Note
I made an updated post, since editing this would’ve been a far larger task than I had anticipated. The new post can be found here https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d4/t/detailed-feedback-from-both-weekends-from-2-povs/14225
Greetings
I’m going to structure this post in topics, under which will be both the positive and the negative remarks. My personal background, which might give some perspective on these views will be at the end, followed by the TL;DR.
I shall refrain from giving any major spoilers.
During the beta I played Sorceress, got to 25, played a couple of hours after that including trying my hand at the first Ashava spawn.
I do acknowledge, that the experience is skewed because we are low level, and artificially capped at level 25 which won’t happen in the real game. I’ll state this here once, but it applies to all that follows.
The story
The early cinematics were really hype, but then the character was kind of dropped into a world without much background or foundation. This is okay but some class and character backstory wouldn’t hurt.
The very first quests, which keep you on a set line felt good story-wise, and the first small town was great. I am assuming all classes start the same way, even if it was great to have variety here.
However, the immersion quickly falls apart, when you are very quickly thrust into 2-3 different quest lines, and there’s a lot going on in multiple fronts simultaneously. I found myself struggling to find the connection between the characters or some of the events.
The World of Sanctuary
The regions and density felt nice from a gameplay perspective. The events, villages etc. were simple and intuitive, even if most didn’t have any explanation to their existence.
However cellars and dungeons were where the game fell apart bad. Cellars are the exact same as in Diablo 3, where you never enter them after playing Act 1 for the first time. Dungeons have way too much backtracking, and tedious interruptible channels to do things. Monsters re-spawning within the dungeon was proposed as a solution to the backtracking being boring which is addressing a symptom instead of the root cause.
Dungeons having different modifiers later on will help make the enemies more interesting, but if the core mechanic and “idea” of the dungeon is unimaginative, modifiers won’t solve that.Additionally, the enemies didn’t feel any special, and were seen as normal occurrence by the NPC:s, nothing special about a vale being full of phantoms etc. This took another bite out of the immersion, when everything is either left uncommented or just brushed off as “Lilith’s evil spreading” which felt rather unimaginative. However it is just the first zone, I am not too concerned about NPC chatter.
Here I have to admit, the BDSM side quest was an unexpected, definitely positive experience! Another plus was the players, this hit the sweet spot for me. Random encounters in the wild were rare enough, but town felt populated.
The tactics and roles of different monsters within a family was overstated a fair bit. Normal trash monsters are so easy on Veteran that any specific behaviour can’t really be noticed to a higher degree than in Diablo III. In that game the fallen shaman and other summoners too stay further from the player to summon more minions. This, however might be more apparent in higher difficulties, and with different enemy types, The Fractured Peaks just seemed to be swarming with small stuff everywhere.
The harvesting is a nice touch, but is a bit underwhelming if all you do is click everything that is outlined. And after getting a couple of stashes, the common herbs become entirely irrelevant. Having a deeper harvest system would be amazing!
The items
The yellow items hit a good spot, even though it’s hard to judge by only knowing the early game. However not being able to salvage the “unique” rares with flavour text definitely felt annoying, since they are common enough to clutter up your inventory. Making it more clear when you get these unique items, having their special stat be highlighted or something would be appreciated. I think Borderlands 2 does this fairly well with the unique blue items.
Where the yellow items lived up to sometimes being better than legendary ones (less so on levels below 25) blue items definitely failed. There was never an instance where I would’ve ended up using a blue over a yellow or a legendary.
Speaking of items, comparing them was rather hellish, and not in the good way. I like having to spend time deciding what stats are better, but the UI and the tooltips were just hard to read and make sense of.Imbuing rare items with legendary aspects is a great mechanic, however I reckon balancing this will be a long and hard road. It adds much-needed depth to the itemization and makes spare legendary items useful. However, those spares will probably be taking a fair bit of stash space at some point.
One complaint about the legendary powers I have is, that the powers themselves don’t feel particularly interesting. It’s good that they aren’t as powerful in terms of numbers as in Diablo III, but I feel like D4 took the boring part, which was the numbers, and left out the good part, being the heavy changes to skills and how they are being used. I want to see something transformative like Diablo III’s The Swami, Vile Ward or Jenkangbord, but without the numbers.
The skills
Skill tree
After seeing the concept skill trees, I couldn’t hide my disappointment when opening my Sorceress’s skilltreehighway for the first time. Sure, it offers a tiny bit more decisions than Diablo 3, but not much. Actually, Diablo 3 has 5 runes where D4 has kind of 2 or 3. The appeal in the skill tree having a tree-like structure, to me at least, is in picking a target, and then taking that route. Knowing that there is another appealing thing in another direction, and contemplating whether it is worth it to take the detour, or to pick something closer to the initial target.Looking at the skill tree the “hard synergies” become instantly apparent. If you like lightning, you can instantly see that Crackling Energy is a mechanic that a lot of the skills revolve around, so if you pick one you should probably pick the others. That’s half of your skill build (before it being affected by items) decided. This is both good and bad, for the casual players, and those new to any RPG:s this is a simple way to understand that there are synergies and skills are not just stand-alone things. However for the discoverers and the veterans it’s just a lot of agressive hand-holding.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want the tree to be as mind-bendingly huge as in PoE, I don’t think it should be, but at least have like 3-5 branches with interesting bigger nodes.
