Diablo IV Beta Feedback

Lord_Jaroh

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Feb 21, 2021
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After playing the beta, here are my thoughts on it. Yes, it is a wall of text, the same kind of thing that I wrote for the D3 Beta, although this one is not nearly as in depth (or "nitpicky"). If anyone has any thoughts or any information showing where I errored, please let me know. :)

TLDR: So far I will be waiting until after launch to see what state the game is in before I purchase, especially since they want top dollar for a game I feel is not ready for release as is. It just doesn't feel "fun" to play, beyond wanting to experience the storyline of Diablo. The character building and item hunt so far feels weak, and the lack of randomization in dungeons really hurts for replayability.

These are my notes that I took while playing the game, which I then expanded upon after the Beta closed. I played as a Druid, up to Level 25. I only went through the main questline up to the first major town, only so that I can experience the story if and when I pick up the game later. I was looking at the gameplay aspects, rather than story critiques. The story, while great to experience, is not something that the average person who picks up the game is going to play through more than once or twice, and it is not likely to change at all. The gameplay is what is going to keep the person playing once they have finished the story.



Opening, Story and General notes:

It would have been nice to pause the opening cinematic, as I got a phone call in the middle, and couldn't pay attention to it fully.

Campfire screen excellent, the character creation screen is excellent. Both of these are vast improvements over Diablo 3, and bring nostalgia towards D2.

The larger Stash size is great. I would like to see stackable Gems, or a separate tab for gems, much like the ingredients tab would be nice.

The only thing I will say about the story presentation is there is a lot of pausing of gameplay to listen to what is happening. I am hoping that on repeated playthroughs with new characters, There is a way to bypass this completely if you do not want to listen to the story again and again.

Potions/gems are a little out of place, size and coloring. Just feel disjointed from the rest of the vibe the game is giving off.

Boss fights locking you into an “arena” was very “gamey” feeling, and took away from the atmosphere quite a bit.

The potion play felt okay, but gimmicky and arcadey, rather than being fun and adding to gameplay much. Potions would actually feel better if they were on a timer and unlimited, rather than the current system of when you run out, you're screwed, so to speak.

I like the “New Stock Delivery” timer for merchants.

There did seem to be a lot of new merchant options, which was both good and bad. It meant there was a lot more variety in what to do (as well as splitting up other players within the town, so everyone wasn’t grouped there), but it also meant a lot of running around within town doing downtime activities after battles. As well, keeping players ungrouped around different vendors really was dismissed when it came to the Wardrobe and Stash.

“Zzzzz” above afk characters is a nice touch, petting the dog, little things like this help add to the gameplay experience.

Tabbing to larger map was annoying to find where I was going. I would like to see a transparent overlay toggle for the map, so it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the game.

Having “Locked Door” feels silly, when you bust other doors down. It removes you from the immersiveness of the game. This goes for the fetch quests in the dungeons as well.

If you grabbed the Chapel Key before speaking to the priest, it would have been nice to see the dialogue change. “This Key?” Just having some dialogue relating to events that your character has completed shows that the game acknowledges your character there. This would be a nice touch.

Having your character speak some dialogue to NPCs, but not other dialogue makes for a very disjointed feel, especially when there are such pains taken to make your character feel central to the story, and involved in it.

Secret Doors, or secret things in general? If there were, great, but it would have been nice to see some if there weren’t. I did not find any such secrets in the game as I played. Hopefully there are in the finished version.

The UI in the game is very clumsy, and overall ugly, from the button tips underneath your hotbar, to the Map not being toggleable or having an overlay option, to the general layout of your character screen, and multiple font styles used in the game. Hopefully this is fixed in the future. I do miss the original Diablo Font as well.

The Shrines seemed to where off too quickly for my liking. It would have been nice if they were longer effects. Maybe a tweak that you could keep them going as long as you satisfied some requirement? You could even change up the requirements depending on the skill. The Gold Shrine? As long as you keep picking up gold, it would last longer. Increased Damage? The more monsters you kill, the longer it lasts. Etc. Anything to changeup the gameplay a bit would be nice, and temporary effects that change how you interact with the game for short bursts really are excellent. The Treasure Goblins are one such feature that really helps this, and I think Shrines could very well do the same thing. The keys are making sure to emphasize the core of the game: killing monsters, and being in short bursts that you control, so you can choose whether to interact with them or not.



Overworld

The overworld map looks nice. The one thing I didn’t really care for was the blue location circles that would show up to direct you to a quest location. I think it would be better served to simply highlight the whole region the quest was located, rather than the much smaller circle within that region. This would give more emphasis to exploring. You could even have the target location change randomly for some quests within that region as a result, so things aren’t always in the same spot, helping for replayability.

