schneeland
Hero
In case you find yourself spending too much time waiting in queues this weekend, the new sound piece they have put up on Youtube is quite nice:
Diablo IV
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I just spent several hours writing listening to their first such video:
Ruin Explorer
Legend
After having got 3 characters to 20 this weekend (don't think about how long that took, I forbid you!), I've got a few thoughts on Diablo IV in a totally random order.
1) They went too heavy on the quests. @Whizbang Dustyboots is right re: "a modern World of Warcraft", but the quests aren't actually as advanced or fun as WoW quests often are now, and there are just endless numbers of them. You don't have to do them, if you don't, they going to sit there acting like you should. They should have done half as many with twice as much effort put into them, frankly (and commensurately greater rewards), given that the game scales. Also the rewards being pretty much all boring, generic, and unspecified gear is not helpful - you can't even go "Oh this gives me something nice, I'll do it!", you just have to hope.
It's okay for an ARPG to be about killing stuff, Blizzard.
2) Scaling is a little excessive. It's definitely working, and well, but it's also managing to make it feel like you're not really getting much better, overall. Not ideal, imho.
3) The UI is awful. I hate it. It's ugly as sin (in a bad way), and anti-immersive in a way I've never seen before in an ARPG, so that's kind of an achievement. Plus very clearly designed for consoles - loads of stuff requires a key-press where it should obviously have a clickable element on PC (or the clickable element takes some finding - but sometimes it doesn't even exist!). It also makes the game feel like a mobile game.
4) There's a bit too much pure, unaltered Diablo 3 DNA in Diablo 4 generally, and not enough of Diablo 2, Path of Exile, and so on. It's almost like 4E's Essentials as a reaction to 4E. This manifests in a variety of different ways, like the very regularly-sized packs of monsters, the hideously neon-blue skeletons the Necro has (please for god's sake change it Blizzard, it doesn't remotely fit the new aesthetic), the crafting/gambling systems, and so on. Diablo 3 wasn't terrible, but it's sad to see none of these elements was innovated on in the way D3 innovated on D2, because it's been 11 years, and they could have done with innovating on.
5) The gameplay flows well and is very smooth, and most classes feel pretty interesting and different to play - it's certainly better at lower levels than any preceding Diablo game, and arguably better than most Diablo-clones in this regard.
6) There's a serious oversight in not giving us a "preview" mode for the skills - I know we can change them fairly easily at first, but it's dumb, and I feel like Diablo 3 had it (would have to check). It's especially annoying as a lot of skills do NOT work like their description would seem to imply.
7) Some of the systems/ideas feel definitely half-baked. For example, the Rogue take on Exploit Weakness requires way too much build-up and precision for a tiny, brief reward (ohhh 3s of free energy, likely at a time when it's totally unneeded!).
8) There are way too many abilities which are "just rubbish" unless you buy the enhancements AND get a piece of gear which makes them do something extra. That's not the right way to balance things, frankly.
9) The classes are hilariously, insanely, unbalanced at these levels. Maybe that'll be fine in the end, but it doesn't feel like it, given the Druid is approximately 10x harder to play than the Rogue which is itself like 3x harder to play than the Necro. You expect a bit of this in ARPGs, especially whilst levelling - pet classes are usually very easy to play - but the Necro also just totally destroys stuff.
10) The game is incredibly stable and good at alt-tabbing. I was astonished. That's not normally something you see in a beta. This is game built by people who definitely expect you to be alt-tabbing and stuff.
11) The classes are interesting and diverse - but I have to assume there's absolute ton of later-game or endgame gear which enables various builds not evident from the skill tree, because otherwise the number of builds is very, very limited (I've kind of heard there is, though).
