There was a beta for Diablo 4 this past weekend. It was limited to Act 1, with player level capped at 25, and only three of the five classes were playable (Barbarian, Rogue, Sorceress). A second beta next weekend will add the Druid and Necromancer into the mix. Progress doesn't carry to the full release, for what that's worth.

I was very interested to give it a shot, since I've sunk a metric crap-ton of hours into past entries. I love brainlessly hittin' me some loot piñatas, and Diablo is the basically the platonic ideal of a podcast game.

After spending most of the weekend playing it, I've come away pretty pleased. It ain't a flawless game, but it sure is more Diablo. Blizzard still seems to know how to make a compelling one of those, it's still got that certain je ne sais quoi. One could argue that it seems a little safe, but there's this "don't fix it if it ain't broken" thing that comes to mind. Pretty sure I'm going to sink 1,000+ hours into this one just like I did for Diablo 2 and Diablo 3.

Maybe it's easiest to start with some flaws:

• Boy is this game grimdark. It feels like a reaction to the outcry against Diablo 3's more colorful design... which was always enormously stupid. At best this makes the game look a little bland, at worst it actually makes it hard to "read"; e.g., it's hard to tell which environmental objects are interactable and which aren't.
• The current UI isn't always awesome. E.g., the new skill point system can be respeced for free at any time, but since later tiers of skills require a certain amount of points invested in previous tiers of skills, respecing an early "basic" attack skill often requires taking points out of later tiers to do so (hopefully this be mostly a non-issue with endgame builds). There's also a maze of menus for all sorts of stuff, some of which I never even figured out how to find again beyond when the game prompted me to open them.
• This is beta-specific, but the overworld seems very much designed with a mount in mind, because it can really take a while to hoof it out to objectives without one (see what I did there?). Odd choice for them to not give you a mount for the beta, especially since mounts are a new thing for a Diablo game, and I'm sure people were interested to try them.
• There were definitely technical issues, but I assume those will get sorted out eventually. The game crashed my computer once, and I experienced somewhat frequent rubber-banding.

But all of that is fairly minor stuff in the scheme of things.

I played a fair bit of all three available classes, if nothing else to see which one I wanted to start with when the full release happens. They all seem fun, and I didn't really settle on one. The Sorceress was the first I tried and has great area control, but her basic attacks seem to be the weakest of the three characters and she runs low on mana pretty fast. The Rogue has good single-target damage output--at least the way I spec'ed mine--and is probably the class I had the easiest time with overall. I didn't expect to like the Barb much, I've never been much of a Barb player, but I ended up liking how different he felt due to having much stronger basic attacks--undoubtedly because his resource is built from basic attacks and drains away rather than starting full and recharging back. But I'm very interested to give the Necro and Druid a shot, hopefully one of them will really jump out at me as the character I want to main.

It wasn't all a cakewalk, even on world tier 2. There was a vampire sorcerer boss guarding a castle that I actually never beat. I do know that I need to be using the dodge button more; IIRC this wasn't in the PC version of Diablo 3 but was added for the console versions. Now it seems like a core mechanic of the boss fights, and I haven't found a keyboard layout I'm comfortable with yet. I'm sure I'll figure something out when the full release happens. These days I almost always play with a gamepad, but I'm doing keyboard and mouse because, well... it's friggin' Diablo. I've always played these games with keyboard and mouse, and if nothing else it makes it easier to precisely place those ranged area attacks. But I should probably test it out with a controller just to see how it feels.

I had heard that they were designing this game so that equipment sets either weren't a thing at all anymore, or were much de-emphasized; in the latter years of Diablo 3, set equipment was the only stuff that actually mattered. This game seems to instead have a mechanic that lets you remove "legendary" effects from equipment and add them onto other pieces, not unlike unsocketing and adding gems. I guess we'll see how that goes, impossible to judge the end-game until I've actually played some of it. But from reading the descriptions of world tiers, it's not clear that "set" items even exist in this game at all.

Interesting that the entire game seems to be displayed on that one overworld map--and that it appears to no longer be procedurally generated. The procedural generation is now only for the instanced dungeons, while the overworld is occupied by dozens of other players, MMO-style, who might end up joining you for random world events.

I was amused to see that identifying items now seems to be gone as a concept, though perhaps it will make a return for items that can only drop in world tiers 3 and 4 (unavailable in the beta, since you need to reach level 50/70 to play them).

The new skill system seems interesting; I'm sure I wasn't leveraging it properly, I'll worry about that when the full game comes out. It's definitely much more complicated than Diablo 3's simple "pick six skills, you either have it or you don't." Now you can have up to five points in a skill, and modifiers on items can push it past that. My only general criticism of this system--and really all systems that work like this--is that it appears to add more freedom/choice to builds than it actually does, because one assumes that you'll always max all six of your active skills, and one-pointing a seventh doesn't seem to matter since you can only bind six, as far as I can tell. It looks like the actual choice will be where you spend your points on "passive" buffs on the tree--I didn't even really look at this stuff in the beta, I just wanted to try all the active abilities.

I do wonder if the game will have a way to do loadouts that includes both equipment and a skill tree setup together. If there's one in the game now, I didn't notice it, but then I wasn't really looking. But for endgame, I can see myself having entirely different loadouts for, say, running a dungeon vs. fighting a world boss.

Anyway, I could go on, but... anyone else play this thing and have some thoughts?

So, thoughts:

1. Disappointed that I couldn't play the Druid. That was the one I actually wanted to play since I was hoping to see if there was a melee-focused class other than the Barbarian. But you know, actually good (I am so fucking sick of the Barbarian. And the Necromancer. I don't know why Blizzard has such a hard on for those classes) I ended up playing the sorceress, which seemed decent enough.

2. I'm sort of 50/50 on your point about it being dark. I don't disagree that the graphics can get hard to "read" in spots, but the overall tone of the world and story is so, so much better than Diablo 3. Having a cutscene of Lilith and not having her act like a bad Saturday morning cartoon villain is a massive improvement.

3. Level scaling. Big negative for me. I get why they did it, but I always feel like it's a lazy way out of actually having to balance a game. This is particularly true in a looter like Diablo. What's the point of having all the gear if it's never going to make you feel more powerful? Stupid. I'm hoping some of these regions at least have an upper cap so you can at get some sense that your character has improved.