Being a “forced-mmo feel” didn’t sit right with me. I would rather it adopt the Guild Wars approach, where the cities were where people were, and the overworld was more instanced for you/your party/clan, but that ship has sailed long ago. I will say, having randoms show up as I was playing did not add anything to the play experience, and more often than not detracted, as I would run through areas without any monsters to kill as there were people killing them before I got there. This could also work with the Stash and Wardrobe areas which just felt glutted up with people. Have a separate loaded area where you can go to get to these quickly that isn’t accessed by the world at large.

The level scaling as a result really detracted from the experience as you never felt like you were gaining power when you leveled up. One small change that could help a bit is to not show a player’s level above their head, so you don’t know if it is a level 3 character beside you or a level 25 character. It would just have their name, and would lead to less immersion-breaking thoughts such as “Why is this low level character killing the mobs just as fast as me?”

The many different loot containers was nice to see, but also very annoying, in that you had to click on them in order to get what was inside. I would have liked to see more of them be affected by attacks going on around you, so that being destroyed by accident would still yield what you were looking for. This way people can concentrate on monster killing, instead of also having to run around and farm resources/open barrels as separate actions.

I would have liked to see more exploration rewards, whether that be secret dungeons not on the map, or more treasure chests in odd corners. The Altars of Lilith are nice, but once you have found them, there’s no reason to hunt more.

I was disappointed to see only 5 classes in this game, and all 5 being "old" classes. I would have liked to see all of the previous old classes represented as options, or else seeing a couple of new classes. I know that we will be getting new ones in the future, however it was still disappointing to see how few there were to choose from at launch.



Monsters

I liked the shielded skeletons/tough monsters having a blue bar rather than glowing shields.

The return of the Fallen, and other such mobs, was nice, especially with the new Fiery Fallen showing up to spice things up. Maybe have Shamans turn normal fallen into Fiery Fallen? Just an example of having old mobs appearing, but having different gameplay elements to them.

Tougher boss mobs were a little hard to differentiate from regular monsters. I would regularly run into a pack of monsters and then go “Oh, these are a bit tougher than normal, there must be a tough one here” Rather than be able to see ahead of time that there was a tough monster with minions to watch out for.

I think the circular patterns of soon to happen effects (like bombs/explosions) would be nicer if they weren’t so exact and regular. It feels too “gamey” for the world. Again, a disconnect. And again, the out of place “spinning laser” of D3 makes an appearance here (amongst other gamey effects). It just feels so wrong.

I loved the return of Treasure Goblins. They are one of the few new inclusions from D3 that I really like to see return. Chasing and killing these really adds to the gameplay, along with giving you a reward for doing so. Everything in the game should “feel” like this, an action you want to take despite the danger it may get you into, and a reward for doing so.

First boss was “alright”, if underwhelming; the pattern of attacks was far too predictable. It would have been nice to see a little changeup in attacks. And the dropping of health potions was a bit too predictable as well.

The overall density I did not have a problem with, as long as if you go to higher difficulties, the density grows with it, and not just mob damage/health.



Things that I would like to see changed

Being locked to only 4 hotbar skills, and not being able to use the scrollwheel to set different attacks on my mouse click felt bad. I would have liked to have more options with which to attack with, especially since the generate spirit/spend spirit combo felt so bland after a short time. It would have been nice to swap to Rabies, or even the ultimate for a quick shot in between attacks, but since using the keyboard for using attacks feels so clumsy, and I don't want to have so many timer skills on the bar, I simply never used them, opting for the pets there to give a slight buff while playing. I cannot stress enough how terrible the action economy felt while playing, and the 4 skill hotbar was a big part of it.

Having your core skill be your only option for attack that never really changes, and you use it for the entire game really feels lackluster. Imagine a world where you can either change your “resource generator” while playing the game (via a hotkey or something) on the fly and a way to customize said skill to do different things. That would make it a bit more interesting.

Skills bonuses themselves were fine, but really didn't feel impactful, simply being slight buffs to the main skill, same as the passives. Those incremental bonuses don't feel good at all to have to choose. And having only a couple of options to choose from for any given build really didn't add anything. I would like my Werewolf to be able to play differently from someone else's Werewolf, but the way the skills are, it just doesn't feel like they will.

The arcadey trapped in a small round/square arena got real old, really fast. My melee oriented Druid felt particularly bad. The boss fights, while some moment-to-moment gameplay felt interesting, overall just felt bad in the end, also because all of them are the same. There was no real variety in the arenas themselves, whether that be environmental concerns, size, shape, verticality, solve-this-puzzle-before-you-can-do-damage-style arenas, they were all just a closed box, kite the monster. Rinse and repeat.

