It’s like throughout the last 11 years, Blizzard learned absolutely nothing from all the backlash and criticism towards D3.
The D4 devs must have lived under a rock back then and seem to be mostly unaware of D3’s shortcomings. Whatever they must have heard or read, they have misunderstood and/or misinterpreted.
The unfortunate result is, that the game doesn’t really feel like Diablo, or at least to me anyways. Here are few reasons as to why in no particular order:
The game feels extremely unfinished and poorly optimized!
For the life of me, if I didn’t know this game was in development for years, I would not have believed it. Looks like something made within several months.
Seems to consume crazy amount of RAM (possible memory leak?), sometimes going into 22GB. Do most people nowadays even have that much RAM on their machines?
Skills feel lame and underwhelming. Clearly designed to be crap on their own and require some legendary effect to make them feel good.
Sorcerer’s Lughtning Spear is a perfect example, where you need a legendary for a high chance for the spell to be unleashed twice;
another example is Druid’s Pulverize and the legendary, that adds a Shock Wave.
Skill Damage is still mainly affected by your weapon! AGAIN!!!
Casters are still absolutely dependent on their weapon damage, while skill points barely make any difference.
Just check how dramatically the damage of a Sorcerer skill is affected by merely swapping your weapon from one-hander to two-hander.
Take Hydra for instance. Like your Hydra can do 200damage and you might be foolish enough to believe, that it’s the 5 skill points you put into it made a dramatic difference. Wrong!
You take away the staff you’re wielding and you put a freaking wand, damage goes down to like 60-70 or something like that… but you can unleash spells slightly faster.
In other words, you’re a magic wielder, but the damage of your Fire Bolt is still based on the sharpness of your Axe. Super stupid, extremely annoying…
You should have divorced cast speed from weapon attack speed, and you should have re-introduced a Cast Rate stat.
Also, skill points and the damage they provide are crap, because you wanna have a LostArk like game with Scaling and World Tiers. Giving characters inherent DMG through skill points would be directly at odds with Scaling and World tiers. So instead of giving us meaningful skill system, where we can see the points we earned made a difference, you decided, that stupid Scaling and MMO world Tiers are more important.
The devs have muted the colors to the point, that it feels borderline black&white.
Diablo 2 Resurrected is a much prettier game and the colors are not muted.
It also might be, that whatever effects they have in place, they’ve tried to make it, so that color is affected by light… and by the lack of such. You can see color if you stand on top of a brazier.
During the day the game looks loads better.
The game feels stiff and clunky. I’ve read throughout the years D3 fans saying, that D2 is bad, because they feel it’s not as smooth and responsive as D3 (despite them failing to understand, that the game not feeling responsive comes down to them lacking hit recovery) .
I am here to tell you, that regardless of what you think and how you feel about the previous games, D4 will feel the clunkiest of them all.
The stats and the items are rubbish! Swapping items constantly feels stupid beyond belief.
The Appearance customization is absolutely terrible… and pointless at the same time
This morning I decided to try and make a necromancer… and also spend more time on the customization, because I rushed it last evening.
Yesterday I briefly saw an option for “body type”, but I skipped it and went with what I thought at the time was the default one. Today I figured I’ll make a thicker necromancer, because supposedly there’s customization and… why not. Boy, oh, boy…
Took me few seconds to understand what the devs meant by “body type” and my body literally cringed…
I figured I’ll try a necromancer with somewhat pretty face… all the female necromancers had this crazy look in their eyes… my female necromancer eneded up being an Asmongold lookalike :*(
Doesn’t matter… you can’t see your character’s face in-game, even if you zoom, due to the angle of the camera. You can’t notice it the same way you do in Lost Ark. Only the skin color and the hair cut are noticeable differences. Lame…
Final verdict based on my experience with the beta:
If I were to rate Vanilla D2: __7.5/10;
D2: LoD 1.09 __ 9/10;
D2: LoD 1.10__8/10
D3 Vanilla __5.5/10
Then then I would have to give D4 __ 4.5/10 at best.
It’s certainly not a great game, and not a really good Diablo game from what I can tell based on the beta. More of a downgrate rather than a leap forward.
The Diablo 4 team missed the golden opportunity to redeem Blizzard South in the eyes of the Diablo fan base.
They seem to be ignorant (or simply don’t care) about all the critiques towards D3. For example, skills are yet again too reliant on weapon damage and legendary effects.
Instead of fixing the known problems with the previous installment, the D4 devs have decided to take the worst from D3 and make their own thing. They’ve turned the game into an online walking simulator about sightseeing, watching cut scenes and listening to lore and story.
The combat and the loot hunting aspects are clearly secondary compared to the walking, sightseeing, cut scenes and the lore… and that is very apparent considering how empty the world feels and how you can traverse vast spaces, yet encounter very few monsters.
Again 4.5 out of 10. Definitely not $70 worthy. I hope things change, but I wont hold my breath.
If how other Blizzard products were handled in the past is any indication, I might as well wait for a sale or skip the title altogether.
For more context on how I’d rather other Blizzard products, and, so that you can judge how fairly I’ve rated the game, feel free to read this:
