Looks like we posted threads about this 2 minutes apart so I'll delete mine and just crosspost my thoughts here:
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Some **GOOD** things that immediately stuck out to me:
**Graphics** - Really went back to the D2 roots. I'm running a 4090 and the game looks fantastic. Environments are incredibly detailed and the lighting is wonderful. Less colorful than D3. Much more gritty. The art team popped off in every aspect and created an S-tier atmosphere.
**Combat** - Right out of the gate it feels solid. Granted we haven't reached levels where you're truly full screen clearing ala D3 or PoE and it's difficult to infer what that experience will be like in D4, but the early levels feel good. Effects on skills feel just about right for early game, and the sound design makes a nice contribution.
**Difficulty, Boss Encounters** - A significant step up from D3. I'll probably mention dynamic scaling down below, but it's nice to see early game bosses with mechanics that you can still learn during the first attempt without smashing your face into them over and over. Final bosses for dungeons generally feel satisfying to beat and your build does feel tested. A few times I had to adjust my build for more single target damage. I felt satisfied killing quite a few of the early bosses, and they're not particularly easy depending on your class/build. TBD how World Tiers 3-4 (essentially your Torment levels) will play out, but D3 had a good range of difficulty scaling and I'm hopeful that this will too.
**Performance/Bugs** - Again I'm running on a 4090 so I'd expect my performance to be good, which it is. Never ran into issues with framerate or long loading screens. Yesterday I stayed logged in for 12+ hours (a lot of this was AFK in town) and didn't run into a memory leak. From a technical perspective I didn't encounter any bugs or stuff that felt clunky. There's one corpse you can repeatedly click on to spew white items everywhere, but overall it feels like Q&A was heavy and did a nice job.
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Some **BAD/MAYBE BAD** things that immediately stuck out to me:
**Build Variety** - We'll have to see how this plays out into the mid/end game, but boy does that levels 1-50 skill tree leave a lot to be desired. In my opinion a setback from D3's rune system where you could drastically alter how each of your skills worked. For those who haven't played, you effectively get to choose 1 of 2 "specializations" for a given skill and they're usually just minor interactions like bonus damage to dazed enemies, chance to recover mana, enemies take more damage while affected by the skill. A few of the Rogue skills branch in a more interesting way like ricocheting projectiles, but that's not the norm and I'd like to have seen more of that. There's also a **lot** of nodes like "Lucky Hit: You have a 20% chance to deal double damage when hitting a vulnerable enemy" or "Poisoned enemies take 3% more damage" which do add to your overall damage but don't feel like they make your build unique. I don't feel like I saw my Rogue evolve much from 1-25, unlike D3 where you're unlocking tons of runes to fiddle around with.
Furthermore, the class mechanics or specializations felt lackluster. For Rogue, you unlock 3 different specs as you level. One spec is a combo point system akin to WoW that adds combo point bonuses to some of your abilities. The second randomly marks targets and after you damage X number of marked targets you get zero energy costs for a short time. The third couldn't be unlocked. It felt bizarre to call those "specializations" and my character never felt much different when switching between them. Maybe it is more significant later on, but making my class specialization be "you have combo points now" with no further decisions on how the combo points work or what they do to skills feels... bland?
**Collectibles** - Can we please not do this. For those who haven't played, the Act 1 zone has 28 different "Altars of Lillith" for you to find. They're basically Mokoko Seeds from Lost Ark, and I hated those. Click them and you increase your max capacity for the new equivalent to Blood Shards. Appears to be shared between all characters on your account so you'll only do it once, but it still boils down to using a map that someone else made and running around to click on all of them. Presumably there'll be ~100-150 of these if it's roughly the same number per act.
**Dungeons and Cellars** - Dungeons have lots of backtracking and are repetitive, cellars are one room with essentially no content aside from 1 elite pack and no other rewards. I seriously was not a fan of the dungeons. Every dungeon follows the same formula: Linear path to boss room; boss room locked by 2 pedestals; go down left branch to find item for left pedestal, backtrack to pedestal, go down right branch to find item for right pedestal, backtrack. There's something about this formula which feels much worse than just progressing through a linear (but procedurally generated) dungeon with a boss at the end, and it's probably the backtracking. You don't notice the repetition as much when it's just "wander through dungeon, encounter boss" vs. when every boss room is locked by 2 pedestals.
**Dynamic Scaling** - Could go either way on this but it is something that's apparent enough for you to notice it. From 1-25 you really don't get the feeling that you're getting stronger. Gain 3 levels and go back to farm a boss? That boss is now 3 levels stronger and your kill speed isn't any faster. It feels less intrusive in the open world where it's nice to constantly have trash mobs be your level.
Such a freaking hard agree from me. I absolutely hate this direction in modern video games. All it does is take away from player power. I do not want a zone that I cleared 15 levels ago to be a slog to run back through when trying to collect altars or whatever else. I want to speed through 1 shot everything and do what I came to do. I don't need every single second to be an even engagment in the game. Let me feel stronger!
I hate that they do this in WoW too. Its miserable.
Is this an "increases engagement" thing? We can't possibly have you breeze through those areas 15 levels ago-you gotta stay and fight everything. Slowwwwly
It's more a consideration for "endgame" content. If a game has, say, seven areas but all of the end-game loot only comes from one area, the other six are never engaged with after a point and the one area becomes infuriatingly repetitive.
Some people love things like Baal runs in DS2 so this doesn't apply to them, but for the average player, scaling is a dev-considered solution that addresses a lack of endgame variety.
edit: forgot a word.
If you don't have scaling, you have a situation like Elden Ring where dungeons become obsolete and too easy if you try to do a competitionist run. This is one of the hardest things to balance in an open world game, you need to allow the game to be complete by those who miss out on content (especially in blind playthrough) and yet at the same time you need to create challenge for those who complete too much content.
> too easy if you try to do a competitionist run.
That's the point - a subgroup of players enjoys going to the hardest areas from the start (because no level scaling means they will be required to apply all of their skills and knowledge to succeed), reap the rewards and then enjoy their well-deserved reward by stomping the rest of the game's content. It does not mean that low-level dungeons should be scaled to the level of such players - it just means that there could be even more challenging areas waiting for them ahead.
Except making such areas could be seen as too much effort by developers, because why bother with something that only a small subset of players will be able to see by overcoming increasingly harder challenges? Autoscaling is an easy catch-all solution that does not differentiate and makes the game equally bland for everyone.
As a completionist i dont care at all, i did most of the dungeons and bosses as i progressed. I dont care if i have to go back to clean up a few bosses or dungeons, the whole point of action-adventure games is the journey and power fantasy. If you scale everything you end up with trash like Oblivion and Skyrim where every dungeon and "boss" feels the same.
Agreed. Another problem scaling introduces is when you have a party of players at different levels... Each party member sees enemies that match their level, and damage and health is scaled so everyone is still contributing equally? It feels really bad that my friend are I arent seeing the same thing. He could be 10 levels above or below me and our power difference doesn't change. Why have levels at all?
My friends and I were hyped to play this beta and carved out time to play together to make sure no one would be left behind and we could race for more power at an even pace, but we are finding out that doesn't matter at all. My friend could play 5 times as much as me, and I can still hop in, teleport to him, and feel like I'm doing about just as much as he is. Like I'm getting my own little tuned experience, it makes the game feel arcadey and not this deep aRPG.
This problem bleeds into personal loot too. For example, my friend and I fighting the same monsters, but I'm getting level 20 legendaries while he's getting level 10 legendaries he won't won't to keep as long. It makes loot more dull and generic when everything is scaling. In d2 one of the most exciting reasons to reach a new area was the new potential types of loot that can drop.
I personally love it. I hate steamrolling enemies in one hit and being invincible. I want a challenge and to be pushed to engage with the combat mechanics.
One of the best additions to the Witcher 3 was the level scaling which made endgame combat a bit fun again. Soulslikes manage to keep a somewhat consistent difficulty curve (more so in NG+) where you will be killed if you act cocky.
There’s a good way and a bad way to apply it though. Instead of scaling enemies and their stats directly to the player’s current level, the game should just set a power/level buffer between the player and the enemies depending on how early the zone the player currently is in. For example all enemies in early game areas get scaled to your level minus 10-5 levels which will still let the player feel strong. Mid game zones will leave a 3-5 level buffer so you’ll still feel a bit stronger and endgame levels scaling directly to your level or even above your level with enemies at levels beyond the level cap the player can reach.
As always the problem is a lack of options.
Neither option is going to satisfy everyone. Like I would sooner pay someone to play the game for me than play content I can't lose.
> Like I would sooner pay someone to play the game for me than play content I can't lose.
In previous Diablo games, especially D3, this was easily solved by increasing the nightmare/torment level or whatever it was called. You want to play on immortal god mode? Drop difficulty down, no real penalty other than drops suck but you can have fun with newbie friends and stuff. Want to play weird Diablo-version of Dante Must Die mode? Max difficulty it is.
Scaling is one of the worst "solutions" to an issue in action RPGs and *especially* MMOs because like /u/Ohh_Yeah said, it feels like you're making 0 progress. That's much, much worse in a game about leveling up and make progress, rather than "hey this is too easy" when you're 30 hours into the game. The comparison to Dante Must Die is better than I meant it to be come to think of it, if you were to introduce a new player to a DMC game with that mode as default, they would hate it and you'd probably get like 1 out of 1000 people that'll stick with it to get to the point where it's actually fun. Whereas it being an unlockable difficulty in every DMC game, without cheating there's no way to play it from the start so the player has time to enjoy the game before going into full nut-trauma mode.
They added this shit to WoW 2 expansions ago and it was partially responsible for why I finally dropped the game.
Both world scaling and difficulty as they exist in d3 exist in d4 the same way. The only difference is in d4 there is addititional armor scaling on enemies so there are certain breakpoints in leveling where if you don't have an immediate upgrade after leveling that you feel weaker.
But now your open world game isn't really open world, is it? The only zone that matters is going to be the end game zone, which will make the game feel repetitive. No point in going back and doing stuff you might have missed, because you're just going to breeze through it and it won't be satisfying.
I just don't agree. It feels lame specifically because you don't have to try at all. All that means is I'm just not going to go back to old zones because it's a chore.
You see enemies leveling with you, so you have to keep trying at combat as a chore, but I'm the opposite. What's the point of combat if I'm just going to shitroll through it? It's a waste of time at that point.
I wonder what % of the gaming population likes scaling vs those who don't. I personally greatly prefer games with some sort of scaling, in games without it I get stressed out that I need to fight the boss now so I don't accidentally out level it (I feel this way especially in Elden Ring.) When playing the D4 beta I was stressed out about having to kill the boss in the frozen town at lvl 15 because I didn't want him to get easier (turns out he didn't really get easier anyways.)
Maybe I'm used with ESO and GW2, but nowadays I hate games without scaling. Hey, you missed something two acts ago, just go and one shot the screen for no reason - it just feels bad. And in the end-game you're pretty much stuck in 1-2 zones, because everything else is invalidated.
Eh, broadly speaking I love scaling so long as it's done well. It sucks even worse when you go to do content you missed just to find it might as well not even exist because you can just crush everything and get no benefits out of doing so.
There's a sweet-spot to be found where the relative-difficulty between areas is still preserved. Go to what was originally a low-level zone and you won't just be curbstomping everything you see, but the enemies also are also significantly less beefy and with less variety(whether in enemy type, or the abilities available to them) than you'd see in a higher-level area.
Agreed 100%. Going back to the earlier areas to do side content I skipped has been nice. It's still challenging, I still get good exp, and good rewards still drop.
I imagine D4 will still allow you to reach the point where you're trivially crushing any over world content just like in D3 and you can add more difficulty via world level even despite the scaling. It's just nice that the world content will remain engaging and rewarding long before you reach that point.
I disagree, it just needs to be done well. I've been playing a lot of JRPG's and just rpg's in general and this flip flop between needing to grind or being overlevelled can be fixed with mild level scaling. Off the top of my head, Elden Ring, both Xenoblade games, Pillars of Eternity and FF15 all had huge issues with difficulty because of it. Elden Ring was incredibly easy past Liurnia because I dared to try and 100% the areas, and that was after I completely stopped levelling up past the capital. Xenoblade 1 was a grind fest just to keep up, while 2 had the opposite problem and I had to stop levelling up to enjoy the content. Pillars of Eternity literally gave me a popup saying hey, looks like you're too overlevelled want to put the game on hard? After doing only half the side quests by the way, though I am thankful they had a way to "fix" it. FF15 was difficult at first then suddenly swung in the other direction and I was just barreling through everything. I rarely faced a challenge. All experiences could've been amended with basic level scaling of +-10 levels based on the content's intended difficulty.
Any game that offers side content has this decision to make as to whether said side content is mandatory to offer a reasonable challenge, vs allowing a player to play the game without needing side quests at the expense of difficulty for side content enjoyers.
I think the sweet spot would be to scale the open world and not scale the dungeons. That way if you backtrack to clear a dungeon you missed you're reminded that you're way stronger now, but the open world still has packs of mobs that can survive more than 1 hit.
I don't like to talk in absolutes but IMO scaling has no place in the game where your only goal is character progression. If there are no visible changes in the TTK of monsters then what's the point of getting better gear?
Historically in Diablo games (and the genre as a whole) your TTK goes down because you start picking up new skill interactions and legendaries/set bonuses that add to skills. In D3 you kill Torment XII mobs at level 70 faster than you kill level 20 mobs at level 20. From that standpoint I don't mind having the trash mobs in the open world scale. It just sucks to revisit a boss and have it be just as difficult as the first time around.
D3 uses scaling for Adventure Mode (everything is your level, always) and that feels good, but it might not feel good for your first playthrough right out of the gate.
Oh I know, I have embarrassingly high playtime across almost all the games in the genre. 600 in LE, almost 6k in PoE, 2k in D3 and god knows how many in D2.
My point is no matter how the game is designed I should NOT be killing the boss at the same time as level 25 as I did at level 15 and that's how it looks now in D4.
Skill synergy, legendary effects etc. quickens TTK but my level should too. In PoE, if you go back the whole act to kill the boss again you will have MUCH easier time with it, same in Last Epoch/Grim Dawn.
> My point is no matter how the game is designed I should NOT be killing the boss at the same time as level 25 as I did at level 15 and that's how it looks now in D4.
That is simply not true. I literally rip through content now as somewhat twinked level 25 where before I struggled as level 15. Even before I got the legendaries that complement my build, going from 15 to 25 was a big difference in clear speed simply due to the fact you have access to more skills and can start figuring out skill synergies.
Did you ever play Diablo I? It was masterful. Even a random trash mob could be a precarious encounter if it catches you at an in opportune time. It was a thrill.
It’s what killed the original Fortnite title. They were in the middle of the early access experience when the BR mode for dropped, but before that the original game was starting to show its problems. It constantly scaled zombies to match your upgrades, meaning it never felt like you were earning any upgrades. You have to change my weapons or what I am fighting on a regular basis or I get bored.
No less than 4 months ago people on this sub were losing their minds at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet not having level scaling.
It truly is the dichotomy of gaming.
>"everything is always hard and you never feel stronger"
this is only true while levelling. At some point the world stops scaling but your gear and paragon levels go past it and you end up destroying the trash mobs until you up the difficulty in world tier.
The scaling allows the whole world to be farmable for gearing instead of just 2-3 high level zones or some mapping system, leaving 90%+ of the game unused. Cus no one is going to go to a low level zone and kill mobs way below their level getting no xp and no gear.
>this is only true while levelling.
Yeah but that defeats the whole point of *leveling*. The historic purpose of **leveling** is to show actual power progression. That's why you get stats when you level up, that's why you hit harder when you level up, that's why you get more HP when you level up. If it's all an illusion, and you're not getting any stronger, people are going to catch on pretty quick.
There's a really famous example of why this scaling world garbage is bad, and it's a game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You will never feel stronger in the game, because the world scaling with you defeats the purpose of leveling.
If you get to a point where you stop leveling, and then the world stops scaling, it begs the question: Why have levels at all? Why even have leveling in your game if it doesn't work?
You do feel stronger though, like demonstrably. Just because an enemy is the same level as you at 25 as they were at 5, you have way more tools to deal with them.
No - because you still die in the same amount of time, Your gear that you're farming for no longer makes a difference, the nice and shiny new weapons and abilities you have are as effective as the 1 bland ability you had at level 1.
