So how's Diablo 4?

Off-topic
102

My take on D4:

THE GOOD:

Story & dialogues

Fully voiced over characters contribute a lot to enjoyable experience.
Plot is OK, bit of a cringe at times with NPC surviving epic battles to die off screen to random stuff.
Every NPC being an evil being worshiper is fun, but gets tedious quickly. Sanctuary is supposed to be a mix between good & evil, but aside from 4-5 guys its all evil and VERY predictable. It looks like a world in which the bad guys already won.

Animations & combat impacts

This is where Blizz absolutely nailed it for me. Abilities feel impactful (visual and audio), animations are decent and overall it feels pretty immersive for an ARPG. The innate dash is something I sorely miss in LE.

Stability

I’ve put over 100h and aside from some server issues at the start I’ve not had any gamebreaking bugs, game freezes, disconnects or lag issues. The game plays smooth as butter.

THE BAD

Character development

Painfully incredibly bland. There are only a few skills and most of them are downright horrible. Even with so few skills per class Blizzard botched balance horribly - both inside and between classes. The “making a build” feature i enjoy so much in ARPGS is essentially non-existent in D4. The builder - spender playstyle is fundamentally broken, because even the trashiest white mobs will take 4-5 hits from your builder skills.

Itemization

Possibly even worse than char dev. For the first 50h or so of gameplay time the only thing you really care is your armor/damage value. Higher number = good.

After that it doesn’t get much better as most of the stats on items are trap options and the legendary aspects are just fixed modifiers to your main skills. When you take the mandatory survival and offensive aspects linked to your main skills you are left with barely any decision making.

Enemy mechanics

The worst thing in ARPG is hard CC. You play this type of games to have fun, dash through mobs and mash skills. Blizz understanding of balance is that either you instantly kill the enemies by having OP damage, ignore their CC because your class can do it or you enjoy watching your character get perma stunned and killed. We are not talking little disruptions of 0.1 - 0.5 sec, we are talking 2-4 sec inescapable stun mechanics. Its entirely possible to be stun locked for 10+ sec when facing 2-3 elite mobs.

OVERALL

D4 is a decent game, but a horrible ARPG. If you want 30-40 hours of fun time, decent story and good visuals its a good pick. It is incredibly fun when you start playing, but as time progresses and the shitty scaling system kicks in you start to notice how certain skills, playstyles and entire classes become unusable. By the time the campaign runs out the fun is over.

Its possible it will become good over time. They managed to fix D3 and D4 launch looks a lot better. But right now I can’t recommend anything after the story campaign.

6 Likes
103

Weird, my builds push both just fine. High Corruption is a lot easier than high arena though, I’ll say that.

104

I feel like we played an entirely different game than each other. Got to 80, was so bored but had the ARPG itch and was over POE nonsense so I picked up LE. My first judgment after getting halfway through the story “Oh this is what a complete game feels like. Oh, it had the same dev time as D4, was made by less than 25 people?!? Well, now that is depressing.”

105

It doesn’t except on Uber Lilith because she never moves other than phase transitions.

106

Thats ok if you feel differently, you are allowed to, it’s just other peoples opinions dont ruin my enjoyment of it.

Have fun.

2 Likes
107

The Lag on D4 has been really bad the last few days. Literally unplayable. And yes, I have “cross platform” turned off (even though the system message on login says I have it on… bug)

1 Like
108

Yes the last 2 days was bad, lag, no login, there was a DDos attack, “Context”

109

Played it a bunch, not a fan. The graphics suck because they are colorless, they only used brown and gray so everything looks boring af. Gameplay is okay, but theres not much sense of progression or character building. In general, it’s very lackluster and feels soulless. ALso there’s crazy amounts of lag. Worse lag than Last Epoch.

Feels more like an MMO than an ARPG

1 Like
110

Soulless. That’s a great word for it.

It’s very boring and character just feels gimped - some way more than others (sorceress). You level up and you feel … weaker. It’s insane. I’ve played every Diablo (not mobile phone immortal) and when new Diablo comes out I usually know I’ll be obsessed for months on end. With D4 I found myself uninterested in logging in within days. I finished the story and things got even worse from there. I tried every class. Pushed them to 50. Just bland. Uninspired and soulless.

