There was a beta for Diablo 4 this past weekend. It was limited to Act 1, with player level capped at 25, and only three of the five classes were playable (Barbarian, Rogue, Sorceress). A second beta next weekend will add the Druid and Necromancer into the mix. Progress doesn't carry to the full release, for what that's worth.

I was very interested to give it a shot, since I've sunk a metric crap-ton of hours into past entries. I love brainlessly hittin' me some loot piñatas, and Diablo is the basically the platonic ideal of a podcast game.

After spending most of the weekend playing it, I've come away pretty pleased. It ain't a flawless game, but it sure is more Diablo. Blizzard still seems to know how to make a compelling one of those, it's still got that certain je ne sais quoi. One could argue that it seems a little safe, but there's this "don't fix it if it ain't broken" thing that comes to mind. Pretty sure I'm going to sink 1,000+ hours into this one just like I did for Diablo 2 and Diablo 3.

Maybe it's easiest to start with some flaws:

• Boy is this game grimdark. It feels like a reaction to the outcry against Diablo 3's more colorful design... which was always enormously stupid. At best this makes the game look a little bland, at worst it actually makes it hard to "read"; e.g., it's hard to tell which environmental objects are interactable and which aren't.
  
  
• The current UI isn't always awesome. E.g., the new skill point system can be respeced for free at any time, but since later tiers of skills require a certain amount of points invested in previous tiers of skills, respecing an early "basic" attack skill often requires taking points out of later tiers to do so (hopefully this be mostly a non-issue with endgame builds). There's also a maze of menus for all sorts of stuff, some of which I never even figured out how to find again beyond when the game prompted me to open them.
  
  
• This is beta-specific, but the overworld seems very much designed with a mount in mind, because it can really take a while to hoof it out to objectives without one (see what I did there?). Odd choice for them to not give you a mount for the beta, especially since mounts are a new thing for a Diablo game, and I'm sure people were interested to try them.
  
  
• There were definitely technical issues, but I assume those will get sorted out eventually. The game crashed my computer once, and I experienced somewhat frequent rubber-banding.

But all of that is fairly minor stuff in the scheme of things.

I played a fair bit of all three available classes, if nothing else to see which one I wanted to start with when the full release happens. They all seem fun, and I didn't really settle on one. The Sorceress was the first I tried and has great area control, but her basic attacks seem to be the weakest of the three characters and she runs low on mana pretty fast. The Rogue has good single-target damage output--at least the way I spec'ed mine--and is probably the class I had the easiest time with overall. I didn't expect to like the Barb much, I've never been much of a Barb player, but I ended up liking how different he felt due to having much stronger basic attacks--undoubtedly because his resource is built from basic attacks and drains away rather than starting full and recharging back. But I'm very interested to give the Necro and Druid a shot, hopefully one of them will really jump out at me as the character I want to main.

It wasn't all a cakewalk, even on world tier 2. There was a vampire sorcerer boss guarding a castle that I actually never beat. I do know that I need to be using the dodge button more; IIRC this wasn't in the PC version of Diablo 3 but was added for the console versions. Now it seems like a core mechanic of the boss fights, and I haven't found a keyboard layout I'm comfortable with yet. I'm sure I'll figure something out when the full release happens. These days I almost always play with a gamepad, but I'm doing keyboard and mouse because, well... it's friggin' Diablo. I've always played these games with keyboard and mouse, and if nothing else it makes it easier to precisely place those ranged area attacks. But I should probably test it out with a controller just to see how it feels.

I had heard that they were designing this game so that equipment sets either weren't a thing at all anymore, or were much de-emphasized; in the latter years of Diablo 3, set equipment was the only stuff that actually mattered. This game seems to instead have a mechanic that lets you remove "legendary" effects from equipment and add them onto other pieces, not unlike unsocketing and adding gems. I guess we'll see how that goes, impossible to judge the end-game until I've actually played some of it. But from reading the descriptions of world tiers, it's not clear that "set" items even exist in this game at all.

