Diablo IV

Wasted potential. ~15 years of Diablo 3 development & maintenance, and a few years of Diablo Immortal, yet they learned nothing about what makes a good Diablo game in the 21st century.

Instead they tried to cater to the Diablo 2 fossils by copy/pasting all the classes & skills from it, and then charged us full price for the same old cr@p that everyone and their granny has already played for 1000 hours 10-20 years ago.

No new classes, hardly any new skills, terrible legendary powers, zero innovation or originality. Tries to be MMO-lite but provides zero incentive for grouping up, and doesn't even have a Group Finder or Lobby Creator, or even a decent chat system.

Result: a stale-from-the-start mess with zero replayability, terrible class design and no real endgame to speak of, with players abandoning it in droves.

I've dragged Diablo 3 over the coals plenty in my lifetime, but it still kept me playing for ~10 years despite having no mod support - mods being the only reason Diablo 2 stayed popular enough. Diablo 3 gave us vastly improved classes to the point where you felt like you were playing something completely new. That is what Diablo 4 is missing - something new to play.

The game director's only skill is copy/pasting & cutting corners from top to bottom. Diablo 3 has no less than 8 fully professionally rendered Cinematics. Diablo 4 only has 2, the rest are rendered in-game in much lower quality.

The Bestiary is the same 5-6 boring enemy groups copy/pasted across the entire game. Lycans, Skeletons/Ghouls, Ghosts, Goatmen, human Bandits, Fallen, with the occasional cameo of Wasps, Scorpions, Spiders, Bears/Boars and some varied Hellspawn during timed events. As soon as I heard the phrase "monster families" I had a sinking feeling in my gut, but I never imagined how bad it was really gonna be.

The Endgame...what endgame? They took the worst of Diablo 3 and somehow made it even more tedious, with the same 4-5 variations of Dungeons being considered "the endgame" while you grind your way to max level 100 at a snail's pace.

Add on top a bunch of one-time irritating side quests with mostly unskippable dialogue, the same 4-5 copy/pasted random events across the game world, a poor excuse for a timed event called Helltide, and a couple of terribly designed "world bosses" that appear without any warning so you never know they're there. Because there's no decent chat function or group finder.

The Cosmetic shop is a complete fail because in-game colors are terribly washed out to the point where it doesn't even matter what your toon looks like.

The game itself has been completely outdone by a mobile game built around Pay2Win. When a P2W mobile game is more fun than D4, then you know it has failed miserably.

You would think it was created by Kathleen Kennedy.

I've taken my time exploring every area, going through the full campaign (and starting Tier III), and doing just about each piece of content. The gameplay itself is well done. The game is fun to play. Story story, though, is not that amazing. It doesn't try anything new, and uses the same tropes from every single "safe" fantasy story. It is clear that love and care were taken to make a game that plays well, but the time that could have been spent on more story, doing something new and memorable, etc, was instead spent on making sure there was room for a live service component. I've spent my entire life playing D&D, MMO's, reading fantasy novels, etc and a couple of the characters were decent, but most of the game is just simple tropes to get you from point A to point B so you can start the live service part of the game. Honestly, I took my time leveling, doing the story, watching all cutscenes, and trying to experience everything the first playthrough but I'm not sure how much longer I'll play it after finishing the main story. I've started the "repeatable stuff" at the end and it feels hollow. I was in a drought of games to play, with over 10k hours in heavily modded Skyrim in the last 5 yrs, and I don't regret buying it but this isn't going to be that memorable to me in a few months, I have a feeling. Unfortunately, it appears that Activision (I don't call them Blizz anymore) had the story writers spend more time in their formula and making sure there is nothing memorable, funny, or possibly offensive to a single person, rather than writing something truly memorable. The story is just.... meh.

It's done well, for the most part. The writing harkens back to Diablo's original two outings; a gothic, low fantasy miasma of hopelessness and intrigue. Most impressively, this version of Diablo's world feels, well, like a world again; a place with history and tension, rather than a collection of maps strung together to facilitate dungeon delving.

Diablo 4 adopts a muted aesthetic and a slow-burn narrative that seems desperate to mimic Game of Thrones or Sony's God of War reboot, but it's constantly in tension with how massively unsubtle the series' worldbuilding has always been. "It was probably demons," would have been an exceptionally useful dialogue choice to have for every person who asked me if I could investigate what happened to their loved ones. And, I'm sorry, I can't take it seriously when a sad quest where I end the life of a tortured man tied to a tree ends by giving me the spear I used as a temporary weapon upgrade.

So far, nothing has convinced me the endgame is so brilliant that it's worth stripping everything out of the initial leveling process. The thin storytelling doesn't help either-thankfully you can skip it on subsequent characters. Diablo 4 is a live service game that puts an insulting amount of effort into trying to convince you it's not. It's backwards; trying to build up to the most robust part of itself instead of starting with it. The moment entering a fresh dungeon feels more like a chore than a ride is the moment Diablo loses me, and I've been worryingly close to that feeling in my time with it so far.

Diablo IV went from a drudge completed only in service to my professional responsibilities to a pleasure I sought. There's something in Diablo IV that will appeal to you, if you know enough about yourself to find it. I don't know what that is yet, but in the coming weeks, I hope to find out and share it with you.

I like this game. I played Diablo III for 6 years. I've been waiting for this game for a long time and recently finally got access to it.

