Diablo IV. Hell, it's about time.

Making its debut back in BlizzCon 2019 (who remembers Blizzard's convention, at least that's returning this year), we saw a period of silence as the team worked on the game, the company went through their own hell, and a pandemic shifted everyone to work from home. The Diablo team eventually started to show us bits and pieces though, through developer blogs and quarterly updates which gave us important insights and them important feedback from the community during the development process. That last part was important because it, anecdotally, felt like Blizzard was losing its connection with its audience, as it had been ignoring key feedback throughout its World of Warcraft and Hearthstone games for years.

The excitement and anticipation of revisiting Sanctuary once more was as strong as it could be. Some class favourites, a neat looking paragon system, customization through a talent tree, and beautiful steeds. What wasn't to love?

Diablo IV's potentially biggest problem? The live service model. 

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Live Service Games = Incomplete Games

Modern gaming has so many problems. For some, it's the yearly re-releases of content, such as those offered by another Activision Blizzard game, Call of Duty, where they games effectively become extinct after the new release lands and your old cosmetics you stupidly purchased are no longer available in the "new" game. For others, the microtransaction hell has created a pay-to-win wall that puts players at a significant advantage over others. The biggest issue of them all though, has got to be a lack of content.

If you have a behemoth of a franchise like Blizzard has with Diablo, you almost can't even blame them for it. They could have changed a minimal amount of content from Diablo III, swapped out the roman numeral for the next one over, and they would have printed hundreds of millions. Instead, they created a new story, developed a new game, and spent a chunk of Bobby Kotick's pocket change on marketing, all to bring out something new and to start a real live service game for the Diablo series.


Here we go again.

It's a great idea. Bring a game out, support it for a long time by continuously introducing content that players will pay for, and maybe you never need to do another game again. Augment the base game with expansion content for big new stories that you want to tell, but no more do you need to worry about huge new engines or big engine updates - your developers can use the pipelines you've designed already. The problem is, for players, that we end up with a product that has less content than it should have, and we're going either be paying for it later, or simply waiting.

Previously, if you wanted to launch a game, you needed to release an actual game and not something that is half complete. If it was half complete, you'd see outrage and chargebacks en masse. Now though? Now you can launch something and tell people hey, we're going to release updates soon for a new season and there will be some content for you. This ultimately is allowing developers to launch games, make money, and then maybe follow through on their promises of creating something truly great.

This seriously feels like a Star Citizen kickstarter.

Diablo IV Lacks a True End Game

This was a major problem that plagued Diablo III too. Upon completing you campaign in Diablo III, you were able to work your way up to the ultimate difficulty, Interno. Itemization was poorly thought-out, it was next to impossible to party with your friends unless you really gave it some thought as to composition, and the change in difficulty from Hard to Inferno was unfair. Later, all of these things would be corrected through years of game updates, including a personal favourite where torment levels were introduced which allowed for many more levels of end-game difficulty.


Torment levels were fantastic difficulty increases.

Right now though, Diablo IV sees much of the same problems that Diablo III has.

There are certain breakpoints where if you are out in the world participating in events, it is more beneficial to allow a lower level character kill monsters for you. Due to the way scaling works on these events, anyone from any level can come and participate. That's cool, it creates a world that actually feels alive, however, you are penalized for being a higher level. Now, if you're fresh out of the campaign and making your way up, you're likely in a spot where you don't have many good gear drops and you certainly won't have many, if any, paragon points, so you have a wall of difficulty to climb regardless, but it does feel very strange to have it be more efficient to let your level 20 friend finish content for you.

Why are Nephalem Rifts not in the game? Their spiritual replacement, Nightmare Dungeons, require obtaining specific keys to run them instead of the lower barrier of entry that rifts were. Rifts made for fantastic gameplay, much like the Path of Exile Atlas system, and access to them was easy - visit a town and open up a portal. Now with the huge world that Diablo IV takes place it, you need to physically travel to these dungeons when you get a key. I'm surprised they didn't ask us to pay for teleports.

Server Slam, Boss Woes, "MMO"

Ashava was the goal back on the final beta weekend for Diablo IV, and it's where I started to really reconsider playing the game at launch. 

Team up with a group of 16 random people, slay the boss, and get a fancy item for your horse. Seems easy enough but when you're being placed with people are are going AFK or don't know what's going on with their class, and you've wasted 15 minutes of your time a handful of times during the weekend, it makes your eyes open to an experience that you can almost be guaranteed to see in the live game.

