Intro
In no particular order here is the list of things that I think could be addressed (bugs, feedback, thoughts).
I’ve played through the D4 on my female barbarian, reaching level 25, killing world boss, teaming up with players, finishing all the strongholds, doing the majority of side quests and doing a half of dungeons in this game.
World tier 2 and during character setup I chose “only show new additions as tutorial” option.
PSA
A lot of the points are probably going to echo what others have written. I was writing my feedback notes without reading forums as to not color any of my own impressions.
It’s also possible that some of the issues I’ve experienced are simply because I was not aware that was an option. If that is the case then treat such lines as if I missed the way to perform given task or fix the problem then other players may as well so there should be better conveyed via user interface.
Character Customization
- Very limited, not in a good way. I am a huge proponent of not complicating customisation too much in an ARPG setting since most of the time you won’t be staring at your character while playing. With that said faces/hairstyles options are extremely lacking in selection. There is simply not enough variety. I don’t expect, or want, sliders for every single feature, but I want to see the amount of hairstyles to be doubled/tripled with amount of face selections drastically increased. Barbarian only has 4.
- Ability to write nickname in CamelCase is great, would be even better to be able to have spaces in the names.
- Body type is not gender. What we are picking at the character selection screen before customization is gender (sex). Body type would refer to overall body physic which perfectly goes into another suggestion which is…
- Add more actual body types while still adhering to overall upbringing of a particular class. You would of course never see super slim barbarian, but you could pick how well-built your physic is (more / less muscle mass).
Gameplay / UI / UX
- Ability to move HUD to left is a great addition. Now do the same to move the HUD to right
- Ability to set where chat is (left / right) when HUD is centered or be opposite side to the HUD (hud left, chat right and vice versa).
- Item drop font (when the item is on the ground) seems a tad bit too large, would be nice if you could control it.
- Character rotating instead of actually turning like a human. Talking about cutscene with IOSEF when you puke out the petals of blood, my character just rotates like it’s Pokemon Sword & Shield animation.
- Ability to see/compare items when on the ground!
- Potions seem to be less recognisable when drop on the ground? To me, they look like health globes, which segways nicely into another point…
- Ability to set consume potions that are on the ground automatically when low on health and you run over them.
- Some subtitles disappear a bit too quickly.
- Characters popping in causing me to rubber band back a few meters. Perhaps have bounding boxes for characters always loaded, but lazy load the textures. I am not sure if this one is due to server stability or some other factors.
- Waypoint unlock could be automatic when you are near proximity of it. There is no need for pointless clicking to activate it. Nothing feels worse than blowing past it only to realize you never clicked on it.
- Instead of writing “Elite” in the name, have an ornament to denote that this is an Elite mob. Visual style over text.
- Place a portal at the end of dungeon upon completion automatically, there is no need to open the map/action wheel unless you wish to exit early.
- Stagger bar should deplete when it takes damage, not fill up.
- When voice over for journal entry gets dismissed early it should also dismiss the text that appears on screen.
- Dungeon layout could use randomization, it looks identical and gets boring to look at.
- This has been addressed in the dev Q/A that dungeons are different per zone and I guess the expectation that you would switch it up by moving zones. I still think dungeons in the air could really use a spruce up, especially if we are expected to run them as endgame grind for obols. Randomization in this instance is to prevent mindless re-tracing of steps when re-running it.
- Objectives in dungeons could use diversification, at this point it’s pretty much either clear all, place 2 cubes to open door to clear some more, kill X elites and final boss.
- Final bosses tend to share behaviour, so far all bosses summon minion, have some kind of movement mechanic and/or cc. Variation is lacking.
- Introduction boss was great, especially since game teaches you about dodging mechanics while fighting it.
- Buff icons, like party exp increase, could really use more Diablo like style.
- Icons of abilities look fantastic and have that unique style that I very much enjoy, perhaps you could stylise buff icons while still maintaining how recognisable they are in terms of what the affect/do.
- 24-hour clock option is missing!
- When you finish quests that make you perform an action (gem crafting) it should grant the same amount of gold you just spend. Example when game teaches you about gem crafting I spent 4500 gold but the reward back was 450. Granted I expect the gold amount to increase it would still feel bad for newcomer to spend what little they had and not get back the return on their investment for crafting one item the quest instructed them to do.
- When clicking to spend points in a tree, further clicks without any points to spend should not put the skill under cursor to be placed on action bars. Keep that action for drag & drop only.
- Being able to control cursor size is great. Would be even better if you could select a different color for it as well!
- Bring back overlay map, please!
- I miss old dialog where you would also see character portrait, would give it that much more immersive experience to the conversation.
- When interacting with NPC dialog it would be nice to have an option not to close the dialog if I happen to click outside of dialog window or miss the option in the list.
- I’d rather use ESC key to quit dialog prematurely if need be.
- Give an option to quickly switch tracking to newly picked up quest/side quest.
- Apparently there is a key bind for it, but it would be nice if action was prompted on screen like “Press R to track”.
- Have an ability to see/track (in the list below the map) more than 1 objective outside of Map & Journal.
- Health bars of friendly npc and cast bar being teal color seems really odd and not Diablo to me.
- Can you provide an option to use different color for friendly bars?
- Same goes for when interacting with objects and there is a bar to be filled, it’s also colored teal which, again, seems out of place.
- It would be nice if guards actually reacted to nearby combat if it’s too close to em. Fought some ghouls next to a guard, and he did nothing.
- NPC that follow you should be fast enough to follow instead of being teleported to you all the time due to their walking speed being slower than yours.
- Animation of you exiting the portal is redundant.
- Just let me control the character from the get go after teleporting. This extra addition of me slowly walking out just feels like a waste of time.