Items are too over-engineered. Whites are useless, Blues are useless, Yellows become useless quickly. All that matters is Legendaries. This is poor game design. Not to mention the way the “wall of text” really makes you zone out on some items. Items should all have “some” use in the game, not just be a placeholder until you get a better item. An aside is regarding upcoming “set” items. I hope there is an option to “build-your-own” set, rather than collect premade ones. An example would be to collect blueprints for a set, put items of your choice into the blueprints, and then you get to create and name a set of your design. I would like to run around using a set that I build, “Jaroh’s Vestments” rather than hunt down the pieces for “Tal-Rasha’s Vestments” for example. The same could be used with a Legendary item that you have built to have the option to turn it into a Unique based on your character.

Another issue I have with items is how character-tied the items are. One thing I really liked about the older games is you could have off the wall builds for playing the game. You wanted a Scythe Wielding Sorceress? Sure. A Barbarian that uses a Bow? Why not? Leaning into unique items for character classes is a bad decision, in my opinion. What if those class specific items gave other classes access to abilities they couldn’t use? Running around with a Rogue that has a point in Wolf Companions because she is carrying a Druid totem in her off hand? Hell, this could be expanded to normal items as well for the Aspect hunting, a way to get you skills that you otherwise wouldn’t have, to open up build variety.

I think the current timer system of many skills just leads to feel-bad play. This is where expanding a stamina system would be much better instead, and feel less “gamey”. Imagine where you could use your skills based on how much stamina you had, and you had to wait for a stamina bar to recharge to use them again. Then you could hunt for items that affected your stamina pool/recharge rate/skill use percentage instead. This could allow you to have builds that rely on using your higher cooldown skills more often, or even as your main skill, depending on your Stamina stat, rather than having to push a button once and then rely on your main attack until it recharges. One thing that really felt bad for me in particular was the Companion Skills having to be on my hotbar. What if the skills gave you the companions as a Passive, and if you had them on your hotbar they could do something else? This way I can choose to have companions if I want, but also use other attacks I might be more interested in. This was just part of being so limited in the skills I was allowed to use for the game, and made me less interested in using the ones with larger timers at all.

This is also an issue of not having choose-able stats to some degree. Not being able to play a Throwing/Ranged Barbarian or a Shout Barbarian, or a Melee Sorcerer, or any other such “odd” build on a class is thrown out the window. Even with the skills we are given access to, not being able to choose my stats doesn’t let me help out my gameplay issues with Spirit spenders/Regenerators for example. If I was able to put points into my Spirit stat, I would be able to use that skill more often, if that was the skill I wanted to focus on.

The lack of randomization in the game is staggeringly bad. From every Cellar being a one floor dungeon with the same basic layout, to every Dungeon being pretty much identical as well, to every event that you find having the exact same layout and play progression every time you run into them, to every boss battle taking place in a small, locked in arena...all of it is bad. Sure, the “look pretty”, but that will get old quickly. Where are the randomized dungeon layouts? Secret doorways? How about randomized amounts of floors? How about having events have different triggers or even just basic layouts for some of them? (An example of this is the Blood Pillars, where you have to stand on a glowing circle for X time and then move to the next one, until they are all done, then kill the monsters. Why are they always with the same orientation? It would be nice to get some variation in these events so that when you run into these little events, they all feel a bit different from each other?). When the endgame is “running dungeons”, why are they all the same, with a few minor variations?

I think leaning into the randomization more would help a lot with the game. Have a “pool of attacks” that a boss can draw from randomly, so when you run into a boss, you have to identify his play pattern and formulate your attack/defense style would be nice. This way you aren’t looking for the exact same attacks every time. This is important when you fight the same boss monsters multiple times. This can be expanded upon as you fight higher difficulties, the bosses get more attacks to choose from each time. For an easy to understand example, let’s say a boss on “normal difficulty” has 9 attacks to draw from, and the game randomly sets 3 of them as the ones it will use for a given fight. Then on each progressive difficulty, they can add 1 or 2 attacks, making the fight more difficult to read. This can be helped by attacks that have similar “tells”, but different outcomes, and only careful observation will tell you which one the boss is about to take. This would allow for more interesting boss fights, where potion management as well as when to use your dodge will actually matter. It would also help if melee characters had some sort of “interrupt” or “parry/block” so they can mitigate some attacks that a boss may do, rather than have to rely on a dodge roll that has a timer on it (which could be relegated again into a stamina system instead) to dodge one attack, but have to face-tank the rest until the timer recharges.



The Little Things I miss that I would love to see return:

In D1, the thing I really enjoyed about the monsters were the little bits of extra information that you would get as you killed more of them. This was a nice touch that I would love to see return in some capacity.

I loved the notes you would pick up while playing D3 that were about the monsters. Listening while playing was the best part, as I did not need to stop killing monsters to hear the lore.

