Good Morning Friends. This past weekend was the Open Beta for Diablo IV and since my friend Ace was going to give it a spin, I thought I would try out the Necromancer. That gameplay is something that I have enjoyed greatly in other games, so I figured it was worth a shot here as well. At this point, I have leveled Barbarian and Necromancer both to 25, and they were wildly different experiences. Necromancer felt pretty solid and honestly a bit on the grossly overpowered side, and Barbarian felt like I had made a mistake at the character selection screen. You would think that the Necromancer would have improved my opinions of Diablo IV, but in truth, it didn’t because there is something intangibly wrong with this game and it is almost impossible to put my finger on it.
I thought it was just me honestly. I thought maybe I was struggling to grasp the brilliance of this game. Then Ace played it and had some of the exact same comments. There was a side thread going on over slack about how they felt like the game just was wrong, that there was something not right with the combat, and that they could not put their finger on it either. I’ve tried to give you a close approximation over my several posts about Diablo IV… but none of them really explain the totality of the experience. The thing is… the game that is there seems to be what a lot of players wanted. I’m seeing quite a few comments showing up in my threads about how much they enjoyed the experience. I did not. I stopped playing a little way into Saturday because after hitting 25… I just felt like I didn’t care enough to keep playing. I had accomplished the ephemeral goal I had for the weekend which was maxing out the Necromancer and was largely done with the game after that.
I contemplated trying out the Druid, because that is another class I have liked quite a bit in the past and wished that Diablo 3 got. However, after watching this video from Wudijo… I decided against it. All signs point to the Druid feeling even worse than the Barbarian did. I think maybe my general takeaway is that much like Path of Exile… playing melee is arguably the wrong choice. The players that opted to play the Sorceror or the Necromancer had pretty good experiences. Playing a ranged rogue was fine, but was not really doing it for me in the way that the Demon Hunter did in Diablo III. Though honestly, it seems like a lot of people liked the sluggish gameplay because to them it felt more weighty and meaningful. For me, it just felt like a game from a different genre than the one I was wanting to play. I said this on the podcast but had I not been gifted a copy of Diablo IV, I would have absolutely made the decision to just pass this game up until a year or so after launch. I feel like there are more issues with the game than three months can solve.
Really stupid thing that pissed me off. This screen. When you exit the tutorial you are given a prompt to buy the game. When you finish the campaign… you are yet again given a prompt to buy the game. I own a copy of the game. In fact, I own the granddaddy super mega package for the game, because my benefactor was overly generous. I feel sort of awful not liking the game knowing how much they spent on it. Doesn’t Blizzard have the tech to be able to detect if someone owns a valid license to the game or not? Because that seems like a relatively trivial check. If I already own the game… stop showing me a billboard in the game.
Honestly, I think the problem really is me and my expectations. I am too ingrained in the culture of the ARPG game to accept this MMORPG as the next Diablo game. Had I been someone who played through Diablo III once, and then showed up to play this game… I probably would have been extremely happy with what I saw. It would have been a better-looking game that has the window dressing of a franchise that I remember fondly. However, I have expectations of what it should be based on what I have experienced from games that have moved on past Diablo and created honestly better experiences. So a key example of expectations biting me in the ass is with the World Boss. When you say that, I picture the deep mechanical feasts that are the world bosses and meta bosses of Guild Wars 2 that feature 50 players. What we got instead was a 10-player limited instance featuring a bag of hit points with three mechanics that all one-shot you if you failed any of them. It felt awful and was so much less than what I was expecting as the bare minimum.
So instead of playing any more of Diablo IV after I finished up with Ace on Saturday afternoon… I went back to Last Epoch a game that is making me extremely happy. I’ve since moved on to the level 80 monolith after fighting my way through the annoying revamp of Lagon at the end of the level 75 monolith. Ace is far enough ahead of me to now be on empowered monoliths, so I am trying to catch up. Slowly bit by bit I am replacing gear that I had held onto for far too long, and that is making me feel more powerful as a result.
When I got to the level 75 Monolith I started saving all of my level 75 chest pieces and then using the stockpile of runes that turn an item into a random unique for that slot. There is a new unique chest that went in with the 0.9 patches called Aaron’s Will, named after the content creator behind the Action RPG channel on youtube. Essentially it makes it so you can no longer summon Skeletal Warriors/Archers and instead for every 4 warriors you can summon, it gives you an additional full sized full strength Bone Golem.
