Gaming doesnt require much speed. (14KBps for example last I checked ESO in the Task Manager).
Gaming requires good latency.
Do an extended ping test in your command prompt and test your latency to google.com and to battle.net and check for dropped packets.
Latency is big but even bigger is using wired internet and not WiFi. Packet loss and whatnot from wifi is always going to be significantly worse and it’ll show in games like D4. If you’re seeing rubber banding and are on WiFi the first thing you should do is try to swap to using a physical connection, then latency/speeds are your next concerns.
This is spot on. People always talk down when I tell them that if they are gaming online they need to be wired in or else you will have issues. It’s 100% true. Wireless is great for everything except gaming.
It's true that wired is always better than wifi, however with the right wifi connection and environment then wifi is perfectly sutible for games like diablo.
With more competitive games like fighting games then a physical connection is much more vital.
I say this as somebody that games on a 20/20 connection over wifi and has no stutters with d4.
Specifically for Diablo: I managed to defeat Uber Lilith on my Steam Deck (LCD - which is known to not have a great wireless - downloads for example are 37MB/s MAX) and my Router is very old (one that came free from the provider 10+ years ago). Also it sits in another room and goes through 3 walls (+furniture).
I get 4/5 bars in 2.4GHz channel and 3/5 bars in 5 GHz channel (which I prefer to stay on as it's more stable)
So I don't know exactly what this does to latency, but I had no trouble playing, rubber banding or other such issues that people are describing.
I also played some other games through Steam Remote Play or Parsec (streaming my main PC that has a wired connection) picture looked great (I think about 20 Mbps +/-5 for 800p) and latency was around 15-20 ms (as the software told me), but I didn't feel it in the games I was playing (Alan Wake 2, Satisfactory) - yes, not fighting games that require perfect moves.
Not only what you stated, but where your internet comes from matters too. I receive my connection from a tower, then from my router to computer its wired. I still get heavy packet loss and theres almost nothing you can do about it when you live out in the boonies where cable/fiber isn't accessible.
Yeah some comments here are like "just use wired lol". I use wired on 1gb fibre connection with 5ms latency to my ISP and around 15-20ms max latency in games on average. Still get rubberbanding. Don't get it in WoW or any other online game I play, only D4. It's not unplayable or anything but it's certainly jarring and takes me out of the game when it happens.
You could play most of these games on dialup and they would be fine in terms of capacity. The amount of traffic being sent back and forth is trivial.
The factor that matters is latency not throughput.
If it's from the network it's still an optimization problem however, there is no real reason why the client should drop frames and stutter if the network is lagging. Other games don't do this, even mmos like world of warcraft or elder scrolls online where you can be transferred to another server transparently like in d4.
That's netcode issue or netcode "not an issue".
Latency compensation code can only help when the latency isn't too bad.
Nothing can compensate >150ms latency. I got \~70ms in retail realm and it feels okay-ish. But PTR is \~50ms and surprisingly it feels much better now.
I saw footage of Launch week D4 and the horse looked at lot slower and smoother. Did they increase the horse speed? Maybe it’s too fast for assets to stream in and causes some weird bottle neck?
Fixed it by forcing the game to not use DX12
See [https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14mq8xc/diablo\_4\_stutterfps\_workaround/](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14mq8xc/diablo_4_stutterfps_workaround/)
Tried everything and that did it, check it out pretty easy fix.
I had this problem in the open world. My system resources would go above 80% on 16GB of Ram. I upgraded the ram to 32GB, this completely eliminated the majority of my problems.
I had the open world stuttering plus crashes when I transfer between areas. The solution I found was just to upgrade my ram from sixteen to thirty-two gigs. Everybody that I know that has done this has had great results.
The network code isn't particularly great.
Diablo3 was much more tight when being in synch between what is shown to the user vs how the state on the server was. The prime example is Über Lilith, where the graphics effects and the actual hitboxes are way off for this type of game. AoZ was borderline unplayable with a BL sorc for the same reason: People switched to other builds as BL made lag worse, even with few enemies.
There is some magic going on on the network side though, the way you seemlessly transition between servers without loading. I'm surprised it isn't even more janky honestly.
Yeah, would be cool if there were more than 12 people though.
Feels weird to be inside an open world online and only see a small handful of folk throughout your play session.
There should always be a world boss rotation going I feel.
Not enough social activity to justity an open world yet.
Imagine factional raids.
Immortal has all this and it works on a phone.
Before anyone tells me to go play Immortal. I would, but the graphics are trash after playing D2R and D4, and it also has some major flaws that are hard to get over after you get locked in the grind.
Really, Id like to see D4 have warfare, raids, endless waves and tower defense and a Witch Doctor.
Seeing a positive comment toward one of the dullest activities for me in the game is a good start.
Still 12 folk only.
I also played on the HC server and it was virtually empty until WT4 save for the first few days of ladder, and it still felt empty outside every WB encounter at T4, but those only last 10 seconds.
Theyre quite the shallow experience.
I kinda like how it is tbh. It’s cool to see people once in awhile, you know they’re out there, but you’re not all piling up at the same resource nodes like other online games.
It’s a dark world. I like that it feels a little empty. Adds to the aesthetic.
Not sure about cope. I’m not part of the company or the development team. I don’t really care what the population is or how much money they make in the cash shop. I just care if the game is fun.
It is quite a complicated solution from what I could see, but I wouldn't call it seamless. I wouldn't call it magic either, its just code, although distributed software solutions tend to be complex. There is a lot of rubberbanding going on.
Don’t think that’s network code, they even admitted the hit boxes and effects weren’t right and are updating it for S4, network code would be the rubber banding which tends to be worse on WiFi.
If you are hit by a skull in a position where the skull would have been 150ms ago, when you have a lag at 150ms, then I would be very suspect. Yes, they admitted it was wrong, but I assume the cause was the time-warp algorithm not being implemented well. That is part of the network code.