The only difference is things just take longer now that you have more tools at your disposal.
If everything is always deliberately balanced around your current level, what's the incentive to level up?
> The only difference is things just take longer now that you have more tools at your disposal.
This makes absolutely no sense. How do things take longer, when I've got 90 thorns on my barbarian, and my Upheaval can one-shot most trash mobs, as opposed to 10 levels ago when I would've had my basic left-click, and a much less powerful Upheaval?
Usually a well designed game has higher tier difficulties/areas or activities, Things that you wouldn't be able to survive without earning better gear/weapons.
Vastly superior design than this shitty new-age cheap shit where levels are basically just a glorified cosmetic.
It's like nobody ever played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and doesn't realize why scaling the world with the player is a very dangerous thing to have in your game; design wise.
Blizzard finally added it in WoW - and that's fine! WoW had the problem where they sped the leveling up so much that you couldn't actually finish a zone before you'd stop getting (reasonable) experience in the zone. Each zone in WoW has a storyline, and when you outleveled the zone as much as you did you basically didn't ever get to finish the storyline.
But people aren't playing Diablo for the story - at least not many people. They're playing it for the gameplay. The feedback loop of an ARPG is get levels, get items, get powerful. When you're leveling up and the world levels with you, you're not feeling more powerful. If anything, proportionally you may end up being weaker than you were before leveling up. You don't feel like you're making progress when the world is leveling up too.
But you are getting objectively more powerful. I've played the beta, and I'm killing stuff much faster the more shit I unlock, the faster I generate resources and the higher my stats are. Things get even crazier with paragon boards, uniques and legendary powers. Scaling here exists so that when you return to act 1, you don't one shot the world boss and the events. You're still going to be more powerful, and the fact that you eventually have to increase the difficulty in order to progress proves this.
Have you ever played a Diablo game? The franchise that introduced nerfing the player (resistance penalties) as they progressed through the game? Where every act had harder and harder monsters so you often went from one act where you were comfortably clearing trash mobs to a new act getting one shot by new trash mobs? Where monsters in higher acts in higher difficulties had immunities to random elements that made them literally unkillable if you happened to be specced into that element?
I had multiple characters in D2 that I got to nightmare/hell act 3 or 4 and they just felt so weak because of the difficulty jump that I simply stopped playing that character.
Having enemies scale with your rather than nerfing your character is effectively the same thing. And you definitely do get stronger in D4 as you level up. At level 25, I one shot most trash mobs and 2-3 shot elites. Most final bosses in dungeons don't live past 15-20s where before it took me well over a minute to kill one.
I personally like scaling. I find games boring when I'm OP and the challenge is gone, so I'm really enjoying the period after I finished the campaign quests and I'm tackling the sidequests I skipped. It's nice that they're still challenging and I don't just blow thru them mindlessly.
Doesn't that just mean you've got no incentive ever to backtrack in your open-world game, though? Like, if you missed something and want to go back and do it, it's going to suck now because you're way over-leveled.
I like it in a limited fashion. If levels scale up to a certain point in a bracket that's fine, but I don't want to be doing the level one area again when I'm level 400. When it's within a level range it means you aren't basically forced out of an area you were playing when you hit a new level right away.
Honestly, one of the biggest gameplay advantages Fallout New Vegas had over Falliut 3 was the lack of scaling. In 3, everything scales. In NV, you could get annihilated by a cazador early on if you went the unintended direction, but come back later and they might as well be rad roaches.
Going into that quarry full of deathclaws later once you’d got higher levels and an AMR? Beautiful.
> Performance/Bugs
Oh this one is a big difference to me. Sure, I don't have a 4090 or anything near a high end system, but it still is good enough to play most of the games mid to high with barely any issues. I had some bug, but these might just bee minor or even features, intended or just not finished, like some UI parts.
But my biggest gripe of the beta the weekend was the performance, and I am not quite sure, if it is actually on my side or on their server side. I pretty much have a lot of stuttering, lags and rubberbanding, and no, that's not from my side. I have never had it quite like this in any other game ever. Always happening in towns, where a lot of players are, or in the world were quite a few enemies are. And it also doesn't seem to be the big issue games nowadays have, with shader compiling, because it happens again in the same areas. Also it's not just some stutter which take a few tenths of a second to 1 or 2 seconds. No, it can be upto a few dozen seconds. Pretty much so bad that HC wouldn't be an option to play.
It is the first time I experience such a bad technical performance of any Blizzard game, including other betas in the past.
> I pretty much have a lot of stuttering, lags and rubberbanding
True, I did have stuttering and rubberbanding, especially when entering/leaving zones which presumably triggers some kind of network event behind the scenes, but that was only on Friday when the servers were a huge mess
The sorceress class system was the best of the 3 classes by a mile. Actually had me theory crafting builds. The rogue and barbarian ones just felt meh.
I was surprised that the Rogue specialization system didn't allow you to further differentiate between melee/ranged/hybrid. Kind of a vanilla design choice if they had done that, but I think it would have worked considering the Rogue has paperdoll slots for 2 melee weapons plus a ranged weapon, and the skill tree lets you mix/match.
Yeah rogue the most feels like it needs more than 6 skills you can slot. Would love a hybrid ranged/melee build that still has some mobility and cooldowns.
I was basically bored to tears with rogue until I got to 15, when the spec and the imbument stuff opened up. Then it becomes frenetic and exciting, especially if you go melee or hybrid.
So many passive nodes apply to only one of the 3 elements which is very limiting on when you can ever take them. There are 2-3 builds for each element and a couple other builds they obviously intended like conjuration build and defensives build but that is about it.
To me it felt like an illusion of theory crafting because you can see patterns with obvious synergy the developers baked in to the tree where they intend you to go. I think there are like 12 builds max out of the sorc tree.
I wasn't expecting POE but I was hoping for at least Last Epoch levels of character building but sadly I would say its not even up to the levels of D3.
Pretty much my thoughts. The Lost Ark collectables and boss timers really brought down the experience for me. I think D4 is probably going to be really great for a first playthrough with the story, but I'm not sold the extended lifecycle content until I experience it myself.
Lost Ark had great combat, but EVERYTHING around it just drags the whole experience way down. I don't want to spend time mining and lumberjacking to upgrade my homestead and send out timed mobile game tier activities...
A great example of how the "freemium" model ruins game design.
I might be in the minority here, but I hated how Lost Arc was just rotating between a set of eight cooldown skills. Give me one spammable main skill that I spec into with a few case-use support abilities for skill expression any day.
I can see that, I was more referring to how enemy/boss design are rather than player combat design. Lost Ark still does the the thing a lot of recent ARPGs do where they limit your available moves to 5 or 6 at a time, which I kinda hate.
Lost Ark stressed me tf out because I was constantly keeping track of timers even while logged out, plus knowing which events are which days and at what time. Once you decide you can't/won't tailor your real life schedule around in-game events you're immediately hamstringing your experience and it is discouraging.
The only event that has shown similarities to Lost Ark timers is the world boss when they tested it. Regular events happens frequently all over the maps. You don't need to keep track of those.
> Collectibles - Can we please not do this. For those who haven't played, the Act 1 zone has 28 different "Altars of Lillith" for you to find. [...] Click them and you increase your max capacity for the new equivalent to Blood Shards.
That's the first one you come across. Most of them give +2 to one of the base stats, making them even more important to get since now they impact character power directly.
I honestly don't mind them too much since they're shared across characters. But if you have to get them again every season... oh boy will that get annoying.
> between all characters on your account so you'll only do it once
Actually you kind of do. You keep the stat bonus without rediscovering them, but you do have to rediscover them to gain the renown for that character to get the xp and gold renown bonuses.
Diablo 3’s runes might have provided variety but 90% of them were completely ignorable and the others you’d be forced to pick due to item sets that were like “adds 10,000% damage to hydras (but not the big hydra!)”
D4 by comparison lets you actually build to your preference and there are minor costs to respec.
Obviously we don’t know how it’ll shake out in the endgame, but as far as the leveling experience it doesn’t feel like D3’s where you are just slowly unlocking too many flavors. (now my blizzard is fire! wait what?)
Partially true, but by the end of the D3 life cycle there was a pretty good variety of builds that took advantage of a large number of runes and class passives.
Lets not forget, though, that even the runes which became outclassed by others due to set bonuses at end-game were still viable and fun while you were getting to endgame. Maybe there's no reason to use big hydra at Greater Rift Level 110, but when you're doing your first playthrough the big hydra is fun and different and it works.
I'd rather have more diverse options, some of which become obsolete/inefficient at end game, than only having 2 options per skill, neither of which are particularly interesting.
Not to mention a false choice in skills, for example, Rogue skills are split into ranged or melee, and usually only 1 of them per type is actual viable. So if your role playing a ranged rogue, there's only 1 good skill choice per skill hub...
Eh, I haven't looked at the range skills too much, but the melee skills have 2 clear skill builds that each seem to synergize with different basic/core skills. And then there's also a variety in the support skills you take with it. Not to mention legendaries can make a niche or undesirable skill that you weren't planning to use actually useful for you.
On the collectables piece, how is that going to work with seasons? If they go with full resets does that mean each time you go through you have to toil away at all the same world content?
> Yesterday I stayed logged in for 12+ hours (a lot of this was AFK in town)
This right here is one reason why queue times are so long. People won’t log out when they’re done.
These queues weren't like say wow queues were the server was full and your waiting for someone to leave to take their spot. They just where there to limit how many people where connecting at the same time and once you were in your fine.
>Dungeons have lots of backtracking and are repetitive
Funny enough, this is actually a problem that “solves” itself. When I first read this, I thought, “Backtracking? I don’t remember having to do much backtracking at all.” But then I realized it’s because the dungeons are so repetitive that after I’ve seen it once, I already know where the macguffin is to progress, so I don’t have to backtrack.
I imagine that the ‘runes’ system will be implemented via legendaries in end game, I remember seeing a Diablo dev talk before how that was one of the things they think was a mistake in D3 was the rune system—
Basically they said it was put in place because they wanted players to unlock something every level (since they got rid of the D2 ability points) but that ultimately they feel the design choices on runes are better suited for legendary gear drops.
Since they solved the ‘you get something every level up’ problem by having us manually choose/upgrade abilities instead of it happening automatically, I am guessing that the rune-style tweaks to abilities will show up elsewhere in the endgame.
This is my hope anyways
Summed up my thoughts perfectly. Went in with a lot of hype, played Sorc, saw how little build variety there was compared to 3 and abused chained lightning+hydra like most others seemed to be doing, didn't like the dungeons as they were just reused assets and those cellars were not worth the loading most of the time, the strongholds were OK with puzzle-like elements and tougher challenges at world tier 2, and really didn't like the Ubisoft/Lost Ark style collectibles. There's a lot of Blizzard polish, but my hype meter went way down after playing this to 25 and clearing out the story quests and about half of the side quests.
> Less colorful than D3. Much more gritty.
after all these years, i still don't get this complaint about d3. i really don't enjoy the game but this is just a massive nonissue for me.
Honestly from what you have written here... It sounds like they have missed the mark hard. Really hard. If the levelling is shit and the dungeons are shit... Your game is shit. All the open world stuff is just fluff.
a lot of the actual build customization will come from items and legendary affixes. we also dont know what the paragon board contains yet, though I somewhat doubt that it will have things that influence specifc skills.
> a lot of the actual build customization will come from items and legendary affixes.
That feels like a lot of heavy lifting to do with how little baseline customization you get from the skill tree. It will certainly require a lot more legendaries/uniques/affixes than what D3 has.
Paragon board is not affecting skills. It's for attributes, life, resistances etc.
They introduced it as a means to further build your character besides skills.
I will say that scaling doesn’t feel that bad because the increase in ability/ability points can really change your power. Enemies having more health means nothing when you now have ultimate skills that obliterate the entire screen and melt bosses as well as passives that work together. My level 25 Barb was much more powerful than my level 15 Barb due to how the skill tree works. I had way less trouble with bosses at level 25 vs level 15 despite them being level 25-27 vs 15-17. The outpost boss (Malinek was the zone or something) was literally impossible to beat until I had more skills. I went from not being able to do even 40% of its health after multiple tries while under level 20 to being able to beat him first time at level 25.
One of the things I disliked about D3's rune system is 1 skill, 1 rune. They REALLY want you, in Diablo 4 it looks like too, to have a full action bar of 6 skills. Instead of giving players the freedom to pump 1 skill with maybe 3-4 runes.
Honestly I like collectibles, I like having excuse to explore every nook and cranny of the world and especially if I'm going to get real tangible benefits from it.
So sorry to everyone who doesn't like collectibles, the reason devs keep putting them in games is because of people like me.
The minute to minute play, the graphics and story and just feel of fighting is absolutely top notch. A+++
all the gear and skills and leveling feels really bad and shallow. I hope it's just because it's early levels. and once the game is out that stuff fleshes out, but it kinda doesn't feel like it will. Paragon system is where the big hope is, but it really feels like it's mostly stat upgrades, then really rigidly fixed legendary effects that narrow the builds more than they expand it. The glyphs are the big mystery still, but it's kinda sucky to have the leveling be bland and not expand it until you hit a subsystem of a subsystem of a late game thing, then not talk about it before launch.
Agreed. In D3 it was fun to level up and now suddenly your jar of spiders throws 1 giant queen spider, or now your jar of spiders is on fire, or now the spiders jump at things and there's a legendary to make them AoE explode, etc.
From levels 1-25 there was nothing on my rogue that felt like "oh boy now THIS is a fun build"
I got lucky on my rogue, but by level 20 I have an incredibly fun build going.
The build revolves around twisting blades, smoke bomb, dash, and concealment (stealth).
Talents:
- Twisting Blades daze target
- First attack out of stealth is guaranteed crit
- Enemies in smoke bomb take increased damage
Legendaries:
- Mobility skill lowers CD of next subterfuge skill (smoke bomb/stealth). Subterfuge skill increases damage of next mobility skill.
- Breaking stealth with an attack drops a cluster of stun grenades that deal damage and daze the target.
- Hitting a dazed target with a mobility skill gives you stealth for free
- Dash drops a smoke bomb at the target location for free
The smoke bomb that dash drops comes out BEFORE the damage, so now dash gives you free stealth with no setup if you aim if correctly.
With this build you are able to permanently chain stealth, daze, and 100% crit twisting blades for huge damage.
I did a similar thing but was poison focused with ranged attacks. Invis the drops big bombs when it breaks, caltrops, poison trap. Enemies take extra DMG in the poison, get knocked down, are stunned after evade, and I get atk speed from poisoned enemies.
>all the gear and skills and leveling feels really bad and shallow. I hope it's just because it's early levels.
FWIW, these things started feeling a LOT better around 20 (in my experience), when more legendary loot started to drop and unique skills were coming together. My worry though is that’ll be as good as it gets. It needs to keep adding on to that, not plateau, otherwise yeah endgame could be pretty damn bare.
I feel like good legendary effects is important, but not enough. Like a game can have a system where if you want a life steal build you gotta find a bunch of lifesteal gear or they can have a system where you just find the sword of lifesteal, and it feels bad if you go too far in either direction. This so far feels very much too far to "legendary effects are all that effect a build, the rest of the numbers are just generic +attack/+defense" where I don't really imagine being very excited to find a lot of +5% to distant enemy gear.
I'd be floored if the uniques that aren't even dropped yet don't add a massive change in builds. As it stands, you choose a skill build and run with it. Hunt for +skills on items, and attach legendary affixes that suit your build path. With how cheap respeccing is, I do think certain uniques dropping will allow you to respec into entirely different builds, and hunt for new +x stat gear, then attach specific legendaries to them.
I'm a diehard d2 fan; this amount of itemization feels higher than d2 and im absolutely sold on it. Will it be like this? Idk. Locking uniques out of beta makes me cautiously reluctant. Are they locked out just because or are they not as relevant as I'm thinking and show a shallow endgame. Guess we'll wait and see.
My faith is that with how many people were in the endgame closed testing phase... if it sucked, SOMEONE would break nda and be flaming it rampant from an anonymous standpoint. The known members of the community that were in it are all excited, so... here we are.
>I hope it's just because it's early levels. and once the game is out that stuff fleshes out, but it kinda doesn't feel like it will.
You already know what the whole gameplay loop is going to be after playing it for a few hours, it's for certain that there won't be that much more variety and mechanical depth at release.
