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Now that the Diablo 4 beta is concluded, we have seen a handful of emotionally charged verdicts and initial impressions. While most are generally positive, there have been valid critiques and fair and accurate arguments, many of which I also generally agree with.
As a long time Diablo 2 player who candidly never enjoyed Diablo 3, I approached this beta with a bit of healthy skepticism while attempting to keep an open mind. And I must say, I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed the initial Diablo 4 experience.
Combat & Leveling
Let’s first begin with combat and leveling specific mechanics.
Overall, I loved the combat mechanics. The movements felt crisp and very intuitive. Fighting and slaying demons was very satisfying, especially in close quarter hand-to-hand combat. Decapitating heads or straight up exploding Sanctuary, which added to the goriness of the kills and Diablo 4 Gold.
However, one of the significant components holding the combat experience back was the lack of key bindings for expanding slot skills. This was dissatisfying and required you to make tough choices, shifting bindings in and out as needed.
Overall, while playing on World Tier 2 Veteran leveling was fairly straightforward, but it certainly didn’t come without its issues, mainly in the form of power scaling.
Something Kripp and others have called out is the core mechanic of power leveling in Diablo 4. That is, the monster scale with your character level. This ultimately means that you are weaker as you level up until you acquire significantly improved items, craft upgrades or finally unlock more powerful skills in the talent tree.
And, if you want to obtain such buffs, you need to buy Diablo 4 Gold a lot in advance. While you may be gaining 10% enhanced physical or elemental damage per level, it consistently seemed that monsters were exponentially outpacing you until you had enough of a force multiplier to get back to parody.
Now, power scaling is definitely a core DNA and mechanic to Diablo 4. So, I doubt we’re going to really see many tweaks and adjustments or any fine tuning there. It just really means that you’ll have to be very gritty and patient and persistent in your grind and progression as we approach GA in June.
User Interface
Now that we’ve touched on combat and leveling mechanics, what did I actually think about the user interface?
For the most part, the UI generally mirrors Diablo 3 and that it is simple. However, it did feel rough overall and needed some fine tuning. While I appreciate a large scaled map, completely overtaking the screen and not being able to see your character or anything underneath was undoubtedly not ideal.
Within the world map itself, it felt hard to identify and decipher your tracking of quests outside of setting a pin location, which was a nice touch. This includes an additional click required to access your renowned rewards, forcing you to open your map versus bound to a hotkey direct from the gameplay experience.
Item affixes required scrolling, which was also a pain. And getting to your character’s advanced stats took unnecessary clicks, not to mention it defaulted to your herbs.
Itemization
On the topic of affixes, let’s talk a little about itemization and, more specifically, the Occultus and The Purveyor of Curiosities.
One of my favorite experiences from beta was interacting with the Occultist and Purveyor of Curiosities. The ability to re-roll affixes via enchantment and imprinting and extracting legendary aspects is a positive gameplay experience. And it will massively boost your survivability and damage.
Being able to source specific three stat rare Diablo 4 items that can be upgraded into legendaries creates a dynamic and diverse item framework. A quick call out is at the Codex of Power, which you can acquire by completing Dungeons also unlocks beneficial aspects.
One of the best experiences from Diablo 2 was gambling and the Purveyor of Curiosities is your one-stop shop in Diablo 4. This elevates the importance of a specific rare currency called Obols, which is required for vendoring magic, rare, or legendary items. Obols are a special reward you receive for completing special events. So, this becomes a critical component of the Diablo 4 rinse and repeat experience.
Now with any positive experiences and itemization, there of course are going to be some drawbacks. And for me, that was in the form of what I’m classifying as item power dilution. And this really has to do with the power scaling mechanics of the commensurate nature of monsters scaling with your character.
What this is translating to is that as you are getting excited about these finds, going to the Purveyor and gambling and imprinting these aspects and upgrading your rares with Diablo 4 Gold for sale, it’s certainly giving you that item power at the moment.
But as you start to gain those one, two, three, four, and five levels upwards and if you are not then rinse and repeating and re-upgrading your item power or then sourcing new items from RNG drops, you effectively are going to see a point of degradation and dilution, because that item powers effectively no longer as strong as it used to be previous on that lagging indicator to those levels.
And so this is part of those kinds of tricky mechanics of the power scaling and the force multiplier in between. I don’t think we’re going to see much of that change. It is what it is. But it is a key component that we have to call out and a part of critical feedback.
Open World
Now let’s talk a little about the implementation of the MMO into an ARPG style game.
Obviously, this is a bit unique and dynamic and a bit unconventional. But, I do think that they implemented this the right way, which allows us to basically not have to follow the yellow brick road, which essentially was Diablo 2 and Diablo 3.
And for those that don’t know, you actually won’t have to start in Act 1 in Fractured Peaks where we were in beta. You actually can basically, in a non-linear fashion, go across any act or sequencing that you want. So, this is personally something that I really enjoyed in beta and something that I’m also excited about. So, let’s unpack this a little further.
Diablo 4 delivered a world that is not only very interactive but inviting and inclusive to Co-op and multiplayer experiences. Whether it was swarming Ashava, the first World Boss, or constantly being stimulated with stashes, chests, rock piles and herbs, there were plenty on roadsides to keep players engaged.
One thing we need to talk about is how impressive the overall depth of the open world was relating to Graphics. Considering this was an unoptimized beta, it delivered.
One criticism I did have concerns the camera’s angle and zoom. Unless you were playing on Ultra Wide, you lost more pixel width than Diablo 2 Resurrected. So, I would have liked to see secondary zoom out options to give a better line of sight.
Even though the open world style gameplay was positive, it did have an interesting challenge, once again having to do with level and power scaling specific to Co-op. Kripp and others have touched on level disparity where monsters in the area are easier for lower-level players than higher-level players in the same place.
To put another pin in this, many of us likely experience multiplayer situations where a dramatically lower level character seems to be one-shotting monsters quickly, where it may have taken you multiple attempts with better gear and more robust overall DPS.
Closing Thoughts
At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves that in this beta, we literally only saw level 25, which was probably only 20% of the game.
While I understand there were some emotionally charged frustrations, some of them justifiably so, people were really annoyed by the queue and all the disconnects.
This was an unoptimized beta. These are beta experiences that are somewhat intended to happen. And of course, it was frustrating for me. I was right there with you in solidarity.
But honestly, trying to look at this a little objectively, it was a very impressive game for level 25 only seeing Act 1 of Fractured Peaks, not really having any Paragon Board experience and any uniques implemented into the game.
I think this is a very positive takeaway. I think it was very encouraging. We have a couple months of downtime ahead of general release in June. So, the best thing we can do is obviously stay positive and optimistic that Blizzard and the developer team are going to implement as much of our manage up feedback as possible ahead of the June release.
