Diablo 4’s early access beta weekend, the anticipated RPG’s first truly large-scale public showcase, has come and gone. That means it’s time to dissect what we saw, and how we felt about it overall.
My feelings on the Diablo 4 beta boil down to this: It is a game of two distinct halves, one vastly more enjoyable than the other. When it feels most like Diablo 2 — crawling through inky black dungeons and hunting for loot, it is a joyously chaotic experience. It is, unequivocally, The Good Shit. It’s the stuff that long-time fans have wanted back forever — tough dungeon delves with interesting enemies and loot that create opportunities for interesting character builds. Conversely, Diablo 4‘s beta was at its weakest when it felt most like an MMO — traversing the open world, which the game treats as a giant online lobby. Your fights are consistently hijacked by interloping players on the server, that delete everything in sight with over-levelled characters and leave, robbing you of the chance to play the game for yourself. It’s this expansion of the overworld that I think will be Diablo 4’s most divisive aspect.
In the original Diablo, there was no overworld to speak of. It was a town and a dungeon, and that was it. The loop was extremely tight. Enter dungeon, beat the hell out of many monsters, collect your loot, return to town to sell and level up, and start the dungeon again. Diablo 2 expanded this by adding a traversable world that sent the player hunt for randomised dungeon entrances and points of interest. It was an interesting addition at the time, but in the years since, it has become one of the game’s weaker aspects, a pause in your ruthless hunt for better loot. Act 2’s desert remains a frustrating and directionless experience, leaving you to scour the edges of the map for the path forward.
Diablo 3 leaned further into the overworld, but understood that players just wanted to get to the good stuff. With Diablo 3‘s 2.0 update, Blizzard launched the endgame Adventure Mode that allowed players to hop between dungeons from each act and run them over and over in quick succession for rapid reward. This willingness to get out of the way and make the open world optional was one of the few things that long-time fans can agree D3 got dead right.
Diablo 4 puts the overworld front and centre, turning it into a communal space for romping around and joining fights in progress. I could tell instantly that it was a pain point. Here, it was possible to see the tectonic plates of Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 pressed so hard up against one another that they’d ruptured and created a craggy mountain range. The map felt like WoW or Destiny 2 on new expansion day. There were players everywhere. People kept barging into fights I was working hard to win myself and finishing them for me. It didn’t feel good! I wanted to put in the work!
On top of this, the overworld was still little more than the busy work between the things I actually wanted to do. It was the toll I paid to get to the good stuff. You don’t find pinnacle gear in the overworld — you find it in the dungeons, dropped by powerful enemies and bosses. Making matters worse is that Diablo 4‘s overworld is the largest of any game in the series, meaning the busy work of getting around takes longer than ever. Sure, you can unlock teleport sigils to get from place to place a bit faster but, as in D2, I have to visit those teleport sigils before they unlock. That whole aspect of the game felt like I was being asked to eat my vegetables, and I quickly grew to resent it. You know what I want — to rampage through dungeons and find good loot. Why put a 15-20 minute walk between me and that?
I mean, I know why. Blizzard wants to bring Diablo 3‘s more MMO-tinted social design into the new game. They want me to organically encounter a group of other players who might adopt me into their party. I know this because, when other players are in my vicinity, the game automatically applies the series’ familiar multiplayer XP bonus. This bonus goes up with every additional person in your party. Here’s the problem with that. I don’t want to play with any of these people. I want to ponder my build and do my dungeon runs in peace. If I’m going to play with anyone, I’m going to play with my friends. Years of games like Destiny and Sea of Thieves have taught me that bringing Rando Calrissian into my party is a bad idea. They won’t communicate (unless its to scream for heals), they won’t stick with the group, and they won’t play the team game. Miserable! Why are you pushing this on us, Blizzard?
Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Let’s talk about the game’s better half, where it feels more like Diablo 2.
Because god damn.
It feels good. It feels like a homecoming. The Diablo 4 team has clearly taken a lot of feedback from the Diablo community on board when creating its dungeons and RPG systems. Time will tell if the familiar D2 crunch is there, but what Diablo 4 reintroduces right away is the older game’s expansive possibility space for character builds. It’s so nice to have this many options available to me again, to be able to roll build ideas around in my head and know that each step will make a difference. One of the first characters I created in the beta was a Bleedbarian. She was extremely powerful by only level 6, and devastatingly OP by the time I dinged level 15. Everything — and I do mean everything — I hit with my axe would die a slow, agonising death as the bleed effect leeched its life away. For most enemies, all it took was a single swing of the axe to bring them down. Combining bleed with crowd control moves like the barbarian’s stunning leap only gave me further openings for devastating bleed damage.
Dungeons are still a proc-gen experience but have been refined such that they feel much more authored than they actually are. It’s still possible to run into weird dead ends and spend time backtracking, but the game does a great job of helping you find your way efficiently, with clear map markers and a long trail on the minimap to show you where you came from.
In summary, if I can find my way past the overworld stuff, I think I’ll find a lot to love about Diablo 4. There’s a lot of promise in its first act content and I look forward to exploring it more fully when it launches in June. If you want to try it for yourself, and missed out on the early access beta, good news: the next beta runs this weekend, kicking off on Saturday the 25th of March.
Did you get into the beta, either via preorder, luck of the Blizzard draw, or through a giveaway like ours? Let me know how you felt about it in the comments.
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