So I started off pc gaming one day by going over to a friends house for a sleepover, I was about 10 to 12. As we progress through the evening, my friend’s father goes hey guys come check this out. So first off a little back story, my friend’s household was very religious, so when he showed us this game Diablo 2 I was completely taken aback. We spent the rest of the evening swapping back and forth playing, simply to say I fell in love. When I got picked up I asked my mother if I could use my money to buy myself a PC, the response was if I paid for it I could get it. I saved hard for 3 months doing everything I could do to make a buck. Then finally I had $500, I went to my friend’s dad and asked him what specs I needed and all that to make d2 work 100%. This man’s father went above and beyond, he not only told me, but he offered to build it for me as well. I gave him my $500 and two weeks later he called me up and told me he was done, I excitedly went to pick it up. He told me he got parts for $1000+ machine on the cheap and that it should run d2 with zero issues. Let me tell, not only did he build me my first rig it was way more than anything I had expected, he installed d2 and knew exactly that was what I was going to do with it. So for the next 3-4 years of my off hours for gaming I was playing d2, it was a very enjoyable experience with many thousands hours of entertainment. As of course I went back, played d1, and hellfire……let’s not go there. Then we came to 2012 D3, man was I stoked for this game, and it just fell short. Now I do have over 2000-3000 hours into d3, and it had its problems especially at the start, but it got a little better and better over time. I could go into the details of what I like/dislike in d3 but that would require a very detailed post I think, so let’s just jump to the d4 beta.
So I did a bit of playing this past weekend. Here’s my thoughts and likes/dislikes. So I started off by doing a Sorc, which was usually my fav class in d1,2,3. So the way it was all laid out and explained for skills was well done I think. I saw how things worked, and was able to test different things with pretty cheap respecs. Decided to go the fire route, worked very well and just got more powerful as I went on. Once legendaries started dropping, we learned how that whole system works, and I like it at the moment in its current form. I like the idea that rares are going to be the sought after endgame items. I do however hope that apecs are tradable though, it didn’t look like that to me, but I also like the idea of them becoming BOA after you use it with a rare. So I enjoyed lvling to 25, the combat was fun, the characters and the world seemed very flushed out. However as seen by some of the forum posts, the cancel or skip option needs to be added similar to how d3 has done it. After you watch everything, you don’t really wanna do it all again, and simply clicking and canceling on a second playthrough does get very tiresome.
So next I started another sorc and did a frost playthrough, same enjoyable experience, but it did feel underpowered compared to the fire. Then to follow this up I decided to do a barb, now the way they have the barb set up with skills and weapons, wow I actually like it, it will be a pain to gear vs a sorc due to the extra 2-3 slots you need to find. However he starts strong, and then it drops off. I hope that this is a power creep problem with not being able to access the lvl 15 quest, but it feels really underpowered vs Sorc and Rogue. Till we get access to that 15 q ill reserve a final judgment, with that said the barb needs something to be able to take more damage vs the other chars we had during beta. I chugged hpots on him whereas the sorc and rogue barely ever touched them, they were more of an oh I messed up and stood somewhere you shouldn’t have better hit a pot. Where the barb is taking damage all the time regardless if you are standing in a “bad” spot, so you chug chug away. Next off I did a rogue, again really like the way the gear and skills work similar to the barb, there was nothing like that on the sorc. The rogue did very well, as mentioned above barely used hpots it was an opps stood in a bad spot emergency hpot need situation. The gear and skills all seemed like they worked well together as well as the lvl 15q power, you could see a massive spike in damage once done. Overall the rogue was a fun playthrough.
Now on to some beta bugs although I am sure most if not all have been said. So first off the main town, I dunno what it is but something needs to be done, it just turns to a laggy mess, and if you are in a group a whole ton of dsync issues. The way of fixing it was porting to a different town and then back, we shouldn’t have to do stuff like that. Which brings me to another point, why isn’t the port to friend portal in every town and not just in the main, this is a horrible design decision imo. I shouldn’t have to go through 2 screens just to click a thing to get to my friend. We also ran into a few issues with quests not syncing as well, despite starting the game together once you are done with the prologue. Our simple fix was leaving the party and having the one who missed the quest create the party, which seemed to fix it, but this issue happened multiple times over 3 playthroughs in a group. Had a few crashes as well with no idea what caused them just closed the game 100% no error ticket or anything. All I can say is thank god it happened after the que problems were fixed, the highest I got was a 10min one.
Now let’s move on to dungeons. They are meh in design, the layouts are too repeatable. Go here, kill a thing, find a key, kill the boss. If this is going to be an endgame , oh boy people are going to get bored very quickly, so I really hope there is more that is being done behind the scenes. I am hoping for some kind of maze dungeons where you get lost because of how many paths there are. I like the idea with the codex behind the dungeons, but I am not a fan of the layouts. We also need to add a tool tip of how to get out of dungeons or put the click at the end of the dungeon. It took me far too long to figure it out cause I was getting mad at either walking back to the start or porting to a town only to run all the way back to hand something in.
Overall it has some issues that I hope get fixed for release. I am also hoping once we do get to high level stuff that it isn’t a mess like D3 torment mode upon releases. I’d give the beta a solid 7/10. It seems like the game does have potential to be a long running game in the series.
Till next weekend fellow gamers.