4. The dungeons are cool in concept but lacking in execution. I particularly dislike a lot of the level layouts, which don't have a lot of easy connections back and forth between points. I definitely ran into more than one instance where the objective was "kill these two things to open the big door" only to guess the wrong way, run into the door first, then have to trek all the way back through a now mostly empty dungeon just to hit X on some random object on the other side of the map and then run back again to the door.

5. The UX is . . . not great. And there are a ton of QoL features that seem to have been stripped out from Diablo 3. For example, there isn't an easy way to get a general sense of gear before you pick it up and you can't mark it as junk that way. For how much crap you are picking up, that's a pretty big miss. I feel like the game would benefit massively from a PoE style loot filter where you can just tell the game to not even show you loot below a certain quality tier or gear that isn't for your class.

6. This is going to be a weird one - but I really wish they'd go back to the system where you didn't know what an item was until you identified it in town. I think moving away from that in Diablo 3 broke part of the core gameplay loop of the series. The first two games were broken into these sort of "expeditions" where you'd head out, load up on gear, and then head back. It added to the sense of anticipation with finding out what gear you got and it also gave you an excuse to go back to town.

One of the problems I was already finding with the open world structure was that I kept needing to wander back to town to pick up quests but didn't really have a reason to do so. The game could do a much better job of parceling that stuff out in the open world so you didn't need to go back to a city just because a new "!" popped up somewhere.

-----

So, yeah. I don't think it's bad, and it gave me a better feeling that Diablo 3 ever did, but it does feel like there are some design decisions that they need to revisit. I just don't know if they have enough time to do it before the full release. I honestly think this series would be much better off going back in time than trying to reinvent the wheel. A dose of Diablo 1's simplicity would improve the game massively, I think.

In general I'm not a big fan of level scaling either, for the reason you mentioned. I talked about that some about a year ago in the context of feeling powerful in games (here, near the end). But in this kind of loot game, I think it makes sense, and perhaps more to the point, with the more MMO-like open world, it would have been hard to do it any other way.

I mean, say you were in a level 1 area with your new character and a level 80 character wanders over to do a world event with you and wipes the floor with it in two seconds. That wouldn't be fun. In that instance you could dynamically scale the level 80 player down to around the new player's damage output, but then you're back to scaling, with the level 80 player expecting to roflstomp some monsters and instead getting a tough time.

And in endgame you're going to want to be able to play in any region and have it be viable, rather than be stuck farming some particular region because it's the highest-level one. There are other ways to solve that like Grifts, etc. But yeah, I guess this is just what I expected for this particular game and it doesn't really bother me.

Filters that don't show loot feel like a half-step because you could still sell them or break them down for mats, even if it's not a lot. Now, I haven't played PoE for quite a while, so maybe they actually do something like this, I dunno, but for me the perfect solution was actually in the now-defunct Marvel Heroes. At some point that game added a system in which you could filter out drops either of a particular rarity or for a particular gear slot so that you would still see them drop, but then they would almost instantly (half a second later?) be turned into money that went straight to your inventory. A system like that in which you could choose to instantly dissolve low-tier gear into either crafting mats or money would be great for Diablo 4, but if there have been any loot games other than Marvel Heroes that did something like this, I don't know about it.

I know what you mean. Requiring that items be identified did have a purpose. It added anticipation, and there was also a benefit for group play in the sense that it helped prevent players from stopping mid-run to fiddle with their inventory, which sort of forced everyone in the group to stop. Of course Diablo 3 solved this by adding timers to Grifts, but I've never been a fan of timers as a solution to stuff like that.

I'm still not touching Blizzard products.

Path of Exile 2 should be out next year, I'll wait for that. Not that Tencent (no matter how hands-off they are with GGG) is inherently much better.

Well, I've now played the two remaining characters.

I was kind of disappointed in the Druid? Sounded interesting, but just ended up seeming like a very slightly different flavor of Barb. And I was never a huge fan of Barb.

On the other hand, I like the Necro. Will probably be my main when the full release happens (though I certainly plan to play all classes, the Necro will just be my vanguard). Was interested to see that Corpse Explosion requires no resource other than corpses and has no cooldown, so that you can just just chain cast it in big trash mob situations and blow everything up in no time flat. And the having the menagerie was fun, at the end I had a dozen undead dudes following me around and actually doing totally decent damage.

I will say that I wish they allowed you one or two more skills. Having only four in addition to your basic and core skill feels a bit limiting. But I suppose they need to make it gamepad friendly for the folks playing it on console, which would make more skills problematic. It is what it is, I guess.

Fought the world boss for the first time. Can't say I'm a big fan. There were a lot of maxed characters there (including my maxed Necro), and so we were in no danger of actually losing, since the sole win condition seems to be doing enough damage before a timer runs out. That's sort of the problem. I died three or four times in the course of the fight, but when you die, you just spawn right inside the encounter and run back in, so in effect, it barely matters if you die or not aside from the bit of lost damage while you're running back. Since it's all just a big group DPS check, it makes you feel like your contribution doesn't really mean much. Plus, I can't say I love being beholden to timers for when these things spawn. Yet they're worth it to fight for the ridiculous amounts of good loot they drop... I got something like eight legendary items out of it. I just wish there was an equivalent that was a solo venture or something I could do with my own party only... maybe there will be in the full release, I don't know.

Oh, well. Think I'm done with the beta. Now comes the ~2.5 month wait until the real deal, when I can actually keep all my stuff. Back to the RE4 Remake.

Well, I finished the beta in terms of doing all the story missions. I still have to level up my sorcerer character to level 25, before I start over again with a new character. I'm currently at level 21 and did a pyromancy build. My overall impression is a good one. The game is basically Diablo III with added improvements and a more gloomy story and art design. And as someone who actually liked Diablo III a lot, granted I didn't start playing until the ultimate edition came out, this game is right in my wheel house.

