After more than 25 hours of beta gameplay and 20 hours of live streaming, I dare to give some feedback.
I got 4 characters to level 25, finished the main questline twice, defeated the world boss 3x, tried a lot of builds and explored the map Shivering Peaks to 100%. I also found and completed 30 of 35 side quests.
The classes
Basically new are the passive bonuses of the individual classes, i.e. combo points, inner eye for rogues, passive bonuses for magicians, and weapon expertise for barbarians. Nevertheless, many skills now seem old-fashioned and have already been seen a hundred times. I would have liked a little more fantasy here, because a lot of it just seems recycled from previous titles.
This was “only” a beta, but I wish there had already been a Diablo 3-style closet where you could save builds so you could quickly switch between them at will. Because for the open world you usually need different skillsets in general than for a boss fight or even world boss fight.
The Rogue
I started with the rogue, which for me is actually the biggest innovation in Diablo 4. Here I found most of the new skills in the currently available 3 classes. The balancing act between close and long-range combat, i.e. a hybrid skill set, is just as possible as pure close-up or long-range combat, which I find very successful. Still, up to around level 15, the melee feels tough and squishy. Only with the acquisition of certain legendary affixes and items does a melee skill become wearable and there is something like fun. Without this, a melee rogue is currently hardly competitive, especially in boss fights.
My ranged villain was my starting character for the beta and from level 15 with shadow infusions also extremely strong. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that some damage was missing in some places and that you were very busy kiting. But this could also be due to the fact that I generally only played veteran level 2.
The Sorcerer
I was with the magician for most of the beta, which is also because I found my absolute fun skill here and also found a lot of legendary items for different build approaches.
Starting with a fire build, which currently seems absolutely unrivaled in terms of damage, to a below-average lightning damage build, to a completely overpowered frost barrier build, I tested all 3 builds.
At the moment there is absolutely nothing that can get past the Hydra if you want to do damage, which is a shame because Lightning Ball, Lightning Spear and Meteor don’t feel right. Too little area damage and too high mana costs. I would have liked to test more around these skills, but they just weren’t competitive.
One of the Sorceress’ most important passive skills is probably the cooldown barrier, which made me able to survive in the first place. Coupled with other barrier skills and barrier legendaries, this resulted in interesting builds!
That’s why I had the most fun with the Sorceress in the beta!
The barbarian
To be honest, the barbarian disappointed me a bit, because it felt like there were absolutely no innovations here, all skills had already been seen in the last 3 Diablo titles. Weapons expertise didn’t help either. Up to about level 20, the barbarian felt very weak and vulnerable compared to the other two classes, after that he picked up speed, which was not least due to the Legendaries.
As I said, the skills are unimportant and unimaginative. A lot more would have been possible here if Blizzard had thought outside the box. (Hello POE!)
However, what feels extremely good about the barbarian is the massiveness of the skills and the soundscape. Absolutely awesome when half the inventory in a room breaks because he’s casting a skill.
Game in general
In general, I find the game very successful, because after Diablo Immortal I expected far worse. The quest lines are ok, if not outstanding, and you can tell that an attempt was made to design them alternately. I would have liked to have saved myself the long walks by unlocking the horses earlier, we will see how this is implemented later in the overall context. I don’t see the size of the world map as a disadvantage, but rather as a plus. In general, I think the open world was successful, I only occasionally ran into players at local events, but never so often that I found it annoying.
I would have liked to be able to zoom in closer to my characters as well as zoom out further while playing. Not as far as the world boss event, but somewhere in between. I would like to see opponents on the edge of the screen BEFORE I pull aggro to cast appropriate skills.
In terms of graphics, I find it extremely successful, not as colorful as Diablo 3, but dark and bloody enough to pass as Diablo and have a unique selling point. I also really like the level of detail of the equipment, where you can see and identify each piece of equipment on the body. How the omission of shoulders and belt is noticeable will be shown later, as well as the missing rune system from Diablo 2.
I find the crafting with the “one-off transfer” of legendary skills to new equipment successful, as well as the activation of global bonuses. The exploration of the game world got off to a good start in my opinion, but I would have hoped for more here, e.g. special events when you enter an absolutely remote corner of the map to further reward exploration.
I would have wished that many game mechanics would have been better explained or implemented. For example Hardening and Overpower.
Character Creation / Character Customization
The character creation is really well done, a few options are missing here and there, but overall it’s really pretty so you really have a connection to your character, even if you havent the chance to see all the details later in the game. Here I would have actually wished for a closer zoom factor or screenshot mode. Because the details in the world of Diablo 4 are incredibly beautiful, kudos to the art department. I hope that in addition to the many titles in the game, you can also unlock character customization options.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that this time you can choose male or female without being subject to any restrictions. Small note - it would be nice if you could optionally hide player names in game, as some contemporaries choose names that destroy immersion.
The game world
Two words about the game world: it’s big and rich in detail. It took me over 2 days to explore the starting area of the beta and no matter how many times I walked through it, I discovered new things around every corner. Either altars of Lilith, some of which are very well hidden, or triggers for side quests, or simply a scenery that arose from the lore.
I often found myself stopping, zooming in and looking at the details. Diabo’s dark style comes across beautifully, especially in the Hell levels where everything moves and looks organic. The level of detail is stunning great work by the designers for both the environment and the lighting.