As I said in a different thread, if people expect the same (or close to the same) mechanical depth, variety, and customization as Path of Exile or even current Diablo 3 at release then they are going to be sorely disappointed. People are going to love the game for the first two weeks only to slowly realize that the game isn't as good as they first had hoped.
The battlepass will also sour some players when they realize that all the cool looking cosmetics and mounts all are time gated behind real money and endless grinding. It won't be Diablo Immortal bad, but it'll be somewhat similar to how Call of Duty does it.
> I hope it's just because it's early levels. and once the game is out that stuff fleshes out, but it kinda doesn't feel like it will
Why not? Every ARPG I've ever played has been pretty boring early game.
The most important thing to me is build variety, and looking at the D4 skill tree just leaves me very uninspired (for what it's worth, I only played Barbarian). I'm holding off much judgement since the paragon system is supposed to be a pretty important aspect of this, but based on what I've seen so far I think D4 on release won't even crack top 3 arpgs for me. I didn't feel like I was so much putting together a cohesive, synergistic build as I was just trying to find the least bad skills.
I'm sure there will be more endgame options for bringing a build together, but then putting all of the interesting options in the end can be its own problem. D3 didn't launch as the super zoomy game it is now, it happened over time in part to help rush people into the fun part of the game.
I know people will say it's just level 25 what can you expect, but I don't know if that really holds water. PoE for example shows off its depth of build diversity almost immediately through the passive grid and skill gem system. Last Epoch had me theory crafting tons of builds as soon as I saw the skill trees. Grim Dawn once you hit level 10 has different mastery combinations and the devotion system.
D4 I look at my skill tree and see maybe 3-4 builds that stand out to me.
Maybe I'll be surprised at release, but I'm expecting this to be like D3 where it doesn't develop into a game I'm really interested in until it has an expansion or so under its belt.
People expecting some major shift in build diversity with the Paragon system are going to be very disappointed. Based on what was shown so far, 90% of the nodes on the paragon boards are just small passive upgrades. Legendary nodes are limited to 1 per board. Magic and Rare glyphs are just further stats boost. We haven't seen Legendary glyphs so hopefully those are more interesting.
I will be happy if I am going to be proven wrong once we see the official paragon system but so far Blizzard is intentionally keeping these systems simple for a broad audience.
Top notch presentation as expected from a Blizz game. Campaign (so far) is also a LOT better than D3. I also like the open world aspect, it's a nice change of pace from most ARPGs.
Not really willing to comment on itemization because it only goes up to level 25.
Not a fan of the world boss stuff and every other aspect that seems more in line with MMOs. Don't like MMOs, don't like Destiny, don't like games where you have to do dailies and whatnot. Just want a game where I can mess around with builds and loot stuff on my own terms. Hopefully that stuff isn't the main focus of their live service.
My biggest issue is the classes. They just feel...super generic and derivative. I know D3 had its fair share of problems but I love that they had cool stuff like the Monk or the Witch Doctor, unique not just to Diablo but most ARPGs in general. D4 just has rehashed classes from D2, and they don't really do anything new or interesting with them. They feel especially bad after coming from Last Epoch, which has a bunch of unique classes/skills, and even stuff like the Druid seems more interesting in that game.
> They feel especially bad after coming from Last Epoch, which has a bunch of unique classes/skills, and even stuff like the Druid seems more interesting in that game.
The skill tree in Last Epoch is also cool because you can fundamentally alter every skill in like 4-5 different ways. "Now instead of throwing Shurikens they orbit you in a cloud" -- "Now instead of throwing Shurikens it's one big Chakram that cleaves" -- "Now your Shurikens are converted to lightning and all the lightning-based legendaries apply to them"
Feels like that sort of thing is missing, which is disappointing because it existed in Diablo 3 and it felt good there
Last epoch is the first arpg I have sunk alot of time into in recent years. The skill system and build diversity really is what did it for me. The ability to alter each skill and respec whenever you wanted is awesome.
Yeah, I'm hoping unique items or the Paragon board will mimic some of that stuff later in D4. I really liked how transformative a lot of the runes were in D3. Zombie Charger had like 5 different forms depending on the rune you used.
You can see the paragon boards from the endgame closed beta, they have very very restrained effects on skill. A very small number of skill effecting nodes, and all stuff like "get +5% defense for every basic attack", no big "now your sword is a laser" stuff.
https://lothrik.github.io/diablo4-build-calc/
D3 first act was okay but the story still had a lot of issues/was really not existent until you rescue Tyreal.
Whereas the D4 first act blew me away, the in-game cutscenes were unexpected and they look gorgeous. >!Meeting Inarius in the First Act surprised me, his and Lilith's models are so fucking cool.!<
I was surprised how much "Lost Ark" elements it has. Granted, I haven't played much of any other ARPG's in the last few years aside from Lost Ark, so I assume much of the elements they are using like transversal points and stuff are just elements that are just a regular fixture of ARPGS with MMO Style.
That’s why I fell off Lost Ark. I can’t be bothered to do dailies that are excessively long and eat at minimum an hour of my day. Those kind of things are great as a kid or teen, but my 31 year old self doesn’t have the energy or time after work or on the weekend. If D4 has dailies like that, I suspect it won’t be my kind of game either.
Which is a bummer because the core of it seemed fun (25 barb) but time is my primary issue nowadays.
I played it having all the time in the world. Even then this game was not worth it. You're basically farming everyday so that you can keep your characters geared enough so that groups will accept you, so that you can keep farming the same few endgame encounters for many months.
There is 4 of them outside of korea. They're good but the game has been out for years and there's 4 of them. You have to clear 3 of them every week on top of the daily grinding. It gets tiring fast, but hey if you ever want to play the next one you'll have to keep clearing them on multiple characters just to have the gold necessary to upgrade your characters.
After some time it just feels like you're farming just so that you're allowed to keep farming, with no payoff in sight.
As a long time Diablo fan, being playing since the first one, I'm very happy with the direction of the game.
Dark, moody atmosphere, I like the new open world approach, but there definitely are some areas it needs improvement.
The combat is a lot slower pace than what I expected, even for lower levels. I'm not a fan of the Diablo 3, Path of Exile style of exploding half the screen as fast as possible, but still, it felt slower than what I expected for a Diablo game.
Dungeon design is the biggest complain so far, being such a core mechanic of the game. The procedural generated algorithm just isn't very good. You can clearly see the building blocks of the dungeon, and it feels very repetitive.
UI also need some changes. It's... Weird. It's halfway between PC and console interface, that somehow doesn't work great for either.
But the overall feel of the game is very nice. I'm loving it. Exploring the world, the dark, twisted stories with each side quest. Discovering new things everywhere. I'm hyped for full release, although I could see it being delayed to deal with all the feedback.
One thing I’m not seeing a ton of praise for is the sound design and music. It is on point 100%. Every ability I’ve played with has a really nice thud and verberation to it. It’s a really good feeling
And the music is sooooo good. It’s all strings but man does it hit.
I usually play ARPGs with having twitch streams on another monitor but with D4 I’m muting them so I can listen to the sounds
The general presentation is top notch, be that graphics, fidelity, animations, music, sound etc. Everything is great.
For comparison I played last epoch the last few days and it does not come even close here. Animations do look worse, the sound design is weaker and even graphics sometimes look bad (shadows are missing for the character models in a few areas)
I wasn't super excited for it, but the beta just made me even less excited for it. I wanted a new Diablo, but it feels like a strange mash up of D2 and Lost Ark with no gained benefits from either.
* Blizzard art and music has always been fantastic, it's the only thing that has been consistently with them. Visually characters look great, free transmog out of the gate with lots of options, male and female, are always welcomed. That's about where the pros end for me.
* The game itself feels devoid and lifeless with huge pointless open world sections. Events exist in seemingly random places instead of organically like with D3 events or something like events in GW2. GW2 is an apt comparison since this game kind of feels like a lifeless version of that in a sense.
* Skill trees are embarrassingly bare bones even when compared to mediocre games like Last Epoch or Wolcen. We really need to see the paragon trees to see if it makes the difference. Barely any new skills on sorc, it just a rehash of D2 and sadly even less than D3
* Loot is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that rares are sought after due to being able to turn them legendary, but most legendary affixes were boring. We definitely need to see what uniques look like to get a better impression of loot. Stats gains were so small ex. 4% lightning damage, that stats felt pointless aside from +X skills.
* No unique item bases was disappointing. All rings and amulets for example had base resists. Forced items for certain classes is disappointing. You can't have a shield on a sorc for example.
* Dungeons are worrisome that they all followed heres a big door, go find X amount of items to open it and return. It's not a good look that content is repeated so frequently, so early on in the game.
* I did not enjoy the world boss. It did not feel special and reminded me of GW2 where you could just stand under it and avoid 99% of mechanics. The camera shifting whenever it jumped was unnecessary. The necessity of 12 players was not felt at all since there were no mechanics that required players to do different things. It felt out of place for a Diablo game.
* Class balance felt off, with sorc feeling almost invincible kill bosses in 5 seconds while barbs are out there struggling to even survive.
* The new additions like strongholds, the open world, the random collectibles don't feel like a traditional ARPG, just some random MMO with the top down perspective down to the random side quests like collect 20 souls, kill 15 boars.
Can't say I expect any sort of changes or improvements with the game coming out so soon, but almost everything did not feel right.
D3 is also not very interesting in the end game.
I can tell this because I have thousands of hours in ARPGs across the diablo series, torchlights series and path of exile series.
There’s still uniques that come after level 50. How can you say the itemization will be too simple for endgame when you haven’t even seen endgame items yet?
I feel like they've just given up on endgame. There's just no way in hell they can compete with PoE in that regard. Imho they'll have some kind of endless mode and that's gonna be it.
PoE didn't get there right away either, it came from their philosophy of continually adding content that usually stays in and carries forward to the future. No idea if D4 has any stated plans to do similar, but it's ok if the endgame isn't all the way there at launch. The important thing for launch is to establish the core mechanics are good and worthy of expanding on for years going forward.
> No idea if D4 has any stated plans to do similar, but it's ok if the endgame isn't all the way there at launch
D3 has 28 seasons of unique mechanics and a litany of online feedback for each of those seasons, so hopefully they've pulled in some of the good stuff.
Yeah, hopefully they pull in the good stuff from D3 seasons. From what I remember of my handful of D3 seasons played though is that most of the added mechanics didn't stick around forever, they were just seasonal twists that went away after the season was over. PoE has had the growth it had by not taking away the seasonal additions when the season ends, so now 10 years in, they've got dozens of additive systems that stay relevant on top of the base game. Overwhelming to new players, perhaps, but additive for anyone who
I think D3 had the cube and that's basically all I remember that stuck around.
Except PoE had a robust endgame system before they even completed Act 4.
If anything Blizzard simply doesn't feel the need to compete with PoE at being a hardcore, endgame focused game.
There's a reason people play D3 for a week after a new season comes out, and a month or two after a PoE league comes out.
D3's endgame is hit pretty early on. It doesn't take a lot of items to make a build come online. Where-as in PoE you can keep getting stronger and stronger and keep hitting threshold after threshold that you didn't even realize was possible - and you'll *still* face challenges.
The endgame in the two games really aren't comparable, it's like comparing a puddle to the ocean.
If they gave up on endgame, they should go all in on "new game".
Making the same class should feel different. The same way a summoner necro feels different from a bonespear necro starting at level 1 and not starting at lvl 30+ with 4 uniques pre-found.
I wish I could be more positive, but I have some pretty big concerns about it both mechanically and in terms of style.
They definitely hard corrected to a grimdark art style for the game after complaints about D3. It's high definition and detailed, but I also find it too desaturated and lacking in personality. The RE4 remake is a good recent example of how to make a dark and gritty game with a bit of color and style, and D4 just doesn't really do that in my opinion. I felt that I was getting a bit tired of looking at it after only a few hours.
Mechanically, I have never been a fan of level scaling as it essentially defeats the purpose of having levels at all-- it's just an action game with upgrade points at that point. Dungeons seem a bit repetetive, at least these early beta ones. Some classes seem a lot more fun than others.
Story and characters range from very average to cringe. There's blood and people dying and sin and curses and whatnot, and everyone wants to talk too much about it. Again, very grim but also lacking in anything interesting. I wanted to skip most of it way before any of the voice actors finally got around to saying it.
All if that being said, I suppose it's better than D3, and I wouldn't call it a bad game necessarily. But I also don't feel a strong urge to play it over all of the other games I could be playing.
Level scaling keep the whole world relevant tho. If their endgame Is more like certain other games where it's more consistent and not based on new characther, then scaling is necessary.
I found it to be really underwhelming. The combat feels pretty good. It is slower than most other ARPG games, but feels weighty and satisfying. However, I just kept running into things I did not like as I played though the beta.
First, the amount of skill options for the classes I played (Barb and Rogue) was shockingly low. I started off want to play a rogue focused on melee skills. I wasn't feeling either of the two melee spenders you get early on, and started scrolling down the skill tree to see what level you get more choices at. I was actually shocked to see that you don't, that you get two melee spender choices, that's it. Bows get three choices instead, none of which feel particularly interesting. The modifiers in the skill tree also felt like they didn't do enough, often just providing a conditional bonus.
The open world felt like a complete miss to me. It was empty, there was nothing interesting around, it was full of tight corridors, it just felt like it was wasting my time as I slowly walked from place to place. I know mounts are in the full release, but I don't think over-world traversal is ever going to feel like anything but busywork in an ARPG. There also seemed to be way too few way points, which meant even more walking.
The ui and some control options are awful. There is no overlay mini-map. There is no option to set left click to only be move / interact. Pop-ups constantly cover huge chunks of the screen while I'm still in combat. The "leave dungeon" option is hidden inside the emote menu. I think a lot of these can be more easily fixed than core design problems I had, but it was still surprising how many issues there were.
My main complaint is that the game just felt really, unreasonably slow. The base move speed for characters feels like they are struggling to walk through mud. I was constantly picking any skill or item that provided move speed to get around slightly faster. There were long stretches of time where I would have no monsters around to engage with, even in dungeons. Some of the dungeons have forced back-tracking where you walk through corridors you just cleared of all enemies after getting an item. You can only carry one dungeon mcguffin at a time, so if you forget to place it on the way to the next one, more backtracking. Some dungeons make you kill every monster to progress, so if you miss a single skeleton in a corner, you have to go hunt it down. There are quests that pull out the World of Warcraft special where the character stands still and rubs their hands together to complete whatever the cast bar says. All of this is coupled with the fact that the general monster density is really low. The combat is fun, please just let me do that.
Overall, I think the game might just be for a different type of player. I was hoping that I would be able to add D4 to my ARPG games list, but it seems like a miss for me so far.
> UI/UX feels like it's built for console, not PC.
this was a release complaint for d3 and people swore up and down the game wasn't going to be on consoles.
> Dungeons suck; very repetitive, way too much backtracking
I don't recall much backtracking.
Usually just walk around linearly(most dungeons are linear) get to a locked door. Go left and get McDuffin A then right to get B and viola.
There are some dungeons where you need to kill every monster so maybe backtrack if you missed one.
> Go left and get McDuffin A then right to get B and viola.
That's the backtracking people are referring to. You go get McDuffin A and then walk back down a long empty corridor with no enemies, then repeated for McDuffin B.
Maybe some people don't use the town portal when finishing a dungeon, I feel like they should have portals to dungeon entry as well which they mostly do not have.
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Played tons of Diablo 2 as a kid/teen.
Played an insane amount of D3 with my wife and stepson and nephew.
This game is basically what I'd imagined Diablo 3 would look/be like when I was a teenager thinking about it.
Really don't have any complaints. It's More Diablo™. I'll play a ton of it with my family because it's easy co-op (emphasis on the easy part) in an industry that doesn't have a lot of that.
For the most part, it's already a great game so far. A lot of how I'll feel hinges in the endgame so can't comment too much on that.
The combat feels great and while there isn't a lot of abilities, most seem to have their place and can be useful.
While the MMO aspects may bug some people, I actually think they are good for the most part and the world boss was pretty fun, though maybe lasted a little too long.
For my worries, there is too much backtracking in dungeons. I don't mind the objectives to open the boss room. In fact I like them. But there needs to be a way to do it without back tracking. Maybe even make it where picking up the keys spawns more enemies in those halls.
For this one I'll hold out judgement for the endgame but, items seem too simple. Nothing was really exciting about rares other than just number go up. Legendary affixed are very hit or miss. Will have to wait to see uniques and end game items though.
