I felt the need to ramble about some of my own thoughts after playing some (up to lvl 23).
First, immersion, or rather the lack thereof. I truly despise the mmo-elements, such as seeing other players, world events and bosses, the “emote wheel” and so on. Why are other players seen in “my” room in Kyovashad? Now obviously it is because you made the game this way, and you want us to look at their awesome cosmetics purchased from the shop after release, but it totally ruins the feel of the game, for me. As does it when you explore the world and randomly join in on some event, only to instantly complete it and be rewarded, yay I guess?
I played sorcerer, as that’s the fantasy I am most interested in. I already knew lightning was over-tuned from watching others play, so I decided to play fire instead.
Fire felt… slow and inefficient, but I stuck with it. Didn’t care much for most of the skills, but I invested into a burn damage build as I liked the idea of it. Sadly burn damage turned out to be lackluster, even with a legendary power that added +40% burn damage while using incinerate. Most of the time, a bit later on, I mostly used hydra (which is busted) while I was running around, hardly engaging gameplay.
As for gameplay, there’s far too many crowd control effects happening, while a bigger enemy charges up some hard hitting ability (often too hard for my poor sorceress) and you are too busy evading than doing much else. Not saying the game is difficult, quite the opposite really, but it is “unfair” and doesn’t feel good to play.
My first dungeon, I forget the name, I was level 8-9 and the butcher spawned. I died after a short attempt at kiting, ok haha, you got me. Sadly you get no second chance as he just despawns, how boring! No worries though, he was there in my next dungeon too… no, I did not get my revenge. Anyway, I’m more curious why the butcher appears randomly in some unrelated dungeon/s and why he’s back, yet again (lore?) Not exactly fun when the encounter is only “hard” because he hits like a truck and is also super fast, that’s simply “unfair”. Should have gone with over-tuned lightning and melted him, but that is also not fun or “fair”, imo.
When it comes to dungeons I didn’t end up doing many, they were slow, tedious, uninspired, repetetive and quite boring. Most of the time the rewards were lame, or for some other class. This is worrying, as I understand that dungeons will be one of the main activities in end-game? ouch. Some dungeons also had some ridiculous backtracking, it could be faster to teleport out and go back in at times! Some story dungeons did not offer a teleport after finishing (not on the emote wheel either), had to backtrack or teleport to town, frustrating.
Quests weren’t much better, go here, do this, return for some minor reward. The random events that spawn I had to do by my own most of the time, which I don’t mind as I would much rather play 100% solo. However, they were clearly tuned for multiple people, making them tedious.
Cellars… what’s even the point? you go in, kill a handful of enemies and nothing really happens except for “mission complete” and very minor rewards.
Sooo many crafting materials (herbs and ore especially), quickly learned to just ignore them.
Items, I wasn’t even lvl 6 or so before I ignored white items, and not much later I ignored blue items as well. Thankfully I wasn’t showered with legendaries (I’m aware of elevated drop rates), but I still had 5-7 after reaching lvl 23. None were all that interesting or good though, and I was not interested in grinding materials to min/max in the beta, using the upgrade, enchant and imprint systems. Most items had really strange stats, often several that do the same thing (like ranged and melee dmg reduction or resist). I found it difficult to judge which items were better (the green arrows weren’t much help, but that’s actually a good thing), and so I picked those with the stats I liked instead.
All in all I was not exited at any point when an item dropped, but I appreciate that there’s no need to identify them as well, that would have added insult to injury.
Option to open the full skilltree right away would be nice.
No pause outside of towns! that was incredibly annoying, needing to go back to town for every break, and then backtrack once you got back.
Also missing a lot of settings I feel like. I looked for ways to disable most things, but could not. The “press X button to do Y” need to go, UI elements like quest complete popups are so low on the screen and feel awkward and out of place. Chat is on the right side and constantly interfered with inventory. Much of the UI tied to the world map require unnecessary clicks to get to the menu you want. The quest UI was confusing, why all the different types? like main story, side quest etc, felt unnecessary. objectives were often unclear, most of the time I just followed a path to some wider area and did “something” - and yes I did read all the quests, as that’s something I usually enjoy in games.
The emote wheel is terribly out of place and feels awkward to use, I wanted to remove all the social options, but could not (?) unless I replaced with other random things, which I did. I avoided using the wheel as I don’t care for it, yet I had to at times for quests and various statues for blessings, ugh.
I didn’t play the beta all that much, 6 hours give or take, but I don’t feel like logging in again, truth be told. My hopes and expectations were low, but I’m afraid they have been lowered further after playing just for a short time. Anyways, good luck with the continued development, others will test and give better feedback compared to my ramblings, hopefully.
After playing for myself I am not even sure I will play through it for the story! Why? well the game isn’t very interesting gameplay-wise and already feels too grindy and repetitive (yes, this entire genre is repetitive, but you usually don’t care until after hundreds, if not thousands of hours played). The game is also not very memorable so far, for whatever reason, I have no good thoughts for why I feel this way.
So to conclude, Diablo 4 is as it stands not a game for me, which is fine, just sad for me personally.