So now I am running around with two giant Pyre Bone Golems, that do stupid amounts of AOE fire damage… and the game feels amazing. Like it felt good before now, but after swapping things out it feels dumb in the best of ways. It also meant that I dropped Skeletons since that didn’t really do me much good and let me pick back up Dread Shade again. I had a blast last night chipping away at the level 80 monolith. I ended up killing the Shade of Orobyss without realizing what I was doing… and now have +5% corruption on all of my maps. I think I am stepping away from Diablo IV and the rhetoric surrounding it because clearly, it was not making me happy. Instead, I am focusing on the things that are making me happy and just moving on with life. If you enjoyed Diablo IV, then awesome. I hope it has a very smooth launch. I hope the next few months turn it into exactly the game you want it to be. For me, I think it is too far off the mark to really salvage.
Hey Folks! Tonight we are down three folks and contemplated not recording at all… eventually deciding on the recording to save ourselves from a mega show. The original intent was to record a fairly short show, but ultimately we ended up chatting away for the full time regardless. Tonight we talk about Diablo IV again and some of our frustrations. This weekend Grace got to play the game in the Open Beta so we start out with their opinions and devolve from there. After that Tam talks a bit about his experiences with Triangle Strategy. Finally, we talk about Adepticon and all of the news coming out of it for new miniature gaming releases.
I have this weird superstition when it comes to computers. I will never name the same build the same thing twice. It is almost as though each machine that gets a fresh install is its own “being”, because yes I suffer from the personification of machinery. Generally speaking, the machine gets named after something that I am engaged with at the time. My current gaming desktop is named NormandySR2 and my laptop is named NightCity. My gaming desktop before that was named Serenity, and when I rebuilt the gaming desktop before that into a Plex Server I named it Merigold as I was playing through Witcher 2 and 3 at the time and Triss is legitimately the correct choice. Over the weekend that machine gave up the ghost, and while I could potentially resurrect it with a new system build… I’ve decided to move on. Another proud tradition of mine is to turn my previous gaming desktop into my new “fuck around and find out” system. Merigold was my old AMD FX-6300-based system and when I upgraded to my current i7-10700K-based system a few years ago, I left my previous x99-based i7-5820k system largely sitting there dormant.
The plan is to build this into a Linux Mint based system. Why that distro? Largely it is a case of comfort and familiarity. I’ve built up a few past laptops using it and felt good about it. In theory, I could just run a more server-ly distribution on it, but I often like to use this machine as a secondary desktop. I’ve always built my second machine as a Windows machine, so this is going to be a bit of a first for me. This is going to mean that I will be using Linux a heck of a lot more than I normally do. For decades I’ve had a Linux box as a “toy” machine, that I fiddle with for a few days and then forget about it… and by the time I need it again, I often burn it down and start from scratch. The fediverse however has immersed me more into open source culture… and I am thinking it might be time to test drive actually running one of my primary machines as Linux. I mean I will still likely run Plex on it, but I am also really interested in trying to figure out the best use of it as a remote machine given that I never actually use my second machine with a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse. Previously I had used Parsec as my remote tool of choice, but there is no Linux hosting option for that sadly. In the short term, I will probably use VNC, which I have never loved… but it is functional and easy enough to set up.
I popped in for a little bit yesterday before Diablo IV Beta came to a close and finished leveling to 25, the level cap for that test. I am still a bit “up in my feels” about what I really think about that game. I was honestly not expecting “Blizzard Does Lost Ark” and since I bounced so phenomenally hard from that game I guess I understand the dissonance that I am going through regarding that. Diablo Immortal is also somewhat of a version of that experience, and I liked it just fine because I entered into that with very low expectations. Diablo IV however had been a game I had whether or not I wanted to… been pinning my hopes on as the last chance for Blizzard to really grab me. I’ve always cared far more about the Diablo franchise than anything else that the company has put out, and slowly over the years, I have peeled away from the other franchises. I did not really want to also feel like I had moved on past Diablo as well. I mean I have a copy of it now, so I might sit and watch and see what it evolves into over time.