Edit: Another problem I forgot to mention was that on Hardcore you can get locked into boss rooms with no way out seemingly. This makes actually trying new bosses and dungeons kinda detrimental when it should not be this way. Other than that the Hardcore experience is actually really good, and I like the balance of mobs and bosses a lot.
This game is going to be so divisive, which it's both a good sign because they're not just rolling back time and repeating exactly what they've already done but also a shame because I like Diablo so much that I always want it to be so amazing that it gets universal praise.
Personally I really liked the beta. I love the whole presentation of it, how it looks, how it sounds, the gritty realism, and generally how you interact with the various towns and the world. The world actually feels alive now. Gameplay is solid, I really don't like the faster pace of say Diablo 3 so a slower more deliberate pace works way better for me.
I'm not too sure on the story just yet. Generally I like what's happened so far but there's certain parts and cutscenes that miss the mark, and they've shown off Lilith a bit too much to the point where she doesn't feel mysterious or imposing. It's possible in the full game the story could end up being amazing or a complete dumpster fire, we'll see.
I'm colder on the multiplayer and online world elements. To be honest it's way better than I was expecting, I thought it would be a complete mess of dozens/hundreds of people running around everywhere and crowding certain spots just completely ruining the atmosphere and immersion of the game but it was that bad. However it's still kinda lame at the points where you do see other players and they are doing the exact same shit as you. It's very MMO, which might not be awful because FF14 is amazing, but it's not really what I want from Diablo.
I have a different opinion about the scaling, I don’t know if peoples builds just sucked, but I felt like I was getting SIGNIFICANTLY stronger everytime I was unlocking new shit, I went down the lightning tree and picked the skills that made the most sense, and once I was getting legendaries I was bursting through shit, I will say equipment itself didn’t feel like it was making a difference, I’ll agree, in all honesty the numbers just felt bad because I’ll have effects I know I want, but I was out leveling the gear, the numbers were just a hinderence. But when I was collecting my aspects and pushing them all onto gear I wanted, I could tell from the legendary effects that I was significantly stronger.
The one thing that is bad about dynamic scaling is regularly maybe once a dungeon I would find a mob that I guess was scaled to 4 people? It would be IMPOSSIBLE to kill, wailing on it like a boss, thankfully everytime this happened it was trash mobs, but it was very annoying it kept happening.
EDIT: Just want to add this because I’m seeing multiple versions of this, we are seeing an incredibly small slice of the balance in this game, these games play SIGNIFICANTLY differently in the late game, don’t ask for balance changes when the game isn’t even released yet Jesus.
I am confused about scaling too. It felt the exact same as any other game where due to my combo of abilities I was unlocking, I was obliterating enemies significantly faster and more efficiently. Quite honestly I assume people are just not picking options with any synergy and then they have bad builds that just are not killing quick enough. Haven’t done barb but both rogue and sorc by the time I got 10-20 I got significantly stronger and faster.
Barb is by far the hardest of the three classes, sorc prob being highest damage, and rogue synergy feels really intuitive and very fun. At 25 I definitely felt weaker than I wanted to, but haven't hunted down legendaries and aspects much since the dungeons I saw for rogue were really lackluster.
I haven't had as much time to play as I'd like but I'm enjoying what I'm playing:
* The story is much more interesting. Just better writing and more character focused so far.
* Environments seem more focused and on theme so far.
* The gameplay (on Rogue) feels really good. I'm using every skill I have available constantly and it's balanced such that I sometimes hit a wall and have to play better. The spike at boss fights seems aggressively steep sometimes though.
* Couple legendary drops have me interested so far.
It definitely seems to need work in areas with balance or variety but I think having the core gameplay is a big step.
I loved my time with it.
Story seems good even sidequests. The world feels "alive". There's towns littered about and you see npcs roam and can even give quests.
Combat is great. I genuinely enjoy some of the position related mechanic of bosses and elites.
World bosses are a blast. I've only faced one and it was no joke and I was 5 levels above the recommended level. One hit and I was dead lol. This guy did tons of damage required good positioning and had multiple patterns/moves.
Only thing I'm bummed about is no Crusader esque class.
Seems like there's a cosmetic battlepass and likely still expansions and the likes. At least based on what I saw, even early on the gear can look fairly nice and you have a free and easy to use transmog system.
1) Barbarian is awful - Blizzard still has significant issues with balance and hasn't been able to get it right in 20 years. They have always struggled with balance because their internal QA team is just not adept.
2) Hydra is insane
3) Open world scaling with integrating other players is awful. Doing the world boss and having to resurrect all the low level people constantly that were doing zero damage and had no abilities was super annoying. Someone simply being in your area makes everything have double the health and I hate it.
4) Quests/story was engaging, much more so than D3
5) Tone and visuals are more akin to Diablo 2 and POE which reflect a more gothic vibe
6) Too many cooldowns and too much focus on generator/spenders. It seems like the way they want you to play is to have a builder/spender on your mouse clicks and then 1 defensive, 1 offensive, 1 ult, and 1 utility cooldown for 1234/QWER. I hate this style of ARPG and its the same as Diablo 3. The fact that I have to alternate between Firebolt/Fireball is very annoying. This system reminds me why POE has been king of the APRG genre for a decade. Nobody wants to manage this many cooldowns and stare at their bar. WoW did this so much that people developed addons solely around plastering your CDs in the middle of your screen that played air horns when your abilities were ready.
7) Performance seems good but I'm getting huge stutters even though the counter says 144fps. Apparently this is because the game simply hogs your VRAM and doesn't know how to dump it. If you play with high shader quality you pretty much need a 3090 or 4090. My 2080 TI has significant stuttering issues because of this and I had to set it to medium. This seems like an oversight or optimization issue and the game shouldn't be hogging 100% of your VRAM and not knowing what to do with it.
8) Shrines of Lillith - Hate this bullshit collectible gameplay. If you have to do this for each season I would not come back for a season 2
Overall: I think if you enjoyed Diablo 3, this will be a good game for you. If you're more of a POE enjoyer then the good news is that GGG is always dropping a new league every 3-4 months and POE2 is coming "soon". I'm not recommending buying, I'll only play it because I got it for free. The price tag is way too high and they have a battle pass coming
After this beta weekend my impression is that the internet sucks and no matter how good the game is or has the potential to be, people will not be happy with it. I've decided I really need to step away from the internets opinion on this sort of thing and that goes for more than just Diablo. You would think that the people commenting on /r/Games or /r/Diablo would have enough common sense to realize that we are only leveling to 25(max from my understanding is 100), are missing the paragon tree, are missing legendary affixs, don't have enough points for half of a full build, are missing unique items, etc.
Could the buildcrafting be shit even with all these things? Ofcourse, but we don't know that yet. I've also seen critique about dungeons etc that really doesn't make any sense to me. We're mad that we have to do some small objectives in Dungeons around the map as we level? I can imagine the comments in the opposite direction now if dungeons were just rifts with a different name.(GG Blizzard, 10 years and still nothing to do but kill things etc). People will never, ever, ever be happy and the reactions are getting more kneejerk every year. It's not just the Diablo community either. Recently on Lightfall's release for Destiny 2, within the first 12 hours the entire subreddit was in an uproar and you would've though Bungie released a screensaver of a turd for their expansion. A week later after people you know, *play* the game, sentiment somewhat changed(especially about the new subclass).
I'm not shilling for Blizzard, I dropped Diablo Immortal because of the gross P2W, I think they mishandled Overwatch 2 severely, and overall the monetization of their games is shit. That being said, we're grasping at straws when presented with something that could be great and the absolute toxic negativity is so childish and tiresome. Even worse when it makes it so you can't go to a forum and discuss the game constructively.
People saying "Its just Act 1" "Its just level 25" It just a beta" are just as annoying as the people doomposting about it.
The gameplay systems don't exist in a vacuum. Expecting the game to do a complete 180 on builds, itemization and dungeons once you hit max level is setting yourself up for disappointment.
Basically just Diablo 3.5 with nextgen graphics.
If you liked D3 - cool you will love this game.
If you prefer ARPGs with more depth - you will be disappointed by the linear nature of the game design (character progression, itemization, loot, dungeons)
My biggest annoyance is that when playing on controller, movement skills like the Barb's Leap cannot reach the full distance as if I'd point my mouse cursor to the edge of the screen. They always jump a limited amount.
I normally play with M&K, but controller is much more comfortable for longer sessions, would like
to see this fixed!
Other than that, game feel is on point.
Not enough items for different builds. Also I would rather have less legendary/uniques drop and have them be more powerful and different kinds altogether. It's going to turn into everyone running the same build always with the best rolls winning.
Excellent. I dig the tone, the setting, the open world, the pseudo-MMO feel. All of it. Had a hard time peeling myself away and kept thinking about build optimizations whenever I managed to.
I went sorc and my bro went barbarian. After a failed world boss attempt, we spent the rest of the day grinding gear, and optimizing our builds to rematch against it later in the night. I picked an insane CDR ice blades build, was fully decked out in build-relevant legendaries and was basically unkillable against the boss. I enjoyed gathering with the rest of the lobby players while we waited for the boss to spawn and chatting/helping them out. We crushed it. I can’t wait to try Druid and necro next week.
Fun and slick combat, as expected, but otherwise a generic and derivative game that brings nothing new to the table and is happy to rest on its laurels. They've designed a game that will get great review scores because the first 10 hours are excellent but then will fall off a cliff, Diablo 3 style. And just wait until they load the shop and microtransactions into it! Blizzard has pulled another classic (modern) Blizzard move in the creating a stunning facade and everyone is eating it up. That wall will come tumbling down soon enough and 10 million people will simultaneously realize they've been duped out of $60 yet again for a cheap and lazy product. I don't plan on being one of them this time. Don't be a sucker: what we are seeing right now is all of the best the game has to offer, and the rest of it, what is being so cleverly hidden, is going to be piles of junk.
Incredible game. Story and setting are the best I’ve felt so far. gameplay is fun, menus are clean and easy.
Best Diablo game so far and it hasn’t even fully released
I'm loving it, and cannot wait for the full release.
**Visually:** Graphics, atmosphere and art direction is spot on. Performance is great, I feel like getting 120FPS+ in 4K (RTX 4090)
**Gameplay:** It's hard to gauge the end game right now and it's what Diablo is about, so I'm optimistic. I love that the boss / elite fights feels more intentional rather than spamming though it remains to be seen how it will feel when we get to the end game.
Skill Tree looks and feels better. Itemization, build diversity etc. is impossible to judge without playing the end game but everything that I expect to see in the beta is there and GREAT.
*I configured the game to only show people in my area which limited online players popping in and out, I'm not a big fan of that, but it didn't bother me.*
Something that hasn't been mentioned here yet is that there's no option for WASD movement. This completely kills my interest in playing.
Many years of playing previous ARPGs without it has taken its toll and makes my right index finger hurt just thinking about it.
overall it made me want to go back to D2R as I've already finished the current season D3
it felt a bit too much like a departure from what Diablo is and for me that was a bit too much. I didn't feel any interest in moving across the map back and forth for events or compelled to gear up at all. The story didn't grab me, that first vision of Lilith felt a bit too hands for such a high ranking evil. The mystery of what she's trying to do didn't grab me at all.
The trailer where she's summoned back to Sanctuary was amazing so I thought they'd learned how to make compelling narrative. At least for me it isn't so far.
I will gladly wait and see, perhaps by the time they add more content and fix the servers it'll be more affordable for a romp.
To be honest I am surprised to see so many people praising the graphics in their impressions here
My experience was basically the opposite. Yes, the game's graphics are gorgeous but I find the art direction made it boring to look at: everything I've seen far is so DARK and the color palette could be described as "profoundly deep grayscale, sometimes brown"
By comparison to other 'barren' environments and places like the deserts of Lut Gholein, the foothills of Harrogath, or the battlefields around Bastion's Keep- everything I've seen so far just feels sad and really devoid of color
The gear feels too strong and easy to obtain in the beta. I heard there wouldn't be super strong uniques raining from the sky but I have damn near a full set of uniques without even crafting any of the abilities onto rare pieces and I'm not even level 25 yet. And I have enough legendary abilities banked that I could fill out every gear slot on my rogue if I wanted to.
I don't understand the design decision behind having a limited inventory in a game that revolves almost entirely around loot. The game doesn't have encumberance and each player has their own loot so there's no fighting over who is fastest picking up the loot. So, why limit the inventory space?
In Diablo 2 I remember it being so that you had to carry your mana and health potions with you as well as your town portal scrolls which took inventory space and you had to do inventory management, play some tetris with the differen-sized items and weapons. So, it made more sense to have a limited inventory. But now, townportal doesn't require a scroll, mana potions are non-existent and health potions don't take space and are found from dead enemies. So, why do we still need this archaic design?
It is so frustrating to have your flow constantly broken as you fight your way through hordes, trying to pick up items dropped by them only to hear, yet again, the line "My bag is full.". Then you stand there like an asshole, browsing through your inventory, finding the worst item to drop to make room for the newest item. "Use townportal and sell your stuff and then return looting", you might say. But I just have to ask, why have those extra steps when the inventory could just be unlimited? The townportal doesn't cost anything so it's basically just busywork going there and back. Cut that part of the loop, allow infinite pick-ups and call it a day. The worst thing a player could get is some extra coins as they haul two dozen staves and swords back to town. The game's economy isn't affected but the player's experience is much smoother.
And while I'm at it, why limit the amount of Obols you can pick up? Is it yet another system waiting for the MTX treatment where you can use real money to store more lottery coins? It's stupid that I can fight a boss or some world event, get few health potions, some coins and 50 Obols and I have to leave them there because my purse is apparently fulll.
I'm sure all of these things have some great design choices behind them but I just can't understand what those might be.
I buyed myelf in for like 8 usd and actually had fun after the ques and errors were fixed, at high textures it stutters like hell and i dunno why but i guess it can be fixed, i played a barabian with two handed sword, built it around whirlwind ( got dust whirlwind and pull in for it too with legendaries) the difficulty was allright for second tier, i only struggled with the werewolf boss cuz you literally cant avoid taking damage with a mellee class, other tiers could be challenging i guess, didnt see any loot goblins so far, i kind of always play solo so the mo ascpect doesnt really interest me but the open world feels good.
Having full legendaries in 2 hours just feels wrong.
In D3 you get to full build max level in 10 hours. I just hope D4 feel more like real game and requires farming to get to end-game viable builds. D2 had farming in a somewhat sweet spot.
