Minireview after reaching max lvl (25) and end of beta (act finish). Finished it with Barb. Finishing act 1 took me around 12 hours while finishing about 70% of content of that map.
The good:
- itemization is great. I did not play much with base stat stacking but in my theorycrafting you should be able to stack interesting things. In comparison to D2 it is still worse but not by much. While base stat handling is worse than D2 the legendary powers bring it back to "good" level.
- arpg with actual hard combat. Played as barb and there were plenty of times when i had to redo boss or smaller fight. Some outright i couldn't do before i revised my build and geared up. Frankly outside of Grim Dawn in Veteran mode i don't remember any other arpg that had hard combat from start.
- monsters character, animations, behavior and ai is pretty much at the top of genre. Same with encounter design. You rarely meet one type of mob. Usually they are mix of stronger and weaker ones each having their own special attacks and character. Mages try to freeze you and stay away from you, while small mobs swarm you, bigger mobs try to stun/knockdown you. Aside from that there are plenty of monster types in that map. IDK about later but here even those small regions can have different kinds of monsters.
- gold seems to be really useful. You can actually buy upgrade in shop (rare/magic items), socket creation, legendary power extraction, converting smaller gem into bigger one, upgrade weapon etc. etc. etc. All require gold and quite a lot of it. In all 14 hours i was barely scraping by. Usually when i had some gold i would instantly use it for something. I don't know if they aim at reducing inflation but so far it is much better than any of previous diablo games.
- skills are pretty good (barb). Mix of D2 and D3s skills. I quite like idea of barb using 4 weapons at once. I played mostly as frenzy barb and it was pretty fun. "Kick" is my favorite skill with passive that makes every mob on path of kicked one get knocked down, it just feels fun to kick stuff. Shouts are also great. Everytime you use them it feels great with enemies visually getting pushed back a bit from shock. As for systems in place at first i thought it was pretty simple tree but once you start playing you quickly realize there is much depth in it with synergies hidden everywhere. Should you start berserk from shout or maybe from brawl skill ? How will you continue berserk ? Add points to stricte berserk or maybe add passive to dual swing that extends berserk ? And since dual swing uses rage resource then maybe shout that will cause you to generate rage on getting hit ? Then you combine it with items as well. Like when i found unique which causes 30% chance to stun on bleed. My double swing can do extra damage to to stunned enemies so where i can get bleed... etc.
- potions. Pretty much the best iteration of potions in arpg. They are gained much like in D2 as a drop and you can store say 4-5 of them with healer replacing them in town. On other hand non healing potions are stored in inventory in separate tab and all of them are super long like 30 minutes each and give you certain benefits like gives you thorns, increased fire resistance. So you only care about health potions as resource and you use other potion strategically depending on situation without need to play piano or something like in POE.
- quests. It's essentially D3 adventure mode but with unique design instead of being randomized. That is how it feels to play. It fits really well arpg nature. As for quest story design they are more akin to RPG quests than arpg ones. They are pretty varied: finding someone something, escort, multistage investigations etc. Obviously it is ARPG so 90% of time you smash but at least design isn't boring with kill 10/10 wolves non stop.
- main story. It's pretty interesting to follow it. Story is much more serious like in D2 rather than magical fairy bullshit D3.
- theme. Much darker theme than even D2. More akin to D1 theme. Gore everywhere, pentagrams, entrails, skinned bodies, cannibals, demons possesing people etc etc etc. you get the idea. Even church in that region is portrayed more like hardcore fanatics rather than do good warm priests.
- open world. Expected much worse. Overall it's pretty good. More standard ubisoft style stuff fits arpg where it wouldn't fit rpg. So getting some town freed from freeze curse is just a reason to smash.
- music. Pretty good. After entirely forgettable D3 score, POE going into generic epic orchestra it was nice to listen to those tunes. It isn't anything amazing though.
- boss health reset on death and TP takes a while to use. Yeah. It kills town spamming.
The bad:
- main story. Following Lilith is cool but some of the supporting characters are either boring or bad. There are only handful that were interesting. One being guard and first village peasants who wanted to eat you. The Deckart Cain replacer also seems to be interesting but he fucks off quickly outside of beta map. The worst was the girl. I mean i feel deja vu from D3 where you were supposed to care about that little shit and worst part is that it seems that after act1 she will be one of key npcs... ehh. So main story itself is interesting but presentation of some of supporting cast is wonky.
- ingredients galore. Outside of gold you have to use ingredients. Essentially D3 ingredients.
- area scaling. When you go out of town area scales to your level. There are only few locations with set level and usually it is higher than yours like fort i tried to conquer. I did notice though some crafting items to increase/decrease levels. I assume that eventually scalling will stop at 50 and you will need those items to increase level of those dungeons you want to do.
- limited weapons. Due to how classes are build weapons pretty much are only for certain classes. So as a barb you can't use shield. This naturally limits builds.
- bugs. It's beta duh. Various different bugs from not being able to TP for some reason to my character model not spawning, characters appearing out of nowhere when switching maps etc.
- graphics. Graphics aren't necessary bad but coming from Diablo 2 Remastered this is huge step back. HDR implementation sucks. Sure it works giving you more range but only a bit.
The ugly.
- sorc skills look like trash. Worse than mobile game. Seriously. Every single spell looks like a fucking joke. Incernate from D2 looks and behaves like some kind of laser rather than firefluid with some momentum. Frozen orb isn't orb + ice bolts like in D2 but just ball with some particles spinning as one jpeg or something.
- there will be in game store for micro. They say it will be like POE but this is still 70$ fucking bucks game not F2P.
Overall: Pretty awesome.
I followed development of it and i am not that surprised that it plays great. I think their motto D1 theme, D2 mechanics and D3 gameplay feel is something that can be seen through D4 and it works as intended. What i didn't expect was that they will actually try delivering arpg with hard combat and it's pretty fair hard combat with fails mostly coming from your inability to read situation and respond to combat flow not in GD veteran mode "sorry we decided to spam aether damage" now kind of way. It's hard to tell from this part how rest of game will work but if it will be like that till the end then i would be satisfied.
Glad I've read a positive review on this site.
I soloed Immortal up until about level 40 and the game was actually pretty good for what it is until level 20 and then it totally fell apart.
I've been waiting to play Diablo IV for a very long time, and like yourself, have followed development pretty closely.
In terms of gameplay, there's not much innovation that can be implemented in an isometric hack & slash ARPG, the core gameplay mechanics are pretty straightforward.
Also, I'm exclusively seeking a good PVE experience, and maybe, maybe, some co-op depending on how good the content is to warrant a second playthrough, and/or content only accessible when playing online.
I could never get into Path of Exile because of the muddy visuals and lack of a compelling story; it also lacked atmosphere due to both of these factors, something that completely ruined the game for me.
Path of Exile's biggest positive attribute is its retardedly huge skill tree that made absolutely zero fucking sense and forced me to use a step-by-step guide, and even the guide was confusing.
I'm disappointed that you claim sorceress skills look shitty, mages are usually my go-to character class in any game I play, so I'll probably roll necro instead (not a fan of summoning minions).
Zone scaling is a preexisting problem with almost all of these types of games, and I'm not at all surprised that Blizzard stuck this formula for Diablo IV.
I'm also not suprised that it's full of bugs, this is exactly why I'm waiting for the full release because Blizzard is notorious for shitty early releases that basically render their games unplayable during launch.
Graphics-wise, I've ran my computer specs through System Requirements Lab several times in anticipation of D4, and based on Blizzard's relatively modest hardware requirements across all their games, I'm expecting good graphics, at least as good as D2 Remastered.