I spent lots of hours during Fri and Sat just doing side quest and trying to experience as much as I can during the limited window. I think Lilith is an interesting villain, though I don't think she is the ultimate bad guy in the game like the promotional material makes it seem. I remember Capcom doing the same with Resident Evil 8 by promoting the tall lady before release, and she turned out to be the games first boss fight. I also like that they did another version of the Leaf storyline with the Nayelle character. So Diablo III haters who couldn't stand Leaf because she was "too Anime" will have to suffer through that again.

I will definitively get it, but probably after the price drops. I'm definitely not getting it on day one for reasons some might notice.

I really don't have too many complains about the game. I will say I agree about the level scaling. One of the cool things about Diablo III was the character you picked started out weak, but once you got the right loot and attacks, the character became a killing machine and it felt good. And if you wanted to challenge yourself, there were difficulty modes that made the game brutal but gave huge rewards. Diablo IV also seems to have this option at least. But I can tell its going to be a lot more challenging than III overall.

My wife and I played some of this using couch co-op last night (after individually getting characters through the prologue, an annoying requirement). I thinj I’ll end up buying it when it comes out so we can do more of that, because couch co-op games we both enjoy are few and far between.

For the game itself, boy it sure is a Diablo! Probably won’t make my top 10 for the year but I’ll spend a bunch of time with it regardless.

@av_gamer: Speaking to the difficulty, it does make me think that I never even tried world tier 1, I just put it on 2 and most of the content still seemed easy enough that way. That said, there was that one boss toward that end that kept killing me, head vampire dude in a castle. I can see myself possibly knocking it down to 1 temporarily for the full release if there's some difficult boss blocking my progress, knowing that the real game is the end-game grind anyway, or at least it is for me. It's nice to get to that point when you know you can start to keep your loot and aren't going to simply out-level it after a few hours.

So after playing through the beta, taking a sorceress up to 25 and the other classes up to maybe 10 or so, I think the game feels like about a 3/5 from what I've seen so far. There's the germ of a really good game in there, but it also feels like they would need about another 6-12 months to get it where it needs to be. There are just so many little things that don't work very well. Some of those, like the UX stuff, are probably fixable in the time they have left. Some of the other stuff feels more core to the experience and things that would need a more fundamental re-visit.

* The classes feel super-unbalanced. Melee feels extremely weak next to ranged combat, so the Barb and Druid did not feel at all good to play when compared to my Sorceress. However, she went too far the other way and became so overpowered she was boring. I eventually had the ability to spawn three four-headed Hydras, which, given their negligible mana cost and no cooldown, just meant I would walk into a room, spawn the summon, and kill everything in an area. Rinse and repeat.

* The dungeon design needs a lot of work. Too many instances of the objective being some variation of "find the key" or "kill two monsters" in a dungeon shaped roughly like a cross. The result was a lot of finding one of the keys, then finding the door, then realizing the other key was on the other side of the map, then having to run through a mostly empty dungeon to get there, and then having to run back again. Not fun.

* Not sold on the open world, especially given the level-scaling in place. I was extremely tired of the not-Russia snow hell after just going through it once. I could easily see the world getting very boring, very fast given its size and the seeming lack of interesting things to do, especially if the other zones are as visually disinteresting as the beta area.

One minor thing which might not be that big of a deal to most people, but was notice by me was the lack of personality in the class of characters. This is just a beta and the final game might be different, but one of the things I liked about Diablo III was the different personality in the class you chose. The overall story was the same, but the way each class interacted with the characters and the dialog they spoke was different. They also had their own origin stories and motivations for wanting to stop Diablo, which led to their own cinematic endings if the requirements were met. After maxing out my Sorceress to 25 and clearing the 3 outpost, I started over as a Barbarian and his dialog is the same as the woman Sorceress I cleared the beta with. It would be a shame if this aspect was scaled back in the final game.

@therealturk I agree about the open world. It would be a shame if the whole game takes place in a snowy Russian like setting, when both Diablo II and Diablo III had the game take place is different locations. I have a feeling this will be the case here, because I believe Lilith will be the game's starter villain, but I could be wrong.

@therealturk: I think your criticisms are fair for the beta, but I'm not sure they're going to apply to the rest of the game as much. Hard to tell right now.

Everyone has been talking about class balance and melee feeling weaker, but the devs have said in interviews--and I've heard chatter about the end-game closed beta--that what's strong in the early game isn't the same as what's strong in mid or late game. E.g., the Necro seemed the most powerful to me (took all five characters to 20-25), but apparently trails off in the late game. In any case, Blizzard is always making balance adjustments, and enough people complained about the melee classes seeming weak that I'm sure they're very aware of the perception, and it's gonna end up in a good place. Two and a half months is plenty of time to balance things if need be.

I agree that for now the dungeons aren't great. There can be a lot of backtracking through empty bits, and I'm also not sure why they don't always just have a portal to the entrance at the end like they did for D3 (I know it's in the emote menu thing, but also that doesn't seem to work for story dungeons). We'll see if they can improve that. I know that Nightmare dungeons are a thing at higher world tiers and might make them more interesting? I dunno. Sounds like just random modifiers and nothing else?

As for the world, I myself said that I prefer the brighter colors of D3, and this this seems overly dark and washed out to me. But I'm assuming that the other zones are going to be visually different and not every zone is covered in snow, at least. Also, mounts are a thing. I still think it's bizarre that they didn't let players have mounts to try for the beta since it's a new feature. But I imagine that will help significantly with reaching events and dungeons faster so that there's less relatively dead time walking to places.

Anyway, despite any flaws, based on what I played I imagine I'm going to spend a lot of hours on D4 and enjoy myself doing it.

I tried Rogue on both PC and PS5 (I didn’t even realize you could do so, because I guess I’m not yet used to the wonders of cross platform technology). It very much scratched the part of my brain, that has been quietly itching since I last played Diablo 3 like 5-6 or so years ago. The same part that just allows me to click away at hordes of monster on a weekend, before realizing I just played for 4-5 hours in a single sitting.

I’m not sure if I’ll play it at release (even though it times almost perfectly with my vacation), because I’m interested in maybe giving SF6 a go and I’m definitely going to play Final Fantasy XVI later that month, but it’s pretty likely that I’ll play D4 eventually.

