There are a few caveats:
- I understand the gameplay at 25 in a Beta is not necessarily reflective of later stages of the game, as such, I’ll focus on some constructive feedback that will potentially translate.
- I only invested 15 to 20 hours but did and have consumed a lot of content.
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The slower pace of the game feels good and more strategic but may not align with some players power fantasy. This is fine, and Diablo 4 should endeavor to forge its own path.
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Scaling needs to stop at some point, so you eventually feel as though you have mastery over the world. Otherwise, you can insert a hamster wheel metaphor here.
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The intentional design of respecializations at higher levels being near impractical due to associated costs does not have any obvious benefits to the player experience. “We want a high-level player to think they are better off making a new barbarian”. How does this positively shape the experience? Would another mechanism be better at incentivizing players sticking builds out for a bit longer?
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Resource generation and builders feels as though it could use some attention, especially for Druid and Barbarian. Having to build up X resource whilst negotiating having to get into melee range to use X spender is something that needs some thought. This creates rather skewed damage uptime, and impacts melee viability. A sorcerer actively gains spender and has higher damage uptime and mobility, and a barbarian actively loses spender and has lower damage uptime and mobility.
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95% completion is more than adequate, opposed to “kill all monsters”. The latter has no benefits to the player experience.
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For a game this visually stunning the UI could use a lot of work. The engine is fantastic, and everything looks great, but an adoption of a D2 UI would have been superior to this implementation (in Beta). There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but you can’t even see item stats without scrolling, and there is no map overlay with transparency, and may other elements feel oddly sized, clunky and detract from the player experience.