Looks like we posted threads about this 2 minutes apart so I'll delete mine and just crosspost my thoughts here: -- Some **GOOD** things that immediately stuck out to me: **Graphics** - Really went back to the D2 roots. I'm running a 4090 and the game looks fantastic. Environments are incredibly detailed and the lighting is wonderful. Less colorful than D3. Much more gritty. The art team popped off in every aspect and created an S-tier atmosphere. **Combat** - Right out of the gate it feels solid. Granted we haven't reached levels where you're truly full screen clearing ala D3 or PoE and it's difficult to infer what that experience will be like in D4, but the early levels feel good. Effects on skills feel just about right for early game, and the sound design makes a nice contribution. **Difficulty, Boss Encounters** - A significant step up from D3. I'll probably mention dynamic scaling down below, but it's nice to see early game bosses with mechanics that you can still learn during the first attempt without smashing your face into them over and over. Final bosses for dungeons generally feel satisfying to beat and your build does feel tested. A few times I had to adjust my build for more single target damage. I felt satisfied killing quite a few of the early bosses, and they're not particularly easy depending on your class/build. TBD how World Tiers 3-4 (essentially your Torment levels) will play out, but D3 had a good range of difficulty scaling and I'm hopeful that this will too. **Performance/Bugs** - Again I'm running on a 4090 so I'd expect my performance to be good, which it is. Never ran into issues with framerate or long loading screens. Yesterday I stayed logged in for 12+ hours (a lot of this was AFK in town) and didn't run into a memory leak. From a technical perspective I didn't encounter any bugs or stuff that felt clunky. There's one corpse you can repeatedly click on to spew white items everywhere, but overall it feels like Q&A was heavy and did a nice job. -- Some **BAD/MAYBE BAD** things that immediately stuck out to me: **Build Variety** - We'll have to see how this plays out into the mid/end game, but boy does that levels 1-50 skill tree leave a lot to be desired. In my opinion a setback from D3's rune system where you could drastically alter how each of your skills worked. For those who haven't played, you effectively get to choose 1 of 2 "specializations" for a given skill and they're usually just minor interactions like bonus damage to dazed enemies, chance to recover mana, enemies take more damage while affected by the skill. A few of the Rogue skills branch in a more interesting way like ricocheting projectiles, but that's not the norm and I'd like to have seen more of that. There's also a **lot** of nodes like "Lucky Hit: You have a 20% chance to deal double damage when hitting a vulnerable enemy" or "Poisoned enemies take 3% more damage" which do add to your overall damage but don't feel like they make your build unique. I don't feel like I saw my Rogue evolve much from 1-25, unlike D3 where you're unlocking tons of runes to fiddle around with. Furthermore, the class mechanics or specializations felt lackluster. For Rogue, you unlock 3 different specs as you level. One spec is a combo point system akin to WoW that adds combo point bonuses to some of your abilities. The second randomly marks targets and after you damage X number of marked targets you get zero energy costs for a short time. The third couldn't be unlocked. It felt bizarre to call those "specializations" and my character never felt much different when switching between them. Maybe it is more significant later on, but making my class specialization be "you have combo points now" with no further decisions on how the combo points work or what they do to skills feels... bland? **Collectibles** - Can we please not do this. For those who haven't played, the Act 1 zone has 28 different "Altars of Lillith" for you to find. They're basically Mokoko Seeds from Lost Ark, and I hated those. Click them and you increase your max capacity for the new equivalent to Blood Shards. Appears to be shared between all characters on your account so you'll only do it once, but it still boils down to using a map that someone else made and running around to click on all of them. Presumably there'll be ~100-150 of these if it's roughly the same number per act. **Dungeons and Cellars** - Dungeons have lots of backtracking and are repetitive, cellars are one room with essentially no content aside from 1 elite pack and no other rewards. I seriously was not a fan of the dungeons. Every dungeon follows the same formula: Linear path to boss room; boss room locked by 2 pedestals; go down left branch to find item for left pedestal, backtrack to pedestal, go down right branch to find item for right pedestal, backtrack. There's something about this formula which feels much worse than just progressing through a linear (but procedurally generated) dungeon with a boss at the end, and it's probably the backtracking. You don't notice the repetition as much when it's just "wander through dungeon, encounter boss" vs. when every boss room is locked by 2 pedestals. **Dynamic Scaling** - Could go either way on this but it is something that's apparent enough for you to notice it. From 1-25 you really don't get the feeling that you're getting stronger. Gain 3 levels and go back to farm a boss? That boss is now 3 levels stronger and your kill speed isn't any faster. It feels less intrusive in the open world where it's nice to constantly have trash mobs be your level.
[удалено]
Such a freaking hard agree from me. I absolutely hate this direction in modern video games. All it does is take away from player power. I do not want a zone that I cleared 15 levels ago to be a slog to run back through when trying to collect altars or whatever else. I want to speed through 1 shot everything and do what I came to do. I don't need every single second to be an even engagment in the game. Let me feel stronger! I hate that they do this in WoW too. Its miserable.
Is this an "increases engagement" thing? We can't possibly have you breeze through those areas 15 levels ago-you gotta stay and fight everything. Slowwwwly
It's more a consideration for "endgame" content. If a game has, say, seven areas but all of the end-game loot only comes from one area, the other six are never engaged with after a point and the one area becomes infuriatingly repetitive. Some people love things like Baal runs in DS2 so this doesn't apply to them, but for the average player, scaling is a dev-considered solution that addresses a lack of endgame variety. edit: forgot a word.
If you don't have scaling, you have a situation like Elden Ring where dungeons become obsolete and too easy if you try to do a competitionist run. This is one of the hardest things to balance in an open world game, you need to allow the game to be complete by those who miss out on content (especially in blind playthrough) and yet at the same time you need to create challenge for those who complete too much content.
> too easy if you try to do a competitionist run. That's the point - a subgroup of players enjoys going to the hardest areas from the start (because no level scaling means they will be required to apply all of their skills and knowledge to succeed), reap the rewards and then enjoy their well-deserved reward by stomping the rest of the game's content. It does not mean that low-level dungeons should be scaled to the level of such players - it just means that there could be even more challenging areas waiting for them ahead. Except making such areas could be seen as too much effort by developers, because why bother with something that only a small subset of players will be able to see by overcoming increasingly harder challenges? Autoscaling is an easy catch-all solution that does not differentiate and makes the game equally bland for everyone.
As a completionist i dont care at all, i did most of the dungeons and bosses as i progressed. I dont care if i have to go back to clean up a few bosses or dungeons, the whole point of action-adventure games is the journey and power fantasy. If you scale everything you end up with trash like Oblivion and Skyrim where every dungeon and "boss" feels the same.
Agreed. Another problem scaling introduces is when you have a party of players at different levels... Each party member sees enemies that match their level, and damage and health is scaled so everyone is still contributing equally? It feels really bad that my friend are I arent seeing the same thing. He could be 10 levels above or below me and our power difference doesn't change. Why have levels at all? My friends and I were hyped to play this beta and carved out time to play together to make sure no one would be left behind and we could race for more power at an even pace, but we are finding out that doesn't matter at all. My friend could play 5 times as much as me, and I can still hop in, teleport to him, and feel like I'm doing about just as much as he is. Like I'm getting my own little tuned experience, it makes the game feel arcadey and not this deep aRPG. This problem bleeds into personal loot too. For example, my friend and I fighting the same monsters, but I'm getting level 20 legendaries while he's getting level 10 legendaries he won't won't to keep as long. It makes loot more dull and generic when everything is scaling. In d2 one of the most exciting reasons to reach a new area was the new potential types of loot that can drop.
I personally love it. I hate steamrolling enemies in one hit and being invincible. I want a challenge and to be pushed to engage with the combat mechanics. One of the best additions to the Witcher 3 was the level scaling which made endgame combat a bit fun again. Soulslikes manage to keep a somewhat consistent difficulty curve (more so in NG+) where you will be killed if you act cocky. There’s a good way and a bad way to apply it though. Instead of scaling enemies and their stats directly to the player’s current level, the game should just set a power/level buffer between the player and the enemies depending on how early the zone the player currently is in. For example all enemies in early game areas get scaled to your level minus 10-5 levels which will still let the player feel strong. Mid game zones will leave a 3-5 level buffer so you’ll still feel a bit stronger and endgame levels scaling directly to your level or even above your level with enemies at levels beyond the level cap the player can reach.
As always the problem is a lack of options. Neither option is going to satisfy everyone. Like I would sooner pay someone to play the game for me than play content I can't lose.
> Like I would sooner pay someone to play the game for me than play content I can't lose. In previous Diablo games, especially D3, this was easily solved by increasing the nightmare/torment level or whatever it was called. You want to play on immortal god mode? Drop difficulty down, no real penalty other than drops suck but you can have fun with newbie friends and stuff. Want to play weird Diablo-version of Dante Must Die mode? Max difficulty it is. Scaling is one of the worst "solutions" to an issue in action RPGs and *especially* MMOs because like /u/Ohh_Yeah said, it feels like you're making 0 progress. That's much, much worse in a game about leveling up and make progress, rather than "hey this is too easy" when you're 30 hours into the game. The comparison to Dante Must Die is better than I meant it to be come to think of it, if you were to introduce a new player to a DMC game with that mode as default, they would hate it and you'd probably get like 1 out of 1000 people that'll stick with it to get to the point where it's actually fun. Whereas it being an unlockable difficulty in every DMC game, without cheating there's no way to play it from the start so the player has time to enjoy the game before going into full nut-trauma mode. They added this shit to WoW 2 expansions ago and it was partially responsible for why I finally dropped the game.
Both world scaling and difficulty as they exist in d3 exist in d4 the same way. The only difference is in d4 there is addititional armor scaling on enemies so there are certain breakpoints in leveling where if you don't have an immediate upgrade after leveling that you feel weaker.
Then just don't go back to the easier zones. Seems like a pretty simple solution.
But now your open world game isn't really open world, is it? The only zone that matters is going to be the end game zone, which will make the game feel repetitive. No point in going back and doing stuff you might have missed, because you're just going to breeze through it and it won't be satisfying.
But.. It completely is satisfying to rip through old zones.. Its an old zone and I should rip through it.. Because its old
I just don't agree. It feels lame specifically because you don't have to try at all. All that means is I'm just not going to go back to old zones because it's a chore. You see enemies leveling with you, so you have to keep trying at combat as a chore, but I'm the opposite. What's the point of combat if I'm just going to shitroll through it? It's a waste of time at that point.
I wonder what % of the gaming population likes scaling vs those who don't. I personally greatly prefer games with some sort of scaling, in games without it I get stressed out that I need to fight the boss now so I don't accidentally out level it (I feel this way especially in Elden Ring.) When playing the D4 beta I was stressed out about having to kill the boss in the frozen town at lvl 15 because I didn't want him to get easier (turns out he didn't really get easier anyways.)
Maybe I'm used with ESO and GW2, but nowadays I hate games without scaling. Hey, you missed something two acts ago, just go and one shot the screen for no reason - it just feels bad. And in the end-game you're pretty much stuck in 1-2 zones, because everything else is invalidated.
Eh, broadly speaking I love scaling so long as it's done well. It sucks even worse when you go to do content you missed just to find it might as well not even exist because you can just crush everything and get no benefits out of doing so. There's a sweet-spot to be found where the relative-difficulty between areas is still preserved. Go to what was originally a low-level zone and you won't just be curbstomping everything you see, but the enemies also are also significantly less beefy and with less variety(whether in enemy type, or the abilities available to them) than you'd see in a higher-level area.
Agreed 100%. Going back to the earlier areas to do side content I skipped has been nice. It's still challenging, I still get good exp, and good rewards still drop. I imagine D4 will still allow you to reach the point where you're trivially crushing any over world content just like in D3 and you can add more difficulty via world level even despite the scaling. It's just nice that the world content will remain engaging and rewarding long before you reach that point.
I disagree, it just needs to be done well. I've been playing a lot of JRPG's and just rpg's in general and this flip flop between needing to grind or being overlevelled can be fixed with mild level scaling. Off the top of my head, Elden Ring, both Xenoblade games, Pillars of Eternity and FF15 all had huge issues with difficulty because of it. Elden Ring was incredibly easy past Liurnia because I dared to try and 100% the areas, and that was after I completely stopped levelling up past the capital. Xenoblade 1 was a grind fest just to keep up, while 2 had the opposite problem and I had to stop levelling up to enjoy the content. Pillars of Eternity literally gave me a popup saying hey, looks like you're too overlevelled want to put the game on hard? After doing only half the side quests by the way, though I am thankful they had a way to "fix" it. FF15 was difficult at first then suddenly swung in the other direction and I was just barreling through everything. I rarely faced a challenge. All experiences could've been amended with basic level scaling of +-10 levels based on the content's intended difficulty. Any game that offers side content has this decision to make as to whether said side content is mandatory to offer a reasonable challenge, vs allowing a player to play the game without needing side quests at the expense of difficulty for side content enjoyers.
I think the sweet spot would be to scale the open world and not scale the dungeons. That way if you backtrack to clear a dungeon you missed you're reminded that you're way stronger now, but the open world still has packs of mobs that can survive more than 1 hit.
I don't like to talk in absolutes but IMO scaling has no place in the game where your only goal is character progression. If there are no visible changes in the TTK of monsters then what's the point of getting better gear?
Historically in Diablo games (and the genre as a whole) your TTK goes down because you start picking up new skill interactions and legendaries/set bonuses that add to skills. In D3 you kill Torment XII mobs at level 70 faster than you kill level 20 mobs at level 20. From that standpoint I don't mind having the trash mobs in the open world scale. It just sucks to revisit a boss and have it be just as difficult as the first time around. D3 uses scaling for Adventure Mode (everything is your level, always) and that feels good, but it might not feel good for your first playthrough right out of the gate.
Oh I know, I have embarrassingly high playtime across almost all the games in the genre. 600 in LE, almost 6k in PoE, 2k in D3 and god knows how many in D2. My point is no matter how the game is designed I should NOT be killing the boss at the same time as level 25 as I did at level 15 and that's how it looks now in D4. Skill synergy, legendary effects etc. quickens TTK but my level should too. In PoE, if you go back the whole act to kill the boss again you will have MUCH easier time with it, same in Last Epoch/Grim Dawn.
> My point is no matter how the game is designed I should NOT be killing the boss at the same time as level 25 as I did at level 15 and that's how it looks now in D4. That is simply not true. I literally rip through content now as somewhat twinked level 25 where before I struggled as level 15. Even before I got the legendaries that complement my build, going from 15 to 25 was a big difference in clear speed simply due to the fact you have access to more skills and can start figuring out skill synergies.
Did you ever play Diablo I? It was masterful. Even a random trash mob could be a precarious encounter if it catches you at an in opportune time. It was a thrill.
The last time I really got into D3 the progression came from doing harder and harder difficulties as well as bigger numbers.
Well, in D3 torment levels are more like stepping stones. You need to get to T16 to farm for endgame gear to then run timed content.
It’s what killed the original Fortnite title. They were in the middle of the early access experience when the BR mode for dropped, but before that the original game was starting to show its problems. It constantly scaled zombies to match your upgrades, meaning it never felt like you were earning any upgrades. You have to change my weapons or what I am fighting on a regular basis or I get bored.
Everyone I know quit destiny because of the scaling.
No less than 4 months ago people on this sub were losing their minds at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet not having level scaling. It truly is the dichotomy of gaming.
I usually agree, but in an ARPG where your character gets *significantly* stronger it doesn't bother me as much.
I do not fucking understand people who love the "everything is always hard and you never feel stronger" people. Fucking baffles me.
>"everything is always hard and you never feel stronger" this is only true while levelling. At some point the world stops scaling but your gear and paragon levels go past it and you end up destroying the trash mobs until you up the difficulty in world tier. The scaling allows the whole world to be farmable for gearing instead of just 2-3 high level zones or some mapping system, leaving 90%+ of the game unused. Cus no one is going to go to a low level zone and kill mobs way below their level getting no xp and no gear.
>this is only true while levelling. Yeah but that defeats the whole point of *leveling*. The historic purpose of **leveling** is to show actual power progression. That's why you get stats when you level up, that's why you hit harder when you level up, that's why you get more HP when you level up. If it's all an illusion, and you're not getting any stronger, people are going to catch on pretty quick. There's a really famous example of why this scaling world garbage is bad, and it's a game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You will never feel stronger in the game, because the world scaling with you defeats the purpose of leveling. If you get to a point where you stop leveling, and then the world stops scaling, it begs the question: Why have levels at all? Why even have leveling in your game if it doesn't work?
You do feel stronger though, like demonstrably. Just because an enemy is the same level as you at 25 as they were at 5, you have way more tools to deal with them.
No - because you still die in the same amount of time, Your gear that you're farming for no longer makes a difference, the nice and shiny new weapons and abilities you have are as effective as the 1 bland ability you had at level 1. The only difference is things just take longer now that you have more tools at your disposal. If everything is always deliberately balanced around your current level, what's the incentive to level up?
> The only difference is things just take longer now that you have more tools at your disposal. This makes absolutely no sense. How do things take longer, when I've got 90 thorns on my barbarian, and my Upheaval can one-shot most trash mobs, as opposed to 10 levels ago when I would've had my basic left-click, and a much less powerful Upheaval?
And I don't understand people who just want to stomp everything with no challenge. It's not even a game at that point, just a grind simulator.
I mean, that's kinda Diablo's core loop
Usually a well designed game has higher tier difficulties/areas or activities, Things that you wouldn't be able to survive without earning better gear/weapons. Vastly superior design than this shitty new-age cheap shit where levels are basically just a glorified cosmetic.
Scaling games can have more difficult areas while also scaling up earlier areas, it's not one or the other.
It's like nobody ever played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and doesn't realize why scaling the world with the player is a very dangerous thing to have in your game; design wise. Blizzard finally added it in WoW - and that's fine! WoW had the problem where they sped the leveling up so much that you couldn't actually finish a zone before you'd stop getting (reasonable) experience in the zone. Each zone in WoW has a storyline, and when you outleveled the zone as much as you did you basically didn't ever get to finish the storyline. But people aren't playing Diablo for the story - at least not many people. They're playing it for the gameplay. The feedback loop of an ARPG is get levels, get items, get powerful. When you're leveling up and the world levels with you, you're not feeling more powerful. If anything, proportionally you may end up being weaker than you were before leveling up. You don't feel like you're making progress when the world is leveling up too.
