Hi there,
Just wanted to give my 2 (or 10) cents on my experience of beta! Played barb and sorc a lot to level 25 and geared them well and rogue to 23, prob played 30+ hours and have played D1, D2 and D3 to death! It’s looking really good guys, great work - albeit not without some issues, but the look and feel and smoothness of combat and play is a home run!
DUNGEONS
There has been a lot of hysteria in the community about the dungeons. First of all I wanted to say they look AMAZING, the artwork in this game and care that has gone into the details of the gore, destroyed and gritty environments is absolutely out of this world, so a giant pat on the back for the artists. I loved the little details like tiny ants crawling on things, pulsating sacs on the walls, found myself just standing around looking at everything, the muddy road with carriage tracks… all of it. There has been complaints about them not being procedural even though they are, I think people are not understanding that proceduralism whilst retaining this kind of level of organic detailing and art does require “blocking” of certain sections which is part of working procedurally.
I think this is the right direction, keeping artistic superiority in keeping chunks of the dungeon central to the procedural bits. I much prefer this than running through boxes and boxes of bland environments.
What I would say is, the dungeons need some bigger open areas, bigger rooms. The one feeling I had (I ran all the dungeons in the game multiple times) they do feel a bit like I am just running through a tunnel almost every time. I think spicing it up by incorporating bigger area rooms with greater mob density would really help it feel better.
The dungeon “mechanics” can be a bit frustrating, even den of evil was annoying when you missed one mob, the levers and boxes to open doors, I just think those are unnecessary and will become something just annoying over time – I know this has been said by thousands of peeps tho.
DUNGEON BOSSES
The drops can feel very underwhelming sometimes at level 25 they often even dropped like 1 blue… that doesn’t seem right. It defeats the purpose of having a boss. Spider boss is way overtuned compared to the others! Probably needs some of her snares toned down or the amount of puddles she spits – was very very frustrating on the barb, and not at all frustrating on the sorc.
MAP OVERLAY
We really need a map overlay, having to stop everything and cover the whole screen with the map every time we check it is frustrating and breaks the flow of play a lot.
QUEST LOG
maybe it was just me but I could only track one quest at a time, not sure if I missed something –
I had to open my map, open the log in the map, open dropdown after dropdown for the different types of quests, click on each one to read to even understand what quest I was looking for… it was all very unwieldly and confusing – also having the whole map cover my screen while I am trying to manage my quest log is not great.
Suggestion, enable tracking multiple quests and somehow be able to select one specifically from your in-game quest list (not map quest list) to highlight so you can easily change quest tracking, maybe add minimap to it
CHAT
It overlaps with character inventory which is really bad. Everytime I was chatting I would have to try and xray vision through the chat to find which item I wanted to link to my friends or have to close chat window/wait for long fadeout if I was vendoring or mid run and checking items etc. It absolutely needs to be moved to the left as far away from inventory as possible. Also we are all just used to having chat on the left
CHARACTER STATS
Needs to be default, why do I look at my list of materials before my stats? Stats are important!
ITEM HOVER
The fade in and out whilst I know it adds “polish” and “smoothness” is quite frustrating. I’d come to the vendor and spend a bunch of extra time just waiting for popups so I could read items. Since Diablo is always about time efficiency I think the fadein/fadeout should be removed from item hovers, here practicality matters more than the “feel” I think
RARE/ELITE MOB IDENTIFICATION
It was impossible for me to visually distinguish rares/elites from regular mobs unless I saw their nameplate. I think that can be important. Also couldn’t tell their special affixes until I engaged them
THE WORLD AND THE STORIES
The world looks absolutely amazing, I think you guys really nailed the feel of the game, it’s dark, it’s disturbing, it’s also got a bit of dark humour thrown in, I love it.
I like the little side quests, some of them creeped me out, so great job.
CLASSES
Classes feel really good, combat feels really good, I wish we could bind more abilities though, would give us more flexibility with our builds, I know consoles are a restriction but if there could be ANY WAY!
FOG OF WAR
I wanted to uncover every nook and cranny of the map and make sure I did all the quests and dungeons, but found the fog of war to be too subtle and too small in certain areas, meaning as I was doing this task I had to go back multiple times to tiny little bits I missed, it’s not easy to kind of move your eye over the map and see where fog of war is and where it isn’t. Maybe just a couple of tones darker on the fog of war would help.
WINDOWED MODE
I play in non-fullscreen windowed mode and have 2 monitors. Any time I clicked off the Diablo window and onto my browser on other monitor the stuttering on Diablo was crazy. Thought it would give me an epileptic seizure! Just a tech issue I observed.