Feedback for Diablo 4 (D-IV)
Firstly, I’d like to start by describing my experience:
My system is definitely a mid-range gaming setup that consists of an Intel i7-2700, 32GB of RAM, an Nvidia RTX 3060ti, a Gen4 NVMe SSD, and a 165Hz-1440p display. I am a PC gaming enthusiast who has a strong understanding of my hardware, as well a healthy grasp of Windows and its underlying subsystems; as such I have optimized my configuration quite a bit.
Firstly, I disable turbo-boost. The non-turbo clock speeds on the E & P Cores are more than sufficient to avoid a bottleneck. And since there is no benefit to running at higher clocks than the game requires, I spare myself the power consumption and heat by just disabling features that don’t improve the experience. I also temperature-limit my GPU’s performance such that it never exceeds 65c, and will lower its power draw and clock speed if it approaches that threshold.
Lastly, I make a number of changes to Windows that I won’t explain at length, with a single exception being that I manually disable the use of a page-file, which generally improves performance in all things from web browsing to gaming. I mention this chance specifically because it will be discussed later when I discuss the technical issues I experienced.
With this configuration of hardware and software I was able to achieve the 165+ FPS required to match my displays native refresh rate at its native resolution (DLSS being disabled). There were exceptions to this, as some areas of the game dropped the FPS considerably. Kyovashad (town) was always 30-40 FPS lower than anywhere else in the game. This is almost certainly due to the increase in player density, which serves no practical purpose in the game as I never grouped up with strangers so it was a strictly negative impact on the overall experience.
There was a 3-5 second period of extremely low FPS (between 35 - 40) every time TP’d into Kyovashad. This never occurred when I teleported to other towns, settlements, or strongholds. This was extremely brief each time it occured, but it persisted throughout the beta.
I will break my gameplay feedback down into the following categories:
Character Creation
Combat, Difficulty, & Progression
Itemization
Visuals
Let’s start with Character Customization:
The ability to create a custom character was substantively more restrictive than I had expected. Obviously this is a purely subjective critique so I don’t have specific numbers to offer - there are no magic figures that would act as the appropriate number of faces, hair styles, etc, but overall I found there to be too few options in those categories.
I’d like to caveat this complaint by saying that it is entirely possible that these limits are unique to the beta, and that there will be more options available in the game at launch. It’s is also possible that this is intentionally limited because Blizzard intends to release cosmetics as RMT purchases from their store, which would be a valid way to monetize the game moving forward. If they release a regular stream of cosmetics options and never sell power or progress, I can get behind this model.
Combat, Difficulty, & Progression
The combat in D-IV feels pretty good. The average number of enemies on screen was substantially lower than D3, but this is counter-balanced by each of the monsters on screen being more durable & mobile. Most monsters did just run straight at me and swing until they died, but there were some (succubi, warewolves, vampires, et.c) that frequently used movement mechanics intelligently to avoid my attacks. The generic mobs were mostly fodder, and I don’t think that the elite mobs were sufficiently distinguishable from from part from having more hit points. I would have liked to see the elite mobs do more damage, or pursue me more efficiently as I kite and evade. Where I did see a real difference between monster was when I engaged the “boss” mobs at the end of strongholds and dungeons. The boss fight at the end of the Act 1 story quest line was extremely well done, and I really found that experience to be the best combat I experienced. A close second was the Kor Dragon stronghold - the strong visual theme of the monsters and the boss made that entire encounter an absolute blast.
The rest of the bosses at the end of the various dungeons felt less engaging, but they were sufficiently strong enough that I did actively have to avoid their attacks to succeed - I couldn’t just face-tank them like I could with the cellars, elites, and generic mobs, which never amounted to much of a threat.