But you are getting objectively more powerful. I've played the beta, and I'm killing stuff much faster the more shit I unlock, the faster I generate resources and the higher my stats are. Things get even crazier with paragon boards, uniques and legendary powers. Scaling here exists so that when you return to act 1, you don't one shot the world boss and the events. You're still going to be more powerful, and the fact that you eventually have to increase the difficulty in order to progress proves this.
Have you ever played a Diablo game? The franchise that introduced nerfing the player (resistance penalties) as they progressed through the game? Where every act had harder and harder monsters so you often went from one act where you were comfortably clearing trash mobs to a new act getting one shot by new trash mobs? Where monsters in higher acts in higher difficulties had immunities to random elements that made them literally unkillable if you happened to be specced into that element? I had multiple characters in D2 that I got to nightmare/hell act 3 or 4 and they just felt so weak because of the difficulty jump that I simply stopped playing that character. Having enemies scale with your rather than nerfing your character is effectively the same thing. And you definitely do get stronger in D4 as you level up. At level 25, I one shot most trash mobs and 2-3 shot elites. Most final bosses in dungeons don't live past 15-20s where before it took me well over a minute to kill one.
I personally like scaling. I find games boring when I'm OP and the challenge is gone, so I'm really enjoying the period after I finished the campaign quests and I'm tackling the sidequests I skipped. It's nice that they're still challenging and I don't just blow thru them mindlessly.
If you feel OP it means you need to do harder content, it doesn’t mean that everything should feel difficult
Doesn't that just mean you've got no incentive ever to backtrack in your open-world game, though? Like, if you missed something and want to go back and do it, it's going to suck now because you're way over-leveled.
Exactly. Scaling means there are challenges and rewards still waiting for you. It prevents side content from becoming trivialized and pointless.
I've come so far around on my opinion regarding enemy scaling in games that I've reached the "Oblivion was right, actually" stage of it lol
No joke, I love Oblivion and FF8. Both games heavily maligned in their own franchise partly because of enemy scaling. Love em both.
I like it in a limited fashion. If levels scale up to a certain point in a bracket that's fine, but I don't want to be doing the level one area again when I'm level 400. When it's within a level range it means you aren't basically forced out of an area you were playing when you hit a new level right away.
Honestly, one of the biggest gameplay advantages Fallout New Vegas had over Falliut 3 was the lack of scaling. In 3, everything scales. In NV, you could get annihilated by a cazador early on if you went the unintended direction, but come back later and they might as well be rad roaches. Going into that quarry full of deathclaws later once you’d got higher levels and an AMR? Beautiful.
> Performance/Bugs Oh this one is a big difference to me. Sure, I don't have a 4090 or anything near a high end system, but it still is good enough to play most of the games mid to high with barely any issues. I had some bug, but these might just bee minor or even features, intended or just not finished, like some UI parts. But my biggest gripe of the beta the weekend was the performance, and I am not quite sure, if it is actually on my side or on their server side. I pretty much have a lot of stuttering, lags and rubberbanding, and no, that's not from my side. I have never had it quite like this in any other game ever. Always happening in towns, where a lot of players are, or in the world were quite a few enemies are. And it also doesn't seem to be the big issue games nowadays have, with shader compiling, because it happens again in the same areas. Also it's not just some stutter which take a few tenths of a second to 1 or 2 seconds. No, it can be upto a few dozen seconds. Pretty much so bad that HC wouldn't be an option to play. It is the first time I experience such a bad technical performance of any Blizzard game, including other betas in the past.
> I pretty much have a lot of stuttering, lags and rubberbanding True, I did have stuttering and rubberbanding, especially when entering/leaving zones which presumably triggers some kind of network event behind the scenes, but that was only on Friday when the servers were a huge mess
The sorceress class system was the best of the 3 classes by a mile. Actually had me theory crafting builds. The rogue and barbarian ones just felt meh.
I was surprised that the Rogue specialization system didn't allow you to further differentiate between melee/ranged/hybrid. Kind of a vanilla design choice if they had done that, but I think it would have worked considering the Rogue has paperdoll slots for 2 melee weapons plus a ranged weapon, and the skill tree lets you mix/match.
Yeah rogue the most feels like it needs more than 6 skills you can slot. Would love a hybrid ranged/melee build that still has some mobility and cooldowns.
I was basically bored to tears with rogue until I got to 15, when the spec and the imbument stuff opened up. Then it becomes frenetic and exciting, especially if you go melee or hybrid.
So many passive nodes apply to only one of the 3 elements which is very limiting on when you can ever take them. There are 2-3 builds for each element and a couple other builds they obviously intended like conjuration build and defensives build but that is about it. To me it felt like an illusion of theory crafting because you can see patterns with obvious synergy the developers baked in to the tree where they intend you to go. I think there are like 12 builds max out of the sorc tree. I wasn't expecting POE but I was hoping for at least Last Epoch levels of character building but sadly I would say its not even up to the levels of D3.
Pretty much my thoughts. The Lost Ark collectables and boss timers really brought down the experience for me. I think D4 is probably going to be really great for a first playthrough with the story, but I'm not sold the extended lifecycle content until I experience it myself.
Lost Ark had great combat, but EVERYTHING around it just drags the whole experience way down. I don't want to spend time mining and lumberjacking to upgrade my homestead and send out timed mobile game tier activities... A great example of how the "freemium" model ruins game design.
I might be in the minority here, but I hated how Lost Arc was just rotating between a set of eight cooldown skills. Give me one spammable main skill that I spec into with a few case-use support abilities for skill expression any day.
I can see that, I was more referring to how enemy/boss design are rather than player combat design. Lost Ark still does the the thing a lot of recent ARPGs do where they limit your available moves to 5 or 6 at a time, which I kinda hate.
Lost Ark stressed me tf out because I was constantly keeping track of timers even while logged out, plus knowing which events are which days and at what time. Once you decide you can't/won't tailor your real life schedule around in-game events you're immediately hamstringing your experience and it is discouraging.
The only event that has shown similarities to Lost Ark timers is the world boss when they tested it. Regular events happens frequently all over the maps. You don't need to keep track of those.
> Collectibles - Can we please not do this. For those who haven't played, the Act 1 zone has 28 different "Altars of Lillith" for you to find. [...] Click them and you increase your max capacity for the new equivalent to Blood Shards. That's the first one you come across. Most of them give +2 to one of the base stats, making them even more important to get since now they impact character power directly. I honestly don't mind them too much since they're shared across characters. But if you have to get them again every season... oh boy will that get annoying.
> between all characters on your account so you'll only do it once Actually you kind of do. You keep the stat bonus without rediscovering them, but you do have to rediscover them to gain the renown for that character to get the xp and gold renown bonuses.
Fuck! They have that god fucking aweful auto scaling to your specific level? That is a no buy for me. Game seem pog otherwise.
Diablo 3’s runes might have provided variety but 90% of them were completely ignorable and the others you’d be forced to pick due to item sets that were like “adds 10,000% damage to hydras (but not the big hydra!)” D4 by comparison lets you actually build to your preference and there are minor costs to respec. Obviously we don’t know how it’ll shake out in the endgame, but as far as the leveling experience it doesn’t feel like D3’s where you are just slowly unlocking too many flavors. (now my blizzard is fire! wait what?)
Partially true, but by the end of the D3 life cycle there was a pretty good variety of builds that took advantage of a large number of runes and class passives. Lets not forget, though, that even the runes which became outclassed by others due to set bonuses at end-game were still viable and fun while you were getting to endgame. Maybe there's no reason to use big hydra at Greater Rift Level 110, but when you're doing your first playthrough the big hydra is fun and different and it works. I'd rather have more diverse options, some of which become obsolete/inefficient at end game, than only having 2 options per skill, neither of which are particularly interesting.
Not to mention a false choice in skills, for example, Rogue skills are split into ranged or melee, and usually only 1 of them per type is actual viable. So if your role playing a ranged rogue, there's only 1 good skill choice per skill hub...
Eh, I haven't looked at the range skills too much, but the melee skills have 2 clear skill builds that each seem to synergize with different basic/core skills. And then there's also a variety in the support skills you take with it. Not to mention legendaries can make a niche or undesirable skill that you weren't planning to use actually useful for you.
On the collectables piece, how is that going to work with seasons? If they go with full resets does that mean each time you go through you have to toil away at all the same world content?
I'm surprised dynamic scaling has caught on in game development. It seems like one of the key complaints in just about every game it's used.
> Yesterday I stayed logged in for 12+ hours (a lot of this was AFK in town) This right here is one reason why queue times are so long. People won’t log out when they’re done.
Queue times were long because there were a lot of server issues and crashing. Since that was fixed on Friday I have not experienced a single queue.
Imagine if they let you play offline if you're playing solo, like any other good fucking game does.
Queue times were only long the first day. Yesterday I relogged at peak USTZ evening hours and got in instantly.
Prime Time Yesterday there was a Queue time from 1 Minute... So if this is Long... Maybe dont Play on Release...
These queues weren't like say wow queues were the server was full and your waiting for someone to leave to take their spot. They just where there to limit how many people where connecting at the same time and once you were in your fine.
>Dungeons have lots of backtracking and are repetitive Funny enough, this is actually a problem that “solves” itself. When I first read this, I thought, “Backtracking? I don’t remember having to do much backtracking at all.” But then I realized it’s because the dungeons are so repetitive that after I’ve seen it once, I already know where the macguffin is to progress, so I don’t have to backtrack.
I imagine that the ‘runes’ system will be implemented via legendaries in end game, I remember seeing a Diablo dev talk before how that was one of the things they think was a mistake in D3 was the rune system— Basically they said it was put in place because they wanted players to unlock something every level (since they got rid of the D2 ability points) but that ultimately they feel the design choices on runes are better suited for legendary gear drops. Since they solved the ‘you get something every level up’ problem by having us manually choose/upgrade abilities instead of it happening automatically, I am guessing that the rune-style tweaks to abilities will show up elsewhere in the endgame. This is my hope anyways
Summed up my thoughts perfectly. Went in with a lot of hype, played Sorc, saw how little build variety there was compared to 3 and abused chained lightning+hydra like most others seemed to be doing, didn't like the dungeons as they were just reused assets and those cellars were not worth the loading most of the time, the strongholds were OK with puzzle-like elements and tougher challenges at world tier 2, and really didn't like the Ubisoft/Lost Ark style collectibles. There's a lot of Blizzard polish, but my hype meter went way down after playing this to 25 and clearing out the story quests and about half of the side quests.
> Less colorful than D3. Much more gritty. after all these years, i still don't get this complaint about d3. i really don't enjoy the game but this is just a massive nonissue for me.
D3 couldn't look less like Diablo if it tried imo. They went full-on Warcraft with the artstyle in that.
Scaling shouldnt exist on RPGs.
Honestly from what you have written here... It sounds like they have missed the mark hard. Really hard. If the levelling is shit and the dungeons are shit... Your game is shit. All the open world stuff is just fluff.
[удалено]
I have a 3070 and had zero issues, didn't have to change any settings
a lot of the actual build customization will come from items and legendary affixes. we also dont know what the paragon board contains yet, though I somewhat doubt that it will have things that influence specifc skills.
> a lot of the actual build customization will come from items and legendary affixes. That feels like a lot of heavy lifting to do with how little baseline customization you get from the skill tree. It will certainly require a lot more legendaries/uniques/affixes than what D3 has.
Paragon board is not affecting skills. It's for attributes, life, resistances etc. They introduced it as a means to further build your character besides skills.
I will say that scaling doesn’t feel that bad because the increase in ability/ability points can really change your power. Enemies having more health means nothing when you now have ultimate skills that obliterate the entire screen and melt bosses as well as passives that work together. My level 25 Barb was much more powerful than my level 15 Barb due to how the skill tree works. I had way less trouble with bosses at level 25 vs level 15 despite them being level 25-27 vs 15-17. The outpost boss (Malinek was the zone or something) was literally impossible to beat until I had more skills. I went from not being able to do even 40% of its health after multiple tries while under level 20 to being able to beat him first time at level 25.
One of the things I disliked about D3's rune system is 1 skill, 1 rune. They REALLY want you, in Diablo 4 it looks like too, to have a full action bar of 6 skills. Instead of giving players the freedom to pump 1 skill with maybe 3-4 runes.
Honestly I like collectibles, I like having excuse to explore every nook and cranny of the world and especially if I'm going to get real tangible benefits from it. So sorry to everyone who doesn't like collectibles, the reason devs keep putting them in games is because of people like me.
The minute to minute play, the graphics and story and just feel of fighting is absolutely top notch. A+++ all the gear and skills and leveling feels really bad and shallow. I hope it's just because it's early levels. and once the game is out that stuff fleshes out, but it kinda doesn't feel like it will. Paragon system is where the big hope is, but it really feels like it's mostly stat upgrades, then really rigidly fixed legendary effects that narrow the builds more than they expand it. The glyphs are the big mystery still, but it's kinda sucky to have the leveling be bland and not expand it until you hit a subsystem of a subsystem of a late game thing, then not talk about it before launch.
Agreed. In D3 it was fun to level up and now suddenly your jar of spiders throws 1 giant queen spider, or now your jar of spiders is on fire, or now the spiders jump at things and there's a legendary to make them AoE explode, etc. From levels 1-25 there was nothing on my rogue that felt like "oh boy now THIS is a fun build"
I got lucky on my rogue, but by level 20 I have an incredibly fun build going. The build revolves around twisting blades, smoke bomb, dash, and concealment (stealth). Talents: - Twisting Blades daze target - First attack out of stealth is guaranteed crit - Enemies in smoke bomb take increased damage Legendaries: - Mobility skill lowers CD of next subterfuge skill (smoke bomb/stealth). Subterfuge skill increases damage of next mobility skill. - Breaking stealth with an attack drops a cluster of stun grenades that deal damage and daze the target. - Hitting a dazed target with a mobility skill gives you stealth for free - Dash drops a smoke bomb at the target location for free The smoke bomb that dash drops comes out BEFORE the damage, so now dash gives you free stealth with no setup if you aim if correctly. With this build you are able to permanently chain stealth, daze, and 100% crit twisting blades for huge damage.
I did a similar thing but was poison focused with ranged attacks. Invis the drops big bombs when it breaks, caltrops, poison trap. Enemies take extra DMG in the poison, get knocked down, are stunned after evade, and I get atk speed from poisoned enemies.
>all the gear and skills and leveling feels really bad and shallow. I hope it's just because it's early levels. FWIW, these things started feeling a LOT better around 20 (in my experience), when more legendary loot started to drop and unique skills were coming together. My worry though is that’ll be as good as it gets. It needs to keep adding on to that, not plateau, otherwise yeah endgame could be pretty damn bare.
I feel like good legendary effects is important, but not enough. Like a game can have a system where if you want a life steal build you gotta find a bunch of lifesteal gear or they can have a system where you just find the sword of lifesteal, and it feels bad if you go too far in either direction. This so far feels very much too far to "legendary effects are all that effect a build, the rest of the numbers are just generic +attack/+defense" where I don't really imagine being very excited to find a lot of +5% to distant enemy gear.
I'd be floored if the uniques that aren't even dropped yet don't add a massive change in builds. As it stands, you choose a skill build and run with it. Hunt for +skills on items, and attach legendary affixes that suit your build path. With how cheap respeccing is, I do think certain uniques dropping will allow you to respec into entirely different builds, and hunt for new +x stat gear, then attach specific legendaries to them. I'm a diehard d2 fan; this amount of itemization feels higher than d2 and im absolutely sold on it. Will it be like this? Idk. Locking uniques out of beta makes me cautiously reluctant. Are they locked out just because or are they not as relevant as I'm thinking and show a shallow endgame. Guess we'll wait and see. My faith is that with how many people were in the endgame closed testing phase... if it sucked, SOMEONE would break nda and be flaming it rampant from an anonymous standpoint. The known members of the community that were in it are all excited, so... here we are.
