Diablo IV – Review In Progress

The first review embargo has been lifted today. Diablo IV will open its gates next week, on 6 June. I’ve spent dozens of hours roaming Sanctuary over the last two weeks, having completed the campaign, hit level 50, unlocked the Paragon Board, graduated to World Tier III, and devoured as much post-game content as I could in the allotted review period, such as the Whispers of the Dead missions and Helltides. 

However, I’m not ready to assign a score until I’ve gotten to play the game under normal conditions: with the servers live and teeming with players hunting Lilith. That means you won’t see a full review until the middle of next week at the earliest. Until then, I’ll give my impressions on the things I can talk about. Diablo IV, in a nutshell, is a very enjoyable game.

Before I begin, let me say that my experience was with the Sorcerer Class at World Tier II. This is the difficulty level for advanced players. 

Diablo IV’s thrill comes in the increasingly exciting chase for power, whether it be rare loot or powerful skills, to take down scores of foes as quickly and effectively as possible. This quest for power is engaging, rewarding, and challenging. Progression is less about making the number of your level go up – enemies scale right alongside you, so you’re rarely more than one level higher than them – and more about smartly utilizing the best gear sporting the most useful effects relative to your class and playstyle. It is the same for your abilities.

Though combat is enjoyable (if a bit mundane in the early hours due to limited offensive options), the fun picked up in a big way once I acquired enough skill points to fill up my hot bar. It becomes a fun and chaotic game of blasting away enemies, dodging attacks by using evade, and timing cooldowns in order to unleash chaos at just the right moments. The synergies between skills and perks were a lot of fun. I upgraded my fiery dragon summon to include a gravity pull, which turned the enemies into ducks ready for a chain-lightning attack. I rarely respec skills in RPGs, but Diablo IV’s well-balanced difficulty and variety of dangers challenged me to refund powers (at a reasonable gold cost) to experiment with others. It kept me interested and stopped me from getting complacent. 

The obsession with the gear was also a major factor. Diablo IV allows players to customize weapons and armor according to their own playstyle. The Occultist offers many options, including replacing unwelcome gear traits and crafting new items, adding gems for stat boosts, or imbuing equipment with powerful effects. And even when you’ve crafted a winning set, decent loot drops meant I still found superior items often enough, with Legendaries appearing more frequently as the game progressed. If you don’t like the idea of having to constantly visit the menu in order to switch out gear, then I suggest upgrading your existing equipment until you find something too great to ignore. 

It’s a big game. However, getting the mounts can be tedious. You’ll spend at least half the game traveling between the relatively limited fast-travel points on foot, and I sometimes grew tired of being constantly assaulted by occasionally suffocating mobs of enemies when I just wanted to reach my destination and soak in the beautifully detailed scenery and great soundtrack. I’m glad there are plenty of things to kill, but there’s rarely a stretch where you’re left alone. 

Discovering Sanctuary in all its glory is well worth the effort. Raising my Renown has become a very effective tool, rewarding skill points, cash, or even extra potions, for completing quests, completing dungeons and discovering new locations and waypoints. The live events that occur regularly offer combat challenges with two levels of rewards depending on your performance. The majority of these were enjoyable, and I often made an effort to complete them. The dozens of Altars of Lilith, which grant permanent stat boosts and are well hidden, were also a lot of fun to hunt. Over 100 sidequests range from simple fetch quests to multi-part story arcs, the latter of which often go in some intriguing directions that make them, for the most part, good side dishes to the main course of the campaign. 

The Strongholds is my most favorite and intimidating diversion. Strongholds are tough as nails zones that present unique combat scenarios, tied to a story. Conquering them unlocks new settlements, new sidequests, or even another point of fast travel. The first task was to eliminate demonic statues throughout a town while the residents were swarming me. Another had me expel a ghost by using human ashes as a fire extinguisher. My first Stronghold took several tries to overcome, but every time I do it feels like an accomplishment of skill and strategy. This loop of rewards and their impact on your Renown, and character’s overall progression is so compelling that every action feels rewarding.

Enjoyable action and progression is wrapped in a compelling narrative. Lilith’s return unfolds in a lengthy campaign told through beautiful cinematics and the most in-game cutscenes in series history, presenting an engrossing dark tale about escaping the futility of being trapped at the mercy of greater powers vying for control at humanity’s expense. While chock full of references to past games, the story is easy to follow for newcomers since it doesn’t rely on an encyclopedic knowledge of the series to grasp. Having jumped on board the series with Diablo III, I’m no lore expert, but the game treats its history with such an infectious reverence that I kept a wiki open to learn more about a returning face or referenced event due to how engaged I was with the plot. Some of the moments were outright stupid, but I kept a wiki open to learn more about them because I was so excited to find out what happens next.

The campaign was a great experience, but I wanted to continue my character’s development in the post-game. From what I experienced, it is a rewarding and fun way to test my abilities. Whispers of the Dead present new, limited-time incentives to existing tasks, such as slaying certain monsters or running dungeons in exchange for currency to buy special loot caches. You have to do quite a lot to earn this reward, but they often fold neatly into things I was already doing, so it’s a nice added bonus. The capstone dungeon was a lot of fun (and made me sweat), and it unlocked World Tier III. This introduced Helltides, Nightmare Dungeons and a more challenging challenge. Helltides is a good mixup that introduces stronger enemies to designated zones. These enemies drop different currencies for special rewards. 

I explored the PvP-focused Field of Hatred, but I couldn’t take full advantage of it due to the small number of fellow media members playing the game (I only encountered one human player throughout my entire pre-launch adventure). However, I found value in exploring even without rivals to slay since you can still kill enemies to collect Red Dust to spend on exclusive store items, such as the Odds and Ends store’s risk/reward-style magic scrolls. 

As a live-service game, the always-online requirement most often became a mild nuisance when I wanted to take short breaks. I often left it running to avoid the process of reloading into the server (which isn’t terribly long given the lack of players but still enough of a process where I avoided it when possible), which required finding a safe space to avoid getting jumped by enemies. Outside of that, I was kicked from the game a couple of times due to ongoing technical tests, which provided a glimpse into what will be the real-life tragedies of players losing progress midway through a tough dungeon or missing out on rare loot due to the randomized delivery.

The most heartbreaking setback I suffered happened when I was unceremoniously kicked from the game right before toppling a difficult boss, forcing me to replay the entire battle. For those who plan to treat Diablo IV as a single-player experience, such instances will likely sting, and I can only hope Blizzard has used this review period to reinforce the servers enough to minimize these setbacks at launch. 

While the in-game stores and crossplay were not available during my time reviewing, I was still able to enjoy a little bit of cooperative play, which was really fun. I also ran into a fair number of glitches during my time (some loading gating access to some areas, NPCs riding invisible horses) that Blizzard promises to have ironed out by the time Diablo IV launches, so I’m looking forward to seeing how much that patch cleans up. Diablo IV was a lot of fun, even though I have some unanswered questions. This game is a return to darker tones and styles of previous games. There are also many activities, fun combats, compelling stories, and an engaging story that make me want to stay in Sanctuary for longer. While it remains to be seen how the experience handles the incoming flood of players once the lights are turned on, I think Diablo fans, old and new, are in for a treat.