Diablo IV [PC/PS4/PS5/XB1/XS]

[fuse]

Some ten years after D3, we finally get D4.



Rewind a few months and I played quite a lot of it during the beta weekend, and had a pretty good time levelling a Necromancer; letting my summoned monsters do their thing while I was a bit more selective about my terms of engagement. There's some good scene setting and cinematics, impressively detailed locales to poke about in, and there's a lot of really smart stuff going on behind the scenes to balance things out when you play with friends. That you can very easily run a cross-platform party, and that each player's game shows mobs at levels appropriate to their character and then scales the damage you're all doing so everyone's on an even field feels like such a surprising, luxurious bit of design that just allows you to just play how you'd like to and takes all of the obstacles out of the way.

With the full retail game being out now, my view on things is perhaps not quite so rosy. The always-online requirement is a bit more of a bottleneck now the whole world is trying to play it, and while I don't even begin to understand what they're for or how exploitative they are, microtransactions are now very prominently displayed in the game's menus. Being prompted to re-run the first act prompted me to try out a different class, and this time I haven't been quite so successful with the game's labyrinthian skill tree, almost re-creating this post I've now found on PC Gamer in every way and giving myself an equally dull and ineffective build to work with. I'll have a respec, or maybe roll another new class entirely, and hopefully things will pick back up.

Anyone else playing?

[Neon Ignition]

I'm not but I have had my eye on it, I haven't played the series before but this has looked good however given it's a time sink and requires online so isn't practical to work on whilst on the go I've been waiting and following reactions online. I'm mostly curious about how it seems as fans get on as I've read about how some are finding the sense progression hindered by the way enemies and loot scale with the player.

[Atticus]

I'm a casual fan and I'm having a great time with it. Love the always online set-up ... gives it a Destiny vibe of a bustling hub along with events you can stumble upon out in the fields.

Didn't play the Beta so it's all new. I'm about lvl20 with a Barbarian. The thrill of handling mobs and smashing foes is great fun. Super addictive.

[fuse]

Round about level 30 or so now, finally having done just about everything I did in the beta, but still harbouring some conflicting feelings about this.

The fact that nearly *everything* balances to your level makes it very difficult to prioritise what you should be doing, where you should be going, also not helped by quests for multiple acts being available right at the start. My bigger issue though is that while there's lots of improvements coming into this game specifically, more than anything it just feels like it's an upgrade in terms of volume, and I'm finding it a little overwhelming as a result. Enemies spawn constantly at almost all times - wave after wave of the bastards - every step of everywhere you go, not to mention all of the things you see out and about that want clicking on, and the sheer volume of loot this all generates is actually pretty overwhelming. Even with seems an incredibly generous inventory, it fills so fast, and particularly once you start noticing your first few instances of an 'item power level' misadvising you, you find myself constantly having to go through things one by one to see whether you should switch. I don't even consider myself someone that gets too bogged down in games by stats / gear, but the old dig about it being a playable spreadsheet has never felt more appropriate.

Also had a really crap experience earlier, having wandered off into the middle of nowhere and eventually coming across a stronghold. It was no small effort clearing the whole place out, but the last enemy I needed to beat was behind a locked door, and the elite mob who had the key had managed to die to an attack with pushback, meaning the key (and a rare mace) was dropped somewhere my character couldn't reach. Had to restart the game, at which point of course everything respawns in the stronghold and I have to spend 15 minutes doing it again. To add insult to injury, the final boss after that other last enemy turned into a dull 15-minute slog; a real war of attrition where I fell at the last hurdle. I just walked off - the closest I have come to quitting a game in anger in a very long time.

Also the always online / can't pause thing is not sitting brilliantly with me either.

[fuse]

So here's me moaning about this in the thread some more, however take this with a grain of salt as the reality is that I got sucked in HARD and have basically spent the entire weekend playing this. I've just finished it now, and while I'm happy enough with how the story ended up I do think that the campaign does drag a fair bit in a few places. In terms of the game itself, I really feel like when you make the world this big, the cracks of procedural are going to show, and yeah, it really shows - go into thing, break 3 things, go through the sealed area, survive a minute's wave of elites, clean up, carry on, fight the boss - hey look, I could design these! Exploring the overground is fine and dandy, but the 20+ dungeons in each continent are a daunting prospect and only really something I can feel myself picking and choosing at them if there's a specific quest line or an aspect I'm wanting to spec to.

Another feeling I can't shake is that there's a lot of things that the game does not handle well in its tutorials. Particularly: the six skill limit never goes away - this is particularly noteworthy given the complexity of the tree, and is a huge, huge factor in how you should handle it. Also, some of the vendors suddenly become a lot more useful later on. In particular, learning about extracting aspects was a total revelation, and feels like something that you probably want to be pointed towards once you start getting legendary items that make use of it, so you aren't just salvaging that gear for transmogs like some dope was.

Don't remember the exact point, but the difficulty curve flattened out for me big time when I started getting better gear, speccing to specific aspects, going back and taking redundant points out of my skill assignment, and so on. Barely touched a health potion throughout the last hour or so of the game despite having more of them available than ever before, so I feel like the next hop and step into nightmare might be the best thing for me. Or I might roll a new class? Who knows.

(I should really stop playing this so I don't get too left behind in the great SF6 stakes)

[fuse]

Haven't touched this for about a week now, but seems it was hit with a pretty significant DDoS over the weekend making the game totally unplayable - Eurogamer story on it is here. I already had my beef with the online requirement (I don't want to see other PCs running about all the time, not being able to pause in a game that likes respawning enemies all the time sucks, busy times requiring queueing...), but that you can't play the game at all in these moments is really crummy.

The other thing I've learned (a little) about are the upcoming "seasons" of content - explained on Polygon over here - which require you to start new characters each time. Monetisation is only half of the issue here in my mind - that they expect you to have finished the game and be ready to do it all again within a couple of months of launch is setting a pretty high bar.

Not completely writing it off, but these two little nuggets in conjunction with one another might mean my time with the game is already mostly up.

[eastyy]

I got the game at a discount I echo the sentiments here only at level 37 and i feel the skill tree is really really limited like Corpse explosion you can upgrade the main skill a few times but the extra points you can add to change the properties are very boring, if you compare to the upcoming Last Epoch which while having a limited amount of skills you can really change them.