Interesting that the entire game seems to be displayed on that one overworld map--and that it appears to no longer be procedurally generated. The procedural generation is now only for the instanced dungeons, while the overworld is occupied by dozens of other players, MMO-style, who might end up joining you for random world events.

I was amused to see that identifying items now seems to be gone as a concept, though perhaps it will make a return for items that can only drop in world tiers 3 and 4 (unavailable in the beta, since you need to reach level 50/70 to play them).

The new skill system seems interesting; I'm sure I wasn't leveraging it properly, I'll worry about that when the full game comes out. It's definitely much more complicated than Diablo 3's simple "pick six skills, you either have it or you don't." Now you can have up to five points in a skill, and modifiers on items can push it past that. My only general criticism of this system--and really all systems that work like this--is that it appears to add more freedom/choice to builds than it actually does, because one assumes that you'll always max all six of your active skills, and one-pointing a seventh doesn't seem to matter since you can only bind six, as far as I can tell. It looks like the actual choice will be where you spend your points on "passive" buffs on the tree--I didn't even really look at this stuff in the beta, I just wanted to try all the active abilities.

I do wonder if the game will have a way to do loadouts that includes both equipment and a skill tree setup together. If there's one in the game now, I didn't notice it, but then I wasn't really looking. But for endgame, I can see myself having entirely different loadouts for, say, running a dungeon vs. fighting a world boss.

Anyway, I could go on, but... anyone else play this thing and have some thoughts?

So, thoughts:

1. Disappointed that I couldn't play the Druid. That was the one I actually wanted to play since I was hoping to see if there was a melee-focused class other than the Barbarian. But you know, actually good (I am so fucking sick of the Barbarian. And the Necromancer. I don't know why Blizzard has such a hard on for those classes) I ended up playing the sorceress, which seemed decent enough.

2. I'm sort of 50/50 on your point about it being dark. I don't disagree that the graphics can get hard to "read" in spots, but the overall tone of the world and story is so, so much better than Diablo 3. Having a cutscene of Lilith and not having her act like a bad Saturday morning cartoon villain is a massive improvement.

3. Level scaling. Big negative for me. I get why they did it, but I always feel like it's a lazy way out of actually having to balance a game. This is particularly true in a looter like Diablo. What's the point of having all the gear if it's never going to make you feel more powerful? Stupid. I'm hoping some of these regions at least have an upper cap so you can at get some sense that your character has improved.

4. The dungeons are cool in concept but lacking in execution. I particularly dislike a lot of the level layouts, which don't have a lot of easy connections back and forth between points. I definitely ran into more than one instance where the objective was "kill these two things to open the big door" only to guess the wrong way, run into the door first, then have to trek all the way back through a now mostly empty dungeon just to hit X on some random object on the other side of the map and then run back again to the door.

5. The UX is . . . not great. And there are a ton of QoL features that seem to have been stripped out from Diablo 3. For example, there isn't an easy way to get a general sense of gear before you pick it up and you can't mark it as junk that way. For how much crap you are picking up, that's a pretty big miss. I feel like the game would benefit massively from a PoE style loot filter where you can just tell the game to not even show you loot below a certain quality tier or gear that isn't for your class.

6. This is going to be a weird one - but I really wish they'd go back to the system where you didn't know what an item was until you identified it in town. I think moving away from that in Diablo 3 broke part of the core gameplay loop of the series. The first two games were broken into these sort of "expeditions" where you'd head out, load up on gear, and then head back. It added to the sense of anticipation with finding out what gear you got and it also gave you an excuse to go back to town.

One of the problems I was already finding with the open world structure was that I kept needing to wander back to town to pick up quests but didn't really have a reason to do so. The game could do a much better job of parceling that stuff out in the open world so you didn't need to go back to a city just because a new "!" popped up somewhere.

