Diablo IV Open Beta Trip Report (Patreon)

I like Diablo. I’ve always liked Diablo. But I’d say I was always a fairly casual player. I didn’t spend thousands of hours collecting ears in Diablo 2, for example. But if you show me a pile of skeletons and tell me that some of them are going to drop magic pants for me when they die, I will click on those skeletons, damn it. But I pretty much played the first two games as story-driven RPGs. I started a character, beat the game, and moved on.

Diablo 3 was the first one that got additional hooks into me. It felt like a game designed to streamline the experience, especially as it got patched and updated over time. Staring at different stats on gear became replaced by a simple gear score that, while not perfect, would give you a rough idea about whether or not you should even waste time considering the new pants over your old pants. They also made it very free and easy to change difficulties at any time, letting you hop into an experience that fit your current mood and still make some kind of progress. I got into the paragon levels in Diablo 3—not exactly much of a feat, I suppose, but what I mean to say here is that I found myself continuing to play Diablo 3 long after the story was completed. They made it very easy to hop in, click some guys to death, and then hop back out.

Diablo IV feels very much like a sequel to Diablo 3 and not some “back-to-basics” or “boots on the ground” revamp designed to appeal to the harder-core D2 crowd. I think that’ll probably tell a lot of people right away if this is for them or not. This is actually exactly what I’m looking for out of a new Diablo game. I had a great time with D3 but I’m not especially interested in seasonal heroes or any of the other stuff they’ve been doing with the game that counts on you fighting the same enemies on the same tilesets again and again. I ended up extending my time with Diablo 3 by also getting way into the console version of the game, and playing it with a controller eventually became my preferred way to play. It’s funny that it took them this long to implement proper controller support, considering that old PlayStation port of the first Diablo did it years ago.

Mind you, that old PS1 version of Diablo has not aged especially well. It’s funny, in my mind it’s basically equivalent to Diablo 3 on a PlayStation 4, but having taken a 10 minute break from writing this to go play a bit of it… time has not been especially kind to it. At the time, when plenty of games controlled like garbage and we just sucked it up because there weren’t a lot of other options out there, it seemed like a natural step for the franchise and it left me expecting a console version of Diablo 2 someday. Not to add an aside to an aside, but I will say that when they finally put that remastered Diablo 2 thing out and it had a console version, I was pretty disappointed by how it handled on a controller when compared to Diablo 3. Anyway!

I really like the way Diablo IV looks. Its Eastern European-ish setting starts you out in a bunch of snow. The whiteness of the snow dulls in the darkness, obfuscated even further by the raging blizzard that opens the game. At first it made the whole game look weirdly gray in a “am I running this on the wrong HDMI color setting or something?” kind of way. But as you make your way into the first town and, more importantly, the first dungeon, the overall look of the game starts to feel more established. Dank, wet caves glisten as your character—who casts light in front of them like they were carrying a small-ish flashlight—runs and turns around the environment. That lighting and the way it realistically creeps around corners and casts shadows around the environment is probably my favorite part about the game’s overall look, but there’s just an overall fidelity to the smaller spaces—dungeons, cellars, caves, and the like—that absolutely pops.

I’ve been playing a barbarian, which is also what I played in D3 since I like to spin around in a circle and murder things. The skill tree this time around looks a bit more open and elaborate than the way skills and modifiers were doled out last time around, but in the end I found myself putting points into skills that led to a pretty similar mix of character-buffing shouts, the cool spin attack, and rend, a damage-over-time attack that seems to crit more often than not. This isn’t all that different than how my Diablo 3 barbarian ended up, which in some ways felt nice and familiar, but in others left me feeling like the new look for the skill tree is little more than a coat of paint and a slightly different way of unlocking the same stuff.

This probably varies based on which class you’re playing, I suppose, but as I looked down lower on the tree to the abilities that I wasn’t able to unlock yet, I wasn’t really seeing anything that I couldn’t wait to try. That said there are other character modifiers, such as aspects, which seem like they could be pretty cool. Unlike the skills, aspects are unlocked by completing specific dungeons in the world. Aspects are class-specific, but unlocking an aspect once unlocks it account-wide. I guess I’d say the jury’s still out on how all of this will come together. I mean, without hitting endgame numbers it’s hard to get a feel for how you might slap a build together, how gear and sets may play into that, and so on.

That’s kinda where I’m at with the whole game, really. I had a pretty good time cruising through the first 20 character levels and getting a set of skills together. Exploring was fun, the way a barbarian seems to equip three different types of weapons at the same time is pretty neat, and it looks nice. It did its job of making me want to play the real thing when it ships in June, even if I straight-up don’t care about another angels vs. demons, humanity hangs in the balance style of religious adventure. I see myself turning down all the music, skipping all the cutscenes, putting the 10,000 gecs on loop, and smashing giant tree men to bits until I’ve had my fill.