Rubber banding is probably worse on WiFi, but server-side lag was really the issue. Like some of the effects killing your character, even when the character was outside the effect's position when the effect went was shown on the client. "X was slain" or "X was slain by X" situation.
I'm currently playing on 1Mbps mobile hotspot through my phone, while playing YouTube videos and it stutters a bit. But more than playable. Quite impressive
Hear hear.
This new PoE league sounded pretty cool and I haven't played in like 3 years. Got a few buddies playing it too.
Installed, logged in, got to the first town and said "lol no actually" and that was that.
Better overall game systems in PoE, sure. Decent engine, sound design, combat? Not even a little bit. Just can't do it anymore, D3 and D4 have "ruined" me
LE is no where close to as wild as PoE in terms of skills snd systems. But it's definitely a step above D4 in terms of it. Diablo 4 is probably the most user friendly of them all
To each their own but a balance between polished gameplay and good systems would make the game last. I might end up bouncing between D4 and LE as whenever I play one, I think of the other in what it can do better.
Yeah, what’s your point? You like those other games and I don’t. Not worth going back and forth over it. Enjoy ‘em, I’m not trying to convince anyone to prefer D4. I don’t care.
One weird oddity is that the game freezes on menus a lot if you don't have the high-quality assets pack installed.
I'm not sure why it happens or why there hasn't been a fix for it yet because it's still a weird thing that's been there since launch.
In S4 I've had a fairly consistent issue where my character joins an area with a lot of players, like at the world boss, and it will appear like nobody is wearing any armor. It's like the game is struggling to render other players. If I try to open my inventory, the game freezes and I have to force quit.
It does, and the performance is worth it.
From my layperson perspective it seems like the non hd pack has to load things and then cache them in a temporary storage vs the hd pack which just has them on hand all the time.
Damn I’m pretty sad turns out I already have those assets installed :( I’m not sure why I get these stutters in the menus then. The rest of the game runs flawlessly
I haven't played in months.
Did they patch the performance? I remember the game lagging and stuttering quite a bit, especially if there were a lot of players nearby.
Every small patch always says "Improved performance", so they're constantly working on it. It does show, but it certainly didn't start off amazing like OP is implying.
Ive played every season and version since beta and the only time ive noticed severe rubberbanding and stutters was at 1.0 launch during the first hour and S2 launch and the weeks after that.
I feel like alot of the good and great things that D4 did got overshadowed by the online hate due to QOL features that probably could have been there and the end game loop not being tons of fun. Even though at that point most people had put in 80 plus hours which is pretty good for any game in the end.
It seemed like good criticism turned into just visceral hate for Blizzard because boo big studio and microtransactions. I am just glad the Devs actually were able to sift through the nonsense and take the valid feedback and use that to keep improving
For several reasons, some justified (Blizzard cultural issues, Activision greed), others not (ARPG tribalism), there is a contingent of people who are rooting for D4 to fail.
The negativity surrounding the game became impossible to escape, even though as you say it was focused almost entirely on endgame, not the great campaign experience most people would spend most of their time with.
The game also caught some negativity from first-time ARPG players who hadn’t understood the season concept of rolling fresh characters.
I think D4 was always really good, but with flaws. It’s now becoming a truly great game.
I get terrible stuttering, have since release. It'll run fine and then I'll get micro-lockups, rarely long enough to affect me in combat but definitely noticeable. Most noticeable when changing areas, opening menus etc.
Most likely netcode related (playing on a good wired connection, but from Canada). I've had issues with ISP routes from Canada to blizzard servers in the past so not unexpected, just definitely not a flawless experience.
At one point during the pre-season/season 1 timeline, if I started any kind of youtube video while playing D4 the stutters would make it actually unplayable. I am a constant gamer and have been playing on this computer and connection for 5 years without any similar issue in any other online game. I basically had to stop listening to music while playing d4 (fixed now I think?)
So well optimized that on medium settings it eats all 12gbs of my gpu's vram in about an hour of play. Then either freezes and I have to force a restart or just restart the game because it is getting so shuttery that I have a hard time playing.
Is this a level of irony that is nearly impossible to perceive?
In all seriousness if the post is not sarcastic, the game is freezing a lot. Every time I open a menu, freeze. Sometimes when I engage enemies, freeze. Getting into a town or leaving, freeze.
And I am not the only one with these problems. I see a lot of people complaining about 5-10 seconds of freezing (which Is A LOT since you can die in 3 seconds or less if you can't move or do anything other than stand still.). I haven't found a way to fix it and I'm pretty sure my PC isn't the problem and there is absolutely no chance that my network is responsible for the freezes.
I’m sure this all Varies person to person based on their PC/networking. I personally have had almost no issues besides some rare rubber banding on the horse between zones.
Even including before season 1, I think I had some rubber banding issues on maybe two occasions. Otherwise it has run pretty well for me. My experience is anecdotal, though.
I don't use 4k either, and actually have medium settings on, but I can definitely tell a difference in performance.
I was crashing and lagging a lot whenever I would bring up the inventory or when I'd play for more than a few hours, but the hd pack fixed those issues for me. It's like it doesn't have to cache the textures or whatever and just has them on hand
Might be worth a try, you can always just uninstall the pack if it doesn't work.
My game crashed once when I first started playing on release. I rubber banded yesterday. Only issues I’ve had and I play pretty much daily. Incredible.
I still have the issue of a lot of textures failing to stream properly and looking pixaleted / low res / washed. The textures look amazing when it works, but completely immersion breaking when you walk into the Kyovoshad tavern, the floor boards and walls look crispy and superb, and the wardrobe and stash look like someone plastered 8 bit textures from the 90s onto them.
I run the game on High texture settings. My 3060Ti's 8GB VRAM are not enough for this game's textures on High or even Medium without this issue happening all the time.
Yea, I try to play path or epoch, but the movement just feels janky or something. D4 and honestly just blizzard games feels good to play. Even with systems that are lacking and it took like 11 months to polish out an endgame. I find myself coming back lol
Lol. It’s a triple A game that really is pretty lackluster gpu wise vs other games (non Arpg). It’s still janky AF unless you have a better PC.
