Xbox Empire

[Angelus]

Honestly, my thoughts on Diablo 4, after playing the beta, is that this game is a bit overhyped. Looking around in recent months, there has been so much glowing praise in the coverage of this game, and getting to finally play it myself...it's a bit much. The game is good, don't get me wrong. It's perfectly fun to play, it looks good, the story starts off very promising (although it gets much less interesting after like the first hour, which is far stronger than the rest of act 1), and I think that the open world, and mmo aspects are well integrated into the game.

That said, Diablo 4, as of right now, doesn't appear to me to be bringing anything particularly new, or fresh to the table. It's a good solid ARPG, and it doesn't do anything particularly poorly (at least not anything that can't be addressed with a few balancing patches, bug fixes, and tweaking of the odd mechanic or two)...but there's also nothing here that's really giving me the "wow" factor. I can't point to anything they're doing with this game that would make me say "Yes! This is why I need to play Diablo, instead of the next league of PoE." I will play it, and I'm sure that I'll enjoy it for at least a couple of months or so, but then they're really gonna have to show me something in terms of how they build on the game in future seasons.

My biggest concern right now, is that it looks like the endgame is going to be all about dungeons. They're essentially taking inspiration from PoE's mapping system, by letting you take the dungeons, and making them harder and harder with up to 5 affixes that will change the dynamics of how they play. This is fine one paper, as a starting foundation for endgame, but does present some problems. For one, visually, all of the dungeons in Diablo 4 (at least in act 1) are...well...either the same flavor of dungeon, or some flavor of cave system. They say they've got 150 dungeons, but if they all blend together visually, going through them countless times is gonna get old real fucking quick. In PoE, the maps could pull from any environment in the game. Also, some of the mechanics in Diablo 4's dungeons are just fucking annoying. You'll often have to kill either every single enemy to progress through a door (very fun if you missed 1 or 2 stupid enemies in some corner), or backtrack in various directions to collect some artifact or other (which happens on slow, interruptible timers), etc. This kind of shit is just plain irritating, and you better believe it'll drive you mad once you're knee deep in the endgame, trying to farm efficiently.

I do like the world bosses as an idea, but in the beta they're supremely undercooked imo. Mechanically, it didn't offer much in terms of challenge, or anything that would foster cooperation from the players. I could easily solo it with my rogue by just staying glued to it's back legs, and dashing after it whenever it repositions. If you get a solid build going, you could easily down this thing in a small fraction of time you have available, and then, if you're so inclined, get yourself into another world instance, and kill it some more. That last part probably needs to be fixed, cus it's a bit of an exploit for massive amounts of loot, but yea...just in general would like them to design some world bosses in the future that really push the players. That would be cool.

Not too much to say about it other than that at this point. Class balance is all over the place, even within single character trees. You got stuff that's literally useless, and stuff that's hilariously OP. None of that surprises me, and I don't anticipate it will be particularly well balanced on release. I won't hold that against them too much, cus it's honestly kinda par for the course with these types of games. This will probably be like an 8/10 game at launch, with like a 6/10 endgame. Then we'll see where they go from there.