I’ll put the most important part summarized here for the TLDR:
Diablo 4 is going to need to be carried by transformation leagues, by which I mean leagues that offer a experience altering gameplay- like Delve or Heist. It has to provide a different gameplay loop in addition to base every time. Why? Because base isn’t that engaging, and I say that as someone who lucked into a build altering lego that’s actually slightly engaging to use.
Overall impression: 6 out of 10
Now for the longer feedback.
Enemies and abilities as narrative:
In D1 and D2, there was a slow escalation in enemy types, starting with slow, fearful, small, weak enemies. These enemies sometimes bested you, especially when we were kids, because your characters abilities were very limited and often not dissimilar to your basic attack (smite, bash, kick, magic arrow, etc). There was this sense of pacing where as the enemy types became more threatening, you gained abilities to match the threat.
For example, in D2, when you finally get frozen orb, that’s a big moment. You’ve been shooting mostly single target attacks-ish, maybe you put some points into chain lightning, for a while- but you’ve done it, you’ve reached this point where you can really mow down a horde of demons. This is similar to finding your first 4 link in PoE, it’s like that “oh my god, now this ability is really doing something crazy.” At the same time, that’s about the time when mobs are starting to come at you in high density so it all balances out.
In D4, you get frozen orb in the tutorial. It feels strange to go from wanding wolves and freezing to death to obliterating demons by the pack in just a few minutes of gameplay. What was my character doing 5 minutes ago? Pretending not to be an ultra powerful wizard? All the sense of progression happens in the tutorial and then the rest so far has been fine tuning.
There’s also a problem with enemy pacing. You see all sorts of demons that you would have historically seen in act 3 or 4 in just the first few quests. I think I saw a pit lord while fighting the mother??? Pit lords should be reserved for communicating, “This is now serious.” Not, easy quest mobs. When you got to Hell in Diablo 2, if you didn’t know that fire breath was coming and didn’t have on decent fire resist, there was a good chance the first Pit Lord pack you ran into melted your face. They were there to show you that you were now in the final act of the base game. There’s not much threat escalation in the 20 levels I’ve seen, it’s all been flat. Quilrats and Pit lords are treated with the same level of seriousness.
Tuning
I played the entire time on world 2 and there’s something wrong the AI for a lot of mobs and boss- in that they sometimes just aren’t fighting back very hard, they just kinda die. There’s been one, and only one boss, where I think that there’s something wrong in the other direction, which was a low level werewolf boss in a dungeon that continuously spammed charge attacks faster than roll recharged. It felt like I was fighting Duriel for the first time again. I think the internal cooldown on the charge needs to be fixed, because the other abilities he did didn’t do much of anything. For contrast, there was one level 19 dungeon boss I did that was a giant skeleton mage who died in about 10 seconds. I don’t know what the mechanics were, it didn’t do any. Why is a level 7 boss in the starter zone with 2 mechanics infinitely more difficult than a level 19 boss in a higher level zone?
Tone: Enemies on the minimap
I realize that this is intended to be an MMO quest assist feature… However, this is also supposed to be a diablo game. In Diablo 1, going around a corner blindly could get you blasted by a dozen magic missiles from succubae. If you had a minimap showing you that there was an army around the corner, it wouldn’t have had as much tension. I don’t feel warry, I feel powerful and borderline omnipotent. That’s not what I’m supposed to feel in a diablo game.
Tone: Dialog Delivery (please leave me alone)
Part of Diablo 1 and 2’s appeal is that people in the world are afraid and they hide as best they can from the encroaching darkness. There’s 1 ranger left outside of the camp in Diablo 2, guarding the bridge. The rest have been killed and raised as monsters. Everyone else you meet is barricaded themselves in the camp. Same with act 1 and act 2 and even the angels are mostly taking a defensive position.
It is the end of the world and you are alone because everyone else is dead or hopeless. As a reminder of this fact, you encounter bodies of other people who tried to walk the same path as you constantly.
The people in D4 remind me of Forespoken, but less millennial. I had to just start skipping because every character tried to narrative dump me. To the guy who ended up in pyramidhead armor (Vigo?), I’m sorry that happened to you / I’m happy for you?
I think that less direct dialog and more background dialog, like if you stand near a person you can overhear their conversation with other people, or more environmental story telling like in Diablo 1 and 2 would be better. Like how in act 1 you kill the rogue from diablo 1, in act 2 you kill the wizard from diablo 1, and act 4 you killed the warrior from diablo 1. They don’t tell you it outright, but you can piece together the story between D1 and D2.
Class design: Skill Trees
These are not interesting. You can scroll down to the bottom of the tree and see elemental masteries so you kind of know that you should focus on 1 primary element and then a secondary for getting around immunities/resistances. So you choices get pretty boring. You pick an element and then build around it, modified by your legos.
For legos, I’ve only found 1 lego that’s been interesting. It makes frost shard pierce 5 targets. I respecd frost shard and when the “if barrier, then treat everything as frozen” which makes frost shards fork as well. The interaction should be like pierce + fork in PoE, but something seems a little off. Anyways, I respected “if you use cooldowns, you gain barrier for 5 seconds” and picked up nova, teleport, and frost armor. Cycling between those 3 and the +9% chance to freeze, I could reliably keep forking active.
That’s slightly engaging? Far more so than “if you get hit, you get a bubble” which I got 3 times. It’s moderately build altering and you have to actively engage with it to get it to work well.
However, would I want to level a new sorc every 3 to 4 months? No. It’s not like we’re going to get new skill gems every other season to play around with. This is it. That’s awful given that I’m already bored with the skill tree after one play through.
Dungeons
I understand that there’s a lot of dungeons, and I believe there’s a degree of procedural generation or I’m misremembering that? However, the handful I did, I can’t separate out into district experiences other than the final boss. The rest of the dungeon might as well not exist. It was just 1 shottable mobs that stood there and let you mow them down. There were no mechanics, not really minibosses- just elites, and everything was under tuned relative to the bosses. As it stands right now, dungeons would be better if it was just a boss fight as the rest of it is just padding game time with walking.
Maybe have dungeons be far smaller with almost very little trash and there be 3 bosses instead of 2 mini bosses and a boss?
IT CAN STILL BE GOOD
This doesn’t mean that the game is bad, just that the base game is underwhelming. Luckily, the real game in ARPGS are the seasons. If the seasons are very transformative, meaning that I have new stuff happening in the overworld and dungeons while I’m level or maybe I’m doing something other than overworld and dungeons to level, then that’s great. A good example, in my opinion, is Delve in PoE. So long as you have enough sulfite, you can basically dig your way to end game- if that’s what you want to do it. Otherwise you could do base again. That’s the key distinction, you can do base again (yuck) or the league content (potentially not yuck). Maybe the league content is like a boss rush or tower defense or mythic+ or PvP in the form of a battle royale- it doesn’t matter so long as it’s different enough for base game that it can make leveling a new character not boring.
I’ll add more to this as I think about it.
Edit:
- Alters should be disabled in seasonal
- traversal is simply clunkier one way doors most of the time.