Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one!
I was very happy with what I’ve played in the beta and I think it’s time for me to leave some feedback. I’ve played dozens of ARPGs over the last 15+ years and it is my favorite genre so I think I should give some feedback.
I will talk about both what I liked and disliked, so that the team knows what they did well instead of me just going “fix this, this and this.”
Also, this is not about bugs or the balance of specific skills.
I will not compare the game to Path of Exile, even though this is my most played game, because Diablo IV neither wants to, nor should be like it.
Story and Atmosphere
- The story is really intriguing right from the prologue, the cutscenes look beautiful and the voice acting is top notch. Together with the art design of the world and dungeons, it feels like an actual world, which was elevated by the open world.
- The world looks dark and grim, just like it should be and complements the story itself.
- The highlights are the dynamic cutscenes, they add a lot of immersion, which is something I’ve never really felt in an ARPG.
Not much more to say about that, this is the aspect that was probably executed flawlessly.
Audio and Visuals
- When I’m talking about visuals here, I’m talking about visual feedback, look of skills, armor and so on, not the actual graphics.
- The music is great, it adds to the atmosphere without being distracting.
- One of the most important aspects of how good a skill feels is the audio and, so far, the sounds are all crunchy and sound like you’d think they should. Lightning is crackling, a flurry of blades sounds like they’re slashing quickly through the air and heavy attacks on the ground have a real impact.
- The same goes for visuals, each skills looks great and enemy attacks are all well telegraphed, this applies to bosses as well as rare monsters, you can easily tell what type of powers they have. The icons have also been very helpful to quickly identify what the rare enemy can do.
- One thing that might go (intentionally) unnoticed is the screen shake effect. It is subtle to not be noticed, but felt. Many games get this wrong and it feels distracting, which is not the case with Diablo IV.
User Interface
Now we’re getting to the topics where I have some issues.
- Generally, I like the UI quite a lot. It has some great art and and not needlessly nested.
- The Materials & Stats tab
- it defaults to materials but you usually only open this tab when you want to look at your stats, so that would be the default.
- Also, don’t highlight the button, telling me that I picked something up, because you’re always picking something up. I don’t need that button to tell my that I picked up some berries, this is irrelevant information almost all the time.
- it would also be great to be able to toggle having it open all the time, though that’s not too important
- While the art of the UI is thematically fitting, the font is not. It looks like this is the default font and the devs forgot to change it.
I find the Diablo II font to not be very pleasing to the eye, but I do think a subtle serif typeface should be chosen that goes in the gothic direction.
I would suggest the font that is used in the inventory tabs for Equipment, Consumables, etc. - Item labels on the ground are very bland and look like someone forgot to add a style to them, this is the same issue that I had with Diablo III. At least in Diablo III console icons were added to the PC version so it had at least some visual design plus an actual indicator of what type of item dropped.
- There are off-hand items that are called “Skulls” and there are Skull gems. Unless I pick the item up, open the inventory and look at it, I have no clue what type of item that is. They need to be visually distinct.
- Speaking of gems, they should get their own tab or go into the materials list because they clutter the already fairly limited inventory space.
- There needs to be a transparent map overlay like there is in Diablo III and pretty much every other ARPG, opening the full world map is very disrupting. Also, make sure you can move while having the map overlay open.
- Consider redesigning the skill tree layout and make it only scroll vertically, for example. Currently it’s a bit odd navigating it both with the mouse and controller and you don’t really have a great overview.
Renown
To preface this, I am a completionist and tend to clear out an area before I move on. That’s why I like The Witcher 3, the current iteration of Assassin’s Creed games and others so much, for example.
So with that being said, I like the concept of the Renown system, but it has some pretty big flaws.
- You earn more than enough renown (not sure how much you need for the last two reward tiers) and I finished the third tier way before I discovered everything.
- Altars of Lilith and Dungeons progress should be tracked between all characters of that realm.
- Both give bonuses to all characters, so you don’t have to do them again… except, you do because it gives you renown and the satisfaction of map completion. This is both a logical disconnect and unnecessary busy work.
- Map discovery, waypoints and strongholds should stay per character as they aren’t tedious and you uncover a lot of it just by doing the main story and side quests.
- Altars should show up on your map once you’re near them. I uncovered all of the map and still had like a dozen that I haven’t found. Had to pull up a map online to find the rest, which I think is a bad thing.
- I am not sure if a bit of gold and bonus XP is currently worth the hassle of earning renown again on a second character, it seems like a waste of time. But as a completionist I’m gonna do it anyways, which can lead to me burning out on the game.
Something needs to change here, I feel actively discouraged to make a second character, it felt rough for me even in the beta and that was only Act I. Opening an external map and checking off all the Altars takes me out of the game and isn’t fun. I can see doing all Dungeons on a character again as it is engaging content, but see the next section to find out why it’s not that fun.
Dungeons and Side Quests
- While I like the side quests and their stories, it is absolutely insane that some of those quests are hidden in specific corpses or bushes. I had 100% map discovery and all Altars and was still missing some quests with no way of finding out where they are.