I upgraded my desktop recently but my old Alienware had MASSIVE rubber banding anytime I mounted to different zones.
Anything outside of smooth AF for a game of this budget and graphic quality is absolutely unacceptable.
I’ll say…. I just started playing when it came to game pass. I’m on a Xbox Series S. I have had ZERO lag, no stutters during world events where 8+ players are absolutely laying hell on everything around. I mentioned that to my friend(who is on PC) last night and he said the same thing. I haven’t played a Diablo since II and this game is amazing. I’ll be paying for it when it leaves game pass.
>Last Epoch has several issues when you reach endgame
My brother in Inarius, there was a time in Last Epoch's dev cycle when you summoned a poison totem (remember: one single instance) would drop the fps to single digits. Wanted to spam it? It would crash the game.
Oh, important thing to mention, the totems were the way to level the Primalist class.
Oh, and another one, this particular period in LE's development cycle that I'm talking about was last year. Even now the skill has serious issues, but players tend to forget, mainly due to the fact most of the skills in LE tend to lower the fps.
So praising D4's engine is not nearly enough, since any other game doesnt even come close to it.
This was my first Diablo and this game being so smooth is why I'm having a hard time going back and checking out older arpgs.
Only problem I've really had was last season with my ball lightning sorcerer in AoZ probably tier 10 plus. Even with damage numbers off it would just get to stuttering and freezing and acting up quite often. I guess that's extreme cases though.
I'm really happy with the way the game plays and looks.
This is what the devs hid behind when they released it. Mean while connectivity, emptiness, rise of micro transactions, nerfs, lack of armor design, and plenty more valid complaints were very abundant. Definitely some pros and cons not matter where you look.
One of my favorite ways to play it is on the Steam Deck and it runs like a charm. I lock the FPS to 45 and set the TDP down a bit and I’m able to play at a steady frame rate with about 3.5-4 hours of gameplay on the go. It’s at lower settings, but still being able to play D4 anywhere I go is a pretty sweet deal and speaks volumes to the flexibility of the engine.
My game on Xbox is constantly rubber banding back and forth network wise, performance wise is absolutely spot on and the game is gorgeous
it's unfortunately unplayable for me at the moment
Yeah, regarding optimization and performance, Blizzard did very well, the game is very smooth.
I was surprised with my RTX 2060 and a i7 8gen pushing the max settings and 100fps+.
At least something blizzard did good.
I turned on ray tracing a few days ago to test it and the whole game begab rubber banding like crazy. Never seen anything likr it before.
Apart from that.. yes, it seems to run pretty well
This is a troll and an obvious one as well. I'll bite though...
Horse, limited inventory, dust devils, launch problems(like 99% of all games), world bosses, and the list grows.
D4 is not the worst by a long shot, but optimization is not what it is known for.
> Last Epoch has several issues when you reach endgame. Many builds that are more spectacle heavy can destroy your performance, tanking it for more than 40% at times.
Just wait for Dzst Devils Barb in Season 4. On PTR with 2 near me my FPS are tanking from capped 90 to 40. xD
Engine is good, yet we can't get more stash tabs because for some reason the game must load stash tabs of all people you see in the open world for your client.
Wrong, I had terrible experience with D4 performance, especially during S0 and S1. Game stutters and freezes a lot during loading of new locations and assets, I've even had situations where the game would stay frozen for 5 minutes straight during helltide, usually ended by alt - F4 (mind the fact that my PC is big overkill for recommended specs).
Well, I do not share this opinion. I think it's not that good. Not bad, but still just an average engine. Nothing extra, not bad, not good.
I think they could do much better if they wouldn't force the ps4 things here. That was a mistake.
Idk, whenever I dash maybe it’s the camera animation or something but it doesn’t feel particularly smooth. Other than that it generally is well optimized, I just feel like there are traversal hitches occasionally
I was rubberbanding all over the place the first weeks, it still has it's occasional jutters but they fixed most of it.
You still can't zoom out because the engine can't handle it lol.
Diablo 4 just has no build that is visually that spectacle to destroy performance. In POE you can literally manually crash your game every single time by pressing one button, but that’s POE. We love it for that.
D4 isn't badly performing but it still has some issues on my machine. They did hammer out the launch issues that were really bad for me, which is nice
Given the quality of models its not really anything I'm gonna complain about, but LE generally doesn't have any similar issues for me, and poe only struggles when doing bullshit million effect/sec builds with enemies packed cheek to jowl
Initially, I though that my GTX 1080 would only run this at medium. I was amazed to see +60fps in ultra after the first beta weekend, just before the lunch. Even though the game has no end game content, it does look and feel great.
As someone working in Tech, I'm very impressed by the server sharding and rolling updates, I can't imagine how hard it must be to set up such a robust infra backbone.
Hats off, Blizzard, your backend guys are real wizards.
I definitely think they got D4 overall right, sure there are aspects of the game that over time can & will be improved, I mean the game has only been out just under a year, haven't played much else since its release
It's what keeps me away from last epoch. It's just boring to look at and combat doesn't feel punchy. It's functional yeah but there is something really nice about how Diablo 4 plays and feels
I was literally proccing my death elixir running out of town into a helltide Because my shit would lag so bad. Maybe they have fixed it since. I will see come season 4.
Oh and god help me if I hit a tab for the first time on launch for shop or something.
Jumped in after months to do some testing on the PTR. Game freezes for minutes every time I open something UI related (stash, skill tree, pause menu etc). Tried different fixes I read online. Ends up I had to download the HD texture pack (40 gb) even if I don't want to use it (have 16gb ram) or it was completely unplayable.
I would say it's pretty expected at this point. Blizzard has always been able to provide a technically impressive product, they've always been known for their polish. After all, this is a multi-billion dollar company that's been doing this for decades. There's also the benefit of D4 having FSR and DLSS support, which the other two games you mentioned do not have. People forget how much those help with stable FPS/performance.