I think I said this in the Nextlander Discord, but Diablo seems like the Platonic Form of a podcast or second-screen game. I'm here to hit the loot pinatas, collect shiny objects, and watch the numbers go up while I watch The West Wing or Deadwood for the dozenth time.

The moment-to-moment action felt great and I had a good time piecing together cohesive builds. Those strengths will hopefully be enough to patch over all the bits and pieces of the game that feel either at odds with each other or questionable in their own right. I've got plenty of big-picture structural issues with the game, from its treatment of respecs to the unnecessary multiplayer component, but if the fundamentals are good enough, history has shown that I can work around that to some degree (as evidence, I present the Borderlands games).

It should be noted that the Diablo IV beta has bricked some 3080ti graphics cards. I don't have anything to add other than that, but maybe beware if you happen to have one and want to play this beta.

@justin258: The beta is over now, but thanks for the info. Good thing I played the beta on PS5, since that's the console I plan to get it for like I did Diablo III.

FWIW the Diablo 4 "Server Slam" is happening right now. Either they're not getting as many people as they want or the online infrastructure is just in a really good place, because I was playing yesterday and there were no queue times or weirdness.

Mostly I jumped back on to test my favored classes and see if anything had changed in terms of which one would be my vanguard for a first play (I plan to level them all to max eventually).

And boy, the Necromancer bums me out now. He clearly needed some nerfs, but his minions are now so squishy that I don't really find him fun to play anymore. Doesn't seem like much point to having a horde of minions when they die at the drop of a hat. I'd be OK with their damage being lowered if they could just survive better.

I may actually end up going Rogue. The Sorceress is good, but I feel like she runs out of resource faster than anyone. Rogue is the only other ranged option and I'm not a big fan of the melee classes, so...

Also, in the last couple of weeks, I bought and have played a fair bit of Last Epoch, which is a Diablo-like in early access on Steam. Seems pretty good? Missing a lot of QoL features and it has its problems, but there are also things I actually like better about it than D4. Playing that has cooled my anticipation for D4 somewhat.

Welp, the game comes out very soon--4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern on Thursday for those who paid a little more, and Monday at the same time for everyone else. I did, in fact, pay a bit extra, so I'll be able to dive into the full game less than 48 hours from now, assuming the servers hold up.

The review embargo was up this morning, and reception has been pretty good. I watched a number of video reviews, and the FextraLife one was maybe the most informative. Sounds like it can be a little slow and uneven at the beginning, but that it gets more interesting as it goes and has good endgame content already for a launch ARPG.

The game can now be pre-loaded, and one feature I wasn't expecting but was pleased to see is that--at least on PC--you can choose to not download high-resolution assets, which will cut the install size from about 80 gigs to about 40. I don't have a 4K monitor and my graphics card is a bit long in the tooth, so saving the drive space and easing the burden on my computer is a plus, I don't think I would've noticed the higher-res assets anyway.

One thing that I hadn't been aware of before seeing some of these reviews is that if you finish the main story with a character, future characters can elect to skip it. Seems like a nice feature, I definitely don't feel the need to play through the story five times. I'd been planning on basically playing all five classes concurrently, but with skipping the story being a thing, I think I'll finish the story with one character before starting the other ones.

Seems like it's gonna be a good time...

Well it immediately broke on PS5 and seems to have killed PSN from people trying to restore Licenses.

Normally I take server issues in stride, but this time they asked me to pay $20 so fuck em'.

For anyone who still had any doubts that Blizzard was going to be predatory as fuck with the micro transactions, let's just say the prices in the shop are . . . something else.

If you wanted to buy everything on offer in the shop right now in the most efficient way possible (and they have very carefully and veery deliberately structured this in a way that buying everything is a nice round number), it would cost you a cool $353.94 USD for the necessary funny money. Pre-tax. For ugly-ass cosmetics.

Glad I’m at work. Almost pulled a classic Nodima and bought in just off hype, despite replaying Spider-Man and Witcher 3, still hooked on The Show, starting a new Disco save…

Sucks the PS5 version seems busted, but I suppose Blizzard’s gotta throw shade where it can.

I was debating with myself if I should get SF6 or Diablo 4 first. I guess, I'll be getting SF6. Not only is it 10 bucks cheaper, and the online play from what I'm hearing is the best in any fighting game yet, And its cross platform and runs fine on PS5. Where as Diablo IV seems to have serious server issues, which is bad because I'm used to playing Diablo on a console with a controller like I did with Diablo III. With that said, the shameful tactic of issuing review copies of the game with the microtransactions stuff out of it to fool reviewers and then adding it back in just before release is just dirty. Blizzard has gotten worse since Kotick has been exposed. Sadly, I will likely still get that game sometime later this year, hopefully after the price drops. Luckily, cosmetics aren't that big of a deal to me.

For what it's worth, the servers on PS5 seem totally fine now. There was a... deeply confusing error last night about not having a valid license that you could fix by just sort of interacting with the Playstation store and it would poke your account in some way that would let the game find it correctly.

In a bit of horrid optics, one of the ways this could be achieved was by buying the D4 premium currency which people found first, but you could also just start downloading a free game from the store and cancelling it.

I got it on PC and the launch was really quite smooth there. I had one timed out attempt to log in to Battle.net right at the release time, but after that I got in and had like a 3-4 minute queue, then everything was fine. Never got booted out of the game or anything like that afterward.

I did still experience quite a bit of rubber-banding. I assume most of that must be server-side since I didn't even download the high-res textures. Hopefully it will smooth out with some patches/hotfixes, but for now it's not bad enough to kill my enjoyment.

Game itself is pretty much as I expected based on playing the betas, I'm having a good time with it. Playing a sorcerer. I did eventually bump the world tier down from 2 to 1 in order to beat a stronghold that just seemed annoyingly difficult, and haven't bothered to turn it back up. I figure I'll unlock tier 3 soon enough anyway and will immediately want to switch to that since it unlocks better loot and a whole bunch of endgame mechanics. For now I'm fine with steamrolling things a little harder.

