It takes real effort to publish a truly dysfunctional AAA game. Mediocre, unsatisfying, rushed, those labels are common, but pouring millions of dollars and hiring industry top talent to work on a project and still managing to come up with something that's not just underwhelming, but broken, that's an achievement. And one which Blizzard decided to chase after, apparently: Diablo IV is the latest in Blizzard's long running series of ARPGs, a series said to be "the king of ARPGs" by some. It's a game I have played for longer than I like to think about, desperately trying to find something good about it, and one that failed to deliver even then.
ARPGs are not particularly known for good stories, but since the first excuse the few people who still defend Diablo IV make for it is that the campaign is worth the $70 price of admission, it makes for a good starting point. D4 takes place in the world of Sanctuary, a vast expanse of land between Heaven and Hell occupied by humanity. The opening shows a group of treasure hunters delving into an ancient temple that are manipulated into performing a dark ritual and summoning an ancient demon called Lilith into Sanctuary, who then proceeds to try to take it over. The story plays out as the player's character, the Wanderer, along with a few allies met along the way, chases after her in an attempt to stop her plans of domination.
There are a couple of genuinely exciting moments during the game's prologue: Lilith seems like a fascinating antagonist at first, what with her gentle, motherly demeanor paradoxically bringing out the worst in her followers. Also, Lorath, one of the main characters, makes an impressive entrance into the story during this first hour. That's all we get, however, with the story devolving into a generic fantasy narrative not long after it gets going. Worse, a generic Blizzard narrative: a funny quirk of Blizzard's writing is that they really like using "prophecy" and/or "hot woman turned evil due to a traumatic past" as plot devices, and it worked until Warcraft III or so, but after that, it got silly. And unfortunately, Diablo IV ticks both of those boxes.
Far from that being only problem with the campaign, of course. Its six acts are abysmally paced, some rushing over their plot points blink-and-you'll-miss it style, while others feature roundabout questlines that could have been trimmed down to a third of their length at no loss for the storytelling. They're also cheapened by uneven and incoherent stakes: most notably, at one point in the story, a potential event is determined to be world-ending should it come to pass, and it eventually does... resulting in an unremarkable boss battle and in everyone forgetting all about it by the next quest. It's hard to take any other threat seriously after that point.
The initially exciting cast also consistently underdelivers: just about every character ends up being paper-thin and spouting wonky writing. The illusion of good story beats comes up every now and then, but that's mostly the pre-rendered cutscenes and/or the actors wringing blood from the stone that is the material given to them, moments that soon peter out. One could say Diablo IV's main story is comparable a Marvel movie in that it features incredibly gorgeous CG scenes, great actors and expensive tech to bring to life complete drivel. The similarity also holds in that it ends in a cliffhanger, because please be excited about the expansions to this garbage that we plan to churn out in the next few years.
Finishing the campaign is but the first in a long list of things that are done "to get to the fun part of the game", a list that only grows for the entirety of the game's runtime. The problems begin with how the world of Sanctuary is structured, or rather, how it's not: it's an open world, and a character can go anywhere in it as soon as the prologue is done. The campaign will take the Wanderer through the five regions in a more or less set order, and as superficial as that trip might be, one might as well follow along, because despite all that freedom, there's little reason to care about any of those places: Sanctuary as large as it is barren, with vestiges of civilization -- where locals sit eager to hand out fetch quests -- lost amidst deserts, swamps, snow-covered mountains and other similarly dead places. It's hard to even remember most of the map beyond the prologue areas.
Enemies feel similarly same-y: there's little variety in their mechanics, and the entire game world uses level scaling to match them to the player level. Level scaling is an often-touted but very ugly design solution for open world RPGs, and Diablo IV serves as a perfect example of why: the mechanic fails in its purpose to match content to player as, more often than not, the difficulty is not simply in enemy stats. More pressingly, however, without a natural progression of easy to hard content, the thrill of being able to do quests and kill bosses one couldn't stand against before is lost, and thus, the emotional connection to those things is also lost. Worse, since there's a lot of grind to be done in D4, players outright ignore most areas and gravitate to repeating the most efficient content over, and over, and over again.
