Diablo 4 is bad.

[david0925]

Imagine disliking a game and comparing it to another one when you only got to see about 1% of it, with zero endgame systems unlocked, no adventure mode or bounties to complete, no hellscape invasions to complete, ONE world boss to deal with, and limited to level 25 with no uniques or high end legendary effects to make builds with.


Imagine disliking Diablo 4 and comparing it to Diablo 3 when you don't have runewords yet, or sets yet, or paragon legendary nodes yet, or glyph leveling yet, or nightmare dungeon tiers unlocked yet......I mean I could go on...


Just...Imagine.

This forum has become a cesspool of just bitter, loud negative hot takes.

I don't think many of these complaints are unjustified at all. Maybe it's not the #1 objective for a beta, but if you are going to let people have a taste of what the game has to offer, the first couple of hours of experience absolutely matters on drawing the crowd in. Not a lot of people are interested in gambling with their money hoping the end game would be better. It's less about the actual amount, and more about actually supporting the company for making good products/continuing supporting their games. Even if the end game is somehow amazing, the buildup to it is equally important to show steady progress.

For example, if in an alternative reality they have never stopped supporting Starcraft 2, i would continue to support skins and additional contents because I think the game is good. Same with D3, WC3, and heck even D2r.

I would not do the same for something for something like WC3 reforged though. It had the same issue during beta and people use the same argument about how it is "just beta", and look where we are like what, 4 years from now?

Sure, maybe some people are just complaining for the sake of complaining (the bodytype and gender identity complaints were pretty cringe to me, for example), but I think many of them are pretty legitimate.

[Seiken3]

I got to level 6 and then stopped playing cause... I couldn't be bothered anymore. I feel like Blizzard have lost touch on what made D2 great -- oh wait, they disbanded the studio who made D2. Well, no wonder why they're flapping their arms around in the water, trying to swim.

Diablo 4 does things better than diablo 3, however, but I think it both need a different art team and system manager. Also, is Lilith showing up left and right now? I mean, I only saw her in the church-cinematic(which was actually pretty epic), but I hope its not like Arthas in WoW in Wotlk, where we see flashes of the "villian" running around casuing havoc, trying to build on the reason why we need to kill her in the first place.

When it comes to the dungeon generating, I feel like Blizzard have a lot to learn from Diablo 1 and some of 2. Diablo 1 had a fantastic way of continuously creating strange twisted labyrinths that both made it feel a bit liminal, but also more unnatural in that sense. Where demons have had fingers in play and twisted reality and added their taint. In one of the dungeons I did during beta, the dungeon got more and more demonic the further way one went - which was great! Though, despite the theme being great, the outlay became very quickly repetetive and it lacked the little extra that both D1 and D2 had. The torture of the innocent citizens. Now, I know D3 also had it, but the entire color scheme was so bland that it was easy to overlook at whatnot. To many players, it was easy to run past it and not give it a second thought, but in both D1 and D2, it was with vibrant colors how they had slaughtered and/or tortured citizens which made you feel even more like a hero on a quest to stop this than how you feel in both D3 and D4(so far.).

Also, witnessing the church-cinematic in which(spoiler alert) the priest is brutally murdered by the crowd(End of spoiler), I started to think a bit. That scene in itself should almost be 18+(Yes, I know the game is M, 17+). Which is fine and all, but looking further till I found a corpse hanging off a spike, I noticed the womans breast was... smooth. No nipple. Not sure how many of you actually realize it, but seeing the human traits like said bodypart being displayed on a corpse adds to the whole psychological feeling of these demons not f'ing around and that they will slaughter and torture both men and women. But looking at this torso with one orb remaining intact I was left pondering if it was an alien I was looking at.
Diablo 1 and 2 had these features on the female characters, both on corpses and on the succubus enemy. It added a layer of realization/impression of that humanity itself was at stake, not smooth aliens which you're given a piece of loot to assisst. My point here being; They will show slaughtering of people, yet skimp on the nipple. Glorifying violence and adding taboo to the human body(Which in itself is quite the contradiction when you think of it. Slicing up an eye? Sure thing! Just make sure the cut doesn't go too far down to the chest!)

