Diablo 4’s open beta was fun, but we’d love to see Blizzard make these changes before its full release in June.
Blizzard Entertainment’s open beta weekends for Diablo 4 have come to an end, and we’ve put in more than enough playtime to figure out its strengths and weaknesses - as far as those first 12 hours go, anyway. It’s safe to say that Blizzard has a hit on its hands, seeing as the action-RPG already feels like a massive step up from Diablo 3 with a more focused art style, gorgeous visuals, intricate enemy designs and really fun hack-and-slash combat.
Still, we have concerns. While this is shaping up to be an addictive game we’re likely to sink a hundred hours into (or more), we also ran into a few problems that could easily kill the game’s appeal if they’re not sorted out quickly. From small quality of life changes like a dedicated Ultimate skill button to more controversial additions like the MMO features, here are the five biggest changes we’d like to see in Diablo 4 before launch.
Why can't the MMO bits be optional?
This one’s going to be a bit controversial, depending on what you're looking for in an action-RPG like this. Diablo 4 is, for all intents and purposes, an MMO. You see other players running around town on their own business, and you can team up with them in the surrounding zones to take down enemies, complete world events and run through dungeons together. Where the franchise’s multiplayer features ended with leaner PvP and PvE options, the gates have been opened for the entire world to flood your Sanctuary in Diablo 4.
Some players seem to like the new MMO features, purely because it’s fun to create new memories in Sanctuary with complete strangers. Personally, we feel the opposite. Diablo 4 doesn’t feel like a game that has added value thanks to its MMO features - they’re just something we tolerated during the beta because we couldn’t do anything about it. A world as harsh and brutal to live in as Sanctuary shouldn’t have mobs of gold-plated adventurers moving from town to town like schools of very shiny fish. These zones shouldn’t feel like a free-for-all theme park where other players can just hop in to steal your kills or pass by like ships in the night while you’re mowing down enemies.
Playing with friends is fun, sure, but seeing random players decked out in high-level gear wherever you go is a different situation. In the beta alone, we noticed that a lot of players in town weren’t exactly making use of these social features, instead ignoring one another in favour of doing their business and moving on. The power fantasy of this game’s combat is so strong, so satisfying, that it doesn’t feel necessary to team up with other players to take on the forces of hell together. You’re doing a fine job of that on your own.
Currently, Diablo 4’s MMO features feel tacked on. Other players might still like these features despite that, so we’d love an option to just turn that stuff off and play solo or with friends, just like we used to.
Less repetitive dungeons
Diablo 4 has a fun progression system that doesn’t demand a lot of you. Simply wander around Sanctuary on your own time, deleting nightmares and ticking off sidequests, and you’ll do just fine - unless you want loot, then you’ll want to find a dungeon. In the beta, the dungeons we played were gorgeous to look at, echoing the dire state of Sanctuary outside with broken down jail cells, bloody torture equipment, and torn-apart bodies hanging from hooks. Dungeons offer some of the game’s most challenging enemies, including minibosses and bosses alike.
Unfortunately, that fun wears off a tad when you notice many of these dungeons follow an identical structure. Whether you’re walking down the same flights of stairs or going down the same sets of corridors that seem to meet in the middle every time, it’s clear that Blizzard’s procedurally-generated dungeons could use more handcrafted content. Don’t get us wrong, we love going through these dungeons - but that’s only due to the game’s combat and enemy design, not because they’re that much fun to traverse on their own. Dungeon objectives could also use a little more variety, beyond the ‘collect two keys’ or ‘kill all enemies’ kind.
If one dungeon was repetitive on repeat playthroughs, that would be enough to hurt the game’s replayability. Now that we’ve noticed multiple dungeons share repetitive level design, we’re wondering just how fun beating Diablo 4’s ‘over 150 dungeons’ is going to be.
A few classes need balancing
Diablo 4 has five playable character classes in total, and each of them makes playing the game a very different experience - for better or worse. March’s open beta weekends allowed players to level their characters up to Level 25, which means that we only got a small peek at what playing as them feels like in the full game. Complaints came flooding in after these betas nevertheless, with players pointing out that Barbarian and Druid feel distinctly underpowered when compared to classes like Sorcerer and Necromancer.