Finished Act 1 last night and now am looking to unlock the damned horse, which I believe is an Act 2 thing? Seems like that's going to be a major QoL upgrade since the map is large enough that needing to go everywhere on foot ain't great. I probably should have been mainlining the story harder, but couldn't resist doing a bunch of Act 1 side stuff. But I'd like to finish the story with my first character so that I can start the other characters with the ability to skip the campaign.

I really like the art style, the added destructibles and the punchiness of the combat but... overall does this feel like a huge step back from Diablo 3 to anyone else?

I just played through it recently with my wife in preparation for D4 and I just kind of find myself... wanting to go back and keep playing D3.

A lot of the classes just dont have abilities that are exciting for me to try or look forward to. Maybe things really come on line later on once you've got some exciting items that maybe modify how the abilities play out. The player character also seems to be lacking a strong identity that the D3 characters had. The Wizard was arrogant and witty, the Barbarian wizened and thoughtful, the Demon Hunter and the Crusader both had very dry senses of humor on either end of the emotional spectrum.

Anyway - Im interested to see where it goes.

@junkerman: Always possible that Diablo 3 could end up being the better game when all is said and done. But of course it's way too early to tell.

For one, I've heard people saying that the game really opens up and gets better when you both finish the story and reach world tier 3, which unlocks most or all of the endgame mechanics. Seems meaningless to judge before I've at least experienced some of that nonsense.

For another, Diablo 3 really wasn't in a great state at launch. Remember the abysmal drop rates, the real money auction house, and the "Torment" difficulty that was tuned waaaaay too hard (I seem to recall not even being able to beat the Act 2 boss at all on Torment until they toned the whole thing down)? Reviewers have been saying that the D4 endgame already seems better than what we got with launch D3... and Blizzard has plenty of time to make adjustments, add systems and content, etc.

So I guess what I'm saying is: yeah, D3 may actually be a better game right now (I honestly don't know, haven't played it in years). But they've also been tweaking that one for a decade, which is a huge leg up, and D4 seems entirely decent so far for a launch ARPG, so I can't say I'm worried at the moment. Maybe my feelings will change when I start the endgame content, but we'll see.

@junkerman: The last bit bothers me a lot. This game has come in and just completely torched any remnant of the tone that Diablo 3 had which... I get it some people didn't appreciate the goofy hyper violence meets Power Rangers tone that game somehow landed on but they were wrong and I'm sad that they won out.

@efesell: Yeah I hear you. Ten years ago sadly I was probably in that camp pining for the grim dark, but I also never hated it. I thought the D3 artstyle was stylistically incredibly successful at achieving what it set out to do. And after having just played it again recently I have in fact come to really enjoy its vibrant colors and varied environments.

@atheistpreacher: I totally agree. D3 was not great at ALL at Launch. Arguably wasnt great until the first expansion and the downfall of the auction house.

Nothing felt weirder then selling the shit I was finding for real money so I could then spend that money on things I wanted but werent dropping for me.

I always thought the art design controversy surrounding D3 was dumb. It always looked fine to me. Though one thing that may have influenced me in that regard was that people said it looked too much like WoW, and I have literally never played a second of WoW in my life, so it probably looked more novel to me than it did to a lot of people.

Meanwhile, I feel much the same way so far about D4's look, which is to say: it's also fine. I definitely don't love it like a lot critics seem to--a little too much gray and brown for taste--but I'm also not actually pining for a return to the D3 art style (so far). But I guess I've never cared much about the aesthetics of these games in the first place, as long as the gameplay loop is good.

Having played a bunch of it now I mostly like it but...who at Blizzard decided to add bullet hell like mechanics to Diablo boss fights? I know there were always aspects of it but sometimes in this game it feels almost like a Cave shooter. There have been times when there's just been nowhere for me to go on screen and...I know Diablo is mostly about making the numbers go up but I prefer it when I feel like it is somewhat skill based rather than "hope your build can tank this and if not you're going to need to retune." I had to respec all my skills to get past one boss encounter, and while that's defensible as a game design strategy in a game that does give you unlimited respecs (for an in game price) it's not what I personally like.

My second issue is that the dungeons just feel way too long, especially without the ability to pause and with relatively few waypoints in this game. I've gotten bored of basically every dungeon before I finished it and I've been mostly mainlining them. The "quest" mechanics in this game basically suck (though I do like the vague "area" waypoint system) so "kill two sub bosses, then find two keys, then wipe out all the enemies in this area, then kill the main boss" is a lot for a dungeon, especially for a side quest. Diablo 3 had some long quests but I felt they were better paced and there were more waypoints so you never felt like you had to slog through to the end.

Honestly while, again, I do LIKE the game, it doesn't feel special. Like even a shameless ripoff like Warhammer Chaos Bane isn't THAT much worse (though I liked that game and finished it, so this is not like a vicious attack.)

@bigsocrates: This was maybe a little bit unfair. One area where it's way ahead of something like Chaosbane and really any other AARPG is production values. Not just in the cut scenes or the storytelling, both of which are far better than D3 but in the graphics and even the variety of the leve design in the outdoor areas and the random events. I guess what I really mean is that the moment to moment gameplay feels a little...basic for lack of a better word. Maybe that's the sorcerer class or maybe that's just the nature of AARPGs, but I will say that I don't accept the "it will get better and deeper after you beat the game" argument, because only about half of the people who play the game get to the end.

I like the dungeons quite a bit, even how involved some of them are, but I will say that almost all of the dungeon bosses I've seen have felt like they have way too much HP. It's not a huge problem but it does seem like I'm expected to either roll in there with a crew OR really optimize my build for boss killing.

Not really grabbing me so far. It's clearly well made, but there are a bunch of little things that just don't feel very good on the edges and they kind of add up. I agree with @efesell that the bosses feel extremely spongy, which actually kind of tracks with my general sense that the game wasn't really designed it with solo play in mind.

I also feel like the level-scaling is way too aggressive. The reduction in power on a level up is very noticeable and extreme. The consequence is that I feel kind of railroaded into taking certain skills over others. For example, I've put a point into Fireball as a sorcerer just for the passive to make enemies explode when they die. It's not a skill I actually use or would have taken otherwise, but that passive is so much better than the others that it feels mandatory, which is not the effect you want.