One might as well also skip the bossing in the game, because most of the bosses are terrible. The design railroaded itself from the moment character movement was decided to be so stiff: characters have low base movement speed, some classes entirely lack movement skills and the evade button meant to replace those is almost always on cooldown. Thus, bosses forgo mechanics that encourage movement and quick-thinking and instead are designed so to be facetanked. There's a few exceptions to that, but even those have very few fight mechanics to engage with. Boss variety in itself is also extremely low: players will tire of seeing the words "Khazra Abomination" on the screen from all the dungeoning, and the game's only (egregious) pinnacle boss is Uber Lilith, recycled from the campaign and given one shot moves to create an illusion of difficulty.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves: we're still early in our leveling journey, dipping our toes into Sanctuary. Assuming the campaign is done, the next step is to farm renown, which is a measurement of how well-known the Wanderer is across Sanctuary. Renown is increased by doing optional side content and rewards the player with more potion charges and skill points -- i.e. it's a mandatory kind of optional. Farming renown is the most fun part of the game, the only part that offers a modicum of variety and comes close to fleshing out the world. It's also near-universally reviled, mainly because every new character is made to do it again, as it's one of the few things low level characters can do if the campaign is skipped.
By the time we're done farming, it's likely we'll have most of our skill points and a complete build. In fact, it will be complete much before that, as there's not much flexibility in how to build a character. Diablo IV's skill tree can barely be called a tree: it's a linear track with skills that have clearly tagged purposes and synergies so obvious, it's more of an exercise in basic pattern recognition than real decision making. One node will have a choice of core skills, then the next one, a set of passives each designed to go with one of those core skills... there's zero room for player choice and creativity, and unfortunately, that statement is also true for every other character development system.
Once level 50 is reached, the Wanderer stops earning skill points and earns paragon points, which are used to traverse a large, modular board of tiles that yield stats and multipliers. Never mind the failure of easing the player into this complete paradigm shift for leveling -- stats had next to zero importance up to this point -- the biggest issue is that, once again, there's an opportunity for diversifying builds; once again, the designed synergies are few and blatant, telegraphed from a mile away. This is made worse from the fact that most of the character's power is gotten from the Paragon board, so by deviating from the optimal path, the player is sealing their own doom. This also has the side effect of making level 100 practically mandatory, as the whopping forty Paragon points obtained in those gruesome final levels matter. That's in stark contrast to something like PoE, where a level 90ish character is often more concerned with fighting endgame bosses and refining their gear.
Speaking of which, it's truly baffling how badly botched the itemization is for a game in a genre that largely revolves around loot. There are five types of items in Diablo IV: Common, Magic, Rare, Legendary and Unique. There is no crafting system in Diablo IV (no, making cute potions in town whose only real effect is +5% exp gain does not count) so those lower rank items are trash that is going to suck forever. Thus, there are three types of items, but wait: most of the uniques that matter are those are insanely rare. In any other game, one would just trade for them, but Diablo IV doesn't just lack an economy, it outright impedes the trading of Uniques and Legendaries, making it so players are highly unlikely to have a unique they desperately need. Incidentally, the only viable way to play a Necromancer Minion build is through one of those ultra-rare, late game Uniques.
We're down to two item types, Rares and Legendaries, which really are one and the same: a Legendary item is a Rare with an Aspect applied to it, that is, a modifier that enhances a skill or group of skills -- sort of an unique one can create themselves. Yet again, a system with potential for diversity further railroads the design of builds: any viable build has Aspects clearly made for it, which sometimes are the one thing that makes it playable, and one would be silly not to include them. Far more concerning than the Aspects that makes builds work, however, are the ones that don't.