These 2 are my biggest beefs with the game so far as a Diablo veteran. Well those, and... Looking closer at the narrative; How they are presenting the story is glorious this time around. However, whats being said in these narratives and otherwise scenes unfolding, I think they still have a way to go.
I know, I know - I didn't play for long, but I am only writing about my first impressions. "It gets better down the road" you may say, but I'd like fundamental things like this to be good from the getgo. It's a blizzard game, and that used to mean something. Resting on things like what I described above is not the way we should expect blizzard to slack with.


To round off my little rant: They have taken steps in the right direction, and the classes included seem fun. However, they're still far off. As things are, I am most likely not going to buy it and instead view a streamer or two play it and leave it at that until I see some blizzard-quality in their games again, and not polished turds for their shareholders.

[NoiseTank13]

It's fairly mediocre, it's competent at what it does... at early game.

No way to tell how endgame is, but I've a feeling its the same as early game.

[luc54]

I got to level 6 and then stopped playing cause... I couldn't be bothered anymore. I feel like Blizzard have lost touch on what made D2 great -- oh wait, they disbanded the studio who made D2. Well, no wonder why they're flapping their arms around in the water, trying to swim.
- -

That really depends because I personally find diablo 2 just awfully dated at this point. But many diablo 2 fans seem to adore them to the point where they think it's a feature. For example charms and how many inventory slots you have free is a choice apparently. So you trade in fun/conviinence for power. Seems quite horrible choice. I don't really hate diablo 2 and found it ok to play, but you can definitely see the age which is less of a problem with other ARPG that i have played.

[Jujudrood]

Imagine disliking a game and comparing it to another one when you only got to see about 1% of it, with zero endgame systems unlocked, no adventure mode or bounties to complete, no hellscape invasions to complete, ONE world boss to deal with, and limited to level 25 with no uniques or high end legendary effects to make builds with.


Imagine disliking Diablo 4 and comparing it to Diablo 3 when you don't have runewords yet, or sets yet, or paragon legendary nodes yet, or glyph leveling yet, or nightmare dungeon tiers unlocked yet......I mean I could go on...


Just...Imagine.

This forum has become a cesspool of just bitter, loud negative hot takes.

A lot of issues are with the core gameplay loop, and that was clearly shown in the beta.
Druid and Barb are behind in survivability and/or damage when compared to sorcerer (god tier, even without legendaries) necro (basically immortal) and rogue (fast as fuck boi), and it's a large gap.
Seasons will feel like shit for anyone who wants to play them outright as leveling and general gameplay is slow for the first couple legs, especially with bosses that penalize melee characters with extremely hard hits or running/kiting the player and keeping out of range.
The fact that you need specific legendaries just to make the characters viable lends itself to the poor construction of the characters themselves.
Like, just upping an item to "increase damage of this useless ability by 5000%, therefore making it mandatory" is kinda... I dunno... gross.

The skill tree is boring; you can see the whole thing, and each point you put into a skill was to "increase the intensity", but in practical use, going from 1/5 to 2/5 increased overall damage by like 2%. Wow.
The skills themselves and having this tree that prevents you from using builds is also an inhibiting factor, especially when you want to experiment.
The modifiers behind skills like "this adds 3% crit" is also flat and boring; at least change the way the skill works/looks/something to give it more life.

The travel in the open world, with all the running through empty areas since they purposefully keep mob density down because they want a more tactical approach to combat, which at the end of the day just make it feel more empty and less of an actual threat.
then there's dungeons, where there's several corridors and, if you take the wrong one and miss another, you miss a required item and have to backtrack, so Blizz's response is "we don't want you without enemies, so we can have them refresh", which is basically saying "I just wasted your time with this poorly designed objective, so now I will waste more of your time by making you fight even more things, thus delaying you from finishing the dungeon".

These are core to the philosophies of the game and were clearly on display.
I'm not saying that the game will be utter shit, but there will be things that are annoying about it and probably won't be addressed in any meaningful way.

