For those who didn’t know, I hold a very odd distinction. Back in 2012, I wrote the only negative critical review of Diablo III. Though the site and the review are gone (save for my original draft), I did not find Blizzard’s third iteration of its action-RPG franchise to be a good one. And despite the small contigent of fanboys who proclaimed I was insane or a “Blizzard hater,” I got a lot more folks telling me they agreed. Being fair, Diablo III was radically reworked between launch and the Reaper of Souls expansion, but when a game goes out the door, it’s the first version that the critics are dealing with. And in the wake of the open beta for Diablo IV, I’m feeling a sense of déjà vu.
In terms of visuals, there’s a lot to be said both in favor and against. On the upside, the visual details on the character models are really quite good, and the graphics engine has the capability to do all sorts of interesting cinematic effects and shots. Dolly shots and zoom outs to panoramic shots of important locales are arguably impressive on their own. Whether they necessarily belong in an ARPG, however, is a matter of some debate. The art style feels only mildly iterative from Diablo III. More detailed, yes. But somehow not as engaging, not as eye-catching as we’ve seen before. Moreover, text labels for objects and enemies felt somehow flat, like I was looking at listings in a spreadsheet. The only exception to this were the really big chapter ending boss fights, which had appropriately fancy name cards over their health bars. We’ll see what happens after release. There were a number of special effects which were quite helpful for giving some “oomph” to your attacks and helping you avoid enemy attacks. But again, iterative, not jaw-dropping and exciting.
As with the visuals, the audio has its high and low points. Being a beta, problems are bound to occur. And there were a number of instances where certain environmental sounds either didn’t play when they were supposed to or you were hearing a lot of monster noises around when there were no monsters in the immediate vicinity. The voice work was quite well done overall, but part of me is wondering exactly what part of Sanctuary we’re in, because it doesn’t feel like we’re in Khanduras or the Arreat Highlands, but some odd out of the way place where everybody is quasi-Slavic for no obvious reason. The soundtrack seemed oddly subdued, not quite as evocative as the orchestrations for the previous games, though whether this is a question of audio mix or poor composition quality is hard to say at the moment.
I primarily spent the open beta (running on a PlayStation 5) playing a Barbarian. They’ve been my go-to starting class since Diablo II because if you can’t enjoy dual-wielding your way through a pseudo-Gothic hellscape, leaving only demon slurry in your wake, it can’t be that good of a game. The very basic mechanics of Diablo IV, at least as of this open beta, certianly seem to keep to the formula. You hit things a lot until they fall over dead or you do. The problem I ran into almost immediately, though, is that you have no control over your weapons. Or rather, your weapons are tied to specific attack skills. In some respects, this is obviously an evolution of the energy resource mechanic that was present in Diablo III. However, it feels like an evolutionary dead end because, at least as far as the Barbarian was concerned, you’re saddled with multiple weapons and each of them requires their own special attack moves. Which means that, at lower levels, you’ve got gear taking up slots and you can’t do anything with it. Other classes do not have quite the same degree of problem, but the loss of fine control in terms of your loadouts is jarring compared to earlier entries in the series. The ability to switch weapon sets for all classes is badly missed here.
There’s one conceit of ARPGs with procedural generation, and it’s that you’re more or less going in a straight line in terms of zone to zone. An individual zone might have a lot of twists and turns, but the overall world design is very much like a string of pearls despite what the world map might show you. And, in truth, I saw precious little procedural generation going on in Diablo IV. Combine that with a giant fixed map, and one gets the uncomfortable feeling of half-measures being taken. It’s as if somebody said, “hey, let’s do a big open world game like Skyrim!” and somebody else said, “nahhh, we’ll do our usual proc-gen thing.” And then one of the suits told them to smash everything together in a pseudo-MMORPG or else. While there are random events happening in the world (often repeating ones, much like one would find in an MMO), there’s very little in the way of variety. It doesn’t feel like a Diablo game without the procedural generation, and considering how Diablo III was already skimpy in spots as far as the maps went, this really doesn’t capture that feel. You’re doing a lot of back and forth running around, on foot because horses weren’t implemented, and there’s little incentive to explore once you’ve revealed the map because it’s exactly the same as it was when you last stepped into it.
Probably the most damning indictment of the beta concerns the lore, both its dearth and its fidelity. Diablo II felt like an evolution of Diablo because they made the world feel like time had passed; locales were mostly derived from existing places mentioned in the first game, and characters were people we simply hadn’t met the first time around. Diablo III went off the rails, lore-wise, killing off the last characters we had any connection with from Diablo II but also giving us a lot more little nuggets of lore. A decidedly mixed result, all things considered. But Diablo IV‘s attitude towards existing lore seems to be, “never mind your lore, this is MY story!” It doesn’t feel like a carefully cultivated metanarrative which evolved organically from existing storylines and plot elements. It feels more like bad fan fiction, as though somebody who tried to make their own game and slapped the Diablo name on it in the brazenly stupid belief that Blizzard wouldn’t sue them.
While there are little glimmers of good narrative and character moments, the tone of Act I’s storyline (which was what the beta covered) feels almost like Blizzard is basically chucking the series in the trash, hinting at an apocalyptic end which coincidentally means they don’t have to make more games in the series after this one. Why bother giving us lots of journal entries on monsters, nations, and historical figures when the world’s likely to be completely destroyed? Worse, it feels entirely too… petty for a Diablo story. The grand battle of good and evil, light and darkness, Heaven and Hell, all of that tossed aside for what feels like some bizarre divorce fight between two equally contemptible beings. It never reached the state of “we need to save the world!” It felt more like, “It doesn’t matter if I live with Mom or Dad, everything’s gonna suck.”
Out of all the games in the series thus far (ignoring Diablo Immortal), Diablo IV does not entirely feel like a Diablo game. It doesn’t have the crazy random dungeons. It doesn’t have the grand sweeping storylines. It doesn’t move us to give a damn about the tormented and screwed-up world of Sanctuary, much less fight for it again. And it makes what used to be deceptively simple yet engaging gameplay into a ridiculous tossed salad of “optimized” mechanics and pseudo-MMO sprawl. It’s unlikely Blizzard has the means, much less the motivation, to try and fix these problems before launch on June 6. A decade ago, Diablo III badly disappointed me. Now, if the beta is representative of the final game, Diablo IV pretty much destroys any hope of salvaging a once great franchise.
Axel played the Diablo IV open beta on PlayStation 5.