While it should be pretty clear that Diablo IV's systems are shallow, the truly offensive part, the part that makes it likely that no amount of patches will ever fix this mess is that most of the game doesn't work. Among item affixes, Aspects, Uniques, and even the nodes on the skill tree, there's so much absolute garbage beyond any level of consideration that's scattered around to create the illusion of complexity. There's even a running gag amongst the community about item affixes that's along the lines of "I found an item with '+10% more damage to stunned enemies while vulnerable on the second Tuesday of the month'", referring to the multiple, bizarrely situational affixes that exist only to flood the affix pool and make the itemization seem deeper than it really is.
Furthermore, while it is true that every build in the game was designed by Blizzard, with very little room to deviate, theirs was an extremely hands-off design: in theory, the synergies are there, so say, this build is meant to bank on Vulnerable, while that build relies on Overpower... In practice, there are clear winners and utter losers that should have been clear not only from any sort of playtesting, but from the systems' design in itself. In that example, Vulnerable multiplies the damage, while Overpower adds damage, meaning the former scales much, much more steeply than the latter -- they are not equivalent, even though the designers seemed to think that they are.
The game is riddled with these fundamental mistakes: defensive options not called "Armor" are useless, with resistances to elements being especially pathetic; critical and vulnerable modifiers, along with cooldown reduction/resource generation to counter the absurdly high downtime suffered by most builds, are the only things most respectable builds will care for in any piece of gear; a couple of classes, namely the Barbarian and the Sorcerer, are completely unplayable compared to the rest, and notably both good Barb builds so far have been the result of now fixed bugs that caused damage to scale in a way that it shouldn't have.
It's a thoroughly incompetent game, and that has to be emphasized: in this breakneck industry, many games end up being rushed, but come out with specks of brilliance and a clear vision of what the production was aiming for. Diablo IV, however, wasn't simply released before it was ready (although it must be said that it was absolutely rushed out to save face after Diablo Immortal and to make Kotick and his goons a quick buck while the ActiBlizz sale closes). Diablo IV is a game without a vision: an ARPG made from the most generic of parts, by people without a single clue about what makes an ARPG work, or even how the game they made works. For proof, look no further than the dreaded patch 1.1.0.
Patch 1.1.0 was the canary in the mine for anyone still holding out hope that the 70 dollars spent in this garbage were going to pay off in any way. Blizzard saw the state the game was in: everyone was stacking armor and CDR, Barbs and Sorcs were in the dumpster, and builds with multiplicative mods dominated the meta. Exp was also a point of contention, leveling was slow, and people straight up paid others to boost them through the endgame grind. Seeing all this, what did Blizzard do? Nerfed everything in the game.
It's hard to fully illustrate just how inept, if not outright malicious, this patch was. To call it a balance patch is a stretch and a half: the patch created the illusion of sweeping changes through numerous small, irrelevant power shifts like "+0.04 base" or "-5%" to stuff that needed reworking from the ground up or that was too powerful to even feel the difference. Among the largest changes, multiplicative damage sources were reduced by a percentage, then additive ones were buffed by a similar amount, all in the name of "shifting power" -- ignoring that the problem was the underlying maths of damage calculation and not the tuning, and that no power was shifted, it was instead reduced.
The already shaky baseline power for characters was devastated by these nonsensical changes, and it was the off-meta builds, that were already hinging on unviable, that suffered the most, further narrowing the set of reasonably playable builds. Meanwhile, the exp changes made a game that was already some 50 hours too long even slower in the name of stopping boosting, and then failed to stop boosting anyway -- in fact, relative to normal leveling, it was made even more effective. Furthermore, changes to monster levels further intensified the funneling towards optimal content since, now, grinding a small set of Nightmare Dungeons was the only activity in the game that still gave decent returns.
