Because I can’t decide how to order these things, I’m putting them alphabetically.
Art: 8/10 - For me, satisfying. There are some places in game where it’s a little janky, but overall this is satisfactory. Hopefully they continue to improve visuals as apart of their live service.
Balance: _/10 - This hasn’t been seen yet publicly. Early game means very little. Can’t comment until release. Barb is BIS though don’t @ me
Character design: 5/10 - The social impact of the choices made with the character designer were an unfortunate miss. I get it that you’re trying to be representative of the people who are playing your games, but locking those representations to a certain class was the wrong way to go about it. I really think some extra time needs to be taken to design body sliders. The gear would have to be able to scale around it, but it’s 2023 and you’re one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. I believe you can pull it off. Even if they were just body presets with 4-5 options, it would be much better than what we have.
I’m a fat guy IRL. Not exceptionally rotund, but I’m not slim. Why can’t I be a fat necro? Sure, it’s kind of goofy but necromancy don’t gatekeep. All bodies can summon the dead.
Now, there are some limits to this ideology. I don’t think Barbarian should be able to scale down to skinny. They should always have a bit of muscle, because if you’re a barbarian, you’ll get it naturally carrying all those weapons around. But nothing about druid indicates it should always be fat, unless you’re trying to reason that they need all that biological material to shapeshift.
Unfortunately this was an attempt at inclusivity that turned into a big oof. It could have been done in such a way that no one would bat an eye, but it backfired.
Itemization: 4/10 (score combined from below)
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Raw stats: 7/10 - I personally am not attracted to lucky hit mechanics. A percent of a percent? Weird. Lucky hit percent shown in the skill is misleading if it’s a multi-hit skill like Hydra. It’s just weird to me. Everything else seems okay. I think gems are a bit boring but eh, not a deal breaker.
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Legendary affixes: 2/10 - This is probably my number one fuss with the game.
There’s a long-term problem with SKILL-SPECFIC legendary aspects tied to items exclusively. (Solution).
I hate to send you to a different thread, but Las’ post TLDR is pretty much spot on.
My own input is basically: Legendaries are MANDATORY for somewhat enjoyable gameplay and that feels bad. We should find this power in our skill tree, and the smaller enhancements on legendaries.
Here’s another thread that hits it pretty nicely:https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/122w7ae/character_development_shifted_onto_itemsagain/ -
Scaling: 3/10 - I have a big issue with items scaling vs monster scaling. We have enemies who are almost always 1:1 with our level, but they drop items up to 14 levels below them. Why? It resulted in hundreds of people camping a level 35 enemy for hours and hours just to get a level 25 item from him. The item scale range should be tightened. Here’s my proposal: Level 25 enemy, can drop between level 19 and 25 gear. Level 19 is the more common drop, and level 25 is the least common drop. Basically there is no variance on monster scaling, but massive variance on item scaling. That’s a disconnect.
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Item bases seem to have no meaning, and you can’t see what the item base was when you pick up the item. I really don’t understand item bases in D4.
UI: I don’t want to be a big downer here, but all I can say is you really need to start from scratch on this. I can and have made an entire post dedicated to the UI and it’s not even complete. Constructive feedback: UI/UX changes I’d like to see
I didn’t want to get too in-depth, even though I said a lot more than I meant to, but admittedly it’s hard to not keep pointing things out.
This is basically the short list. I think if the above points are addressed, the game will be much better for it.
Thanks for reading.