The experience of the Diablo IV Beta has had the effect of causing me to pour my heart and soul back into Last Epoch. This is honestly the sort of experience I was hoping Diablo IV was going to be. For all of the talk of a return to Diablo 2 from the devs… I sort of expected something that would straddle the gap between Path of Exile and Diablo 3. That is ultimately what Last Epoch feels like, a happy medium between those two games. I got my Sentinel/Paladin up to fairly high levels and while I enjoy it… I also was not really feeling it. So instead this weekend I started pushing up my Necromancer and have now almost gotten up to the same levels that I was sitting at on my Paladin. I’ve not started the Monoliths yet but am working my way through the final chapter of content that is currently in the game. I think I have effectively a fully fleshed-out “kit” at this point and it is just a matter of getting levels and getting better gear.
I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in Guild Wars 2. Here is one of those Legendary bosses that I compared Diablo IV bosses to. I legitimately hate the Legendary rogues that spawn after you have defeated a Champion rogue. I largely stick around to help fight them because they are such pains in the butt… and I know they can wipe an entire field’s worth of unsuspecting open-world players. It always feels like I spend most of my time resurrecting other players. It is more a case that I don’t want to damn anyone to do this horrible encounter alone, as opposed to actually wanting to fight it myself. That is the weird thing about Guild Wars 2… it makes me want to take action to help other players because it seems like it is the right and proper thing to do. I have a post in me about how Guild Wars 2 is the best game that the mainstream isn’t taking seriously… but that is going to have to wait for another day. The annoying thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is so good… that it turns players into evangelists for it… which only ends up pissing off the unindoctrinated.
So the goal for today is to finish the installation of whatever I end up naming the new box. I spent most of yesterday furiously copying files from a machine that I have not touched in two years… and probably didn’t actually need anything from… but felt like I had to back up “just in case”. I’m currently running it off the bootable image and am just about ready to do the proper install. Linux “live” images are really a godsend, especially given that they just sort of “work” now to let you copy files off an otherwise dead system. That whole world has evolved so far since the first time I installed RedHat in the late 90s.
Diablo IV Login Screen showing my level 24 Barbarian
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I spent quite a bit of time playing the beta for Diablo IV and have some thoughts about my experience. I honestly was not sure if I would be playing the game, but I had a friend gift me a copy unexpectedly so it would have been rude to not play after that. I love ARPGs and over the years Diablo 3 Seasons have been something that I almost set my calendar by. More recently I have gotten extremely engaged in Path of Exile Leagues and spent copious amounts of time playing Grim Dawn, Wolcen, and more recently Last Epoch. Back in the day, I spent a truly excessive amount of time playing Titans Quest, Fate, Torchlight, and the assorted Dungeon Siege games.
Diablo III Rift showing a Loot Explosion
Suffice it to say I am an aficionado of the genre or more specifically the kill-fast-get-big-prizes style of gameplay that comes with the modern ARPG. I like grinding out content for big prizes and tend to play either ranged classes that can do screen-wide explosions or tanky classes that are effectively invulnerable as the multitudes break themselves on my body. I like turning off my brain and just becoming one with the controls and greatly enjoy the mechanical loop of gameplay that I can find in many modern ARPGs. Last night for example I spent the entire evening leveling a Necromancer in Last Epoch while listening to an Audiobook, and I was honestly in heaven. I am trotting out my resume if only to let you understand what sort of engagement with these games I enjoy, and that I am very familiar with the genre.
Diablo IV Barbarian in the tundra with a flaming sword
I have to be honest… at this point, I am not sure if I like Diablo IV. It is at the very least not the game I was expecting it to be. If you stripped off the branding of this game and presented it to me from another publisher with a slightly altered setting and I am not sure if I would have described it as “like Diablo”. The core gameplay loop that I enjoy so much in a Diablo-style game, isn’t really the core gameplay loop of this game. It instead is a game with much more deliberate slow-paced combat and a world that is much more dangerous than I have come to expect from even Path of Exile. Everything about the game feels much more akin to an Isometric MMORPG that you more commonly find on a mobile platform than what I have come to expect from a PC ARPG. So for me at least it is way less of a contemporary of Path of Exile, Diablo II, Diablo III, and Torchlight and more a challenge-focused version of Lost Ark. I am almost certain at some point during its development process someone uttered the phrase “the Dark Souls of ARPGs” even though it lacks the traditional soulslike trappings apart from “don’t get hit”.