Aside from that, the boss fight felt unimaginative - half-baked. The genre didn't need world bosses. It didn't need any of this "MMO" nonsense if we're going to be completely honest here. The whole point of a Massively Multiplayer Online game is that you can be a city with thousands of people and see incredible scale. It's all about how many people you have on a single server, and Diablo's barren attempt at it does not fit this term at all. It adds nothing to the game. I despise that people use the term MMO to talk about games like D4 or Destiny 2 - 6 players in your zone and 20 inside a city is nothing even close to the scale of an MMO. "But there are a lot of players playing!" I guess Call of Duty and Hearthstone are MMOs too.

Rubberbanding because we're "switching instances", a constantly respawning world because you need to make sure there is something there for everyone to fight - what happened to me being able to clear out an entire area of a map and backtrack without consequence? Yes, fighting in Diablo IV feels like a consequence. They tried to bring something new into the genre and, as far as this author is concerned, failed spectacularly at it. The bosses look cool, some of the effects they use are fantastic, and you sometimes encounter nice little camera moves that make you appreciate the team went the extra mile to keep the action on screen.

Ultimately, in this new hell of Diablo, they should have let me play as the hero in the game, and if I want to, group up with some friends or randoms in an LFG channel.

The Grind

The game starts off at a decent pace, but things quickly begin to slow down once you hit the teens. Partly due to a world that is created to be a maze, with a side of extra long walks to the beach, but mostly due to the combat being uninspiring.

For launch, I decided to give Barbarian a try. I know I wasn't likely to play Barb during seasonal content, so having an opportunity outside of seasons to seriously check the class out and see how I could break it was a fantastic sell. It went a little something like this:

  • Hold down left click.
  • Full rage? Hold down right click.
  • Did you take a tiny bit of damage? Maybe hit potion button.

Once we received some more skill points, we added a new button - war cry! Eventually leading us to using a couple of buttons for buffs, and a couple of buttons for skills. Diablo IV has a huge problem with the number of buttons we're allowed to press. Understandably, Blizzard has used this as a form of game balance, but it's removing a huge aspect of fun out of the game. Forcing me to make a choice between maximum DPS and having the oh shit button available to leap away is fine, but the class fantasy for a Barb is to have that powerful leap. Jumping into my foes feels powerful and gives me movement unavailable to my other allies in Sanctuary. If I could just bind a few more buttons, I'd be able to have much more fun playing the game.

But, we'll talk more about the consolification of Diablo IV in a moment. Here are some other things that dull the grind:

  • Dungeons feel painfully slow.
  • Boss fights aren't very interesting in most cases.
  • The world has little variation in the enemies we see, the abilities we fight, and the events we participate in.
  • Events don't feel very rewarding.
  • Mobility of all classes feels too low.

And then there are Lilith's Altars. Oh. Boy. My favourite. To lock that much power behind one of the most dull additions to the game. Collect em alls worked a long time ago, or when they actually feel good thanks to strong exploration, but Altars of Lilith aren't that. They purely exist to send you off onto the internet to find a map that someone has created so you can tab in and out of your game as you try to make your way through the maze that is the overworld. If players are just going to find a map because of the power increases available through them, this feels like a poor game design decision.


Just look up a map online, like this one from Polygon.

You know what Altars of Lilith should have been? They should have been a way to unlock cool cosmetic items for use in the transmog system, rather than power (and titles, and icons since those are customization too).This wouldn't have even been a question years ago before the introduction of "cash shop all the pretty looking things" that is so commonplace now. A huge miss from the team to create regional styles that we had to go and explore to unlock.

At least I never need to find the altars again.

Necromancer is Disappointing

This topic hits very close to home. As someone who loves playing summoning-style characters in games, especially in the ARPG space, seeing what Necromancers are capable of makes me want to uninstall. The class in Diablo IV feels like a shadow of what it should be; Necromancers should be controlling huge armies of minions at their beck and call.


Diablo IV's "Necromancer"

Having a couple handfuls of minions is nothing like what Path of Exile offers through their Necromancer - where 50 minions on screen is some serious fun.


Path of Exile - A true master of necromancy!

