’s UI is that redeeming your pass is a 1 click but if you try and play eternal instead of seasonal you get a pop up making you acknowledge that you can’t play seasonal activities on the eternal realm before it lets you play.

Overwatch 2 asks you if you're sure like 50 times before you buy the battle pass. How did the same company manage to do a one-click activation in a game that came out AFTER Overwatch 2?

“Have you ever thought about making a good video game? And the game is so much fun I want to keep playing it?” As someone who just finished Tears Of The Kingdom after playing it for two months straight, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment

If Blizzard tried to build a house, you'd get a shed with a note in it saying that it wasn't possible to add plumbing or electrical because shed's can't have those things due to code violations. My brother in Christ, you built it as a shed!

bro I had to check my OSRS client like 10 times thinking I had the music turned up lmao +1 respect from me for using that music in half your videos brother

I don't know the source, but this reminds me of the quote: "the bar was so low, it's practically touching the ground, but here you are, limbo dancing in hell with the devil"

I was going to buy this game when it first came out, but my wife told me to wait because of Blizzard's track record. I'm so glad I listened to her.

I never thought a gaming company could become worse than EA without resorting to severe criminal abuse.

Why do you need to load an entire stash of someone you meet in D4? Do you also load their purchase history, account passwords and credit card details?

I bought Diablo 4 for myself and my gorgeous 17 year old granddaughter. We have played together and it was a great time, especially for me at 73 years old I don't get to see her much besides the holidays because she lives in Rhode Island and I'm in Oklahoma. Christmas is approaching and I think I'm going to get her a Lilith statue.

Whoopi Goldberg sueing Blizzard because she couldn’t play Diablo on a Mac is the greatest thing I never thought would be real

The fact that we celebrate games not having battle passes or storefronts is sad in itself…

Once I completed the main story, I traded this game in. And I do not regret it.

It boggles my mind that with the perspective of hindsight on their previously successful games, that the current executives don’t see why its overall beneficial to just make a fun game.

As someone who regularly hires UI/UX professionals in tech, the lack of safeguards on the battle pass activation button is absolutely intentional. UX teams at a company as elite as Blizzard A/B tests the effect that their flows have on things like, let's say, BATTLE PASS CONVERSION RATES. I promise you that was the metric they were tasked with improving. Look at it. It's literally the most colorful button on screen--complete with a "shimmering" visual effect--against a black and charcoal background. It's designed to grab your attention, and then snag you if you ever touch it.

This is pretty much spot on, and I've been saying it for years now. The Blizzard that folks like you and me look back to in the memories of our childhood; the Blizzard of old who wanted to be your cool gamer bros, who wanted to be your friend, who just wanted to make awesome games that like minded people would enjoy- that Blizzard is gone. It's long been dead. All that remains is the money pit. Do not feed the money pit.

They didn’t want to create a FUN game… they wanted to sell an ADDICTIVE game… they spend millions on behavioural psychologists in order to understand how to implement the most repetitive, sticky, grindy, time absorbing practices… the massive list of damage modifiers is designed to create a min/max black hole 🕳️

So glad I saw the game as being a corny mess and didn’t even entertain buying it.

i still find it hillarious how these buisiness people think baldur's gate shouldn't be treated like it's a standard you can't meet. Just make a good game don't shove microtransactions down our throat and maybe you can actually get people enjoying stuff for once and buying the damn game.

"I feel like I spend more time looking at loot than I do playing the game" I literally looked over my shoulder when Act Man said this and my dad had been spending the last ten minutes looking at his D4 loot.

When I heard about Diablo IV, I told myself I'm not gonna buy it until I know exactly, how it is going to be received by playerbase. Why? Because I had lost my faith in Blizzard. And my fears came true: Diablo IV is not worthy of my time. Thank god I didn't buy it, and now I never will. One of the best decisions I have made in the year 2023.

I played until I think a week into the first season with my friend. We played a ton in the Eternal realm, we took breaks here and there. The massive nerf patch really cut into our enjoyment, but since we were playing together, it wasn't *too* bad. My friend struggled a lot with inventory management, and we kept having to portal in the middle of a dungeon just to unload. It got to a point where we stopped picking up gems (but Diablo 4 prios gem pick up over loot pick up, so that was often another fun dance). Eventually, even the fun we had playing together couldn't salvage this cunty dumpsterfire of a game. We decided to "pause" to play BG3 on release. We've yet to unpause. It's not even that I dislike the gameplay, or even the story. Both are good for what they are. Like I've played Diablo 3 over and over and over, it's a game I play when I wanna do no thoughts head empty shit. D4 is just D3 slightly updated with a new story. It might as well have been a DLC or whatever. Usually when I have casual intentions, a game stays installed on my PC (see: Warframe, The Sims 4). Like games I'll put a few hours into every now and again, but it's so random and the amount of hours vary that installing it every time is a bigger pain than having it readily available whenever I wanna play. Diablo 4 could've easily been one of those games. Diablo 3 is such a game for me. It's uninstalled, though. And since that was the only reason I redownloaded battle.net, that will be departing from my drive very soon as well.