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So, yeah. I don't think it's bad, and it gave me a better feeling that Diablo 3 ever did, but it does feel like there are some design decisions that they need to revisit. I just don't know if they have enough time to do it before the full release. I honestly think this series would be much better off going back in time than trying to reinvent the wheel. A dose of Diablo 1's simplicity would improve the game massively, I think.

In general I'm not a big fan of level scaling either, for the reason you mentioned. I talked about that some about a year ago in the context of feeling powerful in games (here, near the end). But in this kind of loot game, I think it makes sense, and perhaps more to the point, with the more MMO-like open world, it would have been hard to do it any other way.

I mean, say you were in a level 1 area with your new character and a level 80 character wanders over to do a world event with you and wipes the floor with it in two seconds. That wouldn't be fun. In that instance you could dynamically scale the level 80 player down to around the new player's damage output, but then you're back to scaling, with the level 80 player expecting to roflstomp some monsters and instead getting a tough time.

And in endgame you're going to want to be able to play in any region and have it be viable, rather than be stuck farming some particular region because it's the highest-level one. There are other ways to solve that like Grifts, etc. But yeah, I guess this is just what I expected for this particular game and it doesn't really bother me.

Filters that don't show loot feel like a half-step because you could still sell them or break them down for mats, even if it's not a lot. Now, I haven't played PoE for quite a while, so maybe they actually do something like this, I dunno, but for me the perfect solution was actually in the now-defunct Marvel Heroes. At some point that game added a system in which you could filter out drops either of a particular rarity or for a particular gear slot so that you would still see them drop, but then they would almost instantly (half a second later?) be turned into money that went straight to your inventory. A system like that in which you could choose to instantly dissolve low-tier gear into either crafting mats or money would be great for Diablo 4, but if there have been any loot games other than Marvel Heroes that did something like this, I don't know about it.

I know what you mean. Requiring that items be identified did have a purpose. It added anticipation, and there was also a benefit for group play in the sense that it helped prevent players from stopping mid-run to fiddle with their inventory, which sort of forced everyone in the group to stop. Of course Diablo 3 solved this by adding timers to Grifts, but I've never been a fan of timers as a solution to stuff like that.

I'm still not touching Blizzard products.

Path of Exile 2 should be out next year, I'll wait for that. Not that Tencent (no matter how hands-off they are with GGG) is inherently much better.

Well, I've now played the two remaining characters.

I was kind of disappointed in the Druid? Sounded interesting, but just ended up seeming like a very slightly different flavor of Barb. And I was never a huge fan of Barb.

On the other hand, I like the Necro. Will probably be my main when the full release happens (though I certainly plan to play all classes, the Necro will just be my vanguard). Was interested to see that Corpse Explosion requires no resource other than corpses and has no cooldown, so that you can just just chain cast it in big trash mob situations and blow everything up in no time flat. And the having the menagerie was fun, at the end I had a dozen undead dudes following me around and actually doing totally decent damage.

I will say that I wish they allowed you one or two more skills. Having only four in addition to your basic and core skill feels a bit limiting. But I suppose they need to make it gamepad friendly for the folks playing it on console, which would make more skills problematic. It is what it is, I guess.

Fought the world boss for the first time. Can't say I'm a big fan. There were a lot of maxed characters there (including my maxed Necro), and so we were in no danger of actually losing, since the sole win condition seems to be doing enough damage before a timer runs out. That's sort of the problem. I died three or four times in the course of the fight, but when you die, you just spawn right inside the encounter and run back in, so in effect, it barely matters if you die or not aside from the bit of lost damage while you're running back. Since it's all just a big group DPS check, it makes you feel like your contribution doesn't really mean much. Plus, I can't say I love being beholden to timers for when these things spawn. Yet they're worth it to fight for the ridiculous amounts of good loot they drop... I got something like eight legendary items out of it. I just wish there was an equivalent that was a solo venture or something I could do with my own party only... maybe there will be in the full release, I don't know.