- Dungeons feel handcrafted and each one had their own vibe.
- Mission variety is very lackluster and especially the missions where you have to carry items to the door tends to have a lot of backtracking, same goes for killing all enemies of you don’t read the Dungeon quest.
- Nightmare Dungeons are one of the main pillars of endgame so it is important that you don’t get bored doing the same 3-4 type of missions over and over again.
- Please, for the love of God, do not add escort missions.
Skill Tree
- The Skill Tree is basically the foundation of your character and for that it offers more than enough variety.
- In the full game you can max out your 6 main skills and pick up some passives, which is basically all you need once you figure out which build you want to play.
- The damage gain between some level 1 and level 5 skills, at least early on, don’t have that much of an impact.
Example: Spark Level 1: 33 - 41 (8%) vs Level 5: 47 - 57 (11%) - There are some decent synergies between skills with things like Crits, Vulnerable, Injured, Frozen, etc that get further enhanced by items and later on the Paragon board.
- With the huge impact legendary/unique powers can have on a build and the amount of builds you can come up with while playing the game, it is important to either have free respecing or having it be fairly inexpensive.
Leveling another character (especially the same class) to test another build is so much time investment and maybe not worth the hastle, especially considering the points above in the Renown section. - Not much feedback on specific skills but the only skill that felt very weak because of the lack of visual/audio feedback was Whirlwind, it didn’t have any screen shake or other meaningful feedback, it just felt like you’re floating through enemies instead of spinning and slashing your way through them.
Itemization and Legendary Powers
- In general, I like the idea of Legendary items being rares with a special power and considering their randomness, the drop rates have been pretty good so far.
- Some affixes are too specific and/or not meaningful enough to be worthwhile and unnecessarily dilute the affix pool.
- For example, +7% Damage to Distant Enemies is both a very low number and very specific
- There is +2.5% Damage Reduction, +5% Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies and +2% Damage Reduction from Close Enemies, this is absolutely redundant and way too situational to be a worth it. The same applies to the aforementioned +% Damage variaton.
- I hope the numbers go way up later in the game because otherwise a lot of them hardly impact overall damage. At the same time, I think the numbers should be higher from the get-go, otherwise items are rendered mostly meaningless for the first half of the campaign unless they have something like life, main stat and +Skills.
- Affixes like Life/Mana Gain on Hit/Leech are surprisingly missing
- I find the Lucky Hit mechanic to be overly complicated. It is basically a chance to proc effects and each skill with a Lucky Hit chance can proc it, but each skill has a different chance and it is completely unrelated to the Critical Hit chance.
In the beta I didn’t see much interesting effects that warrants its existence, maybe there’s more later on. - Legendary powers and its system to be extracted and imbued onto rares is very good and makes most legendaries worth picking up.
- While a single power might not be build-defining, it’s the combination of skills and multiple powers that can create some crazy interactions, even this early into leveling and is very good for build diversity.
So far, I think itemization is in a decent state but the issues above should be adressed.
Here’s an example of how interesting the legendary powers can be:
Build Example
I got a power that gives me a Barrier when I hit an Elite or Boss, a power that gave my Chain Lightning a chance to chain 4 additional times and a power to gain 4 Mana whenever Chain Lightning bounces off of me via the Codex. Together with the skill specializiation that it gains additional damage when it bounces off of me, I could facetank bosses for a couple seconds and cast Chain Lightning without running out of Mana. If I cast Unstable Currents with the 25% Attack Speed mod my damage output is even higher.
Miscellaneous
Now some stuff that didn’t really fit into a certain category.
- There are some pretty good gold sinks, namely upgrading gear and crafting. You gain gold at a decent rate and prices seem very approriate for that. I hope I don’t end up with millions of gold at the end an nothing to spend it on.
- Resource/Cooldown management seems to be pretty spot-on right now, I always found a groove with my skills and had some sort of rotation and that made combat very engaging and didn’t just make me press one button until everything dies.
- As I’ve mentioned early on, boss attacks are pretty well telegraphed but I wanted to highlight that the fights themselves are really good and keeps you on your toes.
- The Evade move and the cooldown is a really good addition, it makes you think about when you have to use it and it was pretty handy quite often.
- The World Boss was incredibly fun, it was brutal but fair, especially once you figured out Ashavas moves.
- The transmog feature is exactly how I wanted it to be. It changes your slot and not just the single item you’ve equiped so you don’t have to constantly re-transmog. It also has some really sick looking armor sets early on which surprised me.
I just hope we get more color options, it’s a bit sparse right now.
Final Thoughts
Well, I don’t want to give a tl;dr because people will just scroll down and look at what I think and don’t read the points I’ve made and think for themselves. (Yes, I am talking about you!)
I’m sure I’ve missed some things I wanted to say but that can wait for next week.
If you have any questions, additions or whatever type of feedback, feel free to write a reply!
Thanks and good luck to everyone at the Blizzard team!