The combat is fluid and amazing to watch in action. It's dull and breaks the soothing flow of just blasting through dungeons filled to the brim with monsters without needing to stop for anything.ĭespite all that, Diablo IV has the skeleton of a good game, and maybe even a great one. There aren't enough enemies, and the time spent killing small packs of them is outweighed by the un-fun activity that is riding your, and I can't stress this enough, horrendous horse to the next group. In theory, this is the classic Diablo gameplay loop I described above, but the open world once again dilutes too much. These require player to run around a few open-world zones and kill 5-10 enemies every few seconds in hopes of slowly collecting enough items to open some chests that contain valuable loot. It doesn't help that one of the most lucrative activities in Diablo IV are open-world farming sessions called Helltides. Who is asking for this Ubisoft open world bloat in a Diablo game? Am I going to have fun because I have to get off my horse and spend five seconds clearing a barricade that's in the way on the road to, say, the Aldurwood dungeon? Are the small packs of easily defeated monsters that harass me along the rest of the journey immersing me into the open world, or just forcing me to make a few extra mouse clicks before I can do the thing I actually want to do? This is what just one section of the open world map looks like. It's obvious that Blizzard hoped to make traversal a core part of the game's charm, but so far I've just found this new element to be an obstacle standing in the way of the stuff I actually come to a Diablo game for. There are plenty of dungeons to raid, but in order to reach them players have to spend time moving across the open world, either on foot or by riding one of the worst horses in video game history. This is not how Diablo IV was built to work. The kill-loot-repeat process was as unencumbered as possible. The (perhaps sadistic) allure of every previous Diablo game has been the ability to fall into a feverish gameplay loop-you kill a lot of monsters at once with your demigod character, you collect loot ranging from "crap" to "the greatest item in the history of video games," and then you do it all over again without ever needing to come up for air. But it also hamstrings itself through its commitment to the MMO framework. Diablo games have always been about action, through and through, and Diablo IV still provides plenty of chaotic and adrenaline-spiking combat encounters with huge packs of freaky monsters. It is, first and foremost, a single-player game. There are social mechanics here, but Diablo has by nature been resistant to that kind of cooperation. And you can, as you could in Diablo III, group with three buddies to complete the hardest challenges in the game. Sure, you can see up to 11 other players when fighting one of three different world bosses, which show up on a random timer in the world. This game wants to be an MMO so badly, but without much of what that entails from a social aspect. With Diablo IV, though, the pendulum has swung hard the other way. The combat has been simplified and refined throughout the years, and everything that's been released for WoW since 2016's Legion expansion has made the game feel more like Diablo. WoW borrowed the bounty system from Diablo III and turned it into world quests it leeched Diablo III's mostly beloved rifts system and turned it into the mostly beloved Mythic+ system. But before Diablo IV was released, that influence was mostly being applied in one direction. Despite being worked on by completely separate teams, these two games have influenced each other in deep, game-altering ways. It's useful to think about how World of Warcraft and Diablo have been in conversation for the last decade. Diablo IV is the first game in the series to put players into an open world, to give them a much longer road to the character level cap, and to ask them to pick their heads up from the monster-slaying grind in order to appreciate the game's surroundings. Diablo IV's biggest innovation is its attempt to turn what was once a linear ARPG built to suck players into a fast, repeatable, and loot-based gameplay loop into something resembling an MMORPG.
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