whelp, I did indeed play the shit out of this. it was pretty fun, but I don’t think it’s going to blow anyone away. as a game to buy and play through as a AAA map filler once or twice, I think it will do very well. it looks nice, it feels nice, its big, and its systems and pacing are well designed to that end. all the bloviating about how it is a ‘dark and gritty horror game’ or whatever was, predictably, well overblown. it’s a tick up from diablo 3 on that front, but only a tick. a giant corporate leviathan like blizzard is simply not capable of making what they promised they would make. I knew that. you probably knew that. so it wasn’t really expected. I do like the lone angel in the game being an overbearing selfish asshole, that’s kinda nice, even if very little in the game world reflects on that in any appreciable way. the story and world building is otherwise exactly as bad as everything else blizzard has done in the last 15 years. but, like most blizzard games, it is also very playable and satisfying in the moment.
as an actual diablo game, I am much less convinced. I’ve never been a real power player or whatever, but I do still have a lot of time in diablo games, and it is likely that I’ll get pretty wrapped up in the game for at least a while. luckily creating a good end game system is much easier to do post launch than anything else is, so it would not surprise me if a lot of things change over time. right now, it’s kinda rough. the skill trees are pretty simple. each skill has one upgrade that you have to take in order to access the next set of upgrades, of which you can only pick between one of two. there is never an option to get all the upgrades for a given skill, and the differences are not generally substantial. putting points directly into a skill itself only ever results in a flat upgrade to whatever it is the skill does. you have to take at least one basic skill no matter what, and you can’t take more than one ultimate skill no matter what. the passive skill nodes are generally pretty boring. there’s not a lot to go on.
most builds are completely item reliant, which means most items are strictly useless for any given build. you can rip a legendary power off of an item and transfer it to a new item, but you can only do that once per item and it gives you the lowest roll, which means you can easily just be stuck hanging on to a mediocre item forever because of one good roll on one legendary affix that you simply have to have. there are a lot of stats in this game, most of which are going to be useless to the character you’re playing, and any of them can pretty well appear on any piece of gear in any item slot. the only stat guaranteed to be on a piece of armor is armor value itself. there is no fixed primary stat roll that would work to make sure you’re eventually replacing a lower level item simply because its primary stat is too low. there are a lot of what I would call core stat systems like overpower, fortify, lucky hit, and vulnerable that are irrelevant for many builds. none of them are explained in game very well. gem benefits seem very minor.
the dungeons are very samey, simple, and slow paced. from what I understand, they make up almost the entirety of the end game play loop, and they’re the only randomized maps in the game. they all have backtracking and lock and key systems for some reason, and they’re all pretty divorced from the game world. I think they need a lot of work. they’re the biggest problem with the game right now.
oh, and the game is currently unbalanced as fuck. sorcerer is significantly better than the other two classes. bosses are very melee unfriendly, and barbs have to invest significant skill and item resources to gain any kind of defensive power. a lot of their builds just don’t seem to work.