Ares42

I feel like one of the things no one seems to be talking about is the absolute whiplash the game has when it comes to scope/stakes. Act 1 is largely ok, you get this grand opening hinting at bigger things but then you're put into this goblin vs druid conflict and you have this conspiracy thread going in the background.

Then you get into Act 2 and you have this cursed area with a necromancer in a tower and you end up saving/using an angel to help you. Things are scaling up a bit, but still fairly grounded and you still feel like you're participating in the world around you. Then BAM, big floating brain conquering the world. When I hit that moment I was just flabbergasted.

But then we just move on from that and move into Act 3 with a villain taking over the city, refugees suffering, and building a rebellion. However once you get into the city proper things just start going wild. One second I'm dealing with some thieves and bandits squabbling, the next I'm fighting the champion of a death god, then I'm having a quiet story moment with Jaheira and her kids to be followed up with a ancient vampire sacrificing a towns worth of people to ascend to some superior being.

I'm not usually someone to complain about the "ticking clock problem", but this dichotomy of grounded conflicts vs other-worldly villains in the second half of the game kinda broke the experience for me. I guess it kinda speaks more to the core DnD audience, but for me the amount of "non-sense high fantasy" just makes the experience too silly. Didn't really help that I find the main plot with the mindflayers etc to be fairly uninteresting and weak in the first place, and every time the big brain is involved I can't help but think of Futurama. When I hit the moment near the end where the Emperor goes "It's not longer an elder brain, it's a netherbrain" I was just done.

@efesell: Honestly, with the way DnD works I wouldn't want to be responsible for creating combat encounters. The extreme differences depending on party composition, levels, combat preparation, items etc etc makes it damn near impossible to find a balance sweetspot. And then there's the absolute absurdity that is the DnD powercurve.

If you play the game the "correct" way there's not really gonna be any encounters that will challenge you, but that's pretty counter-intuitive to what the game is supposed to be about.

@efesell: On a similar note, I just got into the city and my performance absolutely tanked. Was already having some issues in the outskirts area, but nothing unplayable. It's also become abundantly clear that the game has memory leaks, so the only way for me to keep it playable is to regularly reboot the game at this point. Makes me wonder how the console versions are gonna turn out.

Having put 50 hours into the game now I feel like this game is the perfect example of a 8/10 game. People often judge games by taking off points for things they didn't like, which tends to come off as very archaic, but this game is the ultimate "this is good, but I know exactly how it could've been even better". It's the Witcher 2 to Witcher 3. Witcher 2 is a great game on its own, but when compared to Witcher 3 you easily see how they turned everything up to 11.

@mistersims: As far as I can tell the game very much follows the Bioware formula of having companions at base, talking to them and eventually they unlock missions. You use whoever you wanna use for your party, you can even just get hirelings if you want, doesn't really matter except for some encounter specific dialogue here and there.

@sethmode: I feel like if they just stopped allowing you to pick up all the trash items it solves like 90% of the issue. You could still have them as objects in the world that you can move etc, but there's no real point to picking them up. It's one of the limitations I've put on myself when playing Bethesda games to make them more enjoyable. Only loot enemies and chests, and only pick up items I actually need. I started doing the same in this game, but also liberally using the highlight feature to not miss useful/important items, and it's cut down my time spent on inventory management drastically.

Kinda funny, there's been a fair bit of talk about how this game sets new standards for RPGs, but I just came to the realization that most of my issues with the game stems from the fact that it doesn't meet my expectations for story-driven RPGs after having played Witcher 3 (and to some degree Mass Effect). It's obviously not fair to say that the game is bad because it's not as good as Witcher 3, but I hadn't really realized how much of a cloud that game has put over my enjoyment of other similar games.

Hadn't touched the game in early access and have now put about 10 hours into the full release. First thing that comes to mind is that I hate the fact that it's a silent protagonist. I understand why they did it, but it just sucks so much life out of the conversations. Which leads me into my second gripe, which is that the game is very much stuck in the early 2000 era of pacing, plot and exposition. It's giving me major Fallout 3 flashbacks. Also not a huge fan of the in conversation dice rolls, and as I predicted, most of the cast is just not my cup of tea. The only character I've enjoyed so far is Gale.

After about eight hours or so I ended up restarting the game because the character I wanted to play just didn't work with the cast or the general vibe of the campaign. So now I'm back to playing the bog standard goody two-shoes help everyone hero character.

I'm sure a lot of people will love it, as it's a very "open" game as far as doing what you want, problem solving and playing into multiple different traditional archetypes, but so far I'm feeling the "indie-ness" and fairly uninspired writing dragging my excitement down. In 10 hours the most exciting thing that's happened was a room filled with traps that blew up my entire party.

The game looks really great and I'm looking forward to trying it, but watching parts of the stream I was reminded how I just don't like the kinda characters cRPG enthusiasts and developers seem to love. I remember struggling badly to get into DA:Inq because of it, and even when I played Horizon Forbidden West it was putting me off. It's kinda hard to describe, but there's this tendency for super sincere while also very "extra" characters. I'm down for ridiculousness and I'm down for "down to earth" characters, but this middleground where you're supposed to take it seriously but the characters are largely acting like they're in a TV drama just becomes too cringey for me. And yeah, the general horniness isn't really helping either.

This is pretty much what I was talking about with my early impressions as well. There's just this overall theme of "someone who actually knows what players enjoy about these games would not design it this way".

The mount controls is probably one of the best examples. Having momentum on the horse, where your mount has to physically turn, feels incredibly clunky and goes against everything a snappy arpg is about. And the speed control on PC is something that shouldn't have gone through the first set of intial testing.

Another example is the whole issue with having to travel to nigthmare dungeons. It makes sense for the game to have dungeons spread across the map that players can discover as they explore the game, but when you're at the point of doing nightmare dungeons there's no added value of having to travel to them every single time. And you're activating random dungeons all across the map, so it's a LOT of trudging. Anyone that's somewhat familiar with how arpg endgame works would instantly recognize that using a sigil should either instantly teleport you into the dungeon, or at least open a portal to the dungeon.

Then there's obvious stuff like the world event beacons, which will only pop up if you are in the open world as they intially appear. So you can literally log in to the game when there's 25 minutes to the next world boss spawn, and you will have no indication that it's happening. How did it even get implemented like that in the first place ?

I feel like I could go on and on, since I haven't even touched on the more fundamental stuff like skills, loot, open world and level scaling. I will say though, that after having put more time into the game there are some things that are really well done.

Firstly, I feel like this is the first Diablo game that has a full plan for your entire journey through the game. The other games are very much "here's an introduction, now go do whatever I guess", while this has a path of building your skill set and doing the campaign, then a first introduction to loot optimization and endgame activities which gets you close to 70, and then nightmare dungeons, glyph leveling and paragon boards as you transition into the final grind to 100, which is a natural end point where your character will be like 98% optimized.

I also think this is the best potion system I've seen in an arpg. While it is quite similar to PoE, that system sometimes suffered from not being able to recharge between fights (due to kill requirements), but there has been extremely few cases in D4 where I got into a fight without the vast majority of potions available. I don't think I've ever played an arpg where I've been this encouraged to use my healing and not worry about future encounters.