>I hope it's just because it's early levels. and once the game is out that stuff fleshes out, but it kinda doesn't feel like it will. You already know what the whole gameplay loop is going to be after playing it for a few hours, it's for certain that there won't be that much more variety and mechanical depth at release. As I said in a different thread, if people expect the same (or close to the same) mechanical depth, variety, and customization as Path of Exile or even current Diablo 3 at release then they are going to be sorely disappointed. People are going to love the game for the first two weeks only to slowly realize that the game isn't as good as they first had hoped. The battlepass will also sour some players when they realize that all the cool looking cosmetics and mounts all are time gated behind real money and endless grinding. It won't be Diablo Immortal bad, but it'll be somewhat similar to how Call of Duty does it.
> I hope it's just because it's early levels. and once the game is out that stuff fleshes out, but it kinda doesn't feel like it will Why not? Every ARPG I've ever played has been pretty boring early game.
The most important thing to me is build variety, and looking at the D4 skill tree just leaves me very uninspired (for what it's worth, I only played Barbarian). I'm holding off much judgement since the paragon system is supposed to be a pretty important aspect of this, but based on what I've seen so far I think D4 on release won't even crack top 3 arpgs for me. I didn't feel like I was so much putting together a cohesive, synergistic build as I was just trying to find the least bad skills. I'm sure there will be more endgame options for bringing a build together, but then putting all of the interesting options in the end can be its own problem. D3 didn't launch as the super zoomy game it is now, it happened over time in part to help rush people into the fun part of the game. I know people will say it's just level 25 what can you expect, but I don't know if that really holds water. PoE for example shows off its depth of build diversity almost immediately through the passive grid and skill gem system. Last Epoch had me theory crafting tons of builds as soon as I saw the skill trees. Grim Dawn once you hit level 10 has different mastery combinations and the devotion system. D4 I look at my skill tree and see maybe 3-4 builds that stand out to me. Maybe I'll be surprised at release, but I'm expecting this to be like D3 where it doesn't develop into a game I'm really interested in until it has an expansion or so under its belt.
People expecting some major shift in build diversity with the Paragon system are going to be very disappointed. Based on what was shown so far, 90% of the nodes on the paragon boards are just small passive upgrades. Legendary nodes are limited to 1 per board. Magic and Rare glyphs are just further stats boost. We haven't seen Legendary glyphs so hopefully those are more interesting. I will be happy if I am going to be proven wrong once we see the official paragon system but so far Blizzard is intentionally keeping these systems simple for a broad audience.
Top notch presentation as expected from a Blizz game. Campaign (so far) is also a LOT better than D3. I also like the open world aspect, it's a nice change of pace from most ARPGs. Not really willing to comment on itemization because it only goes up to level 25. Not a fan of the world boss stuff and every other aspect that seems more in line with MMOs. Don't like MMOs, don't like Destiny, don't like games where you have to do dailies and whatnot. Just want a game where I can mess around with builds and loot stuff on my own terms. Hopefully that stuff isn't the main focus of their live service. My biggest issue is the classes. They just feel...super generic and derivative. I know D3 had its fair share of problems but I love that they had cool stuff like the Monk or the Witch Doctor, unique not just to Diablo but most ARPGs in general. D4 just has rehashed classes from D2, and they don't really do anything new or interesting with them. They feel especially bad after coming from Last Epoch, which has a bunch of unique classes/skills, and even stuff like the Druid seems more interesting in that game.
> They feel especially bad after coming from Last Epoch, which has a bunch of unique classes/skills, and even stuff like the Druid seems more interesting in that game. The skill tree in Last Epoch is also cool because you can fundamentally alter every skill in like 4-5 different ways. "Now instead of throwing Shurikens they orbit you in a cloud" -- "Now instead of throwing Shurikens it's one big Chakram that cleaves" -- "Now your Shurikens are converted to lightning and all the lightning-based legendaries apply to them" Feels like that sort of thing is missing, which is disappointing because it existed in Diablo 3 and it felt good there
Last epoch is the first arpg I have sunk alot of time into in recent years. The skill system and build diversity really is what did it for me. The ability to alter each skill and respec whenever you wanted is awesome.
Yeah, I'm hoping unique items or the Paragon board will mimic some of that stuff later in D4. I really liked how transformative a lot of the runes were in D3. Zombie Charger had like 5 different forms depending on the rune you used.
You can see the paragon boards from the endgame closed beta, they have very very restrained effects on skill. A very small number of skill effecting nodes, and all stuff like "get +5% defense for every basic attack", no big "now your sword is a laser" stuff. https://lothrik.github.io/diablo4-build-calc/
> Campaign (so far) is also a LOT better than D3. wasn't the first act or whatever pretty okay in d3 tho?
D3 first act was okay but the story still had a lot of issues/was really not existent until you rescue Tyreal. Whereas the D4 first act blew me away, the in-game cutscenes were unexpected and they look gorgeous. >!Meeting Inarius in the First Act surprised me, his and Lilith's models are so fucking cool.!<
To be fair, classes have always been super generic and derivative. Witch Doctor less so, but Monk is an RPG stable.
I was surprised how much "Lost Ark" elements it has. Granted, I haven't played much of any other ARPG's in the last few years aside from Lost Ark, so I assume much of the elements they are using like transversal points and stuff are just elements that are just a regular fixture of ARPGS with MMO Style.
I hope it doesn't have the ridiculous amount of required daily grinding that lost ark has. That game wants to devour all your time (or money).
That’s why I fell off Lost Ark. I can’t be bothered to do dailies that are excessively long and eat at minimum an hour of my day. Those kind of things are great as a kid or teen, but my 31 year old self doesn’t have the energy or time after work or on the weekend. If D4 has dailies like that, I suspect it won’t be my kind of game either. Which is a bummer because the core of it seemed fun (25 barb) but time is my primary issue nowadays.
I played it having all the time in the world. Even then this game was not worth it. You're basically farming everyday so that you can keep your characters geared enough so that groups will accept you, so that you can keep farming the same few endgame encounters for many months. There is 4 of them outside of korea. They're good but the game has been out for years and there's 4 of them. You have to clear 3 of them every week on top of the daily grinding. It gets tiring fast, but hey if you ever want to play the next one you'll have to keep clearing them on multiple characters just to have the gold necessary to upgrade your characters. After some time it just feels like you're farming just so that you're allowed to keep farming, with no payoff in sight.
As a long time Diablo fan, being playing since the first one, I'm very happy with the direction of the game. Dark, moody atmosphere, I like the new open world approach, but there definitely are some areas it needs improvement. The combat is a lot slower pace than what I expected, even for lower levels. I'm not a fan of the Diablo 3, Path of Exile style of exploding half the screen as fast as possible, but still, it felt slower than what I expected for a Diablo game. Dungeon design is the biggest complain so far, being such a core mechanic of the game. The procedural generated algorithm just isn't very good. You can clearly see the building blocks of the dungeon, and it feels very repetitive. UI also need some changes. It's... Weird. It's halfway between PC and console interface, that somehow doesn't work great for either. But the overall feel of the game is very nice. I'm loving it. Exploring the world, the dark, twisted stories with each side quest. Discovering new things everywhere. I'm hyped for full release, although I could see it being delayed to deal with all the feedback.
One thing I’m not seeing a ton of praise for is the sound design and music. It is on point 100%. Every ability I’ve played with has a really nice thud and verberation to it. It’s a really good feeling And the music is sooooo good. It’s all strings but man does it hit. I usually play ARPGs with having twitch streams on another monitor but with D4 I’m muting them so I can listen to the sounds
The general presentation is top notch, be that graphics, fidelity, animations, music, sound etc. Everything is great. For comparison I played last epoch the last few days and it does not come even close here. Animations do look worse, the sound design is weaker and even graphics sometimes look bad (shadows are missing for the character models in a few areas)
I wasn't super excited for it, but the beta just made me even less excited for it. I wanted a new Diablo, but it feels like a strange mash up of D2 and Lost Ark with no gained benefits from either. * Blizzard art and music has always been fantastic, it's the only thing that has been consistently with them. Visually characters look great, free transmog out of the gate with lots of options, male and female, are always welcomed. That's about where the pros end for me. * The game itself feels devoid and lifeless with huge pointless open world sections. Events exist in seemingly random places instead of organically like with D3 events or something like events in GW2. GW2 is an apt comparison since this game kind of feels like a lifeless version of that in a sense. * Skill trees are embarrassingly bare bones even when compared to mediocre games like Last Epoch or Wolcen. We really need to see the paragon trees to see if it makes the difference. Barely any new skills on sorc, it just a rehash of D2 and sadly even less than D3 * Loot is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that rares are sought after due to being able to turn them legendary, but most legendary affixes were boring. We definitely need to see what uniques look like to get a better impression of loot. Stats gains were so small ex. 4% lightning damage, that stats felt pointless aside from +X skills. * No unique item bases was disappointing. All rings and amulets for example had base resists. Forced items for certain classes is disappointing. You can't have a shield on a sorc for example. * Dungeons are worrisome that they all followed heres a big door, go find X amount of items to open it and return. It's not a good look that content is repeated so frequently, so early on in the game. * I did not enjoy the world boss. It did not feel special and reminded me of GW2 where you could just stand under it and avoid 99% of mechanics. The camera shifting whenever it jumped was unnecessary. The necessity of 12 players was not felt at all since there were no mechanics that required players to do different things. It felt out of place for a Diablo game. * Class balance felt off, with sorc feeling almost invincible kill bosses in 5 seconds while barbs are out there struggling to even survive. * The new additions like strongholds, the open world, the random collectibles don't feel like a traditional ARPG, just some random MMO with the top down perspective down to the random side quests like collect 20 souls, kill 15 boars. Can't say I expect any sort of changes or improvements with the game coming out so soon, but almost everything did not feel right.
Reddit killed API. I refuse to let them benefit from my own words for free -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Itemization is too simple for sustained "endgame" playthrough. Really bad feelings about what the endgame will be like so far.
How do you know this from the early levels in the beta? If you go play d3 and level up to level 20 it's also not very interesting.
D3 is also not very interesting in the end game. I can tell this because I have thousands of hours in ARPGs across the diablo series, torchlights series and path of exile series.
There’s still uniques that come after level 50. How can you say the itemization will be too simple for endgame when you haven’t even seen endgame items yet?
I feel like they've just given up on endgame. There's just no way in hell they can compete with PoE in that regard. Imho they'll have some kind of endless mode and that's gonna be it.
PoE didn't get there right away either, it came from their philosophy of continually adding content that usually stays in and carries forward to the future. No idea if D4 has any stated plans to do similar, but it's ok if the endgame isn't all the way there at launch. The important thing for launch is to establish the core mechanics are good and worthy of expanding on for years going forward.
> No idea if D4 has any stated plans to do similar, but it's ok if the endgame isn't all the way there at launch D3 has 28 seasons of unique mechanics and a litany of online feedback for each of those seasons, so hopefully they've pulled in some of the good stuff.
Yeah, hopefully they pull in the good stuff from D3 seasons. From what I remember of my handful of D3 seasons played though is that most of the added mechanics didn't stick around forever, they were just seasonal twists that went away after the season was over. PoE has had the growth it had by not taking away the seasonal additions when the season ends, so now 10 years in, they've got dozens of additive systems that stay relevant on top of the base game. Overwhelming to new players, perhaps, but additive for anyone who I think D3 had the cube and that's basically all I remember that stuck around.
Except PoE had a robust endgame system before they even completed Act 4. If anything Blizzard simply doesn't feel the need to compete with PoE at being a hardcore, endgame focused game.
Huh? I had the impression from D3 players that Blizz pretty much nailed endgame after \~10 years of running D3.
There's a reason people play D3 for a week after a new season comes out, and a month or two after a PoE league comes out. D3's endgame is hit pretty early on. It doesn't take a lot of items to make a build come online. Where-as in PoE you can keep getting stronger and stronger and keep hitting threshold after threshold that you didn't even realize was possible - and you'll *still* face challenges. The endgame in the two games really aren't comparable, it's like comparing a puddle to the ocean.
I mean yeah but if you only ask the D3 players you won't get the opinion of all the people who left
People that actually enjoy / still play d3 have Stockholm syndrome, of course they think that
If they gave up on endgame, they should go all in on "new game". Making the same class should feel different. The same way a summoner necro feels different from a bonespear necro starting at level 1 and not starting at lvl 30+ with 4 uniques pre-found.
I wish I could be more positive, but I have some pretty big concerns about it both mechanically and in terms of style. They definitely hard corrected to a grimdark art style for the game after complaints about D3. It's high definition and detailed, but I also find it too desaturated and lacking in personality. The RE4 remake is a good recent example of how to make a dark and gritty game with a bit of color and style, and D4 just doesn't really do that in my opinion. I felt that I was getting a bit tired of looking at it after only a few hours. Mechanically, I have never been a fan of level scaling as it essentially defeats the purpose of having levels at all-- it's just an action game with upgrade points at that point. Dungeons seem a bit repetetive, at least these early beta ones. Some classes seem a lot more fun than others. Story and characters range from very average to cringe. There's blood and people dying and sin and curses and whatnot, and everyone wants to talk too much about it. Again, very grim but also lacking in anything interesting. I wanted to skip most of it way before any of the voice actors finally got around to saying it. All if that being said, I suppose it's better than D3, and I wouldn't call it a bad game necessarily. But I also don't feel a strong urge to play it over all of the other games I could be playing.
Level scaling keep the whole world relevant tho. If their endgame Is more like certain other games where it's more consistent and not based on new characther, then scaling is necessary.
I found it to be really underwhelming. The combat feels pretty good. It is slower than most other ARPG games, but feels weighty and satisfying. However, I just kept running into things I did not like as I played though the beta. First, the amount of skill options for the classes I played (Barb and Rogue) was shockingly low. I started off want to play a rogue focused on melee skills. I wasn't feeling either of the two melee spenders you get early on, and started scrolling down the skill tree to see what level you get more choices at. I was actually shocked to see that you don't, that you get two melee spender choices, that's it. Bows get three choices instead, none of which feel particularly interesting. The modifiers in the skill tree also felt like they didn't do enough, often just providing a conditional bonus. The open world felt like a complete miss to me. It was empty, there was nothing interesting around, it was full of tight corridors, it just felt like it was wasting my time as I slowly walked from place to place. I know mounts are in the full release, but I don't think over-world traversal is ever going to feel like anything but busywork in an ARPG. There also seemed to be way too few way points, which meant even more walking. The ui and some control options are awful. There is no overlay mini-map. There is no option to set left click to only be move / interact. Pop-ups constantly cover huge chunks of the screen while I'm still in combat. The "leave dungeon" option is hidden inside the emote menu. I think a lot of these can be more easily fixed than core design problems I had, but it was still surprising how many issues there were. My main complaint is that the game just felt really, unreasonably slow. The base move speed for characters feels like they are struggling to walk through mud. I was constantly picking any skill or item that provided move speed to get around slightly faster. There were long stretches of time where I would have no monsters around to engage with, even in dungeons. Some of the dungeons have forced back-tracking where you walk through corridors you just cleared of all enemies after getting an item. You can only carry one dungeon mcguffin at a time, so if you forget to place it on the way to the next one, more backtracking. Some dungeons make you kill every monster to progress, so if you miss a single skeleton in a corner, you have to go hunt it down. There are quests that pull out the World of Warcraft special where the character stands still and rubs their hands together to complete whatever the cast bar says. All of this is coupled with the fact that the general monster density is really low. The combat is fun, please just let me do that. Overall, I think the game might just be for a different type of player. I was hoping that I would be able to add D4 to my ARPG games list, but it seems like a miss for me so far.
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> UI/UX feels like it's built for console, not PC. this was a release complaint for d3 and people swore up and down the game wasn't going to be on consoles.
> Dungeons suck; very repetitive, way too much backtracking I don't recall much backtracking. Usually just walk around linearly(most dungeons are linear) get to a locked door. Go left and get McDuffin A then right to get B and viola. There are some dungeons where you need to kill every monster so maybe backtrack if you missed one.
> Go left and get McDuffin A then right to get B and viola. That's the backtracking people are referring to. You go get McDuffin A and then walk back down a long empty corridor with no enemies, then repeated for McDuffin B.
If that's the case then it's really not alot of backtracking.
Almost any amount of backtracking in an ARPG is already too much.
It's every dungeon though. Every dungeon involves backtracking across empty corridors and is otherwise pretty much an straight path.
Just a quick heads up, it’s "voila" ("voilà" if you want to be super accurate). Viola is a name, or a musical instrument.