Oh, well. Think I'm done with the beta. Now comes the ~2.5 month wait until the real deal, when I can actually keep all my stuff. Back to the RE4 Remake.

Well, I finished the beta in terms of doing all the story missions. I still have to level up my sorcerer character to level 25, before I start over again with a new character. I'm currently at level 21 and did a pyromancy build. My overall impression is a good one. The game is basically Diablo III with added improvements and a more gloomy story and art design. And as someone who actually liked Diablo III a lot, granted I didn't start playing until the ultimate edition came out, this game is right in my wheel house.

I spent lots of hours during Fri and Sat just doing side quest and trying to experience as much as I can during the limited window. I think Lilith is an interesting villain, though I don't think she is the ultimate bad guy in the game like the promotional material makes it seem. I remember Capcom doing the same with Resident Evil 8 by promoting the tall lady before release, and she turned out to be the games first boss fight. I also like that they did another version of the Leaf storyline with the Nayelle character. So Diablo III haters who couldn't stand Leaf because she was "too Anime" will have to suffer through that again.

I will definitively get it, but probably after the price drops. I'm definitely not getting it on day one for reasons some might notice.

I really don't have too many complains about the game. I will say I agree about the level scaling. One of the cool things about Diablo III was the character you picked started out weak, but once you got the right loot and attacks, the character became a killing machine and it felt good. And if you wanted to challenge yourself, there were difficulty modes that made the game brutal but gave huge rewards. Diablo IV also seems to have this option at least. But I can tell its going to be a lot more challenging than III overall.

My wife and I played some of this using couch co-op last night (after individually getting characters through the prologue, an annoying requirement). I thinj I’ll end up buying it when it comes out so we can do more of that, because couch co-op games we both enjoy are few and far between.

For the game itself, boy it sure is a Diablo! Probably won’t make my top 10 for the year but I’ll spend a bunch of time with it regardless.

@av_gamer: Speaking to the difficulty, it does make me think that I never even tried world tier 1, I just put it on 2 and most of the content still seemed easy enough that way. That said, there was that one boss toward that end that kept killing me, head vampire dude in a castle. I can see myself possibly knocking it down to 1 temporarily for the full release if there's some difficult boss blocking my progress, knowing that the real game is the end-game grind anyway, or at least it is for me. It's nice to get to that point when you know you can start to keep your loot and aren't going to simply out-level it after a few hours.

So after playing through the beta, taking a sorceress up to 25 and the other classes up to maybe 10 or so, I think the game feels like about a 3/5 from what I've seen so far. There's the germ of a really good game in there, but it also feels like they would need about another 6-12 months to get it where it needs to be. There are just so many little things that don't work very well. Some of those, like the UX stuff, are probably fixable in the time they have left. Some of the other stuff feels more core to the experience and things that would need a more fundamental re-visit.

* The classes feel super-unbalanced. Melee feels extremely weak next to ranged combat, so the Barb and Druid did not feel at all good to play when compared to my Sorceress. However, she went too far the other way and became so overpowered she was boring. I eventually had the ability to spawn three four-headed Hydras, which, given their negligible mana cost and no cooldown, just meant I would walk into a room, spawn the summon, and kill everything in an area. Rinse and repeat.

* The dungeon design needs a lot of work. Too many instances of the objective being some variation of "find the key" or "kill two monsters" in a dungeon shaped roughly like a cross. The result was a lot of finding one of the keys, then finding the door, then realizing the other key was on the other side of the map, then having to run through a mostly empty dungeon to get there, and then having to run back again. Not fun.

* Not sold on the open world, especially given the level-scaling in place. I was extremely tired of the not-Russia snow hell after just going through it once. I could easily see the world getting very boring, very fast given its size and the seeming lack of interesting things to do, especially if the other zones are as visually disinteresting as the beta area.

