Diablo IV’s gameplay is fluid and I found it to be quite fast paced across the board for all characters. Whether I was zooming around as a Barbarian, tackling enemies and slamming them against walls or laying down my fire Hydra as a Sorcerer who did most of the heavy lifting for me while I dodged attacks and applied elemental damage onto enemies, or using the Druid to wreck everyone with my hurricane and raven storm for maximum emotional damage.
The game is fun. The hunt for gear with aspects that compliment our build or adapting our play style to better suit what we have is addicting and honestly, I worried that when Diablo IV launches in June it will completely consume my life and lay my sleeping pattern and schedule to ruin.
The open world aspect just makes the game’s scope bigger and this affects dungeons as well as unlike previous games, there is no loading screen between ‘levels’ in a dungeon. Instead, players have to complete an objective like killing all enemies on one level, or finding a key to unlock a door that takes them to the next level. I am a little worried about repetition as all the dungeons in the beta had the same mechanic to them. Do this to unlock the door to the next level, then kill boss—done. It made for a lot of backtracking and I really hope that when the game launches (or post launch at some point) there will be some dungeon variety. I also noticed odd collision in one or two dungeons where I couldn’t walk down a pass that was blocked by an invisible wall. But other than that, the game was very polished. I can’t even count the amount of bugs I encountered on one hand. The servers were overloaded, of course, but I expect this to be sorted for the main release. But gameplay was so smooth on the Xbox Series X. There was a hectic fight with more visual effects than I could count and I didn’t drop my FPS at all.
I am quite excited about the over world as it is huge! And full of character as well.
I’m looking forward to jumping back into the game come launch to perfect my builds, explore the brutal and dark world of Sanctuary and chase items as well as mop the floor with demonic blood!
In Part three, I will talk about my experience with the different classes of Diablo.
