"The dead deserve nothing when the living are in danger." - Lorath
I say these things as a fan of the entire Diablo series. I've been playing since the first game and even enjoyed the first game on the first PlayStation console which I thought couldn't be done on a controller and was pleasantly surprised to find out how wrong I was. The third game is my favorite, especially after Reaper of Souls.
The visuals in Diablo IV are stunning in every way including amazing environments and animations. The music is superb. The voice acting is excellent. The cinematics have some very cool camera angles that don't take away from the isometric look and feel. The stories are great. It's totally worth playing. It's a great and impressive experience.
The rest of what you're about to read is what bothers me.
As impressive as Diablo IV is in different ways, it's a huge disappointment and no longer Diablo. Like what Ubisoft has done to the Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs series: ripping out the heart and soul of the first games and turning it into mainstream cash grab garbage, Blizzvision has done the same with Diablo. Diablo IV is like if you want to play a game that's like Diablo but isn't Diablo.
I took my time playing through the campaign. I was level 50 (normal level cap) in Act 3, and was nearly level 52 (Paragon) before getting my mount. I hit level 55 just before completing the main campaign.
The HUD displays large keybind buttons that aren't even on the ability icons. They're just covering up empty space on the screen. Is the target audience people with no brains and are using a keyboard for the first time? If players need this, they aren't gamers. This is what happens when you have developers that aren't also gamers. Why did this get past the Beta with no update? Even the Alpha players should have mentioned this nonsense. The key commands are better over the icons themselves and in a small part of it, not covering the entire thing. An option to remove them entirely would be cool.
Diablo IV has level scaling for enemies that plays like World of Warcraft where when you level-up you're suddenly no longer as powerful as you just were ten seconds ago. The scaling is unreliable and makes no sense with many enemies being overly difficult while others are easier in different zones while switching "Acts" and such. It's a mess. This is something that's not as noticeable in the early game.
Here's a less detailed list of more things that suck:
- Leveling isn't fun.
- Now focused on fetch quests.
- Only two camera angles (again) and with an even worse zoom-in!
- Giant glowing feet for climbing or jumping events.
- Have to loot nearby individual gems.
- No pet that loots gold, no pets at all. (this has been updated and the pet is even better than in Diablo 3. However, D3 had a lot of different pets as random loot for free.)
- Re-skill costs money and there's no real incentive to try different builds while still punished for wanting to try others.
- Spellcasting feels tedious rather than fun, too much mana management and no mana potions. Spend more time managing resources than slaying. (It's fine and you get used to it. I'm just saying. It obviously would take major re-balancing to change this.)
- Destructible environments never drop any loot.
- Nearly pointless to explore cuz all the quests will take you everywhere and the maps are just copy/pasted everywhere, There's a lot of backtracking. I read some bookshelves and then immediately after started a quest to read the bookshelves I just read.
- Can't view world map from dungeon map.
- Some parts look like D3 re-used / re-skinned assets.
- Open world events are like Destiny patrols.
- Paragon traits are garbage and uninspiring.
- Lore books / journals have the same blue colors as magic items so they're easy to miss.
- Shop prices are ludicrous, should at least include extra "premium" coins with every purchase at these prices.
- Zero lessons learned from previous games. How?!
You just killed my hype for the Steam port...
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