This is the season with the free perma-RoRG, right?
At least that's more interesting than "double _____"
Just doubling stuff might be good for a weekend event to boost numbers or something, but it's not interesting enough to make playing a whole season worth it.
The D3 season twists are still pale shadows of anything seen in Path of Exile, but the game is on skeleton crew maintenance mode, so I'm not expecting much ever anymore, if they even continue seasons indefinitely like the Diablo 2 ladder. They might build up a stable of interesting enough ideas and just rotate them around rather than come up with anything new. Just randomize what the modifier on the newest season is when pushing the button to launch it. Boom, done.
I still think the combat smoothness/animations beats any competitor on the market, though I haven't tried Grim Dawn, so I'm not sure how that compares. Loot in D3 is real stale though with the end-game forcing you into sets, and them giving you a starter set for minimal effort that exponentially boosts your power level. There's not much choice, other than to pick which set you're gonna use and pursue that, assuming it's one that's viable for pushing high GRs or clearing T13 fast. That's about as diverse as it gets. There's a little more nuance for group vs. solo play, but not much.
I think Path of Exile's 4.0 release is supposed to entail a major upgrade of combat and visuals to match or exceed the proficiency achieved in D3, but from what I read of their plans, 4.0 is dated for early 2020 or something.... They don't have the largest team and I guess if they want to keep working on fixes/smaller updates and launching unique leagues every 3 months or so... In conjunction with that, they might be switching the game to a newer/different base technology or engine to better facilitate development, I've heard Unreal Engine 4 tossed around as a possibility.
All of PoE's other systems are pretty much ahead of what D3 has done though at this point. Maybe the lore isn't quite as strong, but the actual in-game story might be better than at least the one in D3, if not D2?
It just makes me sad because I like Diablo, but someone decided that it wasn't worth further development after Reaper of Souls fixed the biggest issues of the base game for the most part (though some core problems remain), so they decided to basically mothball it and put out Diablo Immortal first instead of a "real" sequel. The whole wishy-washiness of not even being able to announce a PC/Console sequel was...eugh.
Which is SHOCKING since the game is one of the highest selling PC games of all time, as one of the most anticipated sequels of all time, and even Reaper of Souls did well to rebound after the catastrophic state D3 launched in. Somehow the decision to remove the RMAH from base D3 and not have another constant income stream in Reaper of Souls killed future development. And I wouldn't even say the RMAH was that bad an idea honestly, just that all the systems around it were bad and served to prop it up much more than they should have. I only made a return of maybe $20 or so, but I know other people made hundreds or more on some of the stuff they sold to insane whales. The legal framework for setting up the RMAH in all the various counties must have been expensive as hell too at the time, so maybe they lost a fair bit of money on doing that, more than it brought in, and more than the value of warping the game around it was.
Of course an analysis like this is with 20/20 hindsight pretty much, but better leads on projects like D3 would have been able to anticipate or adapt to the market better, barring some crazy new development.