The day/night change, the weather changes and the transitions between the individual zones are beautifully done. At no point did the map feel choppy or implausible. I only noticed the repetition of individual dungeon assets, some of which look like they were assembled in a construction kit. I’m not sure yet if parts of maps are randomized or not. The same scenery was used over and over again, especially in the cellars.
I also really like the integrated base capture, which dynamically changes the game world. For example in Kor Dragan, where later world events take place. This is a great change for co-op scenarios and alternative to world bosses to get high quality loot. In fact, here in the beta, I’ve been out quite often to farm level 30 loot, as this was the only place in the game world above level 25 that wasn’t scaled.
The sound
In addition to the beautiful, detailed game world, the sound was one of the absolute highlights. The skills feel very brute and are perfectly matched to the individual scenarios, great work by the sound designers! The music, which could only be heard subliminally, fits perfectly with the environment.
Since this isn’t the release version yet, I’d like to refrain from judging the localization, but I’ve noticed that some speakers sometimes speak very monotonously and irrelevantly. Also, different npcs sometimes have one and the same speaker, this was clearly audible.
The technique
After the expected rush to start the beta, during which I was in a queue for more than 2 hours, I only encountered loading lag and rubber banding on the first day. After that I had no more problems getting into the game. In the game itself I still had problems switching between the zones from time to time, I was stuck on an invisible wall and couldn’t get out of town, for example. But using the town portal helped by simply walking in that direction again.
From day two of the beta I adjusted the graphics setting from very high to high and the loading lags while running decreased noticeably. It is absolutely necessary to improve the performance here.
I only played on 1440 resolution in ultra wide and had no problems until loading lags.
The interface
While the genre-typical interface is usable and I also like the skills distribution in the submenu (S), I didn’t like the user guidance in many places.
The first main point of criticism is the lack of space in the inventory, here representatives of the genre already have much more intelligent solutions ready. For one thing, I would like a separate tab for gems, like there is for aspects. Each character has their own aspect inventory, but there isn’t room for it in the shared box, which is very strange. It’s also a pity that you have to have aspects in your inventory in order to be able to use them with the occultist, while with the jeweler it is possible to work on gems that you don’t have with you without any problems. In my view, this is illogical and not consistently thought through.
The second main criticism is the skill window and its search function. With the best will in the world I don’t understand why you created a skill window which you have to scroll down 5 pages to move around in it. We live in the age of ultra wide screens and I would also like to use the space effectively to see everything at a glance. A vertical division is absolutely outdated and has already been implemented much better in earlier Diablo titles. Also, synergies between the individual skills can only be implemented with a lot of imagination. There is a search function, but you can’t use it manually, you have to use pre-defined keywords (some of them are actually missing!), which sometimes makes the search useless.
Blizzard should definitely improve here, I mean we’re talking about a user interface here, i.e. things in which the players are constantly moving and on the go.
Conclusion
The basic tenor of my conclusion is consistently positive. Because I had one thing above all in the beta: FUN!
Played for over 25 hours, brought 4 classes to level 25 and explored everything there was to discover - in other words, the game got me and did a lot of things right. But that’s not all! Blizzard still has time to do its homework in the next 3 months, we’ll see what else is implemented from the player feedback. The franchise or Diablo IV would be absolutely worthy of it and would have deserved it.
Thanks for reading and see you next weekend!
TheOrigin
Ps: If you want to see some of the 20+ hours of livestreaming during the beta, you can follow the video description of my facetank op ice skill video.
Update for Beta Weekend 2:
Feedback continued from second beta weekend:
The Necromancer
This is without question one of the most popular classes in Diablo, and I’m no exception. The range of minion variations is nice, but the implementation is questionable. Why do you need 2 separate slots to take skeletons and golems? More elegant solutions would have been possible here. Still, I find that the Necromancer offers the widest range of builds up to level 25 of any character that is also competitive. On Veteran 2, however, it was mostly a walkover, especially in terms of bosses compared to all other classes. I also built an absolutely insane corpse explosion build that: makes you immortal, deals huge damage and also ignores CC. Absolutely OP.
But it is one thing above all: a character who is absolutely fun and that is what matters.
The druid
Unlike most of the second beta weekend, I started the druid as a pure werewolf build. This went quite well up to level 20, after which the damage and survivability dropped massively due to scaling and I was forced to switch to a werebear build. Unfortunately, however, it has been shown that the werebear has NO healing whatsoever, only steeling in the talent tree. So I was forced to negate the damage elsewhere. While Pulverize does massive burst damage, it’s generally far too slow to be fun. Only with the world boss did this benefit me because of the already high movement. All other builds tested were mediocre. Blitz with a channeled main is absolutely ridiculous at the mana cost and doesn’t work at all since you have no passive resource regeneration. In addition, the Blitz base generator is also a melee skill, which is doubly idiotic if you rely on ranged combat. Wind Build was ok, but only if you get the Legendary with homing. Stone Build is only fun with Legendaries, but is only suitable for bosses/single targets.
Overall I see the druid between rogue and wizard on the lower performance spectrum and you have to like him to play him, because there are characters that can do everything far better. Melee → Barbarian, Spell → Wizard.
From a technical point of view, the second beta weekend was much better than the first, the progress made with patches etc. was clearly noticeable. The new Gameready Driver from Nvidia has also significantly improved performance.