My Overall Assessment of D4

PC General Discussion
1

I’ll do my overall assessment of the game. Estimating my playtime around 200 hours post release. My highest character is around lvl 80 in the eternal non-season realm and lvl 60 in seasons. My mindset of D4 coming in, it will be my go-to game for the next few years.

Campaign: I enjoyed it, but have no interest in doing it again. The story with Lilith was very good. I enjoy stories where the enemy is well defined and worthy. The acts were uneven and some spots towards the end were too long. The beginning story was the highlight.

World 1: Never played. Always started on World 2.

World 2 and 3: Lots of things to focus on. Side quests and strongholds to gain renown points. Conquering dungeons around the map to unlock your codex of powers. Whispers of the tree adventuring is a good way to level up (post patch) and get crafting materials. World 3 adds Helltide, Nightmare dungeons, and unique items. Helltide is an event around the map that gives you another way to level your character and get crafting materials. Nightmare dungeons using Sigils for progressing your character and glyph leveling. I really like the nightmare dungeon concept. World 2 and 3 has a perfect amount of interesting things to do while leveling up and preparing for World 4.

World 4 and endgame: Here lies my main complaint about the game. World 4 is D4’s endgame. Root of my compliant, essentially there is nothing new in World 4. No new events, no new gameplay, no new zones, no new monsters, and hardly any new items to discover. A glaring gap in the game. There are only a handful of new ‘unique’ items to find which maybe 1 or 2 of those would be considered useful in your build. There is a new power tier of existing items called ancestral. There is one endgame boss and a seasonal boss. So in summary, things to do in world 4 is leveling and finding ancestral items while going through the same map, events, dungeons, as you did in World 2 and 3. World 4 must be fleshed out in every category.

Bosses: There are only three distinct bosses in D4. Lilith, the Butcher, and one world boss (that I like). I do love the whole Butcher concept. All other bosses are not memorable like we had in the previous Diablo games.

Character building: My absolutely favorite part of the game and why I am still playing today. Codex of power, Aspects, paragon system, and glyphs are the mechanics to tweak your build. I really enjoy figuring out my own build and there are many different ones for each of the five classes. I did follow a meta guide for one of my characters, but I have more fun doing my own. D4’s strength is having many playable builds and it has enough systems to make it engaging throughout level 1-80. 80-100 falls flat with nothing new to do or discover, so I have no interest for those levels.

Overall: My opinion the foundation is in place. Character building, the paragon and glyph system is fun to me. Disappointing, the endgame is not built yet thus my opinion it is an incomplete game at release that I expected. I do trust Blizzard will come through and flesh it out. I just hope it is quickly. Hearthstone, a game that I consistently play, is an example of them being committed long-term. They keep pumping out new stuff on a very frequent schedule.

To be specific, here is my list of what needs to be added quickly and D4 will become a complete game.

  • Complete the endgame (World 4) with new quests, new zones, new dungeons, new events, new things to do, and add a ton of new items to find that further expands your character skills. Add new skills might be necessary.

  • Add three new classes

  • New distinct memorable boss fights

  • Each class needs about 20 new Aspects

  • Add new paragon boards to make character building even more fun

3 Likes
2

Agree there’s lack of content and things to do.

My personal take is Blizz has trouble balancing the game and seeing it from perspective of casual players. Thus, they are unable to make it fun for non-competitive gamers.

Plus there’s some antics within Blizz ranks that prevents them from doing an effective job. Business priorities, toxic culture or lack of coding calibre… no one knows for sure but the results are showing in the game.

There’s new classes coming alright. Blizz has been doing surveys on how much to charge for Paladin on the forum. I think it’s going to be $30-$50.

3

I largely agree with your assessment. I’m not really in end game yet, so I don’t have experience by comparison.

I especially enjoy the paragon boards. A very interesting way to update and modify the build. I finally got my first glyph to 15 and was disappointed that the expansion of coverage was basically one tile in each direction.

There is a lot to build on here. I will like to see more quests that are memorable as you point out.

Thanks for writing your summary.

4

I have D4 Ultimate. I want my money back. I feel ashamed of playing something like this.

1 Like
5

Good post.

I agree, overall I do enjoy the gameplay in this game, thought the campaign was great, questing was good especially liked the way you could float from area to area and progress anyway you felt like, but the lack of endgame and having a place to go really kills motivation for it. I think that was WoW’s biggest accomplishment and why it became the success it is, is you had leveling but then you knew you had a whole nother game waiting for you at 60 in the form of PvP, raiding, dungeons, treasure hunting, etc.

At least it’s something they can add to it, maybe it’s in the works.

6

Pretty decent review, Kudos on expressing yourself very well. You forgot to mention the itemization of the game. Or maybe you haven’t went too much into the endgame. And even better if you haven’t much. A lot of us did.

About your suggestions.

  • Won’t happen soon
  • Max 1-2 classes and won’t happen soon
  • Maybe soon
  • Maximum a few new more aspects, 20 is too much for an indie company. + It will bloat the aspects which are bad enough as they are. There are currently lots that need reworking.
  • Won’t happen soon