Advantages: +Graphics +Large amount of content +Characters

Neutral: +- Story +- Large map

I don't like:

• Gameplay

Why did I write the story in "neutral"? As I said, I played Diablo III for 6 years. I played through this game many times, where at the end Malthael broke the black soul stone, inside of which was Diablo's soul. (I played Reaper of souls) At the end they even say that Diablo is free. This is where the game ends. I thought that Diablo IV would have Diablo himself, but... he just isn't there. He is replaced by a certain Lilith, about whom I am hearing AT ALL for the first time. But I like the plot itself. That's why I wrote the story in "Neutral".

So, what's next? Ah, "Big Map".... Question: "What's wrong with this? This problem is related to the gameplay, which I don't like at all, and the gameplay is the main component of the game. So what's wrong? Lilith infuriates me. No, no, don't get me wrong, the GAMEPLAY with Lilith is terrible. The fact is that we are following in the footsteps of Lilith, but we NEVER MAKE TIME! NEVER! We constantly find bloody petals, and watch wonderful cartoons of Lilith killing someone. This is okay, but we are constantly going from one end of the map to the other. And at this time we are accompanied by small, but damn strong demons, and it becomes boring to beat small demons for the second hour without moving forward in the story. This is precisely the reason for which I abandoned the passage of Diablo IV.

Result: 7/10.

According to D4 Armory website I got over 600h of playtime. Now that out of the way.

It is no secret the original producers of the game have left the project some time ago, and despite multiple closed & open betas, early tests, etc. We got an undercooked game. At launch we received:

GOOD: * Super fluid combat

* Amazing graphics and sound effects. When you hit or cast a spell, the timing and sound just feel right

* Good old Blizzard-level top notch cutscenes

NEUTRAL: * Soundtrack was overly meh IMO, nothing stuck in my mind, except a single overly eerie WB fight music which is great. But it's a subjective topic, so...

* Unlike most people, I'm kinda ok with the lack of trading of leggos & uniques. If done right, this could've been acceptable. I don't have a strong opinion for or against it, yet.

* Abattoir of Zir is a nice touch, and kinda brings the Uber-Tristram/torch farming type of grind to endgame

BAD:

* Overly mediocre but unnecessarily complicated itemization

* No resistances... in an ARPG... in 2023!

* No ladder-system, again in a live-service ARPG... which relies on seasons!

* The horse, oh the horse! Before they fixed it, the horse could drive any sane person crazy with its quirks and bugs and artificial limitations, like cooldown; the horse should have NEVER EVER left the devs' computers in this state to production, it was an abomination.

* The end game loop was boring, and still is. Crafting is basically non-existant, "grailing" would be a joke. When they make Helltides, Legion Events, ToW stuff attractive, they make them redundant again with the next NMD XP buff or whatever.

* Dependence on external websites & apps; yeah, we all want to track mystery helltide chests via a 3rd party site

* A backwards step in social features, trading & LFGs via Discord, because in-game would be too comfortable

* Boring endgame loop, and with every update they make either the Overworld redundant then fix it and then make it redundant again, in favor of NMDs or lately Uber-Bosses

* Sidequests are only for masochistic completionists. You will do the "same" cellar prob 100 times; there were a lot of copy-paste there.

* Inventory management, stash space, and character limitation. Oh come on, we don't need an infintite stash space as in some other games, or 50 char slots for mules, but 4 stash tabs? For a total of 10 chars? And all of it shared so no muling? What's the point of an ARPG whose core is *items* if you cant store them?

* That major facepalm "we load everybody else's stash into your memory when they're nearby" tweet; it might have its reasons, but still unacceptable to any developer - and I mean any developer, not just game developers because it's basic data structure and memory management - to release it as it is. Imagine WoW, POE, any MMO or ARPG doing that.

* and a ton of other missing usability features: codex & aspect management, missing search features, lootfilter in many places, random max limits on mats.

This was mostly the launch state of the game and some problems still remain after 5+ months. I am 100% convinced that if the devs & testers had done more end-to-end leveling tests instead of point tests, they would have realized many, many, many problems and fixed them.

The itemization & end-game loop are by far the biggest offenders, IMO in that order.

The affixes are very similar to each other and redundant; the DiabLol video hit the nail on its head "Damage on Thursdays" meme. First crit & vuln were necessary, then they were supposedly not anymore... but guess what they are still necessary and most other affixes are just there, in a giant vague blur.

And second, the white & blue items have absolutely zero use in the game, except until level 2 :P In D2R for example at least white, grey or blue items have a contextual use, as a runeword base, or BIS PVP item or whatever. In D4 they're just litter. The lack of an even the simplest loot-filter makes this worse. I'm still hopeful that they will find a use for these.

Yes, yes, they are still working on those, but my main critic point is NOT if current D4 deserves a full AAA price-tag (I paid for the ultimate edition mind you) after so much broad testing, feedback and numerous hotfixes, but IF it deserved the price at launch. If you tell me "yes, it did" you're either lying to me or to yourself. So I lost interest and moved on to more polished games. As the saying goes, this is literally more live development than live service: Missing features are brought in after the launch.

Tl;dr: Too early, too undercooked. Full AAA price tag completely undeserved, was so at launch and still is IMHO. If Blizzard had taken their time, say 1-1.5 years, this could have been an amazing game. As it stands it's lost many players. Regardless, I'm still full of hopium, instead of copium.