Diablo 4 (First Impressions)

Developer: Blizzard Entertainment

Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment

Released: June 2th (Early Access), June 6th, 2023

Price: $69.99 USD

If I had to give my honest view on the ARPG genre, I would have to say that it has come a long way, both positively and negatively throughout the years.

These games, require a very large tolerance for grinding and min-maxing. You need to be interested in the big pictures, which are numbers, theory-crafting, and a slow but constant sense of growth. ARPGs and other grind-heavy games require a specific type of player to be relatively enjoyable, while the more casual players of the game tend to play in the shadows of those constructing the builds.

While you do have two sides of the player-base, it's really easy to just sit down and pass the time with mindless eye candy and decimating hoards of enemies.

Diablo IV BETA could have been better due to the servers being unreliable. However, It appears to have had a very successful and smooth EA launch.

Presentation

Choppy despite the smooth release

The stuttering, the lag, and the T-posing idle animations aren't exactly game-breaking, though they are annoying when they do happen. Compared to the beta, it's relatively tame in severity and actually not too bad, unless you play Hardcore characters which I do a lot with these games. It's to avoid addiction due to the time commitment required to level new characters numerous times.

Stuttering can sometimes lead to death since you are unable to respond quickly enough to input commands, this did happen to me once, though that is the risk you take when playing with this kind of gameplay style. Die and start over.

Personally, I favor hardcore over standard since there is a sense of loss and a great adrenaline rush when you get into tight positions with nowhere to go but ahead as your characters hours flash before your eyes.

The Narrative

So far, the game's lore is great the voice acting is fantastic, and the music is good when it's playing in the background be it for a boss fight or for ambience.

It feels like the narrative is more important than the gameplay at times, with me skipping over paragraphs of NPC dialogue to complete a side or main quest.

While it's not uncommon for Blizzard to invest more assets in the visual and narrative parts, it does feel like a sense of detachment from the combat at moments when all you want to do is butcher a hoard of demons a few feet away.

Character Creation

Disappointing

I understand that not everyone cares about how their character looks, but I do. I want to play a druid, but I would prefer a body type more on the slimmer side, similar to that or the Rogue or Necromancer if not exactly the same as the one pictured in Diablo II. It's upsetting that each class is restricted to their specific body type. Barbarians are big and muscular, Druids are really fat. It just pushes me away to the other classes, which aren't really that fun to play in comparison.

It's also a shame that they didn't listen to the community's worries about the lack of customization; you have a limited pool of selectable hair, faces & appearance, making your characters feel overly generic and not stylized to your taste at all.

But don't worry, you can hide all of those awful generic characters with Early Access cosmetic bundles that cost half the price of the game. That's a bit silly.

What class to play?

While there are many distinct archetypes to play as, only a few are genuinely end game material. This is more about you and your personal preference, so if you want to have fun and develop crazy builds or play a specific way, you can, but if you want to play the best builds, it would have to be Barbarian and Sorceress.

While they suffer a little early on, they really start to ramp up the damage in the mid to late game, paving the way for your extensive farming sessions.

Gameplay

Dull Early Game

So far this is about all you'll accomplish in the early game as you travel very slowly through location after location acquiring new gear and abilities. Find a quest, go around the map completing events and world bosses while entering a few dungeons that are nearly all the same with very little variation outside of the location they are in (Cave, Winter, Etc)

Slowly progress through them all, killing a boss, completing the dungeon, and potentially a priority or side quest along with it, until you reach the late game.

This could be my Path of Exiles exhaustion speaking but I really don't like the early game in ARPGs; I don't think anyone does, and I don't want to listen to much of the dialogue, no matter how good it may be. It's nothing special if you're not a fan of Diablo. You come to expect this type of slow gameplay after years of grinding ARPGs.

Map

Many of the major features from prior games, such as a transparent map, are absent from this one. The community as a whole is encouraging them to make adjustments because it is inconvenient to have to navigate to a different menu to view the actual map and locations while not being able to see your character.

Sure, you could use a way point to lead you to your destination, but it's not the same because you still need to open the map to see the complete map in order to find crucial locations and secret areas. It's awful, but it's something we'll have to deal with because they've openly discussed that they have no intentions to make subsequent modifications to remedy the player-bases concerns.

Worth the money?

Time will tell

It's unfortunate in my case, because the genre as a whole has felt like it's began to degenerate over time, I've played so many hours of ARPGs over the years an each year they seem to stray so far from what they once were. It's less about giving players a surge of dopamine and adrenaline as their screens explode into a flurry of colors and more about generating money or making stupid decisions.

So far, based on what has been seen, at least through the QoL tweaks they implemented in comparison to the BETA release. The game feels a little more balanced with the dungeon bosses for specific characters, most notably the melee ones and certain classes getting their nerfs and buffs that were needed.

While minor performance concerns persist here and there. It's low enough that it's not a significant concern and should be resolved over the next few weeks. 

If you want to play Diablo 4 early access, you'll have to pay a whopping $89.99 USD, which is not worth it. It has good content and visuals sure, but I'd have to wait until I got further into the game to truly recommend it. It as of now is not something that I would recommend, given the availability of alternatives games.

Conclusion

I am currently conflicted

Combined with the Early Access and BETA releases, as well as the Server Slam, I've thrown around 15 hours into the early base game and concluded that it's not that intriguing. I'm just in such a hurry to get back to the upper levels so that I can actually attempt to appreciate the game. I don't really care about the narrative.

It's good, don't get me wrong, certainly some of the greatest writing and voice acting I've heard in a long time, but I've listened to the same dialogue and voices so many times that I don't have time to sit around and listen anymore even with new dialog and new sections that I am unlocking, I just want to skip through it.

My initial thoughts on this game come to a close with the caveat that, while others may disagree, that is what makes gamers unique. You don't have to share their interests or agree with them and are welcome to critic me on mine.

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- Pawkt