12) This is possibly the most twitchy ARPG I've ever played - even including FPS ARPGs like Destiny 2 and Borderlands - I was surprised by that. I mean, Path of Exile has a lot of builds which require some serious reflexes, but it's not as keen on punishing you for not instantly reacting to oddly-timed boss animations with tiny reaction times - there are bosses here where you have to dodge in a 0.5s window which isn't necessarily as a telegraphed as I'd like, for example. It's also very much designed knowing you have that dodge - it isn't a bonus - it's a necessity, and if you blow it at the wrong time, you're going to get spanked. I've got mixed feelings about this. It keeps you awake but it also means I'm not sure it'll be as fun to play mindlessly as some ARPGs.
13) It runs astonishingly well for how detailed a lot of the graphics are. The characters particularly look incredible and wow it's wild to have fairly diverse outfits and so on again in an ARPG, something not present in most (including D3 and PoE). Aesthetically, as noted, I feel like it owes just a little bit too much to D3 (which made some serious aesthetic errors and I'm not talking about "not dark enough" or whatever) and the UI is godawful, but the characters and world look really, really good. Hopefully more areas will make it even better - kind of already looking forward to expansions which might take us to jungle or something (as my impression was that there isn't one here).
14) These bloody accents. I know, I'm British, and most of the characters are either British-accented or sound like British people doing bad Russian accents, but oooof. No. The female Rogue and Necro just have terrible voice-choices. They're not so noisy it's a huge problem but I honestly cringe every time the femRogue speaks - maybe I need to try a male one.
15) Enjoying how diverse the characters look body-shape-wise, even though it's triggering the hell out of the usual suspects (especially the misogynists) on the internet, but I really feel like they should have had more faces for everyone - indeed I thought in early vertical slices they showed like eight faces per gender per class. Four very similar ones ain't quite cutting it.
Overall, whilst I have a lot of questions and quasi-complaints, I am a big fan of ARPGs and the Diablo series, and I had a lot of fun, so I think I'll probably be getting Diablo IV when it comes out, so long as I hear they've listened to at least some feedback from the beta - particularly re: the ghastly UI - but it does seem like most people hate or at least dislike the UI so maybe Blizzard will.
1) They went too heavy on the quests. @Whizbang Dustyboots is right re: "a modern World of Warcraft", but the quests aren't actually as advanced or fun as WoW quests often are now, and there are just endless numbers of them. You don't have to do them, if you don't, they going to sit there acting like you should. They should have done half as many with twice as much effort put into them, frankly (and commensurately greater rewards), given that the game scales. Also the rewards being pretty much all boring, generic, and unspecified gear is not helpful - you can't even go "Oh this gives me something nice, I'll do it!", you just have to hope.
It's okay for an ARPG to be about killing stuff, Blizzard.
2) Scaling is a little excessive. It's definitely working, and well, but it's also managing to make it feel like you're not really getting much better, overall. Not ideal, imho.
3) The UI is awful. I hate it. It's ugly as sin (in a bad way), and anti-immersive in a way I've never seen before in an ARPG, so that's kind of an achievement. Plus very clearly designed for consoles - loads of stuff requires a key-press where it should obviously have a clickable element on PC (or the clickable element takes some finding - but sometimes it doesn't even exist!). It also makes the game feel like a mobile game.
4) There's a bit too much pure, unaltered Diablo 3 DNA in Diablo 4 generally, and not enough of Diablo 2, Path of Exile, and so on. It's almost like 4E's Essentials as a reaction to 4E. This manifests in a variety of different ways, like the very regularly-sized packs of monsters, the hideously neon-blue skeletons the Necro has (please for god's sake change it Blizzard, it doesn't remotely fit the new aesthetic), the crafting/gambling systems, and so on. Diablo 3 wasn't terrible, but it's sad to see none of these elements was innovated on in the way D3 innovated on D2, because it's been 11 years, and they could have done with innovating on.
5) The gameplay flows well and is very smooth, and most classes feel pretty interesting and different to play - it's certainly better at lower levels than any preceding Diablo game, and arguably better than most Diablo-clones in this regard.
6) There's a serious oversight in not giving us a "preview" mode for the skills - I know we can change them fairly easily at first, but it's dumb, and I feel like Diablo 3 had it (would have to check). It's especially annoying as a lot of skills do NOT work like their description would seem to imply.
