The ‘Diablo 4’ Beta Is Fantastic, When You Can Actually Play It

Diablo 4

Blizzard

Finally, the beta for Diablo 4 has arrived, and while it requires a pre-order (or a KFC chicken sandwich) to get in on the first weekend, the game has enough people clogging up the servers to make its initial launch here kind of miserable. known of misfortune.

The good news is that when you get to play the Diablo 4 beta, it absolutely lives up to expectations in its first few hours in terms of gameplay, aesthetics, and shockingly, even the story, rising above past installments. The bad news is that at least in some regions (like mine), you’re allowed maybe 30-60 minutes of gameplay for every 60-120 minutes of re-login queue time.

It was an endless pattern all day yesterday, I would log in, play for a while, then boot in (usually in the middle of a dungeon with no checkpoints). The game would crash, I’d quit, and log back in to find an hour or two of waiting time ahead of me. It’s crazy for a game I want to play myself, but this is 2023, and games like this barely exist anymore without internet login requirements. And certainly not a quasi-MMO like this.

I don’t think I need to remind everyone of Diablo 3’s disastrous launch loaded with Error 37, where the game became inoperable. Blizzard has already begun damage control for long queue times and server issues, and while this “is a beta,” this is also a beta that’s sold out through pre-orders. It should at least be expanded, keeping these issues in mind. And if the game starts like this, it will be a problem.

Diablo 4

Blizzard

But I’ll be damned if the game itself isn’t fantastic, so far.

I’ll admit I rolled my eyes a bit when the dev team kept going back to the “darker” tone of Diablo 2, as I never had that much trouble with Diablo 3’s color palette/themes. noisily they did. But what Blizzard has done for Diablo 4 here isn’t terribly impressive so far. In the first thirty minutes of the game, they’ve already given us two of the most terrifying, mind-blowing scenes of the entire series so far. I’m genuinely interested in Lilith, the Girl of Hate who inspires unsettling devotion in humans and seems removed from the eternal Demon vs. Angel struggle with something else planned.

For as many hours as I’ve sunk into the Diablo franchise, I’ve never cared much for the story. This has changed immediately, though admittedly, things start to enter more traditional territory with less interesting asides and the main story progression with fewer creepy scenes. But the tone here is spot on, no question.

It’s always hard to judge a Diablo game in the early stages before you have a lot of skills and good loot, but at level 15 (I’d probably be beta max at 25 right now without all the server bugs), I’ve unlocked a well the amount of Rogue skills, which plays like an expected mix of the original Rogue class and D3’s Demon Hunter, and even got some legendary points, showing that maybe D4 won’t be as stingy with them as D3 was in the beginning ( I remember going 70 hours before my first Legendary drop in D3, an unusable quiver for my Barbarian). When my game last crashed, I was in the middle of some sort of Rogue-specific specialization quest that looks kind of interesting in terms of how it will modify my potential build. Also, they really killed it with character customization:

Diablo 4

Blizzard

Monster killing feels… awesome. As good as this series has ever been. My current build is setting up a poison trap, double slashing at enemies caught in it, then firing arrows at the survivors. If I wanted to, I could do dagger-based melee actions instead, and while I know you can respect that, I haven’t looked into that process yet.

In terms of how Diablo 4 has evolved from past games, I’m getting a lot of Lost Ark vibes here, the Diablo-esque Korean MMO that Amazon recently brought to the US, but one loaded with I’d only argue . .. many things and many potentially paid items to win. But you can see some of the DNA here, especially with the achievements associated with exploring areas in the game that reward players for doing everything in a certain area. And there are many things to do. Public events where you will encounter other random players already engaged in them. Small dungeons with small encounters and rewards. The biggest dungeons, which are among the most interesting areas in the game so far, and where I’ve found almost all of my legendaries. The most impressive thing I did was an elaborate Stronghold I randomly discovered in the world that culminated in the toughest boss fight I’ve seen in the game. It certainly felt like a level beyond anything else I’d seen so far, even if it wasn’t an actual world “boss” that spawns at certain moments and has to be tricked by multiple players.

So far, I’m not seeing any warning flags. We’ve made sure, repeatedly, that all microtransactions in this game are cosmetic, and we won’t have a Diablo Immortal situation on our hands where it could cost tens of thousands of dollars to max out a character’s power on that mobile monstrosity. It’s fun, feels very connected to Diablo’s roots, and if it ran for a long period of time without kicking me out, I’d already be pretty addicted to it.

I’ll max level as soon as I can, finish the early campaign and report back with full experience. Hopefully things will be fixed soon.

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I’ve been writing about video games, television, and movies for Forbes for over 10 years, and you may have seen my reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. I cover all kinds of console and PC games, but if it’s about heists or shooting, I’m definitely there. If I’m watching something, it’s usually sci-fi, horror, or superhero. I’m also a regular on IGN’s Fireteam Chat podcast and have published five science fiction novels.

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