One minor thing which might not be that big of a deal to most people, but was notice by me was the lack of personality in the class of characters. This is just a beta and the final game might be different, but one of the things I liked about Diablo III was the different personality in the class you chose. The overall story was the same, but the way each class interacted with the characters and the dialog they spoke was different. They also had their own origin stories and motivations for wanting to stop Diablo, which led to their own cinematic endings if the requirements were met. After maxing out my Sorceress to 25 and clearing the 3 outpost, I started over as a Barbarian and his dialog is the same as the woman Sorceress I cleared the beta with. It would be a shame if this aspect was scaled back in the final game.

@therealturk I agree about the open world. It would be a shame if the whole game takes place in a snowy Russian like setting, when both Diablo II and Diablo III had the game take place is different locations. I have a feeling this will be the case here, because I believe Lilith will be the game's starter villain, but I could be wrong.

@therealturk: I think your criticisms are fair for the beta, but I'm not sure they're going to apply to the rest of the game as much. Hard to tell right now.

Everyone has been talking about class balance and melee feeling weaker, but the devs have said in interviews--and I've heard chatter about the end-game closed beta--that what's strong in the early game isn't the same as what's strong in mid or late game. E.g., the Necro seemed the most powerful to me (took all five characters to 20-25), but apparently trails off in the late game. In any case, Blizzard is always making balance adjustments, and enough people complained about the melee classes seeming weak that I'm sure they're very aware of the perception, and it's gonna end up in a good place. Two and a half months is plenty of time to balance things if need be.

I agree that for now the dungeons aren't great. There can be a lot of backtracking through empty bits, and I'm also not sure why they don't always just have a portal to the entrance at the end like they did for D3 (I know it's in the emote menu thing, but also that doesn't seem to work for story dungeons). We'll see if they can improve that. I know that Nightmare dungeons are a thing at higher world tiers and might make them more interesting? I dunno. Sounds like just random modifiers and nothing else?

As for the world, I myself said that I prefer the brighter colors of D3, and this this seems overly dark and washed out to me. But I'm assuming that the other zones are going to be visually different and not every zone is covered in snow, at least. Also, mounts are a thing. I still think it's bizarre that they didn't let players have mounts to try for the beta since it's a new feature. But I imagine that will help significantly with reaching events and dungeons faster so that there's less relatively dead time walking to places.

Anyway, despite any flaws, based on what I played I imagine I'm going to spend a lot of hours on D4 and enjoy myself doing it.

I tried Rogue on both PC and PS5 (I didn’t even realize you could do so, because I guess I’m not yet used to the wonders of cross platform technology). It very much scratched the part of my brain, that has been quietly itching since I last played Diablo 3 like 5-6 or so years ago. The same part that just allows me to click away at hordes of monster on a weekend, before realizing I just played for 4-5 hours in a single sitting.

I’m not sure if I’ll play it at release (even though it times almost perfectly with my vacation), because I’m interested in maybe giving SF6 a go and I’m definitely going to play Final Fantasy XVI later that month, but it’s pretty likely that I’ll play D4 eventually.

I think I said this in the Nextlander Discord, but Diablo seems like the Platonic Form of a podcast or second-screen game. I'm here to hit the loot pinatas, collect shiny objects, and watch the numbers go up while I watch The West Wing or Deadwood for the dozenth time.

The moment-to-moment action felt great and I had a good time piecing together cohesive builds. Those strengths will hopefully be enough to patch over all the bits and pieces of the game that feel either at odds with each other or questionable in their own right. I've got plenty of big-picture structural issues with the game, from its treatment of respecs to the unnecessary multiplayer component, but if the fundamentals are good enough, history has shown that I can work around that to some degree (as evidence, I present the Borderlands games).

It should be noted that the Diablo IV beta has bricked some 3080ti graphics cards. I don't have anything to add other than that, but maybe beware if you happen to have one and want to play this beta.

@justin258: The beta is over now, but thanks for the info. Good thing I played the beta on PS5, since that's the console I plan to get it for like I did Diablo III.