7) Some of the systems/ideas feel definitely half-baked. For example, the Rogue take on Exploit Weakness requires way too much build-up and precision for a tiny, brief reward (ohhh 3s of free energy, likely at a time when it's totally unneeded!).
8) There are way too many abilities which are "just rubbish" unless you buy the enhancements AND get a piece of gear which makes them do something extra. That's not the right way to balance things, frankly.
9) The classes are hilariously, insanely, unbalanced at these levels. Maybe that'll be fine in the end, but it doesn't feel like it, given the Druid is approximately 10x harder to play than the Rogue which is itself like 3x harder to play than the Necro. You expect a bit of this in ARPGs, especially whilst levelling - pet classes are usually very easy to play - but the Necro also just totally destroys stuff.
10) The game is incredibly stable and good at alt-tabbing. I was astonished. That's not normally something you see in a beta. This is game built by people who definitely expect you to be alt-tabbing and stuff.
11) The classes are interesting and diverse - but I have to assume there's absolute ton of later-game or endgame gear which enables various builds not evident from the skill tree, because otherwise the number of builds is very, very limited (I've kind of heard there is, though).
12) This is possibly the most twitchy ARPG I've ever played - even including FPS ARPGs like Destiny 2 and Borderlands - I was surprised by that. I mean, Path of Exile has a lot of builds which require some serious reflexes, but it's not as keen on punishing you for not instantly reacting to oddly-timed boss animations with tiny reaction times - there are bosses here where you have to dodge in a 0.5s window which isn't necessarily as a telegraphed as I'd like, for example. It's also very much designed knowing you have that dodge - it isn't a bonus - it's a necessity, and if you blow it at the wrong time, you're going to get spanked. I've got mixed feelings about this. It keeps you awake but it also means I'm not sure it'll be as fun to play mindlessly as some ARPGs.
13) It runs astonishingly well for how detailed a lot of the graphics are. The characters particularly look incredible and wow it's wild to have fairly diverse outfits and so on again in an ARPG, something not present in most (including D3 and PoE). Aesthetically, as noted, I feel like it owes just a little bit too much to D3 (which made some serious aesthetic errors and I'm not talking about "not dark enough" or whatever) and the UI is godawful, but the characters and world look really, really good. Hopefully more areas will make it even better - kind of already looking forward to expansions which might take us to jungle or something (as my impression was that there isn't one here).
14) These bloody accents. I know, I'm British, and most of the characters are either British-accented or sound like British people doing bad Russian accents, but oooof. No. The female Rogue and Necro just have terrible voice-choices. They're not so noisy it's a huge problem but I honestly cringe every time the femRogue speaks - maybe I need to try a male one.
15) Enjoying how diverse the characters look body-shape-wise, even though it's triggering the hell out of the usual suspects (especially the misogynists) on the internet, but I really feel like they should have had more faces for everyone - indeed I thought in early vertical slices they showed like eight faces per gender per class. Four very similar ones ain't quite cutting it.
Overall, whilst I have a lot of questions and quasi-complaints, I am a big fan of ARPGs and the Diablo series, and I had a lot of fun, so I think I'll probably be getting Diablo IV when it comes out, so long as I hear they've listened to at least some feedback from the beta - particularly re: the ghastly UI - but it does seem like most people hate or at least dislike the UI so maybe Blizzard will.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I have faith that Blizzard is going to change a lot of this stuff before June. This beta is weird in that it's an actual beta, where a lot of what they were testing, two Fridays in a row, is server stability.
But yes, if you get to play it before release, at the moment, sorcerer and necro are hilariously easier to play than the other classes. And given how much is shared account-wide, I suggest playing one of those two until you unlock horses and have a bunch of gear banked in the stash and then switch to whatever class you actually want to play. (I actually will be sticking with sorcerer, although I played a necro to test it out and to marvel at how committed they were to the aesthetic. There are going to be some death metal bands who find the necro too creepy for their tastes.)