This makes Nightmare Dungeons the final step in the list of "things before the fun part", and what a dumpster fire they are. For all the big talk about Sanctuary being large and open and how the player gets to walk around it on a stupid horse that moves at a glacial pace and gets stuck behind ankle-high obstacles... for all that talk, most of the player's time in D4 is going to be spent indoor in dungeons. They could have been just mazes with monsters to kill, but instead, they're that plus some inane task for the player to perform: best case scenario, it's clear the dungeon of monsters or of a certain type of monster; worst case, it's get one thing from one end of the dungeon, backtrack all the way to another part of the dungeon and open a door with it. Regardless, there's an incredible amount of downtime on the thing players have to do hundreds, thousands of times.
And then you grind your life away and kill Uber Lilith, and what do you do next? The fight is awful; she doesn't drop anything special, and even if she did, there's no economy in the game for you to become rich. There's no crafting either to allow for creating neat gear, and since 99% of the loot found is for your character's own class, you probably only have gear for them anyway. So if you do reroll, which is supposed to be one of the pillars of the genre, you're going to be restarting from almost scratch. Wanna stay and collect uniques, then? Even if there were consistent ways to get them, there's not enough stash tabs to keep them in. To have stash tabs, we'd have to load every one of your fancy uniques for every other player because... you know, I'd pay to hear an explanation of why stashes are coded how they are. Whatever that explanation is, though, four minuscule stash tabs is a tasteless joke.
The stash, with its few tabs and no tools to organize or filter them is but one of the ways in which there's no quality of life whatsoever in the game: basic ARPG features like loot filters and map overlays are also absent, and if you're playing on PC, hoo boy, prepare for some clunky UI and for having to aim absolutely everything manually, as only console players get targeting help (to be fair, the UI is also bad on console). Also, despite it being a premium game and there being heavy restrictions on trade between players, there is no way to play offline by yourself, and the game is plagued by lag spikes and rubber banding even when soloing dungeons.
Do you know what the game does have, though? An in-game store filled with outrageously expensive microtransactions, like a $28 set of cosmetic armor or $13 for a horse skin. What else? A paid seasonal battle pass, with more cosmetics and a barrage of annoying in-game messages trying to create FOMO. Seasons which, by the way, aren't good, as one might have expected: Season 1 further complicated itemization for little benefit to the players, and had people not loudly complained online about the loss of armor from replacing socketed skulls, every single Malignant Heart would have been ignored by the player base in favor of survivability, because apparently no one in the dev team plays the game at a reasonably high level.
The maths behind damage calculation is also being worked on in Season 2, after months of complaints. One might think this is the team taking feedback from the community, but don't be mistaken: they have come out multiple times to call complainers a "vocal minority" and who would ban people who said words like "endgame" in their campfire stream's chat. The fact is, high-profile players have been pointing out most of what I mentioned in this review, including the basic math issues, since early on in the Beta, and no one cared. The change of stance now is presumably only because, after the predictably poor reception of Season 1, this live service game of theirs has been dying a slow death, and someone will have to fix it if those expensive MTX are to be sold.
And even then, even if they listen, there's points even the community gets wrong. It's important to understand the idea I've been hammering about there being an ever growing list of things to do before the fun part of the game: a lot of players have negative feelings on D4, but clamour for more content as a solution: "we need Primal Ancestrals and World Tier V!". In reality, Diablo IV already has a lot of content -- god knows this is the best game to give to a person that puts a dollar value on games based on playtime -- but that content is terrible: it's slow, it's easy, it's shallow, it's broken. Adding World Tier V and one more level-gated tier of Rare item would only serve to make the experience worse, turning WT4 into yet another of those intermediate steps that must be taken in order to play the real game. D4 would, in fact, have been better had levels been capped at 70 and the "Content" ended at WT3.
Alas, play time KPIs had to be met at all costs, and this was what we got instead: a glorified skinner box that desperately wants you to put more hours into it and that magnifies every weakness of its genre. The king of ARPGs, you say? I was never one for monarchy in the first place. Diablo IV is a mix of malice and incompetence, and Blizzard having the gall to ship the game in this state and sell it for seventy dollars is a testament to not only how much of their talent they've lost, but also to how much Kotick and his goons are willing to drain the company while on the way out. Don't waste money on this: just go back and play Diablo 2, or Path of Exile, or Torchlight, or literally anything else.