The First Boss fight – X’Fal, the Scarred Baron
Diablo IV feels like it has doubled down on the “bossing” style of gameplay from Path of Exile. Every boss has 4 sections of their health bar, and whittling down a quarter will produce some sort of intermission mechanic or phase shift. This has more or less been true with all of the dungeon bosses I have fought as well. They feel a lot like fighting a Legendary mob in Guild Wars 2, so read… super tanky bag of hitpoints that will take you quite a while to whittle through while avoiding a number of other mechanics. Bossing in general in an ARPG is probably my least favorite part of the game, and I gave up on progressing past the Searing Exarch in Path of Exile because I simply did not really enjoy building for that sort of mechanic. So far all of the bosses in Diablo IV seem to be punitive towards a melee playstyle because my brief amount of time spent playing a ranged rogue saw me breezing through them whereas I had to play much more carefully on the Barbarian.
The conquering of Stronghold Malnok
Dungeon delving however is just a small part of the gameplay in Diablo IV, and you are going to spend a much larger amount of time roaming around the open world. Here you will stumble across events that are spawning constantly in an almost Guild Wars 2 style, where you and any players sharing your map can work together to complete them. So far all of the events I have tried can be completed solo, but simply go much faster with a host of randoms. The coolest of these however is the Strongholds which are one-time completed events that will open up new areas to the players. Malnok for example required me to defeat a number of Goatmen shamen that were channeling into a boss in the center of the map. After killing all of these it shifted into a big boss fight, and upon completing it the area turned into a town. This reminds me quite a bit of the area in Witcher 3 where after defeating all of the monsters in a town, the locals come back and set up shop again. It feels cool, but also a bit like any modern Assassin’s Creed or Farcry game with similar zone control mechanics.
A story mission in Diablo IV
One of the places where Diablo IV excels is in its storytelling. Traditionally the bar for storytelling in the ARPG is something you might be at risk of tripping over. While they often have amazing world-building and lore… they often have a pretty hamfisted narrative that is the bare minimum to keep the game from completely falling apart. Diablo IV is a great story game, and some of the side quests honestly are better than the main story. Once again I am going to pull out the Witcher 3 as a reference because a number of the side quests remind me of just how detailed that game got with its off-the-beaten-path narrative. I feel for a lot of people that this is going to be one of those games that they play through all of the stories once and then feel satisfied and walk away never to touch it again. That is going to be a completely reasonable way to approach this game honestly.
Combat on the Barbarian showing a Legendary Drop
I think my core problem with the game in its current state is the moment-to-moment gameplay loop doesn’t feel amazing. The time to kill in combat feels sluggish and not exactly what I have come to expect from the ARPG genre. Sure a Diablo III Demon Hunter feels awful for the first ten levels or so… but those are over in maybe ten minutes. With Diablo IV I was three or four hours into the game and it still felt like I was fighting while mired in quicksand. Admittedly most of my experience comes from playing the Barbarian but if you don’t nail that class… the most straightforward of Diablo archetypes… I have concerns. Playing as a ranged Rogue felt a little bit more snappy, and I’ve heard tales that the Sorceror is extremely overpowered… so then that raises a whole other line of concerns around class balance. What I expected was honestly something that played and felt a bit more like Diablo Immortal, since there is deep parity between the systems of that game and this game… and quite frankly I would probably rather spend my time playing Diablo Immortal were it not for the egregious monetization strategies. I think it is probably a better game across the board.
All of the Legendary Drops I have Seen So Far
The itemization is also lacking at least in what I have come to expect. Magic and Rare items aka Blues and Yellows are effectively what you would expect from any other game. Where things get weird is Legendary Drops. Generally speaking both Legendaries and Uniques from other games are “curated” rolls that are capable of dropping with very specific parameters making them almost always useful for specific builds. Legendaries in this game however are randomly generated items that just have a single legendary trait on the item. So that means it is entirely possible for you to get a Legendary trait on an item that does not make any sense and is generally useless otherwise. Roll curation is a big part of what made legendaries so special in the first place because getting one meant you knew exactly what you were getting ahead of time. A lot of the chase of item drops is a search for specific cornerstone pieces that you need for your build. Screwing with this mechanic is going to at least in part cheapen the search for those build-defining items.
