Players who pre-purchased the next chapter in the Diablo series from Vicarious Visions and Blizzard Entertainment had a chance to play the earliest build this weekend. While the gameplay experience overall shows Diablo IV in a good light, building the game up to be an entertaining and massive title for fans of the series and RPGs, in general, to look forward to sinking plenty of hours into. As an avid Diablo II fan and not a big fan of Diablo III, let’s get into where this game is looking to lie in its own series as far as quality goes.

Gameplay

The introduction area to this game is quite an experience all on its own, but after the first character, the section immediately gives the idea that it will get a little annoying. You don’t start with immediate access to playing online and instead, you have to complete the first few quests before you reach the first town with the first waypoint, which by activating the waypoint is when the online part of the game connects. Again, it is really intriguing the first time and does a good job of giving the player a chance to experience how to get quests and dungeon dive, which leads to using the skill tree, inventory, and such.

During the beta, they only had three classes available to play as. Testing out both the Barbarian and Sorcerer classes led me to find that it is actually really easy to get your character to an overpowered state. The thing is, you only seem overpowered by the enemies you face during the standard gameplay and the real difficulty lies with big moments - such as the world event boss. You can see the world boss fight here, and you can notice that everybody was dying from a single hit from this beast, even those at the recommended level of 25.

One thing I found interesting and somewhat simplifying, is that when you level up you only get a skill point. You don’t get any points for your stats and so they only increase by what is set in the programming, leaving the rest of the improvements and increases up to your gear to increase. Luckily, they do have a lot of different shops that work on the gear in new ways, such as swapping attributes with a new, chosen one or simply leveling up the item itself, which can be done three times.

The amount of content that was available in the demo was quite impressive. Taking a closer look at the map and it seems that this massive piece of land to traverse is only but the beginning of the game. From Act I we will head into Act II, which seems to be hinting to be in the Dry Steppes, and there I presume we will find a map that is just as massive. Yet, even with massive lands, the experience gained by players does seem to move rather quickly in comparison.

As for the controls for this game, it is very similar to previous titles. You click the mouse where you want to go, left-click for the standard attack and right-click for the secondary attack. Number slots available for other skills learned. The thing is, they are more set on what goes where and it is built into the skill tree. The controls are sectioned off as movement keys, main attacks, secondary attacks, and number keys. As you expand the skill tree, you will see these slots filling up and even being interchangeable as the player prefers.

One of the biggest changes I noticed was how they handle health potions. You seem to only be able to hold four at a time and instead of keeping them in stock, you always have the four. Once you reach certain levels, you can purchase a health potion upgrade to make those potions more effective, but the count stays the same. There are other potions and elixirs that you can get to put a special effect on yourself for a temporary amount of time. These are really helpful but quite expensive.

Expectations

Balancing in this game feels way off. You go from standard enemies that can be handled by a solo player to the world boss that can barely be handled by a full squad of players. Even the side dungeon boss fights don’t feel super challenging and I mostly played solo as a sorcerer without peak skill stats chosen, as I was trying out a handful of skills. Add on the factor of how effective the Thorns are in this game and the ability to become overpowered is just too easy.

The shops never have anything useful and whatever I find out in the game is always better. I liked it better in Diablo II where the shops would always have one or two things that are better than what you have in some ways, making it more enticing to purchase something. I never found any upgrade gear so I always spent my gold on elixirs and upgrades instead. Perhaps that is the point, but it's never bad to have options. As for whether or not they are doing gear right this time, it is just too early to tell, but it seems to be pretty straightforward.

I also hope that they mark the pre-online character section of the game (before the first waypoint) to be a tutorial and give us the option to skip this with new characters. While it is great the first time or two, players are going to have more characters than they care to go through the single-player-only section. I’ve made plenty of characters in previous games specifically just to use with certain friends, keeping them on the same level while using another character while they are offline. Running that intro area every time just to link up and then start playing is a bit of a nuisance.

Verdict

Diablo IV definitely stands out from the other titles and gives a unique style to the series. While it is fun to run around killing creatures quickly and taking down dungeons, I do hope that there is some better balancing brought into play. It’s a good thing they still have a few months to address some of the issues. The potential for a great title with massive replayability and entertainment value is there, they just need to tweak the game to grasp it.

You can get your own hands-on experience with Diablo IV during the open beta running from March 24-26. Otherwise, Diablo IV is set to release on June 6th, for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.