ARPGs are not particularly known for good stories, but since the first excuse the few people who still defend Diablo IV make for it is that the campaign is worth the $70 price of admission, it makes for a good starting point. D4 takes place in the world of Sanctuary, a vast expanse of land between Heaven and Hell occupied by humanity. The opening shows a group of treasure hunters delving into an ancient temple that are manipulated into performing a dark ritual and summoning an ancient demon called Lilith into Sanctuary, who then proceeds to try to take it over. The story plays out as the player's character, the Wanderer, along with a few allies met along the way, chases after her in an attempt to stop her plans of domination.
There are a couple of genuinely exciting moments during the game's prologue: Lilith seems like a fascinating antagonist at first, what with her gentle, motherly demeanor paradoxically bringing out the worst in her followers. Also, Lorath, one of the main characters, makes an impressive entrance into the story during this first hour. That's all we get, however, with the story devolving into a generic fantasy narrative not long after it gets going. Worse, a generic Blizzard narrative: a funny quirk of Blizzard's writing is that they really like using "prophecy" and/or "hot woman turned evil due to a traumatic past" as plot devices, and it worked until Warcraft III or so, but after that, it got silly. And unfortunately, Diablo IV ticks both of those boxes.
Far from that being only problem with the campaign, of course. Its six acts are abysmally paced, some rushing over their plot points blink-and-you'll-miss it style, while others feature roundabout questlines that could have been trimmed down to a third of their length at no loss for the storytelling. They're also cheapened by uneven and incoherent stakes: most notably, at one point in the story, a potential event is determined to be world-ending should it come to pass, and it eventually does... resulting in an unremarkable boss battle and in everyone forgetting all about it by the next quest. It's hard to take any other threat seriously after that point.
The initially exciting cast also consistently underdelivers: just about every character ends up being paper-thin and spouting wonky writing. The illusion of good story beats comes up every now and then, but that's mostly the pre-rendered cutscenes and/or the actors wringing blood from the stone that is the material given to them, moments that soon peter out. One could say Diablo IV's main story is comparable a Marvel movie in that it features incredibly gorgeous CG scenes, great actors and expensive tech to bring to life complete drivel. The similarity also holds in that it ends in a cliffhanger, because please be excited about the expansions to this garbage that we plan to churn out in the next few years.
Finishing the campaign is but the first in a long list of things that are done "to get to the fun part of the game", a list that only grows for the entirety of the game's runtime. The problems begin with how the world of Sanctuary is structured, or rather, how it's not: it's an open world, and a character can go anywhere in it as soon as the prologue is done. The campaign will take the Wanderer through the five regions in a more or less set order, and as superficial as that trip might be, one might as well follow along, because despite all that freedom, there's little reason to care about any of those places: Sanctuary as large as it is barren, with vestiges of civilization -- where locals sit eager to hand out fetch quests -- lost amidst deserts, swamps, snow-covered mountains and other similarly dead places. It's hard to even remember most of the map beyond the prologue areas.
Enemies feel similarly same-y: there's little variety in their mechanics, and the entire game world uses level scaling to match them to the player level. Level scaling is an often-touted but very ugly design solution for open world RPGs, and Diablo IV serves as a perfect example of why: the mechanic fails in its purpose to match content to player as, more often than not, the difficulty is not simply in enemy stats. More pressingly, however, without a natural progression of easy to hard content, the thrill of being able to do quests and kill bosses one couldn't stand against before is lost, and thus, the emotional connection to those things is also lost. Worse, since there's a lot of grind to be done in D4, players outright ignore most areas and gravitate to repeating the most efficient content over, and over, and over again.