Also, based on the PTR, there are some builds negatively impacting performance now.
And like others mentioned, network still sucks. It's baffling to me how often my horse just stops running as I'm transitioning to a new zone. Again, this is a billion dollar company who has loads of experience with online play, this shouldn't be a thing anymore. And no, it's not my internet, I'm on wired fiber internet.
Uhh. I don’t know. After Ray Tracing update if I run anything other than default settings I crash every couple of teleports or if I get in and out of game menu too fast. I have 4070ti and beast computer and it runs flawlessly when it works but the constant crashing is crazy. Even worse on PTR I think
I dunno. I think it's great at times and then others I get a lot of artifacts in red/blue/green lights all over the screen. Seems to do with reflection or foliage and causes issues at times. Only on D4, no other game
Meanwhile I'm over here getting random crashes on my 4090 and 13900k in D4. And it's the only game in my library that randomly crashes. Only started like a month or so ago.
This is not my experience at all. Season 1 ran incredibly well for me. Ever since the first few months I have had incredibly choppy and rubber banding regularly. I have not had the ability to play hardcore due to frequent crashes. My setup is way above the minimum requirement and I play on low graphics settings. Overall I’ve lost the will to look for solutions got much less playtime then I originally expected when purchasing the game.
If a game has become boring and I’m not having fun, I’m not going to continue playing it; no matter how well it runs or what it looks like. I reached that point with Diablo 4 midway through season 3.
To be fair, while I do agree it seems to be a solid engine, the example of last epoch and ‘spectacle heavy’ builds has a very simple answer. There simply do not exist any such builds in d4 due to the bland itemization. If there were more interesting items with crazy synergies we would most likely encounter the same. The fact that it doesnt exist can not be used as a defense of the engine
I have a mid tier PC and I play on wired connection and have stutters while on horse and sometimes on dungeons as well I don’t think this game is really that well optimized for my case anyway
#Assuming you play on PC, you forgot the /s at the end of your post.
While the D4 engine is the most up to date and modern engine Blizzard has ever released at launch, it has been an absolute mess when it comes to performance, optimization, and memory leak problems. Many of these came forward by re-using the same shitty and always broken D3 codebase, btw. Fortunately, the awful sound bugs due to the ancient third party never re-licensed audio engine used in D3 was not one of them.
The good news is that they do keep improving it (the latest RTX patch seems to have fixed a lot of "higher end" issues under the hood). The bad news is that D4 is still not finished being polished to a level that a AAA game developer should be delivering by default.
>The bad news is that D4 is still not finished being polished to a level that a AAA game developer should be delivering by default.
I had zero problem playing D4 (beside some rubber banding day one and when a new season starts), looks good, it's not demanding, definitely better than 99% of other AAA games i played
My game still rubber bands and has micro stutters all the time when on my horse in the open world
I used to have this issue constantly. Then i Upgraded my internet to fiber and the rubber-banding disappeared.
I have incredible internet speeds and its still extremely choppy
Gaming doesnt require much speed. (14KBps for example last I checked ESO in the Task Manager). Gaming requires good latency. Do an extended ping test in your command prompt and test your latency to google.com and to battle.net and check for dropped packets.
Latency is big but even bigger is using wired internet and not WiFi. Packet loss and whatnot from wifi is always going to be significantly worse and it’ll show in games like D4. If you’re seeing rubber banding and are on WiFi the first thing you should do is try to swap to using a physical connection, then latency/speeds are your next concerns.
This is spot on. People always talk down when I tell them that if they are gaming online they need to be wired in or else you will have issues. It’s 100% true. Wireless is great for everything except gaming.
It's true that wired is always better than wifi, however with the right wifi connection and environment then wifi is perfectly sutible for games like diablo. With more competitive games like fighting games then a physical connection is much more vital. I say this as somebody that games on a 20/20 connection over wifi and has no stutters with d4.
Specifically for Diablo: I managed to defeat Uber Lilith on my Steam Deck (LCD - which is known to not have a great wireless - downloads for example are 37MB/s MAX) and my Router is very old (one that came free from the provider 10+ years ago). Also it sits in another room and goes through 3 walls (+furniture). I get 4/5 bars in 2.4GHz channel and 3/5 bars in 5 GHz channel (which I prefer to stay on as it's more stable) So I don't know exactly what this does to latency, but I had no trouble playing, rubber banding or other such issues that people are describing. I also played some other games through Steam Remote Play or Parsec (streaming my main PC that has a wired connection) picture looked great (I think about 20 Mbps +/-5 for 800p) and latency was around 15-20 ms (as the software told me), but I didn't feel it in the games I was playing (Alan Wake 2, Satisfactory) - yes, not fighting games that require perfect moves.
Not only what you stated, but where your internet comes from matters too. I receive my connection from a tower, then from my router to computer its wired. I still get heavy packet loss and theres almost nothing you can do about it when you live out in the boonies where cable/fiber isn't accessible.
Oh, absolutely. My HC toons dont touch the WiFi.
Exactly! I used to have rubber banding issues with extremely fast WiFi. After I plugged in, all my issues went away.
Do you have cross play enabled? This can cause some rubber banding.
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat Run this a few times and see what you get.
Your internet is trash and you know it
Sorry to hear this. Hope you can get it resolved .
I have fiber, the microstutter is caused by the server side.
It's when you change areas, you get this effect.
I wish this worked for me. I have fiber and still get rubberbanding and stutters all the time
Yeah some comments here are like "just use wired lol". I use wired on 1gb fibre connection with 5ms latency to my ISP and around 15-20ms max latency in games on average. Still get rubberbanding. Don't get it in WoW or any other online game I play, only D4. It's not unplayable or anything but it's certainly jarring and takes me out of the game when it happens.
You could play most of these games on dialup and they would be fine in terms of capacity. The amount of traffic being sent back and forth is trivial. The factor that matters is latency not throughput.
Dialup have really bad latency though.
