Hello Diablo team,
I thought now that the first beta ended I try to gather my thoughts on a few items that came to my mind during playing. I’ve played a decent amount, all 3 available character, maxed out the wizard, but played a decent chunk with the barbarian as well. I was also recording the gameplay for my YT channel.
I have chosen the wizard as my main character due to the lack of characters that were desirable / interesting so most of my feedback will be for that character.
Regarding general level-up, the pace was OK. The most problem was caused by the lack of any usable / impactful / good skills. Everything felt weak, even when I maxed out the points on a skill. I re-specced at least 20 times trying to find a combination that feels effective at least a little bit with little to no success… Eventually I settled on Frost nova, Frozen orb, flame shield and hydras. With some legendary updates, the double-hydras were OK, the rest were meh.
The skill tree felt more like a garbage bin than something like an epic progression… stat increases of 1%? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Are we building a power fantasy here or carefully pissing around a sandbox castle so no real impact will be observable?
Also found some of the skills are conditional… When I saw some spell or effect that I liked most cases they had an attached condition that made very little sense to me, or diminishing any enthusiasm I had for the skill, like “only works when I’m at full hp” or “only works on elites” or only work every 2nd week when the moon is between 2 rocks and you are standing on half leg and a man named Wonderer walks within 10m of you… All that kind of ruined the skill selection…
Passive skills I was barely even checking out. The small icons made them seem insignificant, and even when I specifically looked for them, I haven’t seen anything good in any of them, nothing to worth sacrificing any spells for…
It belongs to the level-up and skills, that, what I’ve expected to be a stronger character, the barbarian, was bafflingly weak… 90% of the time it felt like he’s air boxing around without hitting anything, or trying to kill enemies with a bent spoon. Granted, I’ve not played barbarian much (I had 1 max level in D3) but the character played like a pensioner… The first dungeon boss I had to try at least 15 times, and I’ve respected at least 6-7 times. If there are 6 useless combinations for your starter character, and with 6 skill setups one cannot defeat the first boss, you seriously messed up the character…
On the note of items and skills - I’m not too sure about the legendary items not being consistently what I’ve expect but having random affix. I’ll need to play around with that more to make a judgement. I liked the new designs, but I must admit I haven’t found any that I’d say with absolute certainty that I like. Only after the whole weekend passed almost, I’ve found out I can unify colors on the equipment, after looking like clown during the whole beta… That needs some more obvious pointing to.
On regards to item affixes still - I liked that the obvious upgrades were marked, but that didn’t help me make a good judgement call on upgraded items. I found a staff early on that I liked, legendary, had a good suffix, and I’ve upgraded it to the max. I thought for some reason that it’s the best staff I can have. I haven’t even checked other legendary staffs until I came across one at lvl 25, and it turned out that had over 200 damage+ on my max upgraded staff. I felt like an idiot upgrading that staff, if any random is better, even after spending all that resources to max it out…
Regarding items, I found some that required me to stand still for a while for a certain effect to proc. I think this is the worst kind of item you could ever have made for an ARPG where you should encourage movement all the time… These items go straight against the core values of your game, whoever made them probably don’t know what they are doing, or don’t know the game they are making it for… In a game that is a fast paced action game, putting anything on restraint to work is simply bad game design, baffling…
Forced multiplayer - That’s basically my main concerned about Diablo IV. I don’t mind people when I choose to play with them. Forcing them into my gameplay removed another core element of the game, the power fantasy and the hero aspect of my character. How can I feel like the savior of sanctuary, if there are 30 random joes running about doing the silly dance after they humiliated my character by killing everything faster or killing the mob I was after?
Alongside that it’s a horrible decision to make for the main town of the area. Every time I was portaling back for the town, my game lagged like crazy, while it tried to factor in all the randoms running around trying to do the macarena… I just want to play my game in peace!! No interruptions unless I enable them…
Normally this could be solved with a setting, like in normal games, IF I want to see other players I toggle multiplayer on, if I’m not, I’ll not. The worst part is, that you made multiplayer mandatory, since certain events and bosses cannot be done by solo players. The world boss comes to mind as the prime example of the forced multiplayer. Even if my character would be strong enough or resilient enough or narrow-minded enough to try to solo it, you forced others into it, and made sure with a timer that I cannot just resiliently dodge, and dark souls my way through it.
The boss is generic, fighting it felt like just a repeated 1-hit death-resurrect repeat scenario. I had ranged spells but I have not even seen from the boss from the range it 1shotted me so what exactly supposed to be the point here? Is my character just a cannon fodder or the freaking hero of sanctuary? If I don’t participate in this surprisingly bad game design, than I’m missing out on game content I paid for, same with events that require a group…
I wish the game would be single player only, or the online would at least be optional. I have 0 desire to see anyone else but the NPCs in the game… given the opportunity I’d completely disable all of it…
One more note on the item that coma to my mind. I’ve seen there are a ton of elixirs now. No idea why. Never used any, never felt like I’d need it or any of them would make a difference. Wasted space and game making time…
Cellars: Absolutely useless and wasted gamedev time… After visiting 2, I concluded that they are a waste of time, there’s nothing in them, they are just 1 room, never worth going down there… Bafflingly bad game design…
Dungeon bosses and events: They felt copy-pasted most of the time. I only fought with 2 type of bosses, so after I’ve seen all they were more of a chore, and they were boring. Same with all the fetch quests in dungeons, “move the box / crystal whatever” to their place - boring after the 2nd one. I understand the game design behind random events so 1 dungeon can have multiple variants, but I felt since there were only a few available that dungeons were boring after just going through some…
I’d like to commend the environmental design team above al others, the areas looked good, and their work inspires me to make new 3D models, props and similar. Well done.
I was OK with the story, but I must admit I liked the side quests more. It was a shame that some of them were hidden or situational. I hope they can be tracked somehow so I can do all of them and don’t need to aimlessly run around hoping to run into one…
The fundamental game design issues aside, I enjoyed the weekend playing, I was happy to finally be able to try the sequel for one of my favorite games.
If I can make 1 request, please solve it so I can hide other players and just be able to enjoy the game on my own… I’m convinced that I’m not alone with this request, I personally know people who will not buy the game with forced multiplayer due to their numerous bad experiences with other players… Make it a toggle.
That was all for now, might edit later if something else comes to my mind.
Hail Lilith, etc etc.