One might as well also skip the bossing in the game, because most of the bosses are terrible. The design railroaded itself from the moment character movement was decided to be so stiff: characters have low base movement speed, some classes entirely lack movement skills and the evade button meant to replace those is almost always on cooldown. Thus, bosses forgo mechanics that encourage movement and quick-thinking and instead are designed so to be facetanked. There's a few exceptions to that, but even those have very few fight mechanics to engage with. Boss variety in itself is also extremely low: players will tire of seeing the words "Khazra Abomination" on the screen from all the dungeoning, and the game's only (egregious) pinnacle boss is Uber Lilith, recycled from the campaign and given one shot moves to create an illusion of difficulty.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves: we're still early in our leveling journey, dipping our toes into Sanctuary. Assuming the campaign is done, the next step is to farm renown, which is a measurement of how well-known the Wanderer is across Sanctuary. Renown is increased by doing optional side content and rewards the player with more potion charges and skill points -- i.e. it's a mandatory kind of optional. Farming renown is the most fun part of the game, the only part that offers a modicum of variety and comes close to fleshing out the world. It's also near-universally reviled, mainly because every new character is made to do it again, as it's one of the few things low level characters can do if the campaign is skipped.
By the time we're done farming, it's likely we'll have most of our skill points and a complete build. In fact, it will be complete much before that, as there's not much flexibility in how to build a character. Diablo IV's skill tree can barely be called a tree: it's a linear track with skills that have clearly tagged purposes and synergies so obvious, it's more of an exercise in basic pattern recognition than real decision making. One node will have a choice of core skills, then the next one, a set of passives each designed to go with one of those core skills... there's zero room for player choice and creativity, and unfortunately, that statement is also true for every other character development system.
Once level 50 is reached, the Wanderer stops earning skill points and earns paragon points, which are used to traverse a large, modular board of tiles that yield stats and multipliers. Never mind the failure of easing the player into this complete paradigm shift for leveling -- stats had next to zero importance up to this point -- the biggest issue is that, once again, there's an opportunity for diversifying builds; once again, the designed synergies are few and blatant, telegraphed from a mile away. This is made worse from the fact that most of the character's power is gotten from the Paragon board, so by deviating from the optimal path, the player is sealing their own doom. This also has the side effect of making level 100 practically mandatory, as the whopping forty Paragon points obtained in those gruesome final levels matter. That's in stark contrast to something like PoE, where a level 90ish character is often more concerned with fighting endgame bosses and refining their gear.
Speaking of which, it's truly baffling how badly botched the itemization is for a game in a genre that largely revolves around loot. There are five types of items in Diablo IV: Common, Magic, Rare, Legendary and Unique. There is no crafting system in Diablo IV (no, making cute potions in town whose only real effect is +5% exp gain does not count) so those lower rank items are trash that is going to suck forever. Thus, there are three types of items, but wait: most of the uniques that matter are those are insanely rare. In any other game, one would just trade for them, but Diablo IV doesn't just lack an economy, it outright impedes the trading of Uniques and Legendaries, making it so players are highly unlikely to have a unique they desperately need. Incidentally, the only viable way to play a Necromancer Minion build is through one of those ultra-rare, late game Uniques.
We're down to two item types, Rares and Legendaries, which really are one and the same: a Legendary item is a Rare with an Aspect applied to it, that is, a modifier that enhances a skill or group of skills -- sort of an unique one can create themselves. Yet again, a system with potential for diversity further railroads the design of builds: any viable build has Aspects clearly made for it, which sometimes are the one thing that makes it playable, and one would be silly not to include them. Far more concerning than the Aspects that makes builds work, however, are the ones that don't.