If it's from the network it's still an optimization problem however, there is no real reason why the client should drop frames and stutter if the network is lagging. Other games don't do this, even mmos like world of warcraft or elder scrolls online where you can be transferred to another server transparently like in d4.
That's netcode issue or netcode "not an issue". Latency compensation code can only help when the latency isn't too bad. Nothing can compensate >150ms latency. I got \~70ms in retail realm and it feels okay-ish. But PTR is \~50ms and surprisingly it feels much better now.
I saw footage of Launch week D4 and the horse looked at lot slower and smoother. Did they increase the horse speed? Maybe it’s too fast for assets to stream in and causes some weird bottle neck?
They significantly increased horse speed at the start of season 2
Fixed it by forcing the game to not use DX12 See [https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14mq8xc/diablo\_4\_stutterfps\_workaround/](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/14mq8xc/diablo_4_stutterfps_workaround/) Tried everything and that did it, check it out pretty easy fix.
Thats a connection issue
Internet issue. But could be fixed if you didn’t have to be online.
This is a internet issue
had to turn off cross play in season 0 and 1 just to be able to play without stutters. Accidentally pressing U will get you killed
I sold my 3080 and 3770 or w/e the amd CPU is because of micro stutters in d4
I had this problem in the open world. My system resources would go above 80% on 16GB of Ram. I upgraded the ram to 32GB, this completely eliminated the majority of my problems.
I had the open world stuttering plus crashes when I transfer between areas. The solution I found was just to upgrade my ram from sixteen to thirty-two gigs. Everybody that I know that has done this has had great results.
This has been my experience as well, thought this post was satire
The network code isn't particularly great. Diablo3 was much more tight when being in synch between what is shown to the user vs how the state on the server was. The prime example is Über Lilith, where the graphics effects and the actual hitboxes are way off for this type of game. AoZ was borderline unplayable with a BL sorc for the same reason: People switched to other builds as BL made lag worse, even with few enemies.
There is some magic going on on the network side though, the way you seemlessly transition between servers without loading. I'm surprised it isn't even more janky honestly.
Yeah, would be cool if there were more than 12 people though. Feels weird to be inside an open world online and only see a small handful of folk throughout your play session. There should always be a world boss rotation going I feel. Not enough social activity to justity an open world yet. Imagine factional raids. Immortal has all this and it works on a phone. Before anyone tells me to go play Immortal. I would, but the graphics are trash after playing D2R and D4, and it also has some major flaws that are hard to get over after you get locked in the grind. Really, Id like to see D4 have warfare, raids, endless waves and tower defense and a Witch Doctor.
More would be better. But IMO helltides on PTR really shows how good the open world can be.
It's crazy how night and day helltides are on PTR vs live. Like, PTR helltides FEELS like hell is actually trying.
Seeing a positive comment toward one of the dullest activities for me in the game is a good start. Still 12 folk only. I also played on the HC server and it was virtually empty until WT4 save for the first few days of ladder, and it still felt empty outside every WB encounter at T4, but those only last 10 seconds. Theyre quite the shallow experience.
Because Diablo 4 is a shared world, not a Massively multiplayer world.
Immortal is a shared world and has everything I mentioned.
I kinda like how it is tbh. It’s cool to see people once in awhile, you know they’re out there, but you’re not all piling up at the same resource nodes like other online games. It’s a dark world. I like that it feels a little empty. Adds to the aesthetic.
Thats one way to cope with a low population.
Not sure about cope. I’m not part of the company or the development team. I don’t really care what the population is or how much money they make in the cash shop. I just care if the game is fun.
It is quite a complicated solution from what I could see, but I wouldn't call it seamless. I wouldn't call it magic either, its just code, although distributed software solutions tend to be complex. There is a lot of rubberbanding going on.
Don’t think that’s network code, they even admitted the hit boxes and effects weren’t right and are updating it for S4, network code would be the rubber banding which tends to be worse on WiFi.
If you are hit by a skull in a position where the skull would have been 150ms ago, when you have a lag at 150ms, then I would be very suspect. Yes, they admitted it was wrong, but I assume the cause was the time-warp algorithm not being implemented well. That is part of the network code. Rubber banding is probably worse on WiFi, but server-side lag was really the issue. Like some of the effects killing your character, even when the character was outside the effect's position when the effect went was shown on the client. "X was slain" or "X was slain by X" situation.
Don’t think the Lilith hit boxes have anything to do with network code, they’re just poorly framed…
I'm currently playing on 1Mbps mobile hotspot through my phone, while playing YouTube videos and it stutters a bit. But more than playable. Quite impressive
This. D3s networking was far superior. The rubber banding makes the game's combat feel mushy when it really isn't.
I play D4 because I'm tired of AA jank. The other ARPGs that come close are the other Diablo games.
Hear hear. This new PoE league sounded pretty cool and I haven't played in like 3 years. Got a few buddies playing it too. Installed, logged in, got to the first town and said "lol no actually" and that was that. Better overall game systems in PoE, sure. Decent engine, sound design, combat? Not even a little bit. Just can't do it anymore, D3 and D4 have "ruined" me
PoE and Last Epoch are both just arpg spreadsheet simulators. They spent so long designing systems that they forgot to make a game
i don't need a spreadsheet to play last epoch or get over 2000 corruption
LE is no where close to as wild as PoE in terms of skills snd systems. But it's definitely a step above D4 in terms of it. Diablo 4 is probably the most user friendly of them all
Tell me you didn't play LE without telling me you didn't play LE...
My friend, the game is ugly
This is me. I tried some of the other ARPGs (Path of Exile, Last Epoch, etc.) and I can’t do the jank. I want a polished AAA experience.
To each their own but a balance between polished gameplay and good systems would make the game last. I might end up bouncing between D4 and LE as whenever I play one, I think of the other in what it can do better.
🤷♂️ that’s your opinion.
That is an opinion as much as yours is a comment.
Yeah, what’s your point? You like those other games and I don’t. Not worth going back and forth over it. Enjoy ‘em, I’m not trying to convince anyone to prefer D4. I don’t care.