Extracting Imprints from Legendary Items and the Codex of Power
Now one cool aspect of the crafting system is that you can extract any legendary trait from an item, and then imprint it upon another item. So for example, if you have a yellow item that is perfectly rolled but is missing the legendary trait, you can effectively upscale that item into a legendary by adding the trait. The process is destructive and rather cost prohibitive at least with the sorts of money we are able to get in the beta so far. The problem is this is a somewhat flawed process because they also have another system in the game called the Codex of Power. This effectively allows you to collect legendary imprints that are permanent recipes that you can create as many times as you like. What would have been a much better system is that eating a legendary added it to your Codex of Power instead of how it works now and producing a one-time-use item that will ultimately clog your inventory. The codex of power would have been akin to cubing an item in Diablo III and would have added a whole pokemon aspect to trying to find all of the patterns out in the world and add them to your codex. For now, you unlock the Codex through running dungeons and it is a different set of “Legendaries” than the ones you consume and turn into imprints.
Completing an Event by killing monsters to spill blood into a pillar
Throughout the weekend I spent some time threading my comments over on Gamepad.club. In doing so I was reminded by friends of a simple truth. While I might not terribly enjoy the game at the moment, I also did not really love Diablo III at launch either. It was only the significant changes brought on by the Reaper of Souls expansion at the “Loot 2.0” mindset that led me to love that game. Similarly, the Destiny 2 that launched looks very little like the game that exists today. This is sort of the way of the live services game, that it morphs and changes over time to hone in on the types of gameplay that the players want. So while I may not love Diablo IV at this very moment, it does not mean that there is not a Diablo IV in the future that I will not deeply enjoy to the point of setting my calendar around its schedule.
Highly Detailed Dungeon Environment
What I currently see is a game that I think a lot of people are going to play through once and then walk away from. However, it is very clear that Blizzard wants long-tailed transactional income from this game in the form of battle passes and cosmetics. What I do not see is a game that is going to really appeal in large part to the “Core ARPG” demographic that competes in Diablo II: Resurrection Ladders, Diablo III Seasons, and Path of Exile Leagues. The game instead seems to be tailored more to the sensibilities of the MMORPG game player and feels very much akin to the sorts of interactions you might have with a World of Warcraft. If I adjust my expectations to that sort of a game, then Diablo IV honestly holds up pretty well. I would probably rather play this than I would World of Warcraft at that point. However, in that space, I think Guild Wars 2 is doing a far better job of a lot of the things that this game is trying to do with its Strongholds and Zone events.
Lilith from one of the early cinematics
I have to be honest, the game was a little disappointing for me because I was ultimately expecting it to be something that it is not. What I was hoping for was a happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile with a glossy coat of paint. What I got instead is something more akin to a darker version of Lost Ark and the mobile isometric MMORPGs. In truth, I already have my happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile and it is called Last Epoch… but just because Diablo IV is not what I was expecting does not mean it is a bad game. I highly suggest you judge for yourself and next weekend you will be able to. While this weekend was only for those who had purchased the game, next weekend is as I understand it open to anyone with a Battle.net account. The next period begins on March 24th at 9 am PDT and will conclude on March 27th at 12 pm PDT. If it is anything like this week, you will be able to preload the game roughly a day ahead of time.
Screenshot from Quin69’s stream hitting a 108-minute login queue
I will say if you do plan on participating next weekend… maybe don’t take any time off from work. This is good advice in general, to never take off time specifically for a game launch because it will most likely only end in heartbreak. I was off on Friday already, so I did the dumb thing and tried to play when the servers opened. However, there was a period of time on Twitch where the entire Diablo IV section looked like the above shot of various streamers stuck waiting in extremely long queues. While the servers stabilized by Saturday, I would expect them to be bleeding again when the next phase opens up. This first phase was only for folks who have purchased the game, the next one will open the floodgates and let anyone play. If you are interested in this game, I would highly suggest giving it a test drive before you make the purchase. It likely does not match your expectations.
Did you spend time this weekend playing the Diablo IV Beta? What were your thoughts? Am I being weird for not really being all that into it? Drop me a line below.