While it should be pretty clear that Diablo IV's systems are shallow, the truly offensive part, the part that makes it likely that no amount of patches will ever fix this mess is that most of the game doesn't work. Among item affixes, Aspects, Uniques, and even the nodes on the skill tree, there's so much absolute garbage beyond any level of consideration that's scattered around to create the illusion of complexity. There's even a running gag amongst the community about item affixes that's along the lines of "I found an item with '+10% more damage to stunned enemies while vulnerable on the second Tuesday of the month'", referring to the multiple, bizarrely situational affixes that exist only to flood the affix pool and make the itemization seem deeper than it really is.
Furthermore, while it is true that every build in the game was designed by Blizzard, with very little room to deviate, theirs was an extremely hands-off design: in theory, the synergies are there, so say, this build is meant to bank on Vulnerable, while that build relies on Overpower... In practice, there are clear winners and utter losers that should have been clear not only from any sort of playtesting, but from the systems' design in itself. In that example, Vulnerable multiplies the damage, while Overpower adds damage, meaning the former scales much, much more steeply than the latter -- they are not equivalent, even though the designers seemed to think that they are.
The game is riddled with these fundamental mistakes: defensive options not called "Armor" are useless, with resistances to elements being especially pathetic; critical and vulnerable modifiers, along with cooldown reduction/resource generation to counter the absurdly high downtime suffered by most builds, are the only things most respectable builds will care for in any piece of gear; a couple of classes, namely the Barbarian and the Sorcerer, are completely unplayable compared to the rest, and notably both good Barb builds so far have been the result of now fixed bugs that caused damage to scale in a way that it shouldn't have.
It's a thoroughly incompetent game, and that has to be emphasized: in this breakneck industry, many games end up being rushed, but come out with specks of brilliance and a clear vision of what the production was aiming for. Diablo IV, however, wasn't simply released before it was ready (although it must be said that it was absolutely rushed out to save face after Diablo Immortal and to make Kotick and his goons a quick buck while the ActiBlizz sale closes). Diablo IV is a game without a vision: an ARPG made from the most generic of parts, by people without a single clue about what makes an ARPG work, or even how the game they made works. For proof, look no further than the dreaded patch 1.1.0.
Patch 1.1.0 was the canary in the mine for anyone still holding out hope that the 70 dollars spent in this garbage were going to pay off in any way. Blizzard saw the state the game was in: everyone was stacking armor and CDR, Barbs and Sorcs were in the dumpster, and builds with multiplicative mods dominated the meta. Exp was also a point of contention, leveling was slow, and people straight up paid others to boost them through the endgame grind. Seeing all this, what did Blizzard do? Nerfed everything in the game.
It's hard to fully illustrate just how inept, if not outright malicious, this patch was. To call it a balance patch is a stretch and a half: the patch created the illusion of sweeping changes through numerous small, irrelevant power shifts like "+0.04 base" or "-5%" to stuff that needed reworking from the ground up or that was too powerful to even feel the difference. Among the largest changes, multiplicative damage sources were reduced by a percentage, then additive ones were buffed by a similar amount, all in the name of "shifting power" -- ignoring that the problem was the underlying maths of damage calculation and not the tuning, and that no power was shifted, it was instead reduced.
The already shaky baseline power for characters was devastated by these nonsensical changes, and it was the off-meta builds, that were already hinging on unviable, that suffered the most, further narrowing the set of reasonably playable builds. Meanwhile, the exp changes made a game that was already some 50 hours too long even slower in the name of stopping boosting, and then failed to stop boosting anyway -- in fact, relative to normal leveling, it was made even more effective. Furthermore, changes to monster levels further intensified the funneling towards optimal content since, now, grinding a small set of Nightmare Dungeons was the only activity in the game that still gave decent returns.
This makes Nightmare Dungeons the final step in the list of "things before the fun part", and what a dumpster fire they are. For all the big talk about Sanctuary being large and open and how the player gets to walk around it on a stupid horse that moves at a glacial pace and gets stuck behind ankle-high obstacles... for all that talk, most of the player's time in D4 is going to be spent indoor in dungeons. They could have been just mazes with monsters to kill, but instead, they're that plus some inane task for the player to perform: best case scenario, it's clear the dungeon of monsters or of a certain type of monster; worst case, it's get one thing from one end of the dungeon, backtrack all the way to another part of the dungeon and open a door with it. Regardless, there's an incredible amount of downtime on the thing players have to do hundreds, thousands of times.