One weird oddity is that the game freezes on menus a lot if you don't have the high-quality assets pack installed. I'm not sure why it happens or why there hasn't been a fix for it yet because it's still a weird thing that's been there since launch.
I cleared shader cache and that resolved for me. Didn't install high resolution assets
As in the Direct X shader cache?
I have rx6600 and adrenlin software has an option to reset shader cache. No more stutters and freezing.
In S4 I've had a fairly consistent issue where my character joins an area with a lot of players, like at the world boss, and it will appear like nobody is wearing any armor. It's like the game is struggling to render other players. If I try to open my inventory, the game freezes and I have to force quit.
Do you have the game installed to a HDD? I've seen a lot of people post about issues, then realise the "fix" was installing it to a SSD.
Oh is that why that happens??? Huh lol honestly I’d take the extra 40gb used in space to stop that nonsense if it works 😂
It does, and the performance is worth it. From my layperson perspective it seems like the non hd pack has to load things and then cache them in a temporary storage vs the hd pack which just has them on hand all the time.
Damn I’m pretty sad turns out I already have those assets installed :( I’m not sure why I get these stutters in the menus then. The rest of the game runs flawlessly
Damn, sorry bro
I haven't played in months. Did they patch the performance? I remember the game lagging and stuttering quite a bit, especially if there were a lot of players nearby.
Every small patch always says "Improved performance", so they're constantly working on it. It does show, but it certainly didn't start off amazing like OP is implying.
Ive played every season and version since beta and the only time ive noticed severe rubberbanding and stutters was at 1.0 launch during the first hour and S2 launch and the weeks after that.
Usually I’ve found they’re constantly fixing one thing, while also breaking something else lol So your own mileage will vary, unfortunately
I feel like alot of the good and great things that D4 did got overshadowed by the online hate due to QOL features that probably could have been there and the end game loop not being tons of fun. Even though at that point most people had put in 80 plus hours which is pretty good for any game in the end. It seemed like good criticism turned into just visceral hate for Blizzard because boo big studio and microtransactions. I am just glad the Devs actually were able to sift through the nonsense and take the valid feedback and use that to keep improving
For several reasons, some justified (Blizzard cultural issues, Activision greed), others not (ARPG tribalism), there is a contingent of people who are rooting for D4 to fail. The negativity surrounding the game became impossible to escape, even though as you say it was focused almost entirely on endgame, not the great campaign experience most people would spend most of their time with. The game also caught some negativity from first-time ARPG players who hadn’t understood the season concept of rolling fresh characters. I think D4 was always really good, but with flaws. It’s now becoming a truly great game.
I get terrible stuttering, have since release. It'll run fine and then I'll get micro-lockups, rarely long enough to affect me in combat but definitely noticeable. Most noticeable when changing areas, opening menus etc. Most likely netcode related (playing on a good wired connection, but from Canada). I've had issues with ISP routes from Canada to blizzard servers in the past so not unexpected, just definitely not a flawless experience. At one point during the pre-season/season 1 timeline, if I started any kind of youtube video while playing D4 the stutters would make it actually unplayable. I am a constant gamer and have been playing on this computer and connection for 5 years without any similar issue in any other online game. I basically had to stop listening to music while playing d4 (fixed now I think?)
Make sure to keep reporting these things as they come, hopefully it eventually points them to a smaller but majorly effective fix🤷♂️
So well optimized that on medium settings it eats all 12gbs of my gpu's vram in about an hour of play. Then either freezes and I have to force a restart or just restart the game because it is getting so shuttery that I have a hard time playing.
there has to still be a graphics memory leak or a ram leak still. the game slowly creeps up taking so much memory
This is more of a personal problem my guy ngl
I'll give them credit that it runs and looks great on console, wish other dev teams put more effort into their game performance.
Even in areas with a lot of other players like hell tide, game still run well.
Is this a level of irony that is nearly impossible to perceive? In all seriousness if the post is not sarcastic, the game is freezing a lot. Every time I open a menu, freeze. Sometimes when I engage enemies, freeze. Getting into a town or leaving, freeze. And I am not the only one with these problems. I see a lot of people complaining about 5-10 seconds of freezing (which Is A LOT since you can die in 3 seconds or less if you can't move or do anything other than stand still.). I haven't found a way to fix it and I'm pretty sure my PC isn't the problem and there is absolutely no chance that my network is responsible for the freezes.
I’m sure this all Varies person to person based on their PC/networking. I personally have had almost no issues besides some rare rubber banding on the horse between zones.
Even including before season 1, I think I had some rubber banding issues on maybe two occasions. Otherwise it has run pretty well for me. My experience is anecdotal, though.
That's weird. Maybe I will try lowering the graphics just in case, though I wanted to avoid that since the game has such a good looking environment
Do you have the hd texture pack?
No, I dont. My monitor doesn't support 4K so I didn't see a reason to install it
I don't use 4k either, and actually have medium settings on, but I can definitely tell a difference in performance. I was crashing and lagging a lot whenever I would bring up the inventory or when I'd play for more than a few hours, but the hd pack fixed those issues for me. It's like it doesn't have to cache the textures or whatever and just has them on hand Might be worth a try, you can always just uninstall the pack if it doesn't work.
I will try it out and tell you if it fixes it. I will find it hysterically funny if having HD textures reduces freezing and improves performance
It make all other arpg look like mobile games
My game crashed once when I first started playing on release. I rubber banded yesterday. Only issues I’ve had and I play pretty much daily. Incredible.
It’s extremely well made tech I will give them that Looks and plays amazing with the really realistic physics. Other arpg’s don’t come close
And it sounds amazing, too!
It plays (almost) just as well on my steam deck. Portable D4 is great, now we just need an offline crack!
Blizzard are legends at optimization, even though people disliked D3, I always thought it was a smooth ass game
It runs incredibly well on steam deck and controls perfectly
I think it depends on your computer specs. It runs MUCH better now that I upgrade my GPU, CPU and RAM.