Playing as the Barbarian and Druid up to Level 25 feels harder than the other classes, mainly because they’re not putting out quite as much damage in these early hours. As a result, you’re forced to really pay attention to your gear and enemy attack patterns to get through combat encounters. The Sorcerer is a whole lot easier, with abilities in their skill tree that practically blast enemies into dust. The Necromancer goes a step further by allowing the player to do as little as possible to get through an encounter. All you have to do is pay attention to levelling your summons, and let them loose.
The question becomes: who do we want this game balanced around? Do we want Diablo 4 to be a more intense experience where we’re forced to really engage with its mechanics in order to get through a fight, or do we want the power fantasy of crushing Sanctuary’s forces under our heels with ease? Blizzard has pointed out that there will be points during the game where Barbarians are outclassed by Sorcerers simply by design. Sorcerers have more skills, but Barbarians have four weapons and thus have the most legendary slots. Their true potential only shows around the Level 30-40 mark, compared to other classes that are just strong off the bat.
Still, that’s quite a lot of playtime to feel like your character is only as good as everyone else. Throw the Barbarian a bone, Blizzard.
This story needs to get going
This one comes with a big ol’ asterisk. We’ve only played through Act 1 of Diablo 4’s story so far, and there’s plenty of time for things to really start heating up - but so far? We’re not feeling it. We love the tone of this story so far, but that’s mostly due to how engrossing the world of Sanctuary is. From the soft lighting of candles dancing in dark halls to the forgotten corpses lying buried in deep snow, Fractured Peaks is packed with far too much detail for us to appreciate over a measly two weekends. The story thankfully lives up to this setting, immediately pulling players into a world dripping with menace, where trusting the person next to you could end in death… or worse.
Unfortunately, it’s just not that interesting so far. The game’s early hours show a lot of promise, giving us an imposing introduction to Lilith and an interesting ally in Lorath Nahr, a gravelly voiced enigma on horseback. After that, things strangely peter out. Lorath ditches us for greener pastures and besides a brief confrontation with the pompous angel Inarius, we hardly run into the story’s main players. Instead, we follow Neyrelle, a young woman searching for her mother. This quest takes us through several holograms of people talking to each other, which isn’t exactly the way I hoped the story would go.
Act 1 is burdened by a great amount of exposition that we’re hit with all at once, and often in very clumsy ways. Lilith seems interesting despite the little reason we’re given to care about her, so let’s hope that this campaign has more up its sleeves.
Just a bunch of quality of life changes
While we haven’t played enough Diablo 4 to understand how its story campaign is going to shake out or whether its classes are truly balanced, we certainly have played enough to know that it could use a few UI, UX and general quality-of-life improvements. The first is rather obvious: we love this game’s character models and art design, but its top-down camera is far too zoomed-in compared to previous entries. We’d love an option that gives us a better perspective on Sanctuary and everything it has going on, so we don’t get lost in the chaos of big mob fights - especially when other players are involved.
A ton of players came out of the beta complaining about ability cooldowns, which mostly concern the dash ability and Ultimate skills. A few gear items do address dash cooldowns, but it can still be a little frustrating to be stuck in the midst of a crowd of enemies without an escape method. It doesn’t help that your character insists on repeating ‘I can’t use this skill yet’ every time you press the button. Ultimate skills are more pressing however, given that these are nodes on your skill tree that you might end up investing a lot of points into before realising that they’re inferior to your regular skills. They have longer cooldowns and generally provide less bang for your buck, so why invest in them at all?
A few more issues are well-documented by now, and we’re sure Blizzard is looking into all the feedback players have had post-beta. The Necromancer’s skeletons are cartoonishly vibrant against the game’s grittier backdrops, the game lacks a map overlay, you can’t track more than one quest at a time, UI scaling features are nonexistent, gems take up too much inventory space and cellars are just puzzling in their very inclusion. We could go through a bunch more issues Diablo 4 should fix by the time it launches, but honestly, we had a great time during the beta and we’re sure to have a great time in the full game too.