Also, the dodge should absolutely break crowd control. The fact that it doesn't is just baffling - there really aren't a lot of other option to do so and some of those effects last a really long time otherwise. It's already got a fairly long cooldown, so it's not like you could just spam it.

Honestly I think that's kind of a weird attitude to have. It's definitely true that the game needs to be fun all the way through, very much including the early game, especially if Blizzard expects people to do seasonal characters that start at level 1 once again. But Diablo-like ARPGs are the games I think of when it comes to games that are designed to play for hundreds of hours. Lots of people play these things for years, and it seems self-evidently more important to cater to people who are going to be around for a while rather than people who play the campaign once and drop the game forever. So dismissing the idea that it gets more interesting after the first 20 or 30 hours just seems strange to me. For a lot of folks the "post-game" is the majority of the content they'll be playing.

@efesell: @therealturk: I generally agree about the bosses seeming a little too HP spongy. But also, last night I picked up a legendary for my sorcerer that really seems to have allowed me to start burning through them much more quickly.

I got a staff that had the "Aspect of Control," which (on a 2H weapon) makes you deal "[60 - 80]% more damage to Immobilized, Stunned, or Frozen enemies." My roll was toward the high end, almost 80%. And when I tested it, I found that whenever I could fill a boss's stagger meter, I could suddenly burn down half their HP pool in the short period when they're sitting there stunned.

Now, maybe some of this had to do with other skills or passives I'd speced into, or other legendary effects whose importance I'm not realizing. But subjectively, it felt like I got that staff and suddenly started thrashing bosses pretty good. By the numbers, I should be doing roughly double damage to a stunned boss, by it feels more like quadruple. Maybe the values are actually bugged or something, I dunno.

@atheistpreacher: I think that your argument is precisely wrong. Obviously you want to cater to your hardcore community, but when you're selling a game for full price then it should be aimed mostly for the average customer (who is paying the same entry fee as anyone else.)

Catering to whales and designing games primarily to extract money over long periods of time (which is why you want long term players) has absolutely ruined many mobile games and has infected modern game design to the point where you have things like Destiny where they just do not give a fuck about new players (even though, again, they're happy to take their money) and it becomes insular and hostile.

"Hey buddy, thanks for the money but fuck you, we only care about the hardcores" is a super shitty developer attitude, and it's all over the place.

Now that's not to say that there shouldn't be some content for the hardcore community or that there can't be twists to keep people invested but the game should damn well be tuned to be fun for everyone who pays the fee to play it, not with the campaign treated as an afterthought to be gotten through before the real game begins. Talk about fucking over your customers and anti-consumer practices!

@bigsocrates: I think wanting to please the people who are only going to play the game for 20 hours and put it down forever is still important--though I'm not sure why you'd pay $70 for a game like this if that's your intention--but there's only so much you can do with that little investment from your end user. Diablo has always been a series about hitting the loot piñatas in the endless pursuit of better stuff. The fundamental conceit of randomized loot is to create endless replayability, that endless carrot on a stick. So if you don't plan to engage with any of the endgame activities at all, it just seems like there are better games you could be spending your time with, ones that aren't fundamentally designed to be played forever, but rather designed with a discrete end in mind. And that don't cost $70.

(E.g., I'm no big Destiny fan, even though it's designed around the same infinite replayability, so there's no way I was going to pay $60 for Destiny 2 when it came out. Instead I ended up buying a physical copy for something like $8 (shortly before they just made it F2P), played the campaign, and dropped it because I knew I wasn't interested in the endgame. But I would never have paid $60 because I knew that it wasn't really "for" me.)

All players should have a good experience and all portions of the game should be fun--again, even the "hardcore" players will be playing "seasons" and don't want the early hours to be a slog (I never went in for any seasonal content in these games myself). But I don't think Blizzard is treating the campaign "as an afterthought to be gotten through before the real game begins." Rather, it's simply not a great idea to present a bunch of "endgame" mechanics to the player right away before they've even gotten their feet wet. If you present that many live activities to do from the start, it's just plain overwhelming. Lots of JRPGs are much longer than 20-30 hours and continue introducing new mechanics dozens of hours in.

Anyway, in the end I think this is actually a pretty fine point we're talking about, since we both want the game to be good both in its campaign and its endgame. But when you say "I don't accept the 'it will get better and deeper after you beat the game' argument, because only about half of the people who play the game get to the end," you seem to be dismissing the idea that it should become a deeper experience for those who are interested in investing more time than it takes to simply beat the campaign. I don't think it's in any way invalid to say "it gets more interesting at endgame," because for a huge portion of people that's really important! And if it's not important to you, then... fine? Because saying it gets more interesting at endgame doesn't actually need to mean that the campaign leading up to it is bad, just less mechanically dense.

@atheistpreacher: A lot of people buy games that are 10-20 hours long for $70 literally all the time. It's super common! And a lot of people buy games they think they will play for longer but don't for whatever reason. If you look at trophy and achievement data that's very clear. Most people don't finish most games.

I don't think Blizzard has treated the campaign as an afterthought here. For one thing they clearly spent a lot of time and money on cut scenes and story and whatnot. For another there's a metric ton of content for people who only want to do it once with one character.

I also don't object to the game getting deeper or adding wrinkles in the late or postgame. That's normal and what Diablo has done since at least the second game.

My objection is to the argument that the game gets good after half the people have stopped playing and to the idea that it would be okay for Blizzard to withhold the fun stuff until then. Of course they should have stuff for the post game, including some mechanical wrinkles. But the focus should be on making sure the experience is as good as possible for the part that everyone is going to play, and then adding on to that, not making the first part of the game an afterthought that you have to slog through.

I don't think they did that, but some games DO that, and some people excuse it and it gets my hackles up. In general I think that games should seek to serve their paying customers.

My personal view is that Diablo IV's base game play is a little bland, and I don't think that will change significantly in the post game (though different classes and specs may be more or less fun and of course they may mix things up with updates and expansions.) But if there was something that was in the post game that really mixed things up (instead of adding a few cool wrinkles) that would seriously annoy me because the fun part shouldn't be withheld.