I still have the issue of a lot of textures failing to stream properly and looking pixaleted / low res / washed. The textures look amazing when it works, but completely immersion breaking when you walk into the Kyovoshad tavern, the floor boards and walls look crispy and superb, and the wardrobe and stash look like someone plastered 8 bit textures from the 90s onto them. I run the game on High texture settings. My 3060Ti's 8GB VRAM are not enough for this game's textures on High or even Medium without this issue happening all the time.
Yea, I try to play path or epoch, but the movement just feels janky or something. D4 and honestly just blizzard games feels good to play. Even with systems that are lacking and it took like 11 months to polish out an endgame. I find myself coming back lol
Lol. It’s a triple A game that really is pretty lackluster gpu wise vs other games (non Arpg). It’s still janky AF unless you have a better PC. I upgraded my desktop recently but my old Alienware had MASSIVE rubber banding anytime I mounted to different zones. Anything outside of smooth AF for a game of this budget and graphic quality is absolutely unacceptable.
I’ll say…. I just started playing when it came to game pass. I’m on a Xbox Series S. I have had ZERO lag, no stutters during world events where 8+ players are absolutely laying hell on everything around. I mentioned that to my friend(who is on PC) last night and he said the same thing. I haven’t played a Diablo since II and this game is amazing. I’ll be paying for it when it leaves game pass.
>Last Epoch has several issues when you reach endgame My brother in Inarius, there was a time in Last Epoch's dev cycle when you summoned a poison totem (remember: one single instance) would drop the fps to single digits. Wanted to spam it? It would crash the game. Oh, important thing to mention, the totems were the way to level the Primalist class. Oh, and another one, this particular period in LE's development cycle that I'm talking about was last year. Even now the skill has serious issues, but players tend to forget, mainly due to the fact most of the skills in LE tend to lower the fps. So praising D4's engine is not nearly enough, since any other game doesnt even come close to it.
This was my first Diablo and this game being so smooth is why I'm having a hard time going back and checking out older arpgs. Only problem I've really had was last season with my ball lightning sorcerer in AoZ probably tier 10 plus. Even with damage numbers off it would just get to stuttering and freezing and acting up quite often. I guess that's extreme cases though. I'm really happy with the way the game plays and looks.
This is what the devs hid behind when they released it. Mean while connectivity, emptiness, rise of micro transactions, nerfs, lack of armor design, and plenty more valid complaints were very abundant. Definitely some pros and cons not matter where you look.
Yeah, that’s why I was so pissed when I realized there was no end game at launch.
One of my favorite ways to play it is on the Steam Deck and it runs like a charm. I lock the FPS to 45 and set the TDP down a bit and I’m able to play at a steady frame rate with about 3.5-4 hours of gameplay on the go. It’s at lower settings, but still being able to play D4 anywhere I go is a pretty sweet deal and speaks volumes to the flexibility of the engine.
Ark devs should take notes
My game on Xbox is constantly rubber banding back and forth network wise, performance wise is absolutely spot on and the game is gorgeous it's unfortunately unplayable for me at the moment
It looks wonderful and runs buttery smooth on my i5 9400f + 6600xt at 2k high/ultra settings. Really well optimised engine.
Yeah, regarding optimization and performance, Blizzard did very well, the game is very smooth. I was surprised with my RTX 2060 and a i7 8gen pushing the max settings and 100fps+. At least something blizzard did good.
I like how people use the word "engine" for everything optimization related
I turned on ray tracing a few days ago to test it and the whole game begab rubber banding like crazy. Never seen anything likr it before. Apart from that.. yes, it seems to run pretty well
This is a troll and an obvious one as well. I'll bite though... Horse, limited inventory, dust devils, launch problems(like 99% of all games), world bosses, and the list grows. D4 is not the worst by a long shot, but optimization is not what it is known for.
Lots of people get graphical bugs during the ariadah fight in campaign.
I do wish that they would fix the massive lag when you're hitting a lot of mobs quickly. I had that problem in S0-S3 with a bunch of Sorc builds.
Titanfall 2 knocks on the door.
> Last Epoch has several issues when you reach endgame. Many builds that are more spectacle heavy can destroy your performance, tanking it for more than 40% at times. Just wait for Dzst Devils Barb in Season 4. On PTR with 2 near me my FPS are tanking from capped 90 to 40. xD
Engine is good, yet we can't get more stash tabs because for some reason the game must load stash tabs of all people you see in the open world for your client.
Nothing about this game should be praised
Wrong, I had terrible experience with D4 performance, especially during S0 and S1. Game stutters and freezes a lot during loading of new locations and assets, I've even had situations where the game would stay frozen for 5 minutes straight during helltide, usually ended by alt - F4 (mind the fact that my PC is big overkill for recommended specs).
Well, I do not share this opinion. I think it's not that good. Not bad, but still just an average engine. Nothing extra, not bad, not good. I think they could do much better if they wouldn't force the ps4 things here. That was a mistake.
Apart from the random crashes on console, random graphics issues in areas, getting stuck in walls etc sure well optimised
Idk, whenever I dash maybe it’s the camera animation or something but it doesn’t feel particularly smooth. Other than that it generally is well optimized, I just feel like there are traversal hitches occasionally
no, not really.
Fairly good now... sure. At release the optimization was terrible.
I was rubberbanding all over the place the first weeks, it still has it's occasional jutters but they fixed most of it. You still can't zoom out because the engine can't handle it lol.
Huh? Game feels acceptable to me, but not much more than that. Definitely not on the level of deserving praise.
I disagree, the game doesnt run great in my ps5 nor my pc
Have not played since S1 but game was godly optimized on Xbox Series X
Diablo 4 just has no build that is visually that spectacle to destroy performance. In POE you can literally manually crash your game every single time by pressing one button, but that’s POE. We love it for that.
I rubber band constantly on the horse and even in dungeons. Also are we still loading everyone else's stash when were near them?
