Anyone playing Diablo IV open beta?

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Im too old for login queues.

I'm so old i find it comical that a video game company thinks queuing up to play an online game is even something people would even do.

Ahh i think i want the basic title, and to use it as a trial to see if the full game is worth buying.

Any good? Its blizzard though, and lost ark didn't even try to hide the fact that it was a clickbait manipulation engine while you were playing it. Hopefully it also isn't the same.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Just in case anyone cares.. its a bit of a rollercoaster of positives and negatives (beyond the technical issues).

I'm at the point where you can forgive it and move past being a reskin of lost ark. Once you're over that the similarities to d3 start to come though, and its fun.

 

[Christopher Roberto]

Just alt+f4'd and uninstalled it. It's ugly, poorly made (85 gigs for a small slice of a game with Unity graphics?), extremely poorly balanced (even for a beta) despite having a small number of classes and skills to balance, repetitive and tedious, sounds terrible, and is probably the most clinically boring ARPG I've played since Torchlight.

ARPGs often have a problem with being intensely boring for some reason, but there's only so many slow crawls through a unremarkable dungeon to unlock a door for the Nth time with objectives maximally distant from each other and defended by model-swaps I can take before falling asleep at my desk. Even the music is bad, and game music rarely descends below mediocre. At points it's like they took a few string instrument samples and strung them together randomly into a song. Instead of cat piano we get cat violin.

I'm at the point where you can forgive it and move past being a reskin of lost ark.

It's not like Lost Ark. Lost Ark is a stereotypical modern KMMO where all they did is move the camera to a top-down position in hopes of generating enough initial confusion to attract an audience allergic to KMMOs who were looking for an ARPG.

The genres have grown together in mediocrity over time though, with "MMO" now possibly used for games where you play with up to 10 players peer to peer, and "ARPG" now possibly used for games where you recruit a trinity to acquire your limit of weekly character progression.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Yeah fair enough. There seems to be at least half the people who tried it that don't like it.

From not having expectations for it to be my main game, i quite liked it. The visual worldbuilding had me, the balance of the overdone darkness (and unnecessary gore) contrasted to mindless, repetitive gameplay seems to work (like in vermintide i guess, though that game requires a much higher multidimensional learning curve and then still is punishing).

I ordered the gameless collectors edition. The beta was enough to definitely want to keep it. As far as the game goes, no idea when i'll pick it up, though its a definite yes. To me once you get through the story content and "completing the map" achievements.. i can't imagine endgame to be positive to someone in their 40's.. like every other blizzard game i guess. Should be interesting to see what they came up with.

I still think its lost ark. Im not an expert (thankfully) so just going by emotions. What makes it lost arky to me is the mmo lite overworld, and the fact that once you're past the very small ability wall at the beginning, overworld is so easy to the extent of glaring pointlessness, combined with map markers instead of exploration.. in lost ark this eroded all sense of connection to even being a video game.. it was just a click generator. It was genuinely disturbing and i couldn't keep playing it within a few weeks of launch. Didn't make it close to endgame.

D4 is interesting that its the first game where i prefer the night cycle.. you feel cozy and safe in towns from this.. i like the atmosphere.

Yeah i guess i'm positive about it because i'll be completely happy 100%ing it and then coming back if the battle passes turn out to be good. It looks like if you expect to main this game, or are even an arpg enthusiast there are a massive list of issues. And there's a definite mismatch with the top premium pricing and the beta. Showing people an 83/100 game and still charging that much, not so good.

The music i initially thought was bad. Its odd, the first time every track catches your attention, it comes across as noticably bad, bad enough to pull you out of the game and check that its bad bad. Keep listening to it though, it strangely gets better.