The overall difficulty seemed to strike a good balance for me. I played on World Tier 2 (Veteran) throughout the entirety of my time in the beta, and I would describe the challenge level as “stress free”. I never really felt like there was much chance that I would die, and the only time I really needed to actively focus on dodging enemy attacks, or really focus fire to take down an enemy was during boss fights, and only some of those - certainly not all. This isn’t a complaint since I Don’t know what the higher World Tiers are like, but it is an important observation.
I will say that the difficultly and progression mechanics are inherently connected. I don’t think that the game was any more difficult at level 25 than it was a level 5 - the only perceptible difference was that I had access to more of my class abilities. This makes leveling up seem pretty meaningless and it acts as just a wall preventing me from using certain skills until I have played for X-amount of time. I had trouble perceiving differences between the level of my skills and their effectiveness in game. For example, at level 25, I was almost completely unable to see a difference between level 1 shadow step, and level 5 shadow step. I eventually found boots that gave me +2 levels of shadow step, for a total of 7 levels and it still behaved exactly the same - it generally always 1-hit trash mobs, and was basically just a movement skill as it did no perceptible damage to anything else.
This is good point to shift into talking about the Itemization since it loosely relates to pgroession, but quickly becomes its own topic.
Itemization:
Between levels 1-10 I generally found a fair bit of gray and blue items. And blue was universally better than gray.
Between levels 11-25 I mostly found gold (rare) items that were universally better than blue items ad the role of blue and gray items become nothing more that sell or smash fodder. My understanding was that blue items were intended to have fewer affixes than gold items, but those affixes would generally be higher in value. I did not find this to be a compelling reason to ever use blue items when a superior gold item which rolled many many more affixes. More importantly, rare items could be upgraded to legendary items at the occultist, and those became the most desirable items. I found that items which dropped as legendary were generally inferior to items that topped as rare and were upgraded.
Regarding the legendary item affixes, I found them to be pretty underwhelming. 5% more damage against crowd controlled enemies doesn’t strike me as being “legendary”, and I found myself really only using items that gave me +1 or +2 levels to various skills, as that opened up more skills for me to use. After playing around at level 25 for a few hours I eventually came to understand that legendary items are ultimately useless as items, and serve as nothing more than a mechanism for delivering legendary affixes that you are expected to extract and apply to rare items. This isn’t really a complaint since I didn’t have trouble “farming” those legendary powers, but it did cheapen the excitement of getting a legendary drop. I knew that when I legendary item dropped it was instantly destined to be crushed at the forge. I also found that the number of unique legendary affixes was pretty limited. The beta was only 3 days, and I found dozen and dozens of legendaries, the overwhelming majority of which had duplicate or redundant legendary powers. Hopefully this variety increases at higher levels.
I am not sure how I feel about all items taking up the same amount of space in my inventory - rings occupying the same space as armor and weapons seems odd, but it isn’’t a problem by itself. I did find myself running out of inventory space quite frequently, and I was being quite judicious with what I picked up. To be fair, I don’t like playing inventory-tetras in D3, but I feel my overall carrying capacity is reduced.
Visuals:
The best impression D-IV left me with was its visual quality. I was extremely impressed with quality textures, density of objects & effects, and the overall presentation. I loved the fact that dungeons were so packed with content even outside the playable area - it’s such a huge improvement from having a generic gray fog mark any and all space that isn’t playable. I often found myself pausing just to look at the well-crafted scenery and ambiance. The character models are detailed enough that I spent the time collecting all the transmogs I could get my hands on. Again, it’s highly subjective, but the Rogue looked the best in my opinion (although my OCD actually makes my eyes twitch because of how asymmetrical all the armor is).
I will 100% certainly play the Open Beta and greatly look forward to the full release. As things stand right now (assuming the technical issues are resolved) I think this is on track to be my favorite Diablo title yet - but I will have to reserve judgement for later. It’s still possible for Blizzard to ruin this thing; pay-to-win items in the store would instantly kill my interest and send me off playing some other game, but barring that, I think D-IV looks wonderful and plays well!
I hope this feedback is constructive and helpful for the devs 