Really sad.

3 Likes
111

Saying it again, still think it was a was made in one year using assets from DI. Game is trash, it hurts me to say that too because D3 is what got me into the genre and I loved it. Funny thing is DI actually plays better and has more systems than D4 :rofl: :rofl:

112

I completely agree that every time you level up you get weaker. It makes no sense. It feels terrible.

113

Level scaling was a “genius” idea. Just one of many.

114

To be fair, it does enable one to level/play wherever one wishes rather than being constrained to only play in one or two designated end-game zones.

@Makszi it quite evidently doesn’t just use grey & brown, its gone back to the more muted/“gritty” colour scheme that D1 used & that “everybody” was screaming for when D3 was revealed and the entire internet decided that using more than 2 colours (grey and brown) was bad.

115

Only grey and brown and I thought I have problems with my eyes. Look at wizzards bathrobes they are so colorfull they hurt my eyes :smiley: .

D4 needs month if not years to become an overall good game. Most likely history repeats itself and they fix all the glaring problems D4 has with the first big addon. Then again I think D4 will go down the D3 route and will become more powercreepy over time because right now Blizz goes down a bad road and all they can do to please more people then they please right now is to make a complete 180° and go for more and more and more everywhere instead of nerfing and bugfixing everything they messed up to make it “unplayable”.

D4 is by no means a bad game it just looks all over the place and for everything that is good about D4 there is something bad about D4 it’s just another 6/10 game atm. (just to make it more obvious there is no 10/10 game for me because no game is perfect)

116

It’s Diablo 3 with better graphics. Boring, cookie-cutter skill system. Awful itemization system. Awful is an understatement, actually. Crafting is non-existent. All you can do is re-roll one affix, which could end up costing $100,000,000 gold or more before you get what you’re looking for. Nightmare dungeons are the same as rifts, and gets boring fast, Glyphs are the same as legendary gems, which you upgrade by running nightmare dungeons. Just like in D3. Once you upgrade them to the lvl21 cap, NM dungeons become pointless. Gems are utterly useless, there is very little point in using any of them.

The paragon system, which is broken, is nothing more than what was available in D3, just presented in a different way to give the illusion that it’s something new… The implementation of a horse is badly done. The never ending lag is HORRIBLE on both PC and xbox.

The social aspect of the game is terrible, which is to say there is no social aspect even though the game is online only. The entire game stinks of Warcraft around every turn. The massive number of bugs and nerfs from the first two patches is a disgrace. They released this game without proper testing, turning their paying customers into beta testers.

It’s absolutely shameful. D4 was in development for at least seven years, and all they did was deliver a bug-ridden joke that is a combo of D3 and WoW, with nice visuals. I hope beyond hope that Microsoft cleans house over there, and takes over the Diablo franchise on day 1. Maybe they have someone on their team that knows how to build a proper ARPG.

My advise, don’t waste your money.

3 Likes
117

@Llama8 It’s a terrible colour scheme that makes the game boring. The lack of colour and contrast ruins the graphics for me.

1 Like
118

If you go to Blizz site, reddit or twitter, literally everyone is pissed by the D4 update. Not a positive topic about the league on the entirety of the Bliz site, even its official reddit is the same. When your fanboys are pissed, thats when you know you have a problem.

The game is solid in smoth combat and good graphics. Thats enough for Eldin Ring, but not the most well known arpg in History. The game is a soulless slog to hit world 3, and why? Just to do absolutely nothing and hope for a 1 in 10 year drop.

This could actually fuck the Diablo name, people are that unhappy.

119

It’s way worse than D3 IMO. That’s an insult to D3 which did a few things right. This game is boring to look at, to play, to progress, all of it. The only redeeming quality was the campaign/story, and that’s 30 hours of game time tops. There is no end game.

And sorc, lmao.

1 Like
120

They completely destroyed everything good about the sorcerer, and it wasn’t great to begin with.

121

Before D4 came out, I had been playing a sorc in LE demolishing everything, and had just finished the last D3 season as a godly wizard. I’ve been in a magey mood lately.

Imagine going from that to whatever the D4 male belly dancer is supposed to be. I quit the game and uninstalled at 55 because it was so lackluster, and now they made the class even worse haha.

1 Like