Diablo IV is trying too hard, like early Diablo III, to limit the amount of fun that individual characters can have. ARPG games should let you build crazy amounts of power. You should be able to break the game. Instead, it feels as if Blizzard wants the title to feel "fair", and that's not something that I'm personally a big fan of. You can feel that Blizzard doesn't want players to break out and play the game their own way, we must play in the "balanced" realm that Blizzard has created. Balance, of course, is hilarious to mention in a Blizzard game because they, historically, do not have a great track record with being able to balance anything. There will always be something broken. There will always be a flavor of the month. <strong>Embrace it.</strong>

Diablo IV Was Built for Consoles

Modern games that are built to be cross platform need to have a focus on consoles because if your console support sucks, you're going to have a bad time. Making games work on PC, where we have access to keyboards with a hundred keys and a mouse with buttons and fantastically precise movement, is so much easier and allows for less thought into how things need to be put together for your interface. Console changes things big time.


I don't need these reminders constantly.

This is the only reason I can see for Blizzard to limit the number of skills we can have bound. Modifier keys are, apparently according to Blizzard, too difficult for console players to understand and as such, everyone is going to suffer.

Consoles are great though, and Diablo III sold very well because of their ports to consoles. The UI was a bit different and as someone who much prefers playing a desktop computer with my full suite of peripherals, it felt clunky at times, but Diablo III was genuinely enjoyable on console so it makes sense why Blizzard pushed so hard for it this time around. A console push is also huge for the accessibility side of games, which is thankfully becoming more common place now from developers.

Frustratingly, some menus felt unresponsive on PC, such as when you are speaking with an NPC and your mouse click doesn't register at all. With a controller however, when you get into the menu you can immediately press your button to get to the next part. Maybe this was bad testing on their cursor sizes, but it happened enough that it felt clunky.


I clearly have my mouse over this waypoint, why does left click not travel.

The consolification of Diablo IV is even more evident in the lack of tooltips when mousing over items on the ground. Should I pick that item up? This shouldn't even be a question and could have been avoided if we could just see what was on the ground. Make it an option. There is nothing wrong with giving players options.

And while we're at it, why do we have to constantly re-enable comparison tooltips and why do items on the ground have their tooltips disappear after a set amount of time. That second part is configurable, but it seems like each time you login, you'll have to press your items tooltip key again to make them appear for your session. That second part might also not have anything to do with consoles, but for an ARPG where loot and power is everything, it feels like a very poor user experience.

Gems

As Taric from the League of Legends universe says, "Gems are truly outrageous". The man must have looking into a crystal ball and staring right at Diablo IV because he's right. How the game launched with gems taking up all your inventory space is beyond this Barb's simple mind, but he does feel as if Blizzard missed the mark... by a few miles.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with gems taking up inventory space, but the change from previous games in the Diablo franchise to this system where everything in your inventory is the same size, it makes it feel frustrating that something that would take up half the space of a weapon is now considered equivalent. With the rate at which gems were dropping too, it felt counter-productive to putting them into your stash because that ruby you put in was soon replaced with yet another ruby.

The easiest solution here would be to create a new inventory tab just for gems. If we can carry around a couple dozen aspects, why can't we also do that for gems?

Final Thoughts

Diablo IV, right now, isn't the right game for me. I can see the game being a solid timesink in a year or two after they have had a chance to push several large updates to the game, and maybe an expansion comes out, but as of right now, it just doesn't have enough going on. Diablo III had a better start with over 200 hours being played in the first two weeks of launch on my Monk, but I soon left - on good terms since I had a ton of fun - to play other games. This time around, I'm just playing other games after a brief playthrough and post-campaign go at it.

You'll see me getting my ARPG fix in on Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile, and soon, Path of Exile 2, which should have a equally exciting if not better gameplay loop. I'm not very surprised though since Path of Exile hits those old Diablo II notes, and Blizzard only really took the themes from Diablo II and catered the core gameplay instead to more casual players - smart if you want to sell copies at AAA price points.

I'm glad that some folks are able to enjoy the game in its current state and it will be them logging in that keeps Blizzard on track to update the game. Throw in some whales to spend money in the cash shop for a bland set of cosmetics (because they want to double sell cosmetics like every other game that launches with uninspiring drip) and you've got a recipe for a game that will be updated for many years to come.

Diablo is supposed to be a genre-defining series, but it's clear that Blizzard is no longer up to that task. Diablo 4 aspires to be an Exilelike, but has fallen short.