Diablo 4's open beta returns to the franchise's darker roots, promising a darker and bloodier Sanctuary than ever before.
Diablo 4’s first open beta came to an end last weekend, giving us our first sneak peek at the return of Sanctuary in all of its dark and twisted glory. I spent practically the entire weekend taking in the sights of the beta’s first two zones, which consisted of a few environments, dungeons, and enough story content to get a feel of how this campaign is shaping up. While I came away feeling less enthused about the story than I’d like, I would still return to Sanctuary in a heartbeat.
Even with its emphasis on gory decapitations and shadowy creatures of the night, Diablo 4’s version of Sanctuary feels like a creepy nightmare I never want to wake up from.
The Sorcerer rocks
Choosing a character class is a very subjective thing in an ARPG like Diablo. I went for the Sorcerer, a wielder of elemental magic who works best at long range with strong AoE attacks. First thing’s first: this game’s character creator is pretty great. The options might be limited compared to its peers, but there's enough here to get your character looking all gussied up and ready for battle. I love a good character creator, and the options here are nice - lots of tattoo, colour, anatomy and makeup options to mix and match so that you can create a handful of different characters who stand apart. Some people might just go with the presets, but others (me) will have a lot of fun building someone up from scratch here.
Diablo 4 will live or die based on the strength of its classes, and in this beta alone, the game seems to have nailed it. There's a strong power fantasy in wiping out legions of unholy monsters with a diverse range of abilities, and Blizzard has built a skill tree that allows you to do exactly that without sacrificing player agency. In Act 1 alone, the beta has already forced me to make some really tough decisions for my Sorcerer. Do I want to upgrade and level up all of my abilities, or funnel those precious skill points into my passives instead?
While some abilities are definitely better than others (Lightning spam is pretty great), most of your choices here will work depending on your playstyle. There are layers of specificity to mine here, from the character you choose to the type of abilities you use. This applies to every other character, though I never got as far with them as I did with the Sorcerer. The Barbarian supports melee-focused builds that let you get real close with your enemies and absolutely stomp them into wee little puddles all over Sanctuary. Rogue is a solid choice for bow-and-arrow fans, but I found her ranged combat not quite as satisfying as Sorcerer's. It’s all down to personal taste.
Let’s talk combat and dungeons
Diablo 4 is a hack and slash game, giving players the satisfaction of wiping out hordes of monsters at a time with as few limitations as possible. To that end, it absolutely succeeds - it was much too fun crushing demons in this beta, to the point that I would actively seek out fights because they were ending too soon. The game does, however, need mounts at some point - there were points where I would simply abandon the next main quest because it was on the other side of Sanctuary, and I hadn’t unlocked any nearby fast travel points. We didn’t get to use horse mounts during this beta, so hiking across the map will likely feel less tedious in the full game.
It’s refreshing how brutal this game plays. It’s almost like an isometric Doom game, in the way enemies just explode like sacks of blood when they’re defeated or in its menacing and often grisly environmental design. Dungeons are thematically appropriate for the medieval horror vibe this game is going for, ranging from icy caves to abandoned prison cells filled with torture equipment. While I liked the way these dungeons looked, I did not like exploring them as much as I wanted to. Diablo 4’s dungeons are procedurally generated, but in very obvious ways that only make them feel more repetitive the more you play through them.
These games are built to be endlessly replayable, so that players can grind through the same dungeons over and over again for XP points and better loot. Its dungeons do not support that experience, because there is so little about them that feels handcrafted for the player besides their visual design. The core structure of a dungeon is copy-pasted not just across multiple playthroughs, but often across other dungeons too. You’ll find yourself going down the same sets of stairs and winding your way up the same sets of corridors again and again, though they might come with a different coat of paint each time.
Again, it’s early days. I can’t say definitively that the full game’s dungeons will look and feel as repetitive as these do. Blizzard claims that the sequel will sport over 150 dungeons, the sheer amount of which suggests that many of them were procedurally generated with the same core layouts to save time. If that’s the case, colour me concerned.
Cellars are another new addition to the game that feel puzzling at best. These are small buildings that feature two small rooms attached together, with the bigger of the two containing a simple event to complete or a mob of enemies to kill. These feel like one-room dungeons, except that every cellar is the exact same room with their contents mixed around. If these keep popping up throughout the world, it will take a lot more than some simple loot drops for me to seek them out.
Lilith’s back in town
Act 1 of the story campaign mostly revolves around Lilith, the shadowy mother of Sanctuary who has returned to amass an army and reclaim her home. After a pretty great introduction that has Lilith domineer over a church mass, the villain all but disappears and is only seen in holograms and spectral visions throughout the rest of Act 1. She never runs into the protagonist, who simply trails after her picking up clues with Neyrelle, a new character on the hunt for her mother. It’s a strangely unimpressive start to a story campaign that has been sold to us thus far with the most grandiose cinematics possible.
Lilith has a lot of potential as a villain, but the endless exposition Act 1 feeds us is the dullest way this game could have gone about fleshing her out. I’m not sure where the story goes from here, but after one encounter with Inarius serving as the highlight of the entire first act, one would hope the rest of the game has just a little more up its sleeves. The pieces are there: the game has gorgeous environments, macabre art design and fun bosses. They just aren’t coming together for the story campaign yet but again, that can change.
Some of the side quests haven’t really grabbed me either, which is a shame, considering that the world of Sanctuary seems like it’s just bursting with potential to tell smaller-scale stories about its inhabitants. One quest about a father being haunted by his son’s ghost had me go to a dungeon, beat the son up and come back to the father, only for him to murmur about joining his son and slouching off. Not the most vigorous storytelling I’ve seen in gaming this year. On the other hand, a side quest I deeply loved began with a woman asking me to find her husband in a dark forest - only for the whole thing to end in an utterly unexpected but very cool Hellraiser reference.
While the story might have made a disappointing first impression, what really irked me in these early hours was the game’s heavy MMO focus. Players were constantly running around Sanctuary, though it’s most obvious in the game’s towns. It detracted from the punishing atmosphere Blizzard limned for this game, seeing as venturing out into the open zones and getting into fights could end with another player just dropping in, cleaning up and moving on. Instead of Sanctuary feeling like a dire, uninviting place to be, it ended up feeling like a theme park teeming with visitors in its every crevice. This was just our experience in the early access beta, however. Things could get a whole lot more crowded once the open beta kicks off this weekend.
Final thoughts
Diablo 4 kicked off its early access beta with more than a few network issues and bugs, though there's still time to iron these things out before launch. What the game won’t have time to fix are its unnecessary MMO features, repetitive dungeons and underwhelming story campaign - at least as far as Act 1 goes. I don’t know how the rest of the game is shaping up, but there is certainly enough here for Diablo fans to look past the red flags and pour hundreds of hours into beating things up endlessly in Sanctuary. And who can blame them? While the open beta has its problems, it’s also drop-dead gorgeous with fun combat, has loads of specialisation options for character builds and it controls beautifully on the PlayStation 5.
It will be interesting to see how more players react to the open beta once it drops this weekend, seeing as last weekend had a fairly limited amount of players participating. How many players are about to get blindsided by an unpleasant appearance from our favourite meat cleaver-wielding big bad? Time will tell.