But yes, if you get to play it before release, at the moment, sorcerer and necro are hilariously easier to play than the other classes. And given how much is shared account-wide, I suggest playing one of those two until you unlock horses and have a bunch of gear banked in the stash and then switch to whatever class you actually want to play. (I actually will be sticking with sorcerer, although I played a necro to test it out and to marvel at how committed they were to the aesthetic. There are going to be some death metal bands who find the necro too creepy for their tastes.)
Paul Farquhar
Legend
But there is nothing like punishing yourself in order to get your message across....Argh, going to be harder to boycott this, than Wizards at this rate.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Boycotts can serve two purposes.
1) They make you feel better about yourself and the world. That's completely legitimate. If you individually boycott something - and realistically most people do consciously avoid buying at least one brand/product for reasons other than mere quality/price - that's valid. It's not really "punishing yourself". However it doesn't usually economically impact the company in a particularly meaningful way unless they manage to cause huge numbers of people to feel the same way.
2) Organised boycotts can draw attention to issues, and can make real economic impacts. However they're very rare, and usually only work in a fairly short term over a specific issue, unless you're a larger-scale investor.
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Ruin Explorer
Legend
I certainly hope so.
The biggest takeaway from the whole thing is actually a sort of D&D-relevant one, weirdly enough. Previously the Diablo series has seen two previous sequels - Diablo 2, and Diablo 3.
Diablo 2 wasn't a huge change from Diablo 1, gameplay-wise or in terms of aesthetic. Fundamentally it was a very similar game, just a lot broader and deeper in terms of content/gameplay - one might compare 1E to 2E or the like.
Diablo 3 was a huge change, however, both visually and in terms of aesthetic. It's not a similar game except in being an isometric ARPG in the same setting. The gameplay loop is fundamentally different, the method of play is different, the endgame is different, even how you survive is different, and what is loot is and why it matters to you is different (and the gap was even larger at release). The comparison point would probably be going from 3E to 4E (Diablo skipped a 3E equivalent).
Diablo 4 isn't a huge change from Diablo 3, gameplay-wise. The aesthetic is a bigger change, but is still primarily drawing from D3, just a much darker, grittier, less '90/'00s comics-influenced take on the same visual ideas (partly enabled by the insane graphic fidelity - I could see a goddamn tear or sweat track glint on my character's face when she turned in one in-engine cutscene!). Gameplay-wise, including character-building-wise, it's about as different from D3 as D2 was from D1. It's still got a fundamentally different relationship to characters and gear to D2, and it is a very similar one to D3.
So that's interesting. I don't hate it, because I did, in the end, like D3 (after expansions and the huge rework with RoS), but I would have liked to see a bit more of a jump. Too late for that now though. I hope the endgame is a bit more fun and varied than the GRifts or death approach D3 took. Not that I didn't enjoy GRifts but they were kind of narrow experience for seriously hardcore players - not one I could share with friends like I can with other ARPGs.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I think it's the same incentive as with 5E and The Force Awakens: "Hey, remember all the stuff you liked before that recent thing we're not going to mention? We're back, baby!"
That said, they clearly have a lot of tracks laid down for future expansions or big content patches, so maybe big swings will come in them.
I played the beta a couple of minutes at my brother's.
From a technical point of view the game needs a higher max zoom on PC. Way too close and too little overview.
From a personal point of view I don't think I will play it. D3 kindled my hatred for the high heavens and Reaper of Souls turned it into a roaring inferno.
Unless we get to invade the heavens and kick some angel butt, i am not interested in the story anymore. They must pay for their horrendous crimes toward humanity, they're worse than demons.
From a technical point of view the game needs a higher max zoom on PC. Way too close and too little overview.
From a personal point of view I don't think I will play it. D3 kindled my hatred for the high heavens and Reaper of Souls turned it into a roaring inferno.
Unless we get to invade the heavens and kick some angel butt, i am not interested in the story anymore. They must pay for their horrendous crimes toward humanity, they're worse than demons.
But that doesn't mean the world isn't worth saving. It just means that saving the world requires the destruction of both the Burning Hells AND the High Heavens
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