Has Lost Ark Doomed Diablo 4? <Sponsored by FunPay>

[Kenneth]

Did Lost Ark doom Diablo 4? The MMO-ARPG that took the world by storm just a few weeks ago has done nothing but grow. As I am writing this the peak players for Lost Ark on Steam is just over 1.3 million with a current player count of 990 thousand. There is no denying the games success and one cant help but think “is Diablo 4 doomed?”



The last we heard from the Diablo 4 team was in mid December with there quarterly update. In this update they go over weapon changes, talent additions, and most importantly combat improvements. What intrigued me the most about the combat improvements was the video showing them off. I couldn’t help but think “this game just looks like a graphical upgrade DLC for Diablo 3” not “this is the next new thing in the ARPG space”.

It's hard to ignore what Lost Ark has brought to the table. Sure there are debates if the game is pay-to-win (it is). And sure there are gripes about standard eastern MMO philosophies such as gearing with a + system similar to Black Desert and basically every other eastern MMO. But can you ignore the class design, the unique PvP experience, the open world concept, the absolute insane detail that goes into there world and dungeons/raids let alone how cool the fights look inside them? I don’t think you can. I think Lost Ark, even though not a new game technically, has set a new standard in the west for what we want in an ARPG.



Blizzard is coming off a bad stretch of gaming development. There really hasn’t been anything developed by Blizzard that has changed the landscape of gaming in quite some time. You could argue Overwatch did for a brief period in time but realistically I think Hearthstone was there last big success and innovator. With the recent news of Microsoft buying them out people are hoping this means they can get back to creating the best games in the space but Microsoft won’t have that kind of influence for years to come. Diablo 4 is probably coming out in 2023 which in the grand scheme of things is right around the corner. Is there enough time to take Diablo 4 from what we see in these developer updates to something like Lost Ark? Are they willing to delay it until it gets to this new standard? Or is Diablo 4 in its own lane and has Lost Ark not put a damper on it?

[hackerlol]

I was talking to my friend just the other day about this.
I felt after playing Lost Ark that my expectations for Diablo 4 were vastly increased and while one is classified as an MMO and the other, so far, as a limited multiplayer experience... It still feels like apples to apples for me as far as the online and general gameplay experience goes.