The feel of skills
The skills themselves felt good to cast, however the different lightning skills I used (spear, the bouncy one and the ranged generator) looked very similar visually, it was just flashes and arcs of the same colour. The spear especially could be made more interesting by changing the shape, or especially the movement. Have it be spear like, moving quickly and impaling the enemies, after seeking a target in place, turning ominously.Passives and ultimates
About passives; I know that the early passives never are anything stunning, but at least the Sorceress’s accessible passive nodes in the beta are simply depressing. Another depressing part was the ultimates. I remember devs talking about Diablo 4 not being a game for 60 second cooldowns, but apparently that was overturned. The ultimates are a must-pick with minimal thought process behind every usage: is it off-cooldown, is there a big enemy?Mobility
Mobility is a two-sided topic. On one hand, D4 is meant to be a slower game (but with the amount of area damage and the extremely low difficulty is not) so not having movement skills as powerful as Diablo 3 makes sense. I was actually a bit surprised to see a simple plain teleport. However, if the movement skills are limited, the player shouldn’t feel the need for having better ones either. This is not the case with Diablo 4.On Sorceress you really have to go out of your way to collect Crackling Energy if you opt for that mechanic, and that becomes a heavy chore in combat without at least one movement skill + an extra dodge.
Defense and the rest
Having the best defensive options as active skills, while engaging, is very limiting to actual usable skills. With your ultimate, movement skill and at least one defensive skill, you can actually properly choose 2-3 skills to use. Sorceress had several damage immunity skills, and not using one would just be silly if the option is offered. I feel like having better or more engaging defensive options from passives and gems, or with Sorceress the Enchanment mechanic would feel better overall.Speaking of the Enchantment system, I really like it. This adds depth, another effect you can use, and makes items which add 1 point to many skills you can’t fit into your bar useful and interesting regardless. Just make passives as interesting as the Enchantment powers.
The bugs, rough edges and general positive notes
First of all, I don’t dislike the general look of the UI elements, the visual tone and feeling is good. But here is a list of UI shortcomings that definitely look and feel unfinished:
- The map:
– If dungeons and quests regularly require backtracking, and due to the geometry of the areas, a map that can be opened while walking around the wilderness is a must
– The open world looks very empty when looking at the map. The placeholder objective markers for the quests, and the dungeon markers are alright but please add more texts for different areas- The look and the font of dropped items
– The items often look as if they are floating, and the font seems to be a placeholder- Stats should be in a more accessible place
- Item tooltips are hard to read and don’t always fit in their window
- Gems in the equipment tab in an inventory with four tabs
- Finding out what debuffs you have been afflicted with and what they do should be easier
- Having to click on waypoints even after walking over them. I missed this at the start and had to re-walk to all cities
All of the above was rather irritating. Much more so than running at the invisible wall when trying to move in the town, or out of it. I presume the traversals are used to “hide” this loading barrier, maybe having something like that when leaving town would help.
Now to the positives:
- Player-to-player communication felt easy to use and to understand. However the emote quests used to teach players to use the emote wheel give off a bit of a cheap vibe.
- The queues and connection problems were not as bad as I’d expected. After friday evening everything went smoothly
- The graphics of the game are really good while retaining a stellar performance
– A small minus is some animations, which just don’t look super polished, like the wizard snake, the flame armor and lightning spear- The classes felt good, very different looking and feeling, but immediately recognizeable. Class identity was nailed extremely well
My background
I’m 25, and have been a huge blizzard fan ever since the launch of StarCraft 2, up until maybe 2018-2019 when I got bored of Overwatch and Diablo 3, which were the last Blizzard games I played actively. I still return to D3 every now and then, and it is my most played game, probably ever, with around 3-4 thousand hours spent, a good portion of which in PTR.
I have played Wolcen, Grim Dawn, the Van Helsing ARPGs, Torchlight and whatnot, but all of these were the types of games you play through once, maybe do a couple of things at the end game and then forget about them for me.
PoE was rather intimidating for me, and I disliked the fact that I can complete my character purely by real-money-trading in half an hour, instead of grinding for dozens of hours. I happened to find an Exalted Orb rather early into my gearing experience, and that got me like 4 of my BiS items at the time, and that felt bad. I still leveled a couple of characters, but ultimately the need to rely on a build guide, on a trading site and being punished for experimenting my own things drove me away. That, and the fact that I have to buy my Quality of Life as microtransactions.
My favourite classes are Monk, Wizard, Demon hunter and support Barbarian, all for their mobility and versatility. I used to spend probably 5-7 hours daily playing video games, more on the weekends, but now I’ve graduated, got a job as an engineer and live together with my significant other whom I have been gradually introducing to Diablo 3 just in time to get her to care about D4. I spend about as much time thinking about a game as I do playing these days.
In new RPG:s I crave for depth, but I think a game should be able to be played to a high level without utilizing 3rd party resources such as build guides, as long as you are willing to study and try different things yourself.
The closing words
Diablo 4 looks good and promising. But not great, it does not fulfill the pit created by 6 years of waiting for a sequel. Bringing mechanics from PoE and making them simpler is good in my opinion, but some of them are too simple even for the more casual audience.
The story and the world looks to be stellar, and probably a great experience the first time around. However I fail to see a way where seasons with more or less fresh starts would be anything but laborious, irritating and boring.All the advertising of the number of Dungeons looks corny when seeing that the team went full quantity over quality. The game has MMO elements, and the studio has designed amazing dungeons in WoW, why did so little of that knowledge find its way into the dungeons of Diablo 4?
All in all it looks to be an amazing experience to play through, but based on this limited experience I am concerned for the longevity, when some of the core elements start to feel bad during the first 25 levels even without farming at level 25.
Finally, it is naturally easier to remember the negatives than the positives in retrospect. I will update this post next weekend and hopefully find the energy to make it more cohesive.