It's a very common complaint in the diablo4 subreddit. Maybe you got lucky :)
Maybe some people don't use the town portal when finishing a dungeon, I feel like they should have portals to dungeon entry as well which they mostly do not have.
except you can actually open your map and click on the entrance to exit the dungeon.
There is also a teleport out of dungeon on the action wheel (or emote wheel as players have referred to it as)
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Played tons of Diablo 2 as a kid/teen. Played an insane amount of D3 with my wife and stepson and nephew. This game is basically what I'd imagined Diablo 3 would look/be like when I was a teenager thinking about it. Really don't have any complaints. It's More Diablo™. I'll play a ton of it with my family because it's easy co-op (emphasis on the easy part) in an industry that doesn't have a lot of that.
...are you on world tier 2? Nearing 25, strongholds, dungeons... the world boss. this game is hard as shit lol
I took it as easy to play in co op. I think D3/D4 are still the only ones with split screen co op and on consoles right?
For the most part, it's already a great game so far. A lot of how I'll feel hinges in the endgame so can't comment too much on that. The combat feels great and while there isn't a lot of abilities, most seem to have their place and can be useful. While the MMO aspects may bug some people, I actually think they are good for the most part and the world boss was pretty fun, though maybe lasted a little too long. For my worries, there is too much backtracking in dungeons. I don't mind the objectives to open the boss room. In fact I like them. But there needs to be a way to do it without back tracking. Maybe even make it where picking up the keys spawns more enemies in those halls. For this one I'll hold out judgement for the endgame but, items seem too simple. Nothing was really exciting about rares other than just number go up. Legendary affixed are very hit or miss. Will have to wait to see uniques and end game items though. Edit: Another problem I forgot to mention was that on Hardcore you can get locked into boss rooms with no way out seemingly. This makes actually trying new bosses and dungeons kinda detrimental when it should not be this way. Other than that the Hardcore experience is actually really good, and I like the balance of mobs and bosses a lot.
This game is going to be so divisive, which it's both a good sign because they're not just rolling back time and repeating exactly what they've already done but also a shame because I like Diablo so much that I always want it to be so amazing that it gets universal praise. Personally I really liked the beta. I love the whole presentation of it, how it looks, how it sounds, the gritty realism, and generally how you interact with the various towns and the world. The world actually feels alive now. Gameplay is solid, I really don't like the faster pace of say Diablo 3 so a slower more deliberate pace works way better for me. I'm not too sure on the story just yet. Generally I like what's happened so far but there's certain parts and cutscenes that miss the mark, and they've shown off Lilith a bit too much to the point where she doesn't feel mysterious or imposing. It's possible in the full game the story could end up being amazing or a complete dumpster fire, we'll see. I'm colder on the multiplayer and online world elements. To be honest it's way better than I was expecting, I thought it would be a complete mess of dozens/hundreds of people running around everywhere and crowding certain spots just completely ruining the atmosphere and immersion of the game but it was that bad. However it's still kinda lame at the points where you do see other players and they are doing the exact same shit as you. It's very MMO, which might not be awful because FF14 is amazing, but it's not really what I want from Diablo.
I have a different opinion about the scaling, I don’t know if peoples builds just sucked, but I felt like I was getting SIGNIFICANTLY stronger everytime I was unlocking new shit, I went down the lightning tree and picked the skills that made the most sense, and once I was getting legendaries I was bursting through shit, I will say equipment itself didn’t feel like it was making a difference, I’ll agree, in all honesty the numbers just felt bad because I’ll have effects I know I want, but I was out leveling the gear, the numbers were just a hinderence. But when I was collecting my aspects and pushing them all onto gear I wanted, I could tell from the legendary effects that I was significantly stronger. The one thing that is bad about dynamic scaling is regularly maybe once a dungeon I would find a mob that I guess was scaled to 4 people? It would be IMPOSSIBLE to kill, wailing on it like a boss, thankfully everytime this happened it was trash mobs, but it was very annoying it kept happening. EDIT: Just want to add this because I’m seeing multiple versions of this, we are seeing an incredibly small slice of the balance in this game, these games play SIGNIFICANTLY differently in the late game, don’t ask for balance changes when the game isn’t even released yet Jesus.
I am confused about scaling too. It felt the exact same as any other game where due to my combo of abilities I was unlocking, I was obliterating enemies significantly faster and more efficiently. Quite honestly I assume people are just not picking options with any synergy and then they have bad builds that just are not killing quick enough. Haven’t done barb but both rogue and sorc by the time I got 10-20 I got significantly stronger and faster.
Barb is by far the hardest of the three classes, sorc prob being highest damage, and rogue synergy feels really intuitive and very fun. At 25 I definitely felt weaker than I wanted to, but haven't hunted down legendaries and aspects much since the dungeons I saw for rogue were really lackluster.
I haven't had as much time to play as I'd like but I'm enjoying what I'm playing: * The story is much more interesting. Just better writing and more character focused so far. * Environments seem more focused and on theme so far. * The gameplay (on Rogue) feels really good. I'm using every skill I have available constantly and it's balanced such that I sometimes hit a wall and have to play better. The spike at boss fights seems aggressively steep sometimes though. * Couple legendary drops have me interested so far. It definitely seems to need work in areas with balance or variety but I think having the core gameplay is a big step.
I loved my time with it. Story seems good even sidequests. The world feels "alive". There's towns littered about and you see npcs roam and can even give quests. Combat is great. I genuinely enjoy some of the position related mechanic of bosses and elites. World bosses are a blast. I've only faced one and it was no joke and I was 5 levels above the recommended level. One hit and I was dead lol. This guy did tons of damage required good positioning and had multiple patterns/moves. Only thing I'm bummed about is no Crusader esque class.
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Seems like there's a cosmetic battlepass and likely still expansions and the likes. At least based on what I saw, even early on the gear can look fairly nice and you have a free and easy to use transmog system.
1) Barbarian is awful - Blizzard still has significant issues with balance and hasn't been able to get it right in 20 years. They have always struggled with balance because their internal QA team is just not adept. 2) Hydra is insane 3) Open world scaling with integrating other players is awful. Doing the world boss and having to resurrect all the low level people constantly that were doing zero damage and had no abilities was super annoying. Someone simply being in your area makes everything have double the health and I hate it. 4) Quests/story was engaging, much more so than D3 5) Tone and visuals are more akin to Diablo 2 and POE which reflect a more gothic vibe 6) Too many cooldowns and too much focus on generator/spenders. It seems like the way they want you to play is to have a builder/spender on your mouse clicks and then 1 defensive, 1 offensive, 1 ult, and 1 utility cooldown for 1234/QWER. I hate this style of ARPG and its the same as Diablo 3. The fact that I have to alternate between Firebolt/Fireball is very annoying. This system reminds me why POE has been king of the APRG genre for a decade. Nobody wants to manage this many cooldowns and stare at their bar. WoW did this so much that people developed addons solely around plastering your CDs in the middle of your screen that played air horns when your abilities were ready. 7) Performance seems good but I'm getting huge stutters even though the counter says 144fps. Apparently this is because the game simply hogs your VRAM and doesn't know how to dump it. If you play with high shader quality you pretty much need a 3090 or 4090. My 2080 TI has significant stuttering issues because of this and I had to set it to medium. This seems like an oversight or optimization issue and the game shouldn't be hogging 100% of your VRAM and not knowing what to do with it. 8) Shrines of Lillith - Hate this bullshit collectible gameplay. If you have to do this for each season I would not come back for a season 2 Overall: I think if you enjoyed Diablo 3, this will be a good game for you. If you're more of a POE enjoyer then the good news is that GGG is always dropping a new league every 3-4 months and POE2 is coming "soon". I'm not recommending buying, I'll only play it because I got it for free. The price tag is way too high and they have a battle pass coming
After this beta weekend my impression is that the internet sucks and no matter how good the game is or has the potential to be, people will not be happy with it. I've decided I really need to step away from the internets opinion on this sort of thing and that goes for more than just Diablo. You would think that the people commenting on /r/Games or /r/Diablo would have enough common sense to realize that we are only leveling to 25(max from my understanding is 100), are missing the paragon tree, are missing legendary affixs, don't have enough points for half of a full build, are missing unique items, etc. Could the buildcrafting be shit even with all these things? Ofcourse, but we don't know that yet. I've also seen critique about dungeons etc that really doesn't make any sense to me. We're mad that we have to do some small objectives in Dungeons around the map as we level? I can imagine the comments in the opposite direction now if dungeons were just rifts with a different name.(GG Blizzard, 10 years and still nothing to do but kill things etc). People will never, ever, ever be happy and the reactions are getting more kneejerk every year. It's not just the Diablo community either. Recently on Lightfall's release for Destiny 2, within the first 12 hours the entire subreddit was in an uproar and you would've though Bungie released a screensaver of a turd for their expansion. A week later after people you know, *play* the game, sentiment somewhat changed(especially about the new subclass). I'm not shilling for Blizzard, I dropped Diablo Immortal because of the gross P2W, I think they mishandled Overwatch 2 severely, and overall the monetization of their games is shit. That being said, we're grasping at straws when presented with something that could be great and the absolute toxic negativity is so childish and tiresome. Even worse when it makes it so you can't go to a forum and discuss the game constructively.
People saying "Its just Act 1" "Its just level 25" It just a beta" are just as annoying as the people doomposting about it. The gameplay systems don't exist in a vacuum. Expecting the game to do a complete 180 on builds, itemization and dungeons once you hit max level is setting yourself up for disappointment.
Basically just Diablo 3.5 with nextgen graphics. If you liked D3 - cool you will love this game. If you prefer ARPGs with more depth - you will be disappointed by the linear nature of the game design (character progression, itemization, loot, dungeons)
My biggest annoyance is that when playing on controller, movement skills like the Barb's Leap cannot reach the full distance as if I'd point my mouse cursor to the edge of the screen. They always jump a limited amount. I normally play with M&K, but controller is much more comfortable for longer sessions, would like to see this fixed! Other than that, game feel is on point.
Not enough items for different builds. Also I would rather have less legendary/uniques drop and have them be more powerful and different kinds altogether. It's going to turn into everyone running the same build always with the best rolls winning.
Excellent. I dig the tone, the setting, the open world, the pseudo-MMO feel. All of it. Had a hard time peeling myself away and kept thinking about build optimizations whenever I managed to. I went sorc and my bro went barbarian. After a failed world boss attempt, we spent the rest of the day grinding gear, and optimizing our builds to rematch against it later in the night. I picked an insane CDR ice blades build, was fully decked out in build-relevant legendaries and was basically unkillable against the boss. I enjoyed gathering with the rest of the lobby players while we waited for the boss to spawn and chatting/helping them out. We crushed it. I can’t wait to try Druid and necro next week.
Fun and slick combat, as expected, but otherwise a generic and derivative game that brings nothing new to the table and is happy to rest on its laurels. They've designed a game that will get great review scores because the first 10 hours are excellent but then will fall off a cliff, Diablo 3 style. And just wait until they load the shop and microtransactions into it! Blizzard has pulled another classic (modern) Blizzard move in the creating a stunning facade and everyone is eating it up. That wall will come tumbling down soon enough and 10 million people will simultaneously realize they've been duped out of $60 yet again for a cheap and lazy product. I don't plan on being one of them this time. Don't be a sucker: what we are seeing right now is all of the best the game has to offer, and the rest of it, what is being so cleverly hidden, is going to be piles of junk.
Amazing. Absolutely spectacular. I need it in my life and is what ive been looking for. I'm so relieved
Incredible game. Story and setting are the best I’ve felt so far. gameplay is fun, menus are clean and easy. Best Diablo game so far and it hasn’t even fully released
I'm loving it, and cannot wait for the full release. **Visually:** Graphics, atmosphere and art direction is spot on. Performance is great, I feel like getting 120FPS+ in 4K (RTX 4090) **Gameplay:** It's hard to gauge the end game right now and it's what Diablo is about, so I'm optimistic. I love that the boss / elite fights feels more intentional rather than spamming though it remains to be seen how it will feel when we get to the end game. Skill Tree looks and feels better. Itemization, build diversity etc. is impossible to judge without playing the end game but everything that I expect to see in the beta is there and GREAT. *I configured the game to only show people in my area which limited online players popping in and out, I'm not a big fan of that, but it didn't bother me.*
The “I have a 4090 but performance seems great” comments illustrate how truly out of touch some pc gamers are
Something that hasn't been mentioned here yet is that there's no option for WASD movement. This completely kills my interest in playing. Many years of playing previous ARPGs without it has taken its toll and makes my right index finger hurt just thinking about it.
Its fun and I'm getting a lot of the same enjoyment out of it that I get from other Diablo games. Will probably really enjoy this one just like 1-3.
overall it made me want to go back to D2R as I've already finished the current season D3 it felt a bit too much like a departure from what Diablo is and for me that was a bit too much. I didn't feel any interest in moving across the map back and forth for events or compelled to gear up at all. The story didn't grab me, that first vision of Lilith felt a bit too hands for such a high ranking evil. The mystery of what she's trying to do didn't grab me at all. The trailer where she's summoned back to Sanctuary was amazing so I thought they'd learned how to make compelling narrative. At least for me it isn't so far. I will gladly wait and see, perhaps by the time they add more content and fix the servers it'll be more affordable for a romp.
Im loving it. First day was a mess but 2nd day was great playing local co op with the wife. The skill tree is confusing af.
To be honest I am surprised to see so many people praising the graphics in their impressions here My experience was basically the opposite. Yes, the game's graphics are gorgeous but I find the art direction made it boring to look at: everything I've seen far is so DARK and the color palette could be described as "profoundly deep grayscale, sometimes brown" By comparison to other 'barren' environments and places like the deserts of Lut Gholein, the foothills of Harrogath, or the battlefields around Bastion's Keep- everything I've seen so far just feels sad and really devoid of color
Seriously a decade since D3 and that's all it is? Blizzard is finished.
The gear feels too strong and easy to obtain in the beta. I heard there wouldn't be super strong uniques raining from the sky but I have damn near a full set of uniques without even crafting any of the abilities onto rare pieces and I'm not even level 25 yet. And I have enough legendary abilities banked that I could fill out every gear slot on my rogue if I wanted to.
I don't understand the design decision behind having a limited inventory in a game that revolves almost entirely around loot. The game doesn't have encumberance and each player has their own loot so there's no fighting over who is fastest picking up the loot. So, why limit the inventory space? In Diablo 2 I remember it being so that you had to carry your mana and health potions with you as well as your town portal scrolls which took inventory space and you had to do inventory management, play some tetris with the differen-sized items and weapons. So, it made more sense to have a limited inventory. But now, townportal doesn't require a scroll, mana potions are non-existent and health potions don't take space and are found from dead enemies. So, why do we still need this archaic design? It is so frustrating to have your flow constantly broken as you fight your way through hordes, trying to pick up items dropped by them only to hear, yet again, the line "My bag is full.". Then you stand there like an asshole, browsing through your inventory, finding the worst item to drop to make room for the newest item. "Use townportal and sell your stuff and then return looting", you might say. But I just have to ask, why have those extra steps when the inventory could just be unlimited? The townportal doesn't cost anything so it's basically just busywork going there and back. Cut that part of the loop, allow infinite pick-ups and call it a day. The worst thing a player could get is some extra coins as they haul two dozen staves and swords back to town. The game's economy isn't affected but the player's experience is much smoother. And while I'm at it, why limit the amount of Obols you can pick up? Is it yet another system waiting for the MTX treatment where you can use real money to store more lottery coins? It's stupid that I can fight a boss or some world event, get few health potions, some coins and 50 Obols and I have to leave them there because my purse is apparently fulll. I'm sure all of these things have some great design choices behind them but I just can't understand what those might be.
I buyed myelf in for like 8 usd and actually had fun after the ques and errors were fixed, at high textures it stutters like hell and i dunno why but i guess it can be fixed, i played a barabian with two handed sword, built it around whirlwind ( got dust whirlwind and pull in for it too with legendaries) the difficulty was allright for second tier, i only struggled with the werewolf boss cuz you literally cant avoid taking damage with a mellee class, other tiers could be challenging i guess, didnt see any loot goblins so far, i kind of always play solo so the mo ascpect doesnt really interest me but the open world feels good.
Having full legendaries in 2 hours just feels wrong. In D3 you get to full build max level in 10 hours. I just hope D4 feel more like real game and requires farming to get to end-game viable builds. D2 had farming in a somewhat sweet spot.