You know, one other thought that struck me about this as I was typing my last response, but didn't mention because in some ways it's fairly tangential, is: I wonder what this game might have looked like if Blizzard had been bold and done away with the idea of a main story campaign completely. In my mind it would be similar to a big AAA FPS like COD launching with only competitive multiplayer and no single-player mode. It's not really so unthinkable.

I don't think that Blizzard would ever actually do that, because there are enough people out there who care about the story and lore that they would be sort of silly not to give them what they want. Nonetheless, it's interesting to think about how the design might have changed and flattened out if they just had you doing the "endgame" stuff more or less right from the beginning.

@atheistpreacher: I don't think the problem is that there is or isn't a campaign. The problem is far more fundamental than that. I'm currently level 26 and so far the game shares the exact same issue I had with Diablo 3 - the leveling process is fundamentally unsatisfying to the player.

In Diablo 3 that was because of the utter lack of player choice. You reached a level and you were handed a skill. You didn't get a choice, you didn't get any stat points to assign - you were told what you were going to use and if that skill didn't thrill you, too bad. That made the process feel really poor because you didn't really have any control over your character.

In Diablo IV the issue is that the reduction in power the level scaling gives you is so stark that it always feels bad when you level up. I don't think I can emphasize that point enough, because it's absolutely terrible. Diablo, a franchise which is built around the player power fantasy, makes you feel bad when you level up. Which is exactly the opposite of what you want in a game like this.

So the experience for both games is fatally flawed in slightly different but related ways. That's not something that dumping a campaign is going to fix.

@therealturk: Yeah, that's the evil of level scaling. I'm the type of player who will level up all the classes once and never do any seasonal characters, meaning that stage will only be the beginning of my play. So in the end I don't think it will matter too much for me, but yeah, that part isn't awesome.

It does help that your base magic find seems to keep increasing as you level, and since your power is so gear-dependent, as you go on you keep getting better chances of getting better drops. Nonetheless, this doesn't seem ideal.

The level scaling doesn't seem that harsh to me? Like there were definitely a couple of distinct thresholds where I did feel suddenly that my gear had immediately become dated until I hit another dungeon or something but nothing to the degree of "oh no I leveled up".

@atheistpreacher: Dumping the campaign would hurt the game for just about everyone. First of all you would lose the campaign only players, which again is like half your player base out of the gate, and then you would damage the end game stuff because so much of the game's atmosphere relies on the campaign and the storytelling. And you'd still have to level your characters up somehow before getting to true end game (GETTING to the end game is part of the fun for a lot of end game players) so you'd probably alienate like 70%+ of you players. And what you'd end up with would be more like Gauntlet than Diablo (though the two are not too far apart.) It's different for something like COD because the campaign is SO different from the multiplayers, different maps, no enemy AI, different balance etc... that a lot of the work doesn't transition over, but for Diablo you need to make those assets anyway and the end game is built on top of what you do for the campaign so you don't save nearly as many resources.

@therealturk: I don't think leveling up is so bad, and the game gives you ways to increase your power outside of leveling through altars of Lilith and Renown rewards (those extra potion slots are key) so there's that. What I think the REAL issue with the leveling is is that skill points basically suck except if you're buying the first rank. There are skill points on the sorcerer's tree that give you literally 3 mana. 3! And there are items in the mid game that can give you like 40 and everything costs a bunch ot cast. Skill points should feel like a special reward for leveling or accomplishing something and here once you've unlocked the skills you want to use and their modifiers they just feel like a waste. Also respeccing is done poorly because if you only have one skill from a node you can't remove it without removing everything that comes after it in the tree. That's fine as a requirement, but if I want to swap out one skill for another in a given node I can't unless I have a spare skill point I can transfer first like a bookmark. This isn't a problem later in the game when you can just take a skill point from some random skill you have more than one point in or multiple skills off a node but it makes experimenting early on a huge pain and there is no reason for it. If you want to make having a skill in each node a requirement fine, but just make it so I can't quit out of the skill tree with an invalid spec, not that I can't move stuff around.

So yeah I'd say that in general the entire skill system in the game is pretty bad.

Playing this game reminds me a LOT of playing Destiny when it first came out. It has this overhanging feeling of the developer not quite understanding the game they're making. The gameplay is still engaging, and the systems and features aren't broken or anything, but so many minor details are just "off". I've been struggling with nailing down what exactly the problem is since my first couple of hours with the game, and after completing the campaign I still can't really put it into words. It's just like a complete lack of cohesive direction.

The most damning thing though is that I'm sitting here, looking at the map, and I'm thinking "Do I even want to keep playing ?". There's a lot of things I could do, but are any of them actually engaging ? My character has already been fairly set in stone for the last 20+ hours, and gear has so far been very uninteresting. Even the "major build pieces" I've gotten never felt like a significant difference. My Ubiworld lizardbrain isn't getting intrigued by the open-world "collectathon" aspect either. I dunno... game's weird man... I kinda just wish it was a more focused experience than it is.

Also, talking about the skill system, it's literally the D3 system with a worse UI and less options. I thought you even had less skill options, but going back and comparing it became super obvious that it's the same exact thing with only 2 runes per skill and far less interesting passive skills.

I haven't played Diablo IV yet, but I agree with @bigsocrates about Destiny 2 these days. The more the game is updated, the more its being gear towards the hardcore players who group up and like to do the very challenging stuff, because they are steady making the game more and more difficult to play. Including the bosses with the spongy health bars. Each season they seem to step up the difficulty to the point it feels like Bungie are completely shafting the solo players and forcing people to play with fire teams or else. This is the reason solo players, including myself, have to wait for some well knowledge veteran to reveal a meta build he is using for one of the three classes in order to get by doing solo content. And the fact I'm a Hunter, which is the weakest of the three classes after constant nerfs over the years, adds to the frustration. This makes it very difficult for new players, and they are even charging them to get their light levels up to current standards when first starting out, if they want to avoid a lot of grinding. With that said, I still think Destiny 2 is an overall good game and I'm invested in the lore, which is why I haven't dropped it. Foolish I know.

But developers seem to be doing this across the board with their games these days. I called it the "Dark Souls" effect.