[Chromeshellking]

It seems D4 grabbed ALL the RAM it could. I have 32GB and it went up to 20GB used there, now much of it may just be a reservation, but IMO that's a stretch, application shouldn't hog ALL your available memory just because "maybe I gonna need it man". I do think there is some sort of memory leak going on.

I did use high quality textures, I head dropping to medium helps.

I reached out to some former guildies who played and apparently textures would also keep reloading and say the town would have multiple times it was loading if you left and came back so it would exponentially keep eating ram every time.

But yea thats gotta be a leak they need to cap on as that makes it unplayable after a while.

[kenn9530]

snip

It has nothing to do with any value system, you cant claim something is a downside just because of personal feelings as thats not how it works, more options in a game is always a benefit to all players, and leveling is not where you get a challenge, all ARPGs are very easy on the leveling through the story so if you want a challenge leveling then ARPGs are not where you get that from.

In D4 you have the option to just ignore other players and do whatever you want, you are not forced to interact you can just treat them as NPCs if you wanted, you barely even see other players on the map because there is a limit, a game being an MMO is better in every single scenario, the game last longer and gets updated and supported more when there is a large active playerbase.

[Ghost of Cow]

The whole open world BS I hear here is vastly overblown. People only congregate for very specific events like Kor, that level 35 mob and Ashava as far as beta went.

Yeah, people are trying too hard on this complaint. I rarely saw many people - and when I did, it was kinda funny to see random legendary drops just appear on my map two screens away, but that's another issue.

This isn't a Lost Ark situation where there's 80 people milling around you constantly.

[kenn9530]

snip.

Its pretty simple if you dont like to dont play it, there is also no point in complaining about something you dont like because its not going to change anything.

D4 is simply better than all its previous titles, it doesnt have to do anything more as it is already better.

Difficulty is unlocked though playing the game just like the previous titles so nothing has changed there, did you play D3 at the start you had to work your way through and couldnt just increase it, you would also not get past the first part of act 2 unless you got some gear from pony land farming.

[prwraith]

D4 is simply better than all its previous titles, it doesnt have to do anything more as it is already better.

You're going to have to explain that statement lol. Seems pretty broad and wrong.

Gameplay slower than D3
Story so far worse than D2
Low end Class balance, nonexistent
Open World, an active detriment to story telling
Characters encountered so far? Can't even name one.

On what basis are you saying it is Better than all previous titles?

[Gaidax]

Yeah, people are trying too hard...

This is my biggest tilt with this thread, so much BS. Many of the issues written here is either a huge exaggeration of reality or simply outright pre-loaded crap.

People write shit like "I got to level 6 and then stopped playing cause... I couldn't be bothered anymore. I feel like Blizzard have lost touch on what made D2 great" and then some 3 paragraphs of rambling about D4 faults, it's like so fucking ridiculous. Brah, you played a fucking game for what, 10 minutes?

Level 6 is literally first 5-10 mins. You literally are sent to do the same fucking "Den of Evil" with the same 1-2 skills, but apparently that's somehow lost touch on what made D2 great.

This is such bullshit take, it's ridiculous it even gets a light of day here.

- - - Updated - - -

You're going to have to explain that statement lol. Seems pretty broad and wrong.

Gameplay slower than D3
Story so far worse than D2
Low end Class balance, nonexistent
Open World, an active detriment to story telling
Characters encountered so far? Can't even name one.

On what basis are you saying it is Better than all previous titles?

That's your subjective take. Don't try to spin it as some actual gospel truth.

[kenn9530]

You're going to have to explain that statement lol. Seems pretty broad and wrong.

Gameplay slower than D3
Story so far worse than D2
Low end Class balance, nonexistent
Open World, an active detriment to story telling
Characters encountered so far? Can't even name one.

On what basis are you saying it is Better than all previous titles?

Slower gameplay is better, dashing around and blowing up mobs like D3 is not what and ARPG is about.

Story is fine not many are playing the game for the story.