And then you grind your life away and kill Uber Lilith, and what do you do next? The fight is awful; she doesn't drop anything special, and even if she did, there's no economy in the game for you to become rich. There's no crafting either to allow for creating neat gear, and since 99% of the loot found is for your character's own class, you probably only have gear for them anyway. So if you do reroll, which is supposed to be one of the pillars of the genre, you're going to be restarting from almost scratch. Wanna stay and collect uniques, then? Even if there were consistent ways to get them, there's not enough stash tabs to keep them in. To have stash tabs, we'd have to load every one of your fancy uniques for every other player because... you know, I'd pay to hear an explanation of why stashes are coded how they are. Whatever that explanation is, though, four minuscule stash tabs is a tasteless joke.
The stash, with its few tabs and no tools to organize or filter them is but one of the ways in which there's no quality of life whatsoever in the game: basic ARPG features like loot filters and map overlays are also absent, and if you're playing on PC, hoo boy, prepare for some clunky UI and for having to aim absolutely everything manually, as only console players get targeting help (to be fair, the UI is also bad on console). Also, despite it being a premium game and there being heavy restrictions on trade between players, there is no way to play offline by yourself, and the game is plagued by lag spikes and rubber banding even when soloing dungeons.
Do you know what the game does have, though? An in-game store filled with outrageously expensive microtransactions, like a $28 set of cosmetic armor or $13 for a horse skin. What else? A paid seasonal battle pass, with more cosmetics and a barrage of annoying in-game messages trying to create FOMO. Seasons which, by the way, aren't good, as one might have expected: Season 1 further complicated itemization for little benefit to the players, and had people not loudly complained online about the loss of armor from replacing socketed skulls, every single Malignant Heart would have been ignored by the player base in favor of survivability, because apparently no one in the dev team plays the game at a reasonably high level.
The maths behind damage calculation is also being worked on in Season 2, after months of complaints. One might think this is the team taking feedback from the community, but don't be mistaken: they have come out multiple times to call complainers a "vocal minority" and who would ban people who said words like "endgame" in their campfire stream's chat. The fact is, high-profile players have been pointing out most of what I mentioned in this review, including the basic math issues, since early on in the Beta, and no one cared. The change of stance now is presumably only because, after the predictably poor reception of Season 1, this live service game of theirs has been dying a slow death, and someone will have to fix it if those expensive MTX are to be sold.
And even then, even if they listen, there's points even the community gets wrong. It's important to understand the idea I've been hammering about there being an ever growing list of things to do before the fun part of the game: a lot of players have negative feelings on D4, but clamour for more content as a solution: "we need Primal Ancestrals and World Tier V!". In reality, Diablo IV already has a lot of content -- god knows this is the best game to give to a person that puts a dollar value on games based on playtime -- but that content is terrible: it's slow, it's easy, it's shallow, it's broken. Adding World Tier V and one more level-gated tier of Rare item would only serve to make the experience worse, turning WT4 into yet another of those intermediate steps that must be taken in order to play the real game. D4 would, in fact, have been better had levels been capped at 70 and the "Content" ended at WT3.
Alas, play time KPIs had to be met at all costs, and this was what we got instead: a glorified skinner box that desperately wants you to put more hours into it and that magnifies every weakness of its genre. The king of ARPGs, you say? I was never one for monarchy in the first place. Diablo IV is a mix of malice and incompetence, and Blizzard having the gall to ship the game in this state and sell it for seventy dollars is a testament to not only how much of their talent they've lost, but also to how much Kotick and his goons are willing to drain the company while on the way out. Don't waste money on this: just go back and play Diablo 2, or Path of Exile, or Torchlight, or literally anything else.