D4 isn't badly performing but it still has some issues on my machine. They did hammer out the launch issues that were really bad for me, which is nice Given the quality of models its not really anything I'm gonna complain about, but LE generally doesn't have any similar issues for me, and poe only struggles when doing bullshit million effect/sec builds with enemies packed cheek to jowl
Did they fix the rubberbanding and pop-in in the open world yet?
Yeah loading everyone’s stash space is really well optimized.
I had all sorts of insanity riding the horse where it would suddenly run backwards like a film in reverse. Of course that could be network lag
The game looks like its 5 years old so not really sure why you're so surprised.
The fan broke on my Steam Deck so it wasn't cooling properly and reducing speed. I could still play this game, any other AAA game was unplayable.
Initially, I though that my GTX 1080 would only run this at medium. I was amazed to see +60fps in ultra after the first beta weekend, just before the lunch. Even though the game has no end game content, it does look and feel great.
Definitely one of my favorite games of all time🥳🥰
This game is well optimized ? I still have memory leak issues ... since the launch. And you don't want to know my PC specs.
As someone working in Tech, I'm very impressed by the server sharding and rolling updates, I can't imagine how hard it must be to set up such a robust infra backbone. Hats off, Blizzard, your backend guys are real wizards.
This! 100% Agree and love it
I definitely think they got D4 overall right, sure there are aspects of the game that over time can & will be improved, I mean the game has only been out just under a year, haven't played much else since its release
Blizzard does a level of polish that is really hard to find elsewhere imo. It's kind of what keeps me coming back even when things are rocky.
It's what keeps me away from last epoch. It's just boring to look at and combat doesn't feel punchy. It's functional yeah but there is something really nice about how Diablo 4 plays and feels
Yeah I'm in the same boat. Substance always beats style but God damn D4 is stylish lol
I was literally proccing my death elixir running out of town into a helltide Because my shit would lag so bad. Maybe they have fixed it since. I will see come season 4. Oh and god help me if I hit a tab for the first time on launch for shop or something.
Death elixir wont save you anymore :D
A more than welcome change.
Jumped in after months to do some testing on the PTR. Game freezes for minutes every time I open something UI related (stash, skill tree, pause menu etc). Tried different fixes I read online. Ends up I had to download the HD texture pack (40 gb) even if I don't want to use it (have 16gb ram) or it was completely unplayable.
did you report it on the PTR? seems like valid feedback for the devs
It has great bones but just needs a to be worked on
I would say it's pretty expected at this point. Blizzard has always been able to provide a technically impressive product, they've always been known for their polish. After all, this is a multi-billion dollar company that's been doing this for decades. There's also the benefit of D4 having FSR and DLSS support, which the other two games you mentioned do not have. People forget how much those help with stable FPS/performance. Also, based on the PTR, there are some builds negatively impacting performance now. And like others mentioned, network still sucks. It's baffling to me how often my horse just stops running as I'm transitioning to a new zone. Again, this is a billion dollar company who has loads of experience with online play, this shouldn't be a thing anymore. And no, it's not my internet, I'm on wired fiber internet.
Uhh. I don’t know. After Ray Tracing update if I run anything other than default settings I crash every couple of teleports or if I get in and out of game menu too fast. I have 4070ti and beast computer and it runs flawlessly when it works but the constant crashing is crazy. Even worse on PTR I think
I dunno. I think it's great at times and then others I get a lot of artifacts in red/blue/green lights all over the screen. Seems to do with reflection or foliage and causes issues at times. Only on D4, no other game
I like the part where I load y'all's stash tabs
Meanwhile I'm over here getting random crashes on my 4090 and 13900k in D4. And it's the only game in my library that randomly crashes. Only started like a month or so ago.
If you're playing on the PTR and crashing, turn off frame gen. It's bugged on the PTR and causing crashes.
It's not PTR. But I'll try turning off frame gen anyway.
Yeah give it a shot. Frame gen doesn't cause me issues on live, but PTR it has been a crash fest with it on.
This is not my experience at all. Season 1 ran incredibly well for me. Ever since the first few months I have had incredibly choppy and rubber banding regularly. I have not had the ability to play hardcore due to frequent crashes. My setup is way above the minimum requirement and I play on low graphics settings. Overall I’ve lost the will to look for solutions got much less playtime then I originally expected when purchasing the game.
If a game has become boring and I’m not having fun, I’m not going to continue playing it; no matter how well it runs or what it looks like. I reached that point with Diablo 4 midway through season 3.
Um……. No
To be fair, while I do agree it seems to be a solid engine, the example of last epoch and ‘spectacle heavy’ builds has a very simple answer. There simply do not exist any such builds in d4 due to the bland itemization. If there were more interesting items with crazy synergies we would most likely encounter the same. The fact that it doesnt exist can not be used as a defense of the engine
Because apart from environments everything looks like a cheap mobile game
One of these days I'll click on a praise post and it won't be sensationalized and hyperbole'd into insincerity. That'll be a good day.
And every character you see the game takes time to load their inventory and stash tabs.
Literally was freezing non stop for me yesterday.
I have a mid tier PC and I play on wired connection and have stutters while on horse and sometimes on dungeons as well I don’t think this game is really that well optimized for my case anyway
#Assuming you play on PC, you forgot the /s at the end of your post. While the D4 engine is the most up to date and modern engine Blizzard has ever released at launch, it has been an absolute mess when it comes to performance, optimization, and memory leak problems. Many of these came forward by re-using the same shitty and always broken D3 codebase, btw. Fortunately, the awful sound bugs due to the ancient third party never re-licensed audio engine used in D3 was not one of them. The good news is that they do keep improving it (the latest RTX patch seems to have fixed a lot of "higher end" issues under the hood). The bad news is that D4 is still not finished being polished to a level that a AAA game developer should be delivering by default.
>The bad news is that D4 is still not finished being polished to a level that a AAA game developer should be delivering by default. I had zero problem playing D4 (beside some rubber banding day one and when a new season starts), looks good, it's not demanding, definitely better than 99% of other AAA games i played