Any sort of stat screen showing what you have done in the world would be nice to see, from individual monsters killed (how many Fallen have died by my hand), to how many Legendaries you have found, to how many Dungeons you have cleared, etc. More stats are great to see.

The ability for any class to use any item. This to me is a pretty big loss, and I hope to see it return.

I am hoping to see the return of certain items in some capacity in the future, or expansion of some items. Gems are a big one. No new ones with fancy new effects? Jewels were a nice inclusion. I both liked and disliked Charms. I hope they come back, but I also hope they have either a dedicated set of slots in the bag, or even a limitation of you can have 1 Big, 1 Medium and 1 Small for example, and just have a much larger effect on the game than the originals did. They got out of hand fast with being in your inventory, and they detracted from the gameplay experience because of it.

Runes, only changed so that they don't create "must run" items. I would honestly be fine with Runes without Runewords, or if there are Runewords, have them not create such important Uniques from them. A Runeword on top of whatever Legendary you have would be better, rather than it replacing it.

I miss the randomized dungeon layouts.



The things I expect them to actually fix:

The Subtitles weren’t lining up with the opening cinematic and stayed on the screen for too long after the words were spoken.

Respawned after a death, and was invisible for a time, until I interacted with a wall to climb down.

Random glitch during gameplay cutscenes where the NPC would finish a sentence, and nothing would happen until I clicked to skip ahead, then it would continue as normal.

Randomly when zoning or coming out of a cutscene, the screen would zoom into my character, as if I had used the scroll wheel.

Sometimes when killing enemies, they would get frozen in an upright attack or standing animation instead of falling to the ground.

Some stuttering with sound and music during play, freezing on the animations; expect it to be server load issues.
 
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Great summary and I agree with a lot of this. I have a feeling that over time much of the negative points will be addressed but it will be a matter of getting the game shipped out first then make changes over the next year.

The Boss fights really were not great, like you say, too samey and in small arenas. Not a fan of this.

Lveling scaling I am torn on but I can see why it's necessary but bumping into randoms can get annoying. I would love to see an option where you could play with your own group and only your group in the open world. That's unlikely to happen though.

YOu can skip the cutscenes so you don't have to watch them again, you have to hold down the Escape key.

Great post and some great feedback.
 
I get that feeling as well, which is why I am of the wait and see variety, right now. There are 3 main things I need to see improved from what they showed to make me re-look at the game:

Randomization
The skill choices and gameplay
Itemization

And considering those are amongst the core aspects of the series and genre, those are kind of important things. The itemization is the one thing they are closest on, however it still needs work, and honestly, it's the one to me that they can afford to update as they go, as adding new items/changing item effects is something that will happen naturally regardless. The first two need to be looked at, as they are the core pillar behind replayability, and the reason people will continue playing beyond the story.

Thanks for the cutscene info. I will remember that in the future.
 
If I was to pick 5 things I like most about what I've played so far in no particular order they'd be.

1. Waypoint usage via the map.

2. New health pot system. I thought not being able to stack up on a backpack full of pots would be a nightmare but it isn't at all. It remains to be seen if this will stay the case at higher levels.

3. Transmog system. Customising my gear. Not really fussed about the tattoos and hairstyle/colour as you can't see that unless you zoom in.

4. Legendary Aspects. Loved extracting those with future builds in mind. So much versatility and control over how the character will play.

5. Monster-scaling. Literally a game-changer. Anywhere, any time and the monsters are a challenge that offers so much replayability no matter what your favourite areas or monsters are.

There's so much more to love about D4 though.
 
I also love the Waypoint system. I heard that teleporting to group members is not a thing anymore though. I didn't get a chance to try it, just wondering if that is true. If not, hopefully they bring that back in some capacity. Maybe teleporting you to outside the dungeon/stronghold they are in?

The Health Potion system is both hit and miss with me. the lack of having to worry about it in inventory is a blessing, absolutely. However, the boss battles made them feel far too predictable, as well the lack of support for melee play made using them more of a necessity than ranged characters, it seemed. I don't mind the gameplay of it (it would be nice if when you ran over the potion it would heal you automatically some percentage).

Transmog is very nice. Being able to customize your look not based on the gear you are wearing is a great touch, especially if you find a look you like and then some random new item is just "better" and makes your look take a nosedive, heh.

The Legendary Aspects are great in theory. I am hoping they will be good in implementation later in the game. Right now they seem to be the main thing about customize/power up your character, rather than your skill choices, which I am not completely a fan of.

Monster scaling is one that I am not completely sold on, only because the gameplay feels so flat because of it. You never seem to have the "powerful" sensation of being able to plow through enemies now that you gained a level or skill, nor the sensation of just around the corner there could be something that could give you pause. Not sure yet, just something about it didn't "feel" right. :\
 
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