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The 'Diablo 4' Beta Is Fantastic, When You Can Actually Play It
The good news is that when you can play the Diablo 4 beta, it absolutely lives up to expectations in its early hours in terms of gameplay, aesthetics and shockingly, even storytelling, rising above past installments. The bad news is that at least in some regions (like mine), you are allowed maybe 30-60 minutes of gameplay for every 60-120 minutes of re-login queue time.
It was an endless pattern all day yesterday, I’d get in, play for a while, then get booted (usually in the middle of a dungeon with no checkpoints). The game would freeze up, I’d quit and log back in only to find an hour or two of wait time ahead of me. It’s maddening for a game I just want to play by myself, but this is 2023, and such games barely exist without online login requirements anymore. And certainly not a quasi-MMO like this.
I don’t think I need to remind everyone of the disastrous Error 37-laden Diablo 3 launch where the game was rendered non-functional. Blizzard has already begun damage control for long queue times and server issues, and while this “is a beta,” this is also a beta that was sold through pre-orders. At the very least, it should be extended, given these issues. And if the game launches like this, that will be a problem.
But I’ll be damned if the game itself isn’t fantastic, so far.
I’ll admit I rolled my eyes a bit back when the dev team was always going on about returning to the “darker” tone of Diablo 2, as I never had nearly as many issues with the color palatte/themes of Diablo 3 as many extremely loud fans did. But what Blizzard has done for Diablo 4 here is nothing short of extremely impressive so far. In the first thirty minutes of the game, they’ve already given us two of the most horrifying, impressive cutscenes of the entire series so far. I am genuinely interested in Lilith, the Daughter of Hatred who inspires unsettling devotion in humans, and seems removed from the eternal Demon vs. Angel war with something…else planned.
For as many hours as I’ve sunk into the Diablo franchise, I have never much cared for the story. That has immediately changed, albeit admittedly, things do start getting into more traditional territory with less interesting sidequests and main storyline progression with fewer creepy cutscenes. But the tone here is on point, without question.
It’s always hard to judge Diablo gameplay in the very early stages before you have many skills and good loot, but at level 15 (I’d probably be beta max at 25 right now without all the server errors), I’ve unlocked a good amount of Rogue skills, who plays like an expected mix of the original Rogue class and D3’s Demon Hunter, and have even gotten a few legendary drops, indicating perhaps D4 won’t be as stingy with those as D3 was at launch (I remember going 70 hours before my first Legendary dropp in D3, an unusable quiver for my Barbarian). When my game last crashed I was in the middle of some sort of Rogue-specific specialization quest that seems somewhat interesting in terms of how it will modify my potential build. Also, they really killed it with character customization:
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The good news is that when you can play the Diablo 4 beta, it absolutely lives up to expectations in its early hours in terms of gameplay, aesthetics and shockingly, even storytelling, rising above past installments. The bad news is that at least in some regions (like mine), you are allowed maybe 30-60 minutes of gameplay for every 60-120 minutes of re-login queue time.
It was an endless pattern all day yesterday, I’d get in, play for a while, then get booted (usually in the middle of a dungeon with no checkpoints). The game would freeze up, I’d quit and log back in only to find an hour or two of wait time ahead of me. It’s maddening for a game I just want to play by myself, but this is 2023, and such games barely exist without online login requirements anymore. And certainly not a quasi-MMO like this.
I don’t think I need to remind everyone of the disastrous Error 37-laden Diablo 3 launch where the game was rendered non-functional. Blizzard has already begun damage control for long queue times and server issues, and while this “is a beta,” this is also a beta that was sold through pre-orders. At the very least, it should be extended, given these issues. And if the game launches like this, that will be a problem.
But I’ll be damned if the game itself isn’t fantastic, so far.
I’ll admit I rolled my eyes a bit back when the dev team was always going on about returning to the “darker” tone of Diablo 2, as I never had nearly as many issues with the color palatte/themes of Diablo 3 as many extremely loud fans did. But what Blizzard has done for Diablo 4 here is nothing short of extremely impressive so far. In the first thirty minutes of the game, they’ve already given us two of the most horrifying, impressive cutscenes of the entire series so far. I am genuinely interested in Lilith, the Daughter of Hatred who inspires unsettling devotion in humans, and seems removed from the eternal Demon vs. Angel war with something…else planned.
For as many hours as I’ve sunk into the Diablo franchise, I have never much cared for the story. That has immediately changed, albeit admittedly, things do start getting into more traditional territory with less interesting sidequests and main storyline progression with fewer creepy cutscenes. But the tone here is on point, without question.
It’s always hard to judge Diablo gameplay in the very early stages before you have many skills and good loot, but at level 15 (I’d probably be beta max at 25 right now without all the server errors), I’ve unlocked a good amount of Rogue skills, who plays like an expected mix of the original Rogue class and D3’s Demon Hunter, and have even gotten a few legendary drops, indicating perhaps D4 won’t be as stingy with those as D3 was at launch (I remember going 70 hours before my first Legendary dropp in D3, an unusable quiver for my Barbarian). When my game last crashed I was in the middle of some sort of Rogue-specific specialization quest that seems somewhat interesting in terms of how it will modify my potential build. Also, they really killed it with character customization:
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