While at BlizzCon, we had the opportunity to get hands-on experience with the Diablo IV demo and compile some of our thoughts and feedback on those play sessions. Below are my thoughts on the demo, and Zenkiki will contribute his later this week.
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General Thoughts and Experiences
For being so early in development, I think it needs to be said how fluid the game felt. Skills felt powerful, combat was visceral, animations were flawless. The developers said this game is quite some time from release and to me that means it'll only get better from here. The game felt incredibly familiar, but different. The demo felt like it was the natural extension of Diablo III's combat system, but a tad bit slower which made positioning and skill animation lengths more meaningful. The Barbarian in particular had a skill with a minor wind-up, but had high damage that felt rewarding when you connected with it. The overall gameplay felt like it struck a great balance between Diablo III's fluidity of combat and Diablo II's speed and pacing.
The demo itself was beautiful rendered, but maintained a muted, gritty feel that was missing in Diablo III. You start the demo on a cliff-side and have clear view of the surrounding areas to the north that really drive home how massive this game is going to be. You could spend the majority of your 20 minute play session just exploring the map and we saw in one of the panels that the demo area is tiny compared to the rest of the planned game. The world in Diablo IV is going to be massive. Hundreds of unique dungeons, hundreds of villages, landmarks from previous games will be explore-able.
Classes
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Sorceress:
The Sorceress was my least favorite of the three classes available in the demo. The class felt powerful and fun, but it felt like it hadn't evolved much from Diablo II or Diablo III's Wizard. The Sorceress was also the only class in the demo without a generator+spender skill setup and when you ran our of Arcane Power, you just had to stand there and spam the basic free Frost Bolt while waiting until you had enough resource to use one of your other abilities. I feel that the Sorceress would have played better if it had another cooldown based spell that didn't require Arcane Power or at least a way of on-demand resource generation. All-in-all, it felt very much like a non-max level class in the caster archetype.
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Barbarian:
The Barbarian has undergone quite a few changes from it's Diablo III counterpart. In Diablo IV the Barbarian has access to four separate weapon slots that allow you can bind to different skills. While this feature was predetermined in the beta, from developer discussions they intend to allow the player full control over binding which weapons will be used by different skills. So while some skills may require a two-handed weapon or that you're dual wielding, you'll have free range to determine which specific sets of you four weapons can be used allowing tons of player customization.
The Barbarian felt very smooth in practice and the skill selection showed some new mechanics. Rupture for instance was a cooldown based skill that did massive damage over a couple of seconds, but if it killed an enemy the cooldown was instantly reset. It made gameplay very rewarding if you could hit smaller enemies and elites/bosses at the same time as it allowed longer uptime of the damage on the nastier monsters. I think the Barbarian showed a lot of potential in future skill design by making things such as positioning or timing the use of skills more important. If this is a hint of things to come from this early in development, I think the players will feel far more rewarded when they master certain elements of gameplay than in any of the prior entries in the series.
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Druid:
To me, the druid was far and away the best class in the beta. The shape-shifting animations were incredibly smooth and wonderfully showcased the possibilities of the new engine that was built from the ground up for Diablo IV. The druid had an excellent selection of skills with a couple of power skills on short cooldowns, a fast generator, an area of effect spender, with a little bit of crowd control thrown in. The druid really had that "Aha!" moment when you landed a Boulder skill into an elite that pushed them out of combat and gave you some breathing room to finish off other enemies around you. The druid also had the best legendary item in the demo that hit a random enemy with a lightning bolt every time you shape-shifted and you could shape-shift a lot.
Bosses
There were two bosses in the demo you could fight: Ashava, the world boss, and the Sea Witch that you encountered if you played through the questline offered in the demo.
Ashava was a truly massive boss. The camera had to pull out to full show the scope of the encounter. This encounter felt akin to a raid boss in WoW, with telegraphed attacks that were absolutely devastating if you didn't dodge or position accordingly. Ashava also showcased a new mechanic referred to as the Stagger System that is represented by a second bar under the boss's health that filled as you used crowd control effects against it instead of actually subjecting the boss to the control effects. When the bar filled Ashava was briefly stunned and one of her giant talons broke off, drastically lowering the damage and range of her attacks made with that claw. The system basically made it so that bosses couldn't be cheesed by chaining crowd control effects, but still made control effects have meaning. All bosses will have different responses to the Stagger mechanic and it will be very interesting to see it in action against more bosses.
The Sea Witch also had the interaction and feelings of a boss that would be at home in a MMO. She would spawn area of effect circles all over the ground that did damage and summoned smaller mobs to try and bury you under their numbers. Sadly the boss was tuned to be easy to defeat as she was the showcase of the demo story and I always killed her before being able to Stagger her to see what the effect was. I was told that her Stagger would clear the room of the damaging pools, but also stun the player briefly while any minions that were still alive would become enraged. This sounded awesome and I wish I could have experienced it because it would give players a real choice in fighting the boss. Deal with the damaging pools continually covering the area and summoning more and more mobs or Stagger the boss and risk the stun, but clear the pools. This demo's bosses are already a couple steps ahead of any rift guardian and will offer far more fulfilling gameplay for players if this is just the starting point.
