Diablo IV

Diablo 4 was my most anticipated game of 2023 right along with Starfield. It's funny that these 2 games turned out to be massively hated on by certain portion of gamers, I guess kind of the price to be in the spotlight like that. I really followed all the development blogs of Diablo 4 and it was looking like a game to just gets everything right in the genre. I'm a huge fan of Path of Exile, but that game has so many annoying things going with it and Diablo 4 was looking to be the game to give a superior experience. Then came time for the beta, which greatly reduced my hype for the game... I enjoyed it, but I realized that it wasn't going the be the best game ever like I expected to be.

Diablo 4 is a different approach to the genre. It's an open world. It plays like Elder Scrolls. And then it plays like Destiny 2 with multiplayer "events". It's not quite the enclosed Diablo experience of non-stop dungeons with just 1 town. It's also designed for consoles where the gamepad is the optimal way to play it. Yeah I wasn't ready at first for all these changes. With the ABK acquisition by Xbox, I was not so much in a rush to acquire the game seeing how it would most likely be a game pass title (In Canada AAA games are a little above 100$ with taxes) and willing to wait to get value and patches. In the meantime the game released to great reviews but not so much from the hardcore ARPG crowd, logging in to Path of Exile and all the discussions were quickly turning to "D4 BAD" and the same was happening on reddit for Path of Exile, Last Epoch and even the Diablo sub itself.

So why D4 bad? Honestly I'm not exactly sure. The game is far from perfect but it feels like a gross exaggeration, kind of like a console wars thing going on with Path of Exile and Diablo as the other one has to be the worst thing ever. While Diablo 4 doesn't have the extreme depth of Path of Exile, it's also certainly welcome that you don't need a guide to play it. You don't need to play 500 hours and still feel like a newbie. It's certainly more welcoming in that aspect, you can hop in, try any homemade wonky build and you'll probably be fine to finish the campaign and even make it to World Tier 4. That doesn't mean the game is shallow as it does have many systems to it and it's comparable to something like Grim Dawn in complexity. Maybe the game is not for Path of Exile players, but it's certainly above many others in the genre and is overall a strong effort.

The players requested a dark and grim game like Diablo 1, and the team definitely delivered that. The graphics, the atmosphere, the style and all the visuals are absolutely top notch. Best in genre caliber. Of course Blizzard has the budget for that but they really answered the call perfectly. The campaign experience is pretty good with a strong campaign and good pace to it, full of cut scenes and unusual things happening. Exploring the map and discovering the world is fun, it's so big and following the main and side quests will have you going back and forth in all types of places. There's level scaling so there will never be any "dead" areas, you can always go back to earlier areas and the monsters will be tougher and more numerous. Clearing mobs is just as satisfying as it is in other games of the genre, the combat is quite good especially in the boss battles where the large areas allow for a lot of movement with the newly introduced dodge button. As far as combat goes, it does feel a lot better than Path of Exile which is starting to show its age compared to this.

The skill tree is a little simple and seems to have 4 main paths to take from (for each class), so that roughly gives the game 20 builds to follow in total. It's certainly not a huge number compared to the versatility of Path of Exile and Last Epoch, but it's not extremely low either and will definitely keep me occupied when I explore other classes in the future. Things get a little bit more interesting when you unlock the Paragon board (at level 50, about the time you'll finish the campaign) where it allows more freedom as you'll choose between 8 different boards to spec your class and those offer a lot of different paths. Not a mindblowing system but it's good enough to work.

As I mentioned before the campaign is a great experience but when you get to the end game the game does show a little bit its holes. Doing the various activites are fun at first but the leveling experience is so slow, it takes about 1 hour of effective grinding to gain a level so you'll be spending a lot of time if you intend to do the 50-100 route. The problem is after a while the activities start to feel redundant and there is no goal to do anymore (aside from getting stronger) and you are just kind of going through the same motions over and over again. I guess this is where Path of Exile shines, the mapping system is so amazing and you always have clear goals of where to progress next (and so many options of course). In Diablo 4, well you're just running nightmare dungeons one after another (or whichever activity you prefer) and doesn't quite have the same great feel to it. This I guess is where the game failed to deliver, but it's also facing a competitor that had 10 years of content added to it to perfect itself.

Much like Last Epoch, Diablo 4 has an amazing core but does need a better endgame and that's going to take some time to get there. It's still very much excellent and I had a great time with it for about 50 hours, but it's not quite the game for me to spend 500 hours in it and that seems to be the insanely high standard that the genre is subjected to nowadays. I have good hopes for it as the changes for the upcoming Season 4 seem to be going in the right direction and I'm especially curious about the expansion(s) and which direction the story will take things to. I think I'll be playing Diablo 4 for a long time and explore the seasonal content, perhaps it will become a masterpiece at some point. Anyhow I would still recommend Diablo 4 to fans of the genre (or even a good introduction to it), it does many things quite well and it's overall a very solid experience.