- Ability to right-click on the map to zoom out to outer area like when you are in a dungeon and want to look at world map.
- Right click to teleport to friend when clicking on their portrait?
- You should not be able to resurrect people when getting damaged. Seems weird that you can just tank it through.
- Resurrection channeling meter does not reset when you prematurely stop it.
- PC players should be able to just right-click on people in the over world to inspect/trade/invite players instead of being forced to use action wheel.
Server
- When disconnects happen it really should throw you back into the game. There is no grace period at all which is extremely infuriating. I can imagine a lot of players will be extremely frustrated if at launch they will have to sit through queue on each disconnect.
- There appears to be 2 separate queues, one is the login queue and the other “entering the world” queue. The former makes sense but the latter doesn’t. I haven’t encountered the queue te enter be more than 1 min, but it’s odd that it is even a thing. Haven’t seen any other game do that (or maybe they did, and it’s just invisible to the end user)
- Extreme rubber banding. Nothing more to say there.
General Issues
- Some enemies seem to attack at a lower frame rate? Perfect example are skeletons, they look like they attack at 15fps.
- This was intentionally updated right before open beta but cinematics should not be frame capped at launch or they should be synced to monitor refresh rate. It’s jarring to have a 144fps gameplay only to drop down to what feels like 30 fps cinematic? I haven’t done actual measurement so the numbers could be way off.
- Random stutters, I can’t say why is that.
- Challenge: Fury Frenzy (40/130) stuck always at the same number.
- Broodguard could use a nerf, either on movement speed or on frequency of snares it does. I kept getting webbed as barbarian without any chance to fight back.
- The loading times entering different mines and caves are much, much longer than in D3. There is really no reason it should take this long to load or have a loading screen at all.
- I and my girlfriend got kicked out of the game, yet when I got in the queue first it said 40 min, but a few minutes later when she logged in it said 33 minutes. That seems odd and made me wonder does server have a botched queue mechanism? We would have waited for each other either way, but it’s not a nice feeling knowing that other players can just “jump the queue” and it’s not a visual bug either since she ended up getting in first by about 5 min.
- Barbarian kick skill can launch mobs into objects where they cannot be targeted!
- Exorcist’s Cache quest coulde use more monsters that drop anima.
- Error codes are fine but please provide descriptive messages about the errors.
- Nothing is more infuriating than seeing Error occurred 123456 without any context what that means or where is the issue. Users are not your internal developers. Provide clear messages in-game about each error code. You can still attach it in the message but expand further on what each error code means.
- You have invincibility when dashing it seems but at the same time I got frozen a couple of times when dashing (mid-dash) so I am not sure if this is a latency issue, or you actually don’t get immunity to everything when dashing.
- Elixir craft NPC isn’t actually holding any potion when she shakes her hand as if she is holding one. (Veroka)
- Sister Octavia NPC duplicates during the final quest line when you ask her: “I am glad you are ok” .
- During one of the quest lines where you bring back the eyes to the guy chained in Kyovashad, his eyes started burning, and then he just jumped out of his restraints?
- Never mind how did he even manage to put the eyes back into his sockets when both of hinds can’t reach his face…
- Don’t know if this one is a bug but partied up with my girlfriend, she went on exploring, found Lilith statue in Melnik’s Hill, told me about it, and then I decided to walk there. Upon arriving no monsters were there and I could not see the statue either. She came to the exact same spot where I was, and we couldn’t even see each other until we both returned to character screen and then went back in.
Pre-order
Let’s forget about how the whole pre-order culture is super weird as it is, Standard Edition does not give you early access to diablo 4 at launch. I don’t know about you but that’s a massive middle finger to all players basically saying oh you paid 70 euros for our game but that’s not enough to enjoy the game at the same time as everyone else since you didn’t pay an extra 10 euros for the privilege of starting early.
Early access for production launch needs to just not exist, it should not matter if player spent 70, 90 or 100 euros everybody should get in at the same time since we all got the base product. This alienation of players just feels wrong.
Overall feeling
I’ve enjoyed my time in the new Diablo world. I love the new muted color palette giving the world that realistic look. Character animations when fighting or using abilities are top-notch as usual. Cinematics are gorgeous (Blizzard’s cinematic team has always been the AAA team of the entire company). While Barbarian was the weakest it still felt amazing to play (Upheaval enjoyers unite) due to how impactful abilities have sounded/looked. Damage numbers can always be tweaked.
Very nice touch on letting basic setups out of the way, like subtitles and some gameplay options. Nothing has been more frustrating at the beginning than game front loading a cinematic without allowing the user to turn on subtitles for when the voice is too low or distorted during the effects.
Game does have a lot of issues (as indicative of the list above) but the core game is on the right track for me. I am a huge supporter of no seasons in this game and instead go more of Guild Wars 2 style approach, loads of horizontal progression so that the players are able to pick up / drop the game at any point and not feel like they lagged behind in any way. Last thing I want is Lost Ark style progression where the game FOMOs you into playing every day until you burn out and then don’t want to come back.
Like any only time will tell what’s in store for us when it comes to in game shops and battle passes but I do hope that
- We won’t see any upgrades in store, direct or indirect. I don’t want another Diablo Immortal where you claimed battle pass won’t have paid upgrades but then Free Tier has item upgrades where Paid Tier doesn’t. Technically you are correct but that’s obviously an incentive to play/spend money to get those items which is against what you said claimed earlier.
- No out of place skins. Let this world be about Diablo only, free of any real world events or funny costumes. While this has worked for Lost Ark it won’t work for Diablo game as it would end up breaking the immersion / style.
Thank you very much for taking time to read this and I wish you all a great day!