What are your thoughts on Diablo IV so far? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to ask us any burning questions you may have about the demo!
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Posted Nov 7, 2019I only did one demo session, and played the barbarian. I liked the way the skills felt, Leap felt great and it was visceral and fulfilling. I should've gone back for more testing and played a few different classes but it was my first Blizzcon and there was so much to experience!
Really looking forward to what's in store; everything looks like it is pointed in the right direction. I'm kind of curious to know what is the biggest roadblock to release given the high quality of the graphics. Perhaps they need more F&F testers XD
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Posted Nov 8, 2019From what I have seen of gameplay so far. The Demo isn’t all the different from the Demo of Diablo 3.
The game play is slow and smooth so that all the skills look well ordered and choreographed. Bosses and mobs that are fun to interactive but a little too easy...
The changes look nice but then they did in D3 too... but all those nice changes were lost once the difficulties increased and hordes of monsters were too much for the fancy moves to handle, the game just became and AOE spam fest where only a select few damage builds were feasible.
Id like to know what changes have been made to the enemy AI in order to make each encounter different enough to be a challenge. AI that runs and hides if damage is too much only to have you chase and ambushed. (This is just a simple example).
in D2 and D3 the difficulty was based on the number of enemies and a simple increase in damage and health. In D4 it has to be something different. Like more intelligent enemies or new enemies that you only encounter after your second or 3rd or 100th etc. play through when your character is much stronger.
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Posted Nov 8, 2019While the event bosses look very cool, I fear they will end up similar to every game that does event bosses. That is to say, they'll have a no-lose scenario, effectively no matter how big and cool and amazing it looks you can't actually fail at killing the boss, as such it's just a bunch of people whacking at a health bar for 5min util you get loot.
I do like the idea of free for group content like this, but inherently it's impossible to make it challenging because it's just a bunch of random uncordinated people it's the LFR of such games. Looks pretty but is ultimately not very engaging. It also devalues gear because your going to kill the boss either way and in a very similar time.
Maybe if they have a system where the better you perform, the better your rewards are?
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Posted Nov 8, 2019Seeing footage and playing doesn't really give same feedback and so on. So here are questions you might answer to get me to ease.
Barbarian, main here, hello. Uhm, so the Druid seems to be a favorite in the demo since he seemed powerful and killed things without much effort, the barbarian I felt (by watching) struggled to feel powerful, and were bashing minions on and on until they died, while Druid just bear hugged them once or twice.
So my question is, do you really have to "learn" to play Barbarian to get remotely into the feel of that class being powerful?
Other question is about the map. You said it felt like the game will be big. Again, seeing it I felt it was pretty small. And I do mean the whole map without the area you could explore. Do you think the regions will become smaller and smaller like we have in Diablo III acts, to get a sense of faster progression, even if its slower than that game?
Last question, where do you think charms could come into play if they introduced a bag you could collect them in, to use in a talisman, altar or area to grant some kind of buff or bonus? What is the game "missing" in terms of this? The runes, items and skills along with traits seems to cover most things. Any thoughts what we could see if they added in more customization in terms of charms to the gameplay?
Thanks. It was a nice read. Again, hard to get the vibe and feel how the game is since I only seen around 10 people playing this.
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Posted Nov 8, 2019After the D3 beta they said they learned from giving out such limited demo for the public so less could be said in terms of constructive feedback. I guess this demo was not so much about feedback, but more like showcasing it until there can be a beta (or alpha) out for some special gamers. Just to give a nod to what they are trying to build.
Hope demo, or beta etc reach the right people this time for a good amount of feedback.
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Posted Nov 8, 2019I can touch on your Barbarian question, seeing as it was my favorite of the three. To me, number balance isn't really a concern right now, since they are so early in development; however, with that said, the barb was easily one of the most fun to play. Each ability felt like it had significant weight to it, and Upheaval was an absolute delight to use. Utilizing the evade dash to get into position in order to line up a huge Upheaval hit felt fantastic, and the combination of abilities felt natural to use.
The Druid felt so much slower than the barb to me, and there was even a point while playing the Barbarian where I thought to myself "yeah, I could kill Ashava by myself if I had more than 20 minutes in the demo."--which should give you a good indication of how powerful I felt. I'll have my thoughts up on the game either today or tomorrow, so keep an eye on the front page for that information!
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Posted Nov 8, 2019The game will never be good if its not a PC exclusives like d2. now its just another d3 all over again with darker graphics, looks casual
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Posted Nov 9, 2019The Barb's spender was Upheaval that had a wind up time, some people didn't like and didn't use the skill, but that was the one of the best ways to kill things. Catch back up on the streams, I saw some people playing through the dungeon with the fallen and primarily using Frenzy which did so much less damage.
It would take most of your 20 minute playthrough in order to walk around the entire map, it was pretty big.
Charms are basically stat sticks and they were dropped from D3, because the developers felt it didn't add anything to gameplay and I feel they were mostly right. But I think they make players feel as if they're making meaningful choices and customizing their characters even though they aren't really. But it's that feeling of player choice which is extremely important to long term enjoyment of the game. Same reason why I've been a fan of adding skill trees back in because even if everything is cookie cutter, it makes players feel better because they're making those decisions.