EDIT: I think I should make one thing clear. The difficulty spikes is within the paid content stuff like the expansions, seasons, dungeons, etc. Anyone can install Destiny 2, go on the different planets and shoot stuff without much of a challenge. That's the games free-to-try hook. But to do anything meaningful, you have to pay and that's where the issues are.

Honestly the skill system wouldn't bother me at all except that I just finished a run of D3 prior to launch so it does feel like such a stark downgrade. Not even from the quality of the skills or passives but just from a pure usability standpoint. It's just so easy in that game to just decide to play the game in a completely different way and then swap back if you don't like it or whatever, it takes a few minutes at most.

I dunno, maybe I'm just done with Skill Trees. They feel like an archaic design decision that we keep almost solving and then immediately regressing back a year later.

Why are you still posting in the beta thread when the game isn't in beta anymore

@sombre: Because it wasn't really in Beta during the public Beta. It's the same game more or less. So all the prior discussions apply to fo the finished product. The thread's name could do with changing though.

Just changed the topic name. Never done it before and didn't even realize I could. I figured someone would just start a new thread rather than continue posting in this one, but this works, I guess!

I suppose I may as well post a little bit about where I am with the game now and what my experience has been. I started as a Sorcerer and have been playing the game hard since release (I named my sorcerer "Dresden," after the Dresden Files series of novels by Jim Butcher, of which I'm a big fan).

I did a lot of side stuff in the Act 1 region, but then started mainlining the campaign more because I really wanted to unlock the dang horse. Turns out you need to finish all of Acts 1-3 before you get one. Feels too long for that, honestly. I was also annoyed to discover that there's actually a limit on side quests you can accept (20), so I had to start abandoning some. I'm really not sure why this is a thing. The ones that you simply accept in towns will be easy to pick up again, but others start out in the wild somewhere, and could be annoying to find once more.

I finished the campaign at level 47, and immediately attempted the "capstone dungeon" that's balanced for level 50 characters and unlocks world tier 3. I did die once to the boss of the stage and was worried I'd have to do the entire thing over, but thankfully the game just spawned me outside the boss room and I got to try again. After unlocking world tier 3, I immediately switched to it, but found that since the game assumes you to be at least level 50, enemies were much tougher than they should have been.

So I decided to switch back to world tier 1 and finish some of the more boring busywork: collect all the Altars of Lilith in the game and remove all the fog from the map. And while I was doing that, I also did all the Strongholds, partly because those tend to be harder content--and I don't need this game to be hard--but also to unlock some otherwise inaccessible waypoints. By the time I'd done all that, I was at least rank 3 mastery for all regions, meaning I'd gotten all the available skill points (gonna be fun for new characters to start with 10 skill points right off the bat), and I'd also hit level 50, so I switched back to world tier 3 for good. The only "region mastery" things left for me to check off are all the side quests and dungeons, of which I've done very few so far.

The side quests feel a bit like the odd man out in terms of activities that are worth doing once you reach endgame, which revolves around doing Tree of Whispers requests and Nightmare Dungeons, and the occasional Helltide when it pops up. Thankfully, if you complete a dungeon in its "nightmare" state, it still gets checked off your list, so they can be done as part of the endgame content. But the side quests really can't be, unless you're lucky enough that a Helltide has spawned in the region you're doing it in. It just means that the side quests end up feeling a bit useless for a level 50 character, since there are always more rewarding activities to be doing. At least I know that for future characters I should skip the campaign and really focus hard on those quests while they're still a more worthwhile thing to do.

As far as the build I've been using, I started out with Chain Lightning and the Fireball enchantment that makes enemies explode upon death. It does feel like that combo is a hard thing to pass up at the beginning, as Chain Lightning provides both good single-target damage and crowd control, particularly with that enchantment. But I've since switched off both.

Mostly I'm running a cold build now. Frost Bolt as a Basic attack (and as an enchantment, which adds more chill to every attack), then Blizzard for more chilling/freezing and DoT, with Frost Shards as my Core skill that benefits hugely when hitting frozen enemies. The "Aspect of Control" on my staff gives me 70% extra damage against frozen enemies, so any frozen enemies or stunned bosses go down quite fast.

But the other part of the build I'm running that feels significant and important is the fire portion. I abandoned the Fireball enchantment for the Fire Bolt enchantment, which makes enemies you've directly damaged burn for 8 seconds. The amount of damage is negligible; the real reason I'm using it is to proc Warmth, a passive most of the way down the skill tree that heals you for roughly 1% of your life every second for every burning enemy near you (also, Fiery Surge is a pre-req for Warmth, and the extra mana regen isn't hurting anything). So while losing the Fireball enchantment means trash mob crowds don't go down as fast, they're also giving me a lot of health back while they're alive, which seems more important on world tier 3 than simply wiping them out quickly (satisfying as the chain of explosions can be).

Amusingly, all of this means that my current build relies on chilling/freezing and burning enemies at the same time... which does not seem to be a problem in the game's logic. Only in a video game.

Most of the "Aspects" I've been using are general defensive ones that grant some sort of damage immunity or barrier, but apparently survivability builds might get toned down soon, so I wonder how many of those might be nerfed (for that matter, I sort of wonder if Warmth will be nerfed, it seems quite powerful). On the other hand, the topic on the official Blizzard forums that was live last night has since disappeared, so maybe they've reconsidered?

Anyway, getting all the Altars of Lilith and clearing out the map fog was most of my yesterday, so today will be the first day of doing just endgame activities. I'll be interested to see how that feels after doing it for a while, though preparation for a work meeting tomorrow means I won't be able to play as much today as I have been. Still having fun, but we'll see if I start to get bored. I did think I would be more enthused about starting the other characters, but for now I'm more interested in sticking with the one I've got.

EDIT: Oh, I also wanted to say that I'm fascinated to see what will happen when the floodgates open to all the standard edition buyers on Monday at 4pm Pacific. Are Blizzard's servers actually up for that? We'll find out!

And speaking to technical issues, I will say that this game seems to be a memory hog in a way I wasn't expecting, and that I hope will improve with updates. I even opted out of downloading the hi-res textures and am running it mostly on medium settings, but nonetheless I've run into a lot of heavy stuttering.