Author: Simulacrum  <nub>    205.209.243.42 Use this link if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion. Post a Msg
Date: 6/13/2023 11:39:21 AM
Subject: RE: Dibabro 4

Impressions so far if you care:

Present characters/approximate levels:

Ice Shard Sorceress - lvl 28
Flurry/Encircling Blade Rogue - lvl 26

1. Connectivity/Stability - surprisingly good. On launch evening with standard edition, only got disconnected once. No long queues. Since then, have only been disconnected one other time; almost instantly got back in. Blizzard should get a standing ovation for this - very impressive. However, they need to work on lag, rubber-banding, and other usual suspects (some of which could be my connection - hard to say).

2. Open world/MMO design -- not as dumb or disruptive as I thought it would be. You see other players, but mostly only in towns or events. Not at all a clown college with loiterers, dance teams, and mounts cluttering up buildings like in other MMOs.

3. The graphics and sound are decent but nothing remarkable. It's what you would expect from a product designed to be spammed onto every PC, console, phone, and toaster in existence. The world design is good for what it is -- a dreary, grimdark, primitive, superstitious, and impoverished place with demons and whatnot running around terrorizing people. I could do without so much mud, soot, and dilapidation, but it is what it is. Maybe it will change later.

4. The user interface is one of the worst I've ever seen, far worse than anything crapped out by Bethesda or eurotrash developers flailing around with Unity or whatever. Information is assigned to panels with no apparent logic. Tool tips explain almost nothing and sometimes don't exist at all (and there's no help file or other resource). Each panel takes up half the screen and contains 465 different fonts and type sizes. Finding anything is a matter of hunting through these panels by pressing random keys and trying to memorize them. For instance, the game puts abilities (skills) in a panel you find by pressing A. IF you want to see "skills" (different appropriations of abilities but basically another skill window that some classes can actually use and some can't -- for instance, my sorc can do something here but my rogue can't). And so on. There is no overlay grid for the map; if you want to see where you are, you bring up the only map in the game, which completely covers the screen and lets you get ambushed by newly spawned monsters. I could go on and on, but that's enough. The UI is a mess.

5. Gameplay is about the same as in D3 -- more or less the same monster density with adjustments related to World Tier/C level difficulty. It's pretty much the same piñata design you find in earlier Diablos -- enter dungeon, kill trash mobs, champions and elites enter from stage left or right, rinse repeat until you get to the boss arena, where you just endure long spammy encounters and hope you get something orange-brown instead of something yellow. Some dungeons are longer than others, especially the main story ones (more on that later). Some are important for different classes. End-game ones are supposed to be important for XP and items -- haven't seen those. Some, called "cellars," are very brief. All contribute to a mechanic called "renown," which is a kind of strange progression currency you need to accrue for various reasons. It's an all-right system. Nothing wildly innovative. More like something to do when you're traveling, like solving word puzzles or reading junk novels.

6. Everything about attributes, items, affixes, and gems is different. It bears no resemblance to D3 or previous games. In D3, you wanted to pile up your main attribute for logical reasons. A wizard wanted more Int to do more damage and get more resistances. A barb wanted more strength to do more damage and get more armor. In D4, Int, Str, Dex, etc. still kind of do these things but on a much smaller scale. More notably, every class can benefit from every attribute in a small way, but you still want your main one for slightly more damage. Resistances are presently bugged, so no one knows what to do with these. Also, you get your biggest benefits from item affixes, not character stats, so more than ever this is a loot game -- except whereas in D3 the developers adjusted things so that a wizard almost exclusively got items beneficial for a wizard, a sorc in D4 gets affixes that are all over the place. You can still go to a mystic or whatever it's called to gamble for more appropriate affixes, but you shouldn't have to do this for an item that is intended solely for your class. Why would I want Str on a wand? Time will tell whether this elevation of item stat importance will be a good or a bad thing. I'm not a fan so far.

7. The main campaign story is an artistic impossibility. Nothing could be more boring than the campaign in D3, and yet D4 surpasses it by an order of magnitude. Not only do I not care about what happens to the characters; I actually dread getting roped into the long, shaggy-dog theatrics of it all. I don't even know what's going on -- something about Lilith corrupting everybody but maybe being a good guy as she struggles against the angel Inarius, who may also be a good guy but it's all a mystery and so forth and so on. I don't care. Nobody cares. I just want it to be over. One reason is that the voice acting is adequate at best and comically histrionic during moments of high drama. As an added bonus, whoever directed the voice actors told them to speak. As. Slowly. As. Possible. All. The. Time. And this has the effect of making me want to skip through as much of the dialogue as possible. Some I can't skip through, and it's like I'm in a dream and I'm about to die from boredom but I can't escape because my feet keep getting gummed up with emo banalities and theatrical treacle. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blizzard shop starts selling a microtransaction that lets players skip the campaign. I would cheerfully pay whatever they want.

I must stop here. I may think of other things later.