Nothing wrong with class balance, every class can get to max level easily.

Open world doesnt effect story telling.

Again most ppl just skip dialogue, most ppl dont play games for the story its just something for access to the actual gameplay.

Diablo games have mostly been about farming items and making a few builds for a more casual ARPG exp, if you want a more indepth ARPG play PoE.

Play a game you like, your not forced to buy the game and play it.

[Chaotic1962]

Surely you can remember budget Leah and Lillith.

At the end of the beta, overall its ok i guess. I like the aesthetic and sound. Some gripes related to spell effects etc. Played rogue to max, tried a bit of the rest. The early game balancing feels whack. Trying a ranged rogue was tiring, bosses take forever for ranged compared to stabbystab spec. From what i gathered unique effects can spawn on any item, some are strong some are meh. Considering the drop rate was increased*, i already see leveling to max level without ever getting a single power that actually matters to the builds making it a pain in the ass. If the world bosses are going to be like this on live as well, spawning on a certain day and time is horrible design.

[Gaidax]

Slower gameplay is better, dashing around and blowing up mobs like D3 is not what and ARPG is about.

Story is fine not many are playing the game for the story.

Nothing wrong with class balance, every class can get to max level easily.

Open world doesnt effect story telling.

Again most ppl just skip dialogue, most ppl dont play games for the story its just something for access to the actual gameplay.

It's not even slower gameplay really. It's hugely dependent on class choice initially - Sorc blows whole screens up as soon as level 15 with Fireball enchantment. And it was the same in D2 btw too, barb started slow as fuck and sorcs blasted already by the time they got to monastery.

Story, imo has absolutely best opening of any Diablo game so far. I do think it trails off after that - so I can see some not clicking with it, that's fine - it's however subjective.

And class balance - typical Diablo thing really. Some classes start slow and some faster, aside from Druids - there aren't really "yuge" issues there.

[Lodreh]

I kinda have to agree with the OP... mob scaling is the worst thing in modern games.

[Itisamuh]

It still doesnt matter what your personal feelings are on the MMO part of the game, it doesnt have any downside only upsides, the simple reality is being part MMO it increases the games options far more than the previous titles, so you cant claim something as a downside just because you have bad taste, just suck it up and either play the game or dont, noone is going to care if you play it or not.

What a ridiculous post, I could just as easily say the MMO aspect makes it factually worse, that it is only a downside with zero upsides, as it limits my options as a solo player, and anyone who disagrees just has bad taste.

[Lodreh]

Also I played a sorcerer to level 20... I felt no real connection with the character... I was using a similar build to that in D3 and even without gear I think I died twice while playing on Veteran.

[BrokenRavens]

What a ridiculous post, I could just as easily say the MMO aspect makes it factually worse, that it is only a downside with zero upsides, as it limits my options as a solo player, and anyone who disagrees just has bad taste.

Yeah, that guy thinks "multiplayer = better", like its some universal truth.

Anyway, at least we still have Bethesda.

[korijenkins]

I kinda have to agree with the OP... mob scaling is the worst thing in modern games.

Another "gem" brought to you by the fucking idiots running Blizzard these days. Mob scaling in WoW was one of the worst decisions they ever made. Mob scaling in Diablo 4 is equally bad and equally stupid. These games are all about gaining power, and for some reason they thought mob scaling was a good feature to add.

I don't care for "it's open world" as a reason. Make an adventure mode then. But if I'm going through the campaign, it's nonsensical for the mobs I'm butchering at level 1 to take as long to kill at level 50.

Honestly, there's big problems all around. Feels like they made this game with no solid direction and didn't innovate anywhere. The character creation, for instance, was more in-depth in Diablo Immortal. Embarrassing. How can DI do anything better than D4? How can they allow that to happen?

[Ange]

D3 seasonal balance for the dominant class-sets was quite a few times a basic 1-2 button spec, often GENERATOR builds with no ressource management and still just 1-2 main keys to press.

Welcome to the game that created the A-RPG genre.

Simple grind specs is what people like since 25 years.