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shikamaru317 on 17 March 2023
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Well, since I'm stuck in a 2nd Diablo 4 beta login queue now, this time for 96 minutes, because I stopped playing to eat dinner and my Xbox went into sleep mode logging me out of the game in the process, here are my impressions so far at level 13 (max is 25 for the beta, 50 in the main game):

  • The art design and graphics blow Diablo 3 out of the water, it looks better in every possible way; textures, lighting, reflections, grass quality, cutscene quality, conversation camera, etc.. It looks all around darker and less cartoony, so if you like dark fantasy, this is definitely the game for you
  • It's definitely more difficult and all around less casualized than Diablo 3 and Diablo Immortal. When I played Diablo 3 on the free Xbox weekend, I already had multiple pieces of legendary gear by level 13, none so far in Diablo 4. I had tons of gear with gain health on enemy damage and health over time effects by this level in Diablo 3, still none of either in Diablo 4. In Diablo 3 and Diablo Immortal, you automatically target enemies around you in any direction with abilities from what I could tell, in Diablo 4 abilities only auto-target in a about a 90 degree arc in front of your character I believe, meaning you now need to quickly turn around while kiting enemies in order to actually hit them. In Diablo 3 you could dodge as much as you wanted, in Diablo 4 you have a 5 second cooldown on dodge, meaning it's much more difficult to evade attacks, which makes it especially challenging if you are playing a ranged build or class like I am (Sorceress). In Diablo 3, I was up to world tier 3 (difficulty setting) by the end of my free weekend and never died once the whole weekend, in Diablo 4 I started on World Tier 2 (only 1 and 2 are available in the beta) and I wiped 3 times on my first dungeon boss due to the aforementioned dodge cooldown. The XP and gold bonuses for each world tier are also lower than they were in Diablo 3, in Diablo 3 you got +75% XP and Gold on world tier 2 and +100% on world tier 3, in Diablo 4 world tier 2 only grants +20% experience and +15% gold. It's definitely an all-around more difficult and less casualized game than Diablo 3, which will surely make some people happy and some people less happy. 
  • Sorceress is pretty fun so far, but substantially more difficult to play than the Monk I was using in Diablo 3 and Diablo Immortal. I'm playing a Frost build with the lightning arc basic as an alternate for dealing damage to groups of melee enemies.
  • Storyline so far seems quite good
  • These queue times are atrocious, I had forgotten just how miserable Blizzard queue times can be from back when I played WoW Burning Crusade at launch in 2007. If the queues are this bad for the early access beta which requires a preorder or promotional code from KFC, I hate to think how bad they will be on the open beta next weekend unless they bring quite alot more server banks online before then.

Overall, I could see this being a 90+ meta game on launch, but only if they can make the servers more stable than this and greatly improve server capacity to cut down on queue times for the official launch.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 17 March 2023