Baldur's Gate 3 made me realize how good we had it from 2000-2013ish. Just a complete game with a focus on fun first and I can't put it down. These parasites at the top that see the gaming industry (every industry) as money printing machines are driving us collectively insane. Steve Jobs was right: the product suffers when management prioritizes profits over their product quality. *Edit: I DID NOT BUY DIABLO 4

I want this to be released on Steam so I can watch the Overwhelmingly Negative score sink Blizzard even deeper into the abyss.

Ma boy Act Man getting better with the delivery and sharper with the analysis deeper research… keep it up mate. I’ll keep watching.

What bothers me about all of this the most is that i think there are still passionate game designers at blizzard. Unfortunately bobby kotick came along and castrated them for having any sort of passion about their games and now the culture of blizzard is to hoard as much money from their games as humanly possible. Dont forget before bobby kotick the ceo of blizzard was making something like 5-10 million a year from blizzard revenue but bobby makes something like 200 million a year.

When I started playing in Beta and began looking at the odd assortment of affixes, it became quite apparent that whoever was developing the itemization system was not optimizing it for the sake of the player's enjoyment. Seemed more they were trying to meet a required word count on a book report.

Whoopi Goldberg being a diablo gamer is the twist I was not expecting

Actman dunking on Blizzard is the gift that keeps on giving. Please keep coming back to this dumpster fire, you've got a rich vein of comedy gold here. 😅

Dude... you freak-in nailed it. Both reviews are gold!

I passed over this game after your first video. My condolences to anyone who had hope. “Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment”

Blizzard's business strategy is to add new, bigger problems to their games so that the old ones don't seem so bad in comparison.

"You are a factory of sadness!" :'D

Dark patters are not just defined by buying or spending money, it could be as simple as changing configuration of a program. Take almost any page's support contact they are very hard to find and get a hold of, unsubscribing to something like a mailing list or a service, how about making it hard to uninstall a program on your computer, that used to be a thing (fortunately, there is no such thing on phones). Any UI that actively prevents you from doing something that should be simple is a dark pattern. Not the inability of designing a good UI but the ability of designing a hard one to use.

That clip of Steve Jobs is a really good insight into how Apple became Apple. Despite his reputation as an a-hole, the man recognized that the best way to build a brand was to make things that customers genuinely wanted to purchase and would be happy with. For him it wasn’t about fooling people into spending money on the bare minimum for short term gain. That is pretty much lost in every industry now, including at modern Apple.

Always sad to see. My cousins dream was to work for blizzard and when he finally achieved it he left in a year as he realized it was not the company he loved as a kid.

Holy shit. The UI design of it automatically highlighting the "Activate Premium" and accidentally pressing "A" activates it and there's no confirmation safeguard... Scummy as fuck. God damn!

Thank you for not putting ads at the beggining

Activision is going to keep beating the Blizzard name into the ground until people *finally* catch on and stop buying their garbage. Then they'll kill it off and put it out of its misery.

The fact that their OWN GAMES from years ago have a better inventory system than this game is the funniest part of the whole thing. Maybe if they drink more breast milk it'll help their brains develop enough to think of a solution.

Never underestimate Blizzard's ability to disappoint.

Why in fuck's name do people keep getting excited for the next Blizzard game? This is a complete farce at this point.

Activision is such a slimy company. The only way to stop this shit is to stop playing/buying their products

That Steve Job's clip is completely right on the dot with what he was saying. This is why small studios always make good stuff, they HAVE to in order for it to sell since they don't have the big reputation. Then the established AAA vampires that chase sales numbers and have zero creativity move to buyout said smaller developers to steal that new popular IP. Then they milk and run that shit into the ground until a new "chosen one" small dev appears. And the cruel soulless capitalistic cycle continues.

As a product designer, I can guarantee you there is a Figma file that has the confirmation dialog for activating premium. Also as a product designer, I’ve been in conversations where the powers that be instruct you to remove it. It’s also in these meetings where you’re referred to as “not being built for this” when you push back. Crazy to see it so blatant in gaming as well :/

I predicted this exact result before the game even had trailers.

Agree so much on the Steve Jobs clips. You put them perfectly where they should be. The business people in the company only cares about ACVs, MAUs, etc. They have 0 clue about the product.

I never thought I’d see the day where I would have to cut off companies such as Activision Blizzard, Rockstar, Apple, Netflix, Disney, Hulu,2K and EA over their predatory shady borderline illegal practices…Companies with so much potential and money, supported by hopeful fans who once loved their art. These days these businesses are not even worthy of being called a shell of their former selves.

Someone give Act Man a break from carrying all this weight of this epic video slamming Blizzard into the ground. That clip of Steve Jobs is INSANELY scary when looking at a company like Blizzard now. Gotdamn Act Man, you absolute chad. *biggest tip of the hat here*

A full price game has a PAID battle pass??? That shits crazy bro

Goddess of Victory Nikke (aka, the big booty gunplay game) gives you multiple chances to avoid making mistaken purchases. 1. You click the price for a battle pass 2. You are given a chance to put in your zip code to calculate sales tax 3. You are given the option to select your payment method 4. You get the thing you pay for. At any time during steps 2 and 3, you can opt out. When a game that markets itself to coomers has better UI than a multimillion dollar mmo action rpg, you done fucked up

The funny thing is when you go to the merchant to sell or dismantle rare or legendary items, the game will ask for confirmation. So protecting virtual items is more important to Diablo 4 devs than protecting players' real purse. Hmm...

Wow the creators of Diablo immortal implemented horrible, money hungry changes to Diablo IV?! Who wouldve thought?!?!

That affix felt like I was modding my sword in d2 hero editor

I wanted this game to be as fun as diablo 3 so badly

I find it absolutely perfect that two games released in the same year, both having 6 years of development time, one being developed by a previously small scale developer, one being produced by one of the largest game devs on the planet, and both being on complete and utter opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of quality, engagement, polish, etc

Act Man, as a guy working in the industry right now, fucking god bless you man. You're doing God's work. Genuinely, videos like this make me keep going.

I've been playing diablo 2 lately and just deleted diablo 4. How sad is that.

I'm now on my way to get the Platinum for Diablo four. Only thing left to do is level to 100. It's taken me from Launch, past season 1 and into season 2 to get up towards 78. If I wish to do battle pass content, I will need to start from one, redo all my past progress with a slightly new short campaign and a gimic for the new map to get new cosmetics or even to get battle pack rewards. I am not gonna do that, every 2 month's.

I swear modern gaming is like watching people in abusive relationships. But when you tell them they can do better, YOUR the enemy, and not the company. I hate this timeline.

THANK YOU! I've done a UI boot camp and they literally teach you to NOT implement dark patterns. They even shared a link to a website that logs a history of dark patterns that major companies have used, it's called the Dark Pattern Hall of Shame. Also, as a Destiny player, the implementation of the longer dismantling time for legendaries was an awesome move and great UI. This is why I love you, Act. You know your shit!

Activision is a horrible, morally bankrupt corporation. I went to load up COD MW2 (2019) after not having played it in at least a year or more, and got hit with a message about how hacks were used on my account, or some such. I've never used hacks on a COD game in my life. This was clearly a false flag, but because of that, I'm banned form the servers and can no longer play any of the COD games that I've spent hundreds of dollars on.. This corporation is absolutely criminal. They've stolen probably millions of dollars from their dedicated fans. Why are they not being hit with class action lawsuits..?

It’s embarrassing that today that modders have more passion than the developers. Project Diablo 2 is a modded D2 with an endgame and constant development. They got that shit to be up scaled to modern resolution. Blizzard doesn’t care about players any more, they just see us as walking taking wallets.

The UI really did make me feel a negative emotion i’ve never felt before. I have nerve damage that impacts my right side (mostly my left forearm to my hand) from a car accident a few years back when I was 18. Some lady blew a red light and t-boned the car on my side. My hand is still functional, but sometimes it locks up or spasms. I went to click on the “Season Blessings” to read them more in-depth and ended up with a battle pass that I never wanted to begin with… not to mention the “dismantle junk” and “dismantle all” being so close… its really disheartening that there aren’t safeguards where there need to be for me.

"You are a factory of sadness!" that is one awesome line and a great summary of blizzard.

Thanks for reminding me. Nevermind storage space, this reminded me I still had the game installed. I uninstalled it now, don’t see a need to go back. A new theme with the same dungeons I got tired of grinding. I’m ok thanks. 12/10 hard skip.

They are the equivalent of the parasite that’s able to attach to a bugs nervous system and essentially turn them into a zombie against their own will. Funny how I immediately thought of the same mechanic in Destiny that the developer went over. The absolute sh!tshow that would’ve taken place if people had accidentally dismantled something like the Gjallarhorn in Destiny 1 when there was no ‘exotic kiosk’ to get your exotics back, which was added later with The Taken King I believe. Imagine putting in hours, days, weeks, MONTHS to get the Ghorn only to accidentally hit the dismantle button and *poof* it’s gone