The bar was incredibly high for Diablo 4, the expectations were probably impossible to meet and the realities of game development in the year of our lord 2023 for a company like Blizzard seemingly was writing on the wall that it would embrace the “live service” moniker in ways Diablo 3 hadn’t in the past. I love action RPGs, they’re probably up there as my favorite genre of game, I also have a lot of fond memories of Diablo 1, had a ton of fun with Diablo 2 and played Diablo 3 to hell and back. How does 4 fare against the legacy of its predecessors? Not perfectly, but pretty well, I’d say!
Diablo 4, in my opinion, does a lot of things well. The mood and setting of this latest story in Sanctuary is pretty spot-on, and I quite enjoyed the story, having me visit plenty of locales, do a ton of side quests, dungeons, events and encounters while chasing Lilith (who did nothing wrong) across the land. My first character was a frost mage, and I had a ton of fun freezing things around with blizzards and frozen orbs while protecting myself with barriers.
Cracks in the design appeared fairly quickly when I realized that I was getting too high level for the game to scale content for me. You see, there are four difficulties in Diablo 4, and you can only unlock the third and fourth one after you’ve beaten the story. But also there are a ton of things to do, and I wanted to get my completion rating up to 100% in all regions before moving somewhere else. This meant that at some point the game stopped scaling and I barely got any rewards and needed to rush through the rest in order to unlock more progression, which left a weird aftertaste in my mouth.
The skill system is fine (putting points in a tree, unlocking tiers as you go, with some passive skills peppered in), the Paragon system you get afterwards with the big grid of nodes and glyphs you can socket is upgrade is also neat. I really love how all classes have their different gimmicks (mages have special passive spell slots, rogues can get combo points, barbarians use an arsenal of four weapons, and so forth), and all class “builds” seem different enough too.
Overall I think itemization is okay-ish, I’m not a big fan of the number slurry all games can be nowadays, and having to decide what is better between one item and another can be a chore, you get more character customization through unique powers on your items that you can transfer around or get at the end of dungeons, but I feel like everything is so gosh darned expensive, I sometimes had to wait before I got more gold in order to get a power somewhere.
As you fight hordes of monsters and roam the lands, you’ll find a ton of crafting materials; metals, herbs, and other infernal body parts. These are used to upgrade your items, potion, craft various elixirs, add sockets, etc. There’s just too much stuff, and it’s not rewarding to find it. Quests will give you a box containing three herbs and there’s no joy coming from that. Which is a shame, because overall I enjoyed the quest design, the nostalgia, the big monster encounters, and all that. But when you don’t get a shiny new upgraded sword, it feels like you did work for naught.
Diablo 4 is a bit of an MMO in some aspects because you’ll encounter other players as you explore and fight, some events are designed around being done with other players as well. At first I thought I would hate it, but it’s fine, they can’t kill-steal your stuff, there’s no unwanted PvP, and it’s just fun to kill a really big guy alongside 20 other people that ressurect each other out when they die. The Seasonal aspect seems a bit weird because of the battle pass and the rewards weren’t realy interesting in season 1 (you had to play forever to get +7% experience) but it’s too early to tell how it’ll shake out in the long run.
I guess that’s my overall feeling about the game! It’s too early to tell how it’ll shake out, but I’m having a lot of fun with it at the moment. The longer progression curve combined with the seasonal content from the get-go means that I haven’t created as many characters that I could’ve in other circumstances, but as soon as another season starts, I’ll jump right